The Last of Us Story Explained: Twenty Years of Loss and the Lie at the End of the Road

Some games open with war or magic. The Last of Us opens with a father holding his dying daughter in his arms as his country collapses in a single night. Twenty years later, that same father takes on one more piece of "cargo" to deliver: a fourteen-year-old girl who may be the key to saving humanity. This article retells the story of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us (2013) — from the outbreak night in Texas to the lie in Salt Lake City that fans have argued about for over a decade.

The game's premise is built on a real fungus: Cordyceps — in nature, it parasitizes insects and puppeteers its hosts like the living dead. In the game, a mutated strain of Cordyceps jumps to humans, spreading through bites and spores; the infected gradually transform into aggressive creatures in stages: Runners, Clickers — blind, hunting by the "clicking" sounds they use to echolocate — and enormous Bloaters after many years of infection. Civilization collapses in the blink of an eye. All that remains of America are military quarantine zones run by FEDRA (the Federal Disaster Response Agency), and the rebel group the Fireflies, who hold on to the hope of finding a vaccine.

The Last of Us was directed by Bruce Straley (game director) and Neil Druckmann (creative director and writer); the minimalist, aching score by Gustavo Santaolalla became the soul of the series, while Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson both voiced and performed motion capture for Joel and Ellie. The game sold more than 17 million copies by 2018, and in 2022 it was remade as The Last of Us Part I — the version the screenshots in this article were taken from.

📌 Quick summary: In 2013, the Cordyceps fungal pandemic wipes out civilization; Joel loses his daughter Sarah on the very first night. Twenty years later, he agrees to escort Ellie — a 14-year-old girl who is uniquely immune — to the Fireflies so they can develop a vaccine. The journey across America binds the two of them together like father and daughter, but at the hospital in Salt Lake City, Joel learns that the surgery to create the vaccine will kill Ellie. He slaughters the Fireflies, rescues the girl, and lies to her.

Chapter 1: Outbreak Night — The Death of Sarah

On the night of September 26, 2013, in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, 12-year-old Sarah Miller gives her father — construction worker Joel Miller — a watch for his birthday. In the middle of the night, Sarah is woken by the phone ringing: her uncle Tommy, Joel's younger brother, calling in a panic. Outside, police sirens are wailing and the neighborhood is sinking into chaos — neighbors have suddenly started attacking each other like wild animals. This is the first hour of outbreak night across America.

The three of them pile into a truck and flee through gridlocked streets swarming with infected. The truck flips in the middle of town; Joel carries Sarah — her leg injured — on foot through burning alleys, while Tommy stays behind to hold off their pursuers. Just when it seems they have made it out, father and daughter are stopped by a soldier. Over the radio comes a cold order from his superiors — and the soldier opens fire. Tommy shoots him down in time, but too late: Sarah has taken a bullet to the stomach and dies in her father's arms, while Joel can only repeat "it's okay, baby girl" over and over. He would wear the watch Sarah repaired for him for the next twenty years.

Chapter 2: Boston, Twenty Years Later — A Piece of Cargo Named Ellie

Twenty years later, America is nothing but military quarantine zones and lawless wastes full of infected and raiders. Joel — now in his fifties, hardened to the point of cruelty — makes his living as a smuggler in the Boston quarantine zone alongside his partner Tess. When a black-market dealer named Robert steals their weapons shipment and sells it to the Fireflies, Marlene — the wounded leader of the Boston Fireflies — offers a deal: she will return double their weapons if the two of them deliver a piece of "cargo" to a rendezvous at the state capitol building. That cargo is Ellie Williams, a 14-year-old girl raised in a FEDRA military school who has never been outside the quarantine zone.

Partway through the escape, the truth comes out: Ellie has a bite mark on her arm — but it is three weeks old, and she has not turned. Ellie is immune. The Fireflies believe her body is the key to developing a vaccine — and Marlene, a close friend of Ellie's late mother, has raised the girl under her protection for exactly this day. But when they reach the rendezvous, the Firefly team there has already been wiped out by the military. Worse still, Tess confesses she was bitten while fleeing through the museum, and FEDRA soldiers are closing in. Believing in what Ellie represents, Tess stays behind to hold off the soldiers, trading her life for their escape, with one last request for Joel: take the girl to Tommy — his brother, a former Firefly — because "this is our chance to make up for everything." Tess dies at the Boston capitol building; reluctantly, Joel sets out with the girl he still wants to treat as nothing but cargo.

Chapter 3: Bill's Town — A Debt and a Car

With no vehicle, Joel heads to the town of Lincoln, where Bill — a paranoid survivalist who owes him a favor — has turned the entire town into a maze of deadly traps. Bill grudgingly agrees to help put a car together, but the car still needs a battery, and the trip to fetch one through a high school infested with a Bloater nearly gets the whole group killed. In the house they use as a rallying point, they find Frank — Bill's only companion for twenty years — hanging from the ceiling: Frank had been bitten and chose death over turning, leaving behind a suicide note dripping with hatred for Bill.

Bill swallows his grief and helps the two of them get the car started. Before they part ways, he mutters that he used to have someone to care about once — and that caring for other people is the quickest way to get yourself killed. The two of them head west — where people are even more terrifying than the infected.

Chapter 4: Pittsburgh — Henry, Sam, and the Price of a Secret Kept

No sooner do they enter Pittsburgh than their car is ambushed and wrecked by the local hunters — gangs who murder travelers and take everything they have. In the occupied city, Joel and Ellie run into two brothers, Henry and Sam: Henry is about twenty-five, Sam only thirteen, and they are also looking for a way out of the city. The four of them join forces to slip past the hunters' armored truck, swim across the river in the night, and hide out in a suburb crawling with Stalkers. For the first time, Ellie has a friend her own age to laugh with and share a love of the Savage Starlight comic books.

But during the escape, Sam was bitten on the leg by an infected — and the boy hid it from everyone, even his own brother. The next morning, Sam — already turned — lunges at Ellie. Henry is forced to shoot his own little brother dead, then turns the gun on himself right in front of Joel and Ellie. Pittsburgh's lesson is cold as steel: what kills people is not the monsters, but the things they dare not say out loud — and Ellie will remember it to the very end of the journey.

Chapter 5: Jackson — A Reunion and the Wound Named Sarah

In the fall, Joel and Ellie reach Jackson, Wyoming — where Tommy and his wife Maria have built a fortified town around a hydroelectric dam: electricity, a school — a rare pocket of civilization still standing. Reunited with his brother, Joel states his purpose plainly: he wants to hand Ellie over to Tommy — a former Firefly who knows the way to them — and return to Boston. Every day beside Ellie is another day the broken watch reminds him of Sarah; he is afraid to grow attached, only to lose someone all over again.

Ellie overhears the plan. She takes a horse and runs away to an abandoned ranch, leaving behind what is considered the finest exchange in the game. "I'm not your daughter, and you're sure as hell not my dad," Ellie says, naming everyone who has died or abandoned her — her mother, Riley, Tess, Sam — "you're the only one I have left." Joel's answer cuts like a knife: "You don't know what loss is." But when dawn comes, Joel changes his mind: he gives Ellie the choice, and when she chooses him, he takes her onward — to the University of Eastern Colorado, where the Fireflies have based themselves. For the first time in twenty years, Joel allows himself to care about someone — the very thing he fears most.

Chapter 6: The University of Eastern Colorado — A Fateful Fall

The University of Eastern Colorado stands silent and empty: the Fireflies' laboratories are deserted, with nothing left but test monkeys and a handful of audio recordings. From the recordings of a dead scientist, Joel learns the Fireflies pulled out long ago and relocated to St. Mary's Hospital in Salt Lake City. But before they can leave, the two of them are attacked by a group of raiders. Grappling on the second-floor balcony, Joel is thrown over the edge and lands on a steel bar that pierces his abdomen.

Ellie — the girl who once only knew how to hide behind Joel — single-handedly shoots down the raiders, hauls the dying man up onto a horse, and gets him out of the university. For the first time, their roles are completely reversed: the protected one becomes the protector, and Joel's life rests entirely in the hands of the girl he once called "cargo."

Chapter 7: Winter — David and the Ghosts of Ellie

Joel lies unconscious with a raging fever, his wound infected, waiting to die in an abandoned house at the Lakeside resort. Ellie hunts rabbits and deer alone to keep him fed, then trades the deer she killed for antibiotics from two strangers: James and their leader — David, a soft-spoken man who introduces himself as a former teacher. But in the middle of the trade, David lets slip a sentence that turns Ellie's blood cold: his group recently lost several men at a university, at the hands of "a crazy man traveling with a little girl." David knows who she is — he is hunting the two of them.

Ellie lures David's men away from Joel's hiding place but is captured alive. Waking up in a cage, she discovers to her horror the truth about David's "community": they survive the winter by eating people — on the butcher's table beside her lie human remains waiting to be carved up. David, instead of killing Ellie, wants to "recruit" her into his group, with a sick obsession. Ellie fights back, bites David's hand, kills James, and escapes; cornered in a burning restaurant, she seizes a machete and hacks David to death in a blind panic — hacking again and again, until Joel, newly recovered after torturing two of David's men to find the way, pulls her off and holds her tight: "It's okay now, baby girl."

The days Ellie spends nursing Joel are also when her past comes flooding back — the story told in the Left Behind expansion. Three weeks before she met Joel, at the Boston military school, Ellie was woken in the middle of the night by her best friend — Riley Abel. Riley had run away to join the Fireflies, and that night was the last one the two of them would ever have together. The two girls slip into an abandoned mall: riding the carousel, pulling silly faces in a photo booth, soaking each other with water guns — one last night of childhood in the middle of the apocalypse. Then the infected swarm in; both of them are bitten. Sitting there waiting for death, Riley suggests: "Let's just wait it out. We can lose our minds together — it would be poetic." Riley turns. Ellie does not. That is the source of the survivor's guilt that weighs on the girl for the entire journey.

Chapter 8: Salt Lake City — The Lie at the End of the Road

In the spring, the two of them reach Salt Lake City. Ellie has grown withdrawn — the shadow of winter has not yet left the girl. In the middle of the ruined city, they come across a herd of giraffes calmly grazing on the leaves: the most magical, peaceful moment of the entire journey. Ellie hands Joel the old photograph she had secretly kept — a photo of him holding Sarah — a quiet confession that she understands his pain. Then, in a flooded bus tunnel, Ellie is swept away by the current, strikes her head, and loses consciousness. Joel has barely pulled her ashore and begun CPR when Firefly soldiers rush in and knock him out.

Waking in the hospital, Joel hears the death sentence handed to Ellie: the strain of fungus in the girl's brain has mutated in a strange way — that mutation is exactly what makes her immune — and to develop a vaccine, the doctors must surgically remove that fungal growth. Ellie will die on the operating table. No negotiation, not even a goodbye. Joel is being escorted out — and on the way, he breaks free. The man storms through floor after floor of the hospital, past dozens of Firefly soldiers, kicks open the operating room door, and carries the unconscious Ellie out, leaving the head surgeon dead on the floor behind him. Down in the parking garage, Marlene blocks his path at gunpoint, begging him to "think about what Ellie would want." Joel shoots her twice — the second shot to the head, cold as a verdict: "You'd just come after her anyway."

On the drive back to Jackson, Ellie wakes up, and Joel tells her a different story: it turns out the Fireflies already had dozens of immune people just like her, they were never able to make anything of it, and they have given up. Climbing out of the car to walk the rest of the way into town, Ellie stops. She tells him about Riley, about everyone who has died around her — "I'm still waiting for my turn" — then looks him straight in the eye: "Swear to me. Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true." Joel does not blink: "I swear." Ellie is quiet for a very long time. "Okay," she says. The screen fades to black. For more than a decade, players around the world have argued over that single word — did she believe him?

Character Fates

Joel Miller — Returns to Jackson with Ellie, carrying a secret that will haunt them both into the sequel. The price of saving Ellie was humanity's hope for a vaccine — and he does not regret it for a moment.

Ellie Williams — Survives, still immune, but carrying survivor's guilt and a crack in her trust in Joel that she cannot yet name. Her story continues in The Last of Us Part II.

Tess — Dies at the Boston capitol building: bitten by an infected, she stays behind to hold off the FEDRA soldiers so Joel and Ellie can escape. Her last words are the first driving force of the journey.

Marlene — Leader of the Fireflies, the woman who bet everything on the surgery. Shot dead by Joel in the parking garage of St. Mary's Hospital, because he was certain she would never stop coming after Ellie.

Tommy Miller — Stays in Jackson with his wife Maria, building the town into an enduring sanctuary — the destination of Joel and Ellie after the events of Salt Lake City.

Sarah Miller — Dies on outbreak night in 2013 at just 12 years old, killed by a soldier's bullet rather than the fungus — the wound in Joel that will never heal.

David — The cannibal leader of Lakeside, hacked to death by Ellie in the burning restaurant at the end of winter.

Common Misconceptions

Did Sarah die because she was infected with the fungus?

No. Sarah was shot by a soldier following lockdown orders on outbreak night, before she ever came into contact with a single infected. The girl's death was something humans did to humans — and that is exactly the point of the story.

Players open the game by controlling Sarah herself, walking around the house on that fateful night and watching the world fall apart through a child's eyes — only for death to arrive from the direction no one expected. It lays the groundwork for the game's central thesis: in the apocalypse, the greatest threat is not the monsters, but the choices people make when they are afraid. And because of that scar, twenty years later Joel gives no "order" a second chance where Ellie is concerned.

If the Fireflies had been allowed to operate, would the vaccine definitely have succeeded?

Nobody knows for sure — and that is the core point the game deliberately leaves open. Ellie is the only case of immunity ever recorded; the Fireflies were betting everything on a single operation that could never be attempted again, under post-apocalyptic medical conditions.

Many players point out that even if a vaccine could be developed, the Fireflies no longer had the infrastructure to manufacture and distribute it to a world that had already fallen apart. Marlene's defenders argue that even a slim chance for humanity is still worth more than a single life — especially since Ellie herself, if asked, would very likely have agreed to the sacrifice to give her life "meaning." The game takes neither side: it puts you in the position of a father and leaves you to live with the choice.

Can the Cordyceps fungus in the game infect real people?

Cordyceps is a real fungus, but in the real world it only parasitizes insects and a few invertebrates; it has never once been recorded infecting a human. Human body temperature is much higher than that of its natural hosts — a barrier scientists believe the fungus would find very hard to overcome.

Neil Druckmann's idea came from an episode of the BBC documentary Planet Earth about the fungus that "mind-controls" ants. The game exaggerates by just one step: what if Cordyceps mutated enough to adapt to human body temperature? The stages of infection are fictional, but consistent enough that many mycologists have praised it as "terrifying because it is plausible."

Did Ellie believe Joel's lie at the end of the game?

Almost certainly not completely. She makes Joel swear to her directly, looking him straight in the eye, and answers with a hesitant "Okay" — the game's storytelling leaves it open, but every sign suggests Ellie knows something is not right.

Remember Pittsburgh: Ellie witnessed with her own eyes how a secret kept hidden — Sam's bite — led to two deaths. Her question, then, is not really "is it true?", but a test of trust aimed at the only family she has left. The lie that slipped through that test becomes the seed of the entire conflict of the second part.

Theories & Mysteries

Why is Ellie immune? The game reveals only half of it: the strain of fungus in Ellie's brain mutated in an unusual way, so her body is never taken over. One theory the community strongly backs — and which Part II has hinted at supporting — is that Ellie's mother, Anna, was infected just as she was giving birth to her, so the fetus was exposed to Cordyceps in the womb and her immune system "learned" to live alongside it from her very first day.

If Joel had left Ellie behind, what would have become of humanity? There is no answer. But there is a detail few people notice: the records at the University of Eastern Colorado show that the Fireflies had already weakened severely long before Joel arrived — scattered manpower, decaying equipment. Most likely, even if Joel had not intervened, "humanity's hope" was already far more fragile than Marlene's words made it sound.

Did the Fireflies really fall apart? After the deaths of Marlene and most of their elite forces in Salt Lake City, the organization lost its leadership — but its scattered branches and those still loyal to the cause did not vanish overnight. That debt, along with the name Joel Miller, will come back — as the sequel has shown.

The Legacy of a Storytelling Masterpiece

Released in June 2013 — in the final months of the PlayStation 3's life cycle — The Last of Us broke beyond the mold of a video game: more than 200 game-of-the-year awards, more than 17 million copies by 2018, then Remastered (2014), the Part I remake (2022), and the HBO series (2023) carried the story to hundreds of millions of new viewers. But its greatest legacy is how it changed expectations for storytelling in games: a game whose "final boss" is no monster at all, but the utterly selfish love of a father — and an ending with no right or wrong, only two people walking home.

This is the first article of the series on Truyện Game — you can find all the articles on the full The Last of Us series storyline on the series page; the journey of Joel and Ellie will return in the article on Part II.