The food could be better. I shouldn’t complain, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t have many options anymore. The more we scavenge from the surrounding buildings, the farther out we have to go. We’re stretching ourselves thinner every day, but it’s an unfortunate necessity to our lives now. We’ll have to move on again soon, but I always wonder how many of us will make it. When we came here, we lost three: John, Michele, and Cade. They were all in good health, but just a moment of bad luck and everything went to shit. It just goes to show that even when you can get a good day without ferals, the world itself is still trying to kill you. Other people are still trying to kill you. It’s bad enough that the dead still walk among us, why do the living have to be so predatory? All we needed was another shelter out of the way from the shit, but theres always someone in the way. There were five in all, slavers. Just looking to get some people to sell and sacrifice for their own means. We got all of them, but they shot Cade. He was just a kid, only ten years old. Pieces of shit. John and Michele were devastated. Their boy was dead. They’d gotten this far, and their son was dead because other people wanted to capture and sell him for whatever horrors the buyers wanted. John lost it and tried to kill Eddie. He always had it out for him and no one knew why. Michele stepped in, she was always the voice of reason for her husband, but it didn’t get through in time. When he pushed her, she tripped on the crumbling foundation of a building and was impaled by the rebar. John was paralyzed when he’d seen what he’d done. Eddie scrambled away while he could, and in the moment, John was gone. I knew it right then and there, he wasn’t coming back. I couldn’t hear what Michele was saying to him, but he couldn’t stop crying. He held her head in his hands as she died, bleeding out on the rocks and concrete. His scream could wake the dead if they weren’t alive already. He started breathing hard. Everyone knew what would happen and no one stopped him. He pulled out his pistol and bullet in his head. There was a moment of silence from all of us. Jason was the first to speak up. He told us to take what we could, not to waste anything. We won’t prey on the living, but we will do whatever necessary to survive.

The food could be better, but I shouldn’t complain.