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(Below is an excerpt of a larger story I am working on.)

Premise: An apocalyptic event has occurred while the main character and her boyfriend are visiting his home in Southern California, where the main character is not from. They become separated and she strives to find him. Below is a one-shot of an interaction with another post-apocalyptic survivor.

Her death was quick. I made sure of it. Besides, killing brought me no pleasure. It was instead a hard truth I’d had to swallow to make it this far, a skill honed with my back against the wall.

It had also been a mercy.

I’d come across her, slowly at first, as one could never be too careful and camaraderie was harder to find than oxygen to breathe. But even from yards away, I could see she was only a threat to herself. 

As I drew closer, the madness in her eyes grew more apparent. Her clothes, tattered rags they were, had been rendered nearly to ribbons by the manic scramblings of her nails. Her skin was torn and bleeding in several places and what wasn’t covered in blood, both fresh and dry as well as the pus of infection, was covered in large angry hives.

The bag at her feet was split, having been rummaged through by someone who’d come across her and paused only to see what they could take. An empty medication bottle lay at her feet, top flung out of view. I flipped it towards me to see what had been it in, more so to answer the quiet curiosity within me of what had caused this woman’s plight. The bottle had been, at some point, filled with antihistamines – likely an allergic reaction with the worst possible timing. 

Medications were harder to find than doctors with fresh water and clothing a close second and third. Her condition had spiraled along with civilization and here she was, a barely cognizant mess who’d been stolen from and ignored. 

I felt a twang of guilt as I retrieved my arrow from the now deceased woman. While the intention was mercy, it felt more than putting down a rabid dog then laying a human to rest. Her only crime was poor timing in a world gone mad, but it made no sense to leave her to infection. I repeated to myself how it’d been a mercy as I dug her grave. The likelihood of her being cannibalized looking like she did was slim to none. But I’d put nothing past humanity at this point and she’d been ravaged enough. While I believed in no heaven nor hell nor God above or devil below, she deserved whatever rest she could come by. The sun set over her freshly dug grave, sweat soaking my clothing as I moved on to a more secure location for the evening.

Night, as evidenced by most media, was in fact always the worst.