Apocalypse Dreams

Monsters

I slowly approached James, who seemingly had tears coming out of his eyes as he had Clementine's head resting on his left hand.

"You can kill me if your will is strong," James said menacingly as he took his hand out from under his daughter's head. Her face seemed to be visible now and it shocked me. There was a rotten corpse lying on the bed, with a gunshot wound to her forehead.

I pointed the gun at James, who now stood up. He slowly took the blanket that Clementine was wearing all this time and put it over to her shoulder.

"You won't do it," James said. "Your will to carry out such a task is not comparable to mine."

"So... what? You're just going to kill those friends at the lab and rule upon the prisoners?" I asked in order to buy some time to think of my next action.

"Killing? Maybe. Ruling? No, that is where we differ," James said while giving me a cold stare. "I only hope to lead the new generation into a better future... One that holds better opportunities for survival against these creatures."

"I know that they're not innocent... but they're still people," I said. "For the ones that haven't turned yet, that is."

"After I'm done, us survivalists will be all that's left," James argued. "We'll be saving the world. Making us stronger, so we can survive this apocalypse... and any future ones. If I had just been stronger and killed Price when I had the chance, maybe my family would've been alive."

"You can't blame yourself," I replied.

"I messed up, Paul," James said while staring at the floor. "I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen again."

"Okay, let's say that each and every one of these monsters are dead... what's next?" I asked. I began thinking about how James admitted that he messed up. I had thought that his ego would not be that compromised. I thought to myself about how I was messing up with not keeping away from the group, even though I was infected. From what I understood though, there was a cure in the lab and so that gave me a bit of hope. I just hoped it was true. No matter what happened, I wanted to make sure that, in the end, things were going to be alright.

"Next... I will rest, hopefully up in heaven with my wife and my child," James responded. "But that's after I make sure we as the survivors are all strong enough to lead the next generation of human beings. We have a second chance."

"See," I said while shaking my head. "The next generation doesn't have to be filled with who we deem to be good at survival. This entire event was just a coincidence and things will work out. We just need to not make the same mistakes again."

"Your optimism is misplaced," James said with a cold look into my eyes. "This event displayed the need to have warriors. You're just too naive to see that at the moment, but, once all hope is lost... you'll see exactly why I am right."

"Maybe you're right," I said. I was shocked to hear what I had just said. "This might be the only way."

"I want partially the same thing as you all do... to solve this mess... I just have a different motivation and methods. Tell me, is that so bad?" James asked.

"I... guess not," I said while putting down my weapon slowly.

The way that I looked at this was that our group needed James to break into the lab and that lab would be our ticket out of this life. For a seemingly long period of time, we had been tirelessly roaming around from place to place. From hospitals to houses to stores in hopes to find more people and survive. This had been the biggest news that we had heard for a long time; that there were more survivors in a protected location. Maybe this was the only way. All I knew was that I was tired and I knew the entire group was also. The endgame was survival.