[ WP ] You were bitten early on by the zombie epidemic , but through some freak of nature you maintained your mental faculties . Other than an unsatisfiable craving for flesh , all you want is someone to talk to . You notice a camp in the distance .

I had always secretly hoped for something horrible to befall civilization. Do n't get me wrong, I generally harbor no malicious feelings toward my fellow man, but I just liked the idea of a reset. I would fantasize and strategize about surviving, and wonder where the line between the two lay. Relying on my intellect, I would rise to become the leader of a new nation of capable humans after the apocalypse weeded out the weak and stupid ones. 
 
 But that's not really what happened. Somewhere far away, a diseased dog bit a monkey who sneezed on a prostitute who infected 24 men before being riddled with police bullets in a hotel room where she was discovered with a mouthful of John's entrails; you know the story. In this particular version though, my target practice and survival training proved useless at protecting me against my own ambitions. 
 
 I had already driven several miles outside the city when I saw her on the side of the interstate. A pretty twentysomething with dark auburn curls and bright emerald eyes. She was small and curvy, and her shotgun sling tugged her shirt askew as if to tease the undead with a hint of cleavage. I picked her up and we hit it off right away, talking and laughing as I drove us away from the sunset. We reached the first of my pre-planned bugout campsites by starlight and spent the night in a more exciting way than I had originally planned. Dawn broke with her already straddling me and moaning loudly, and then she closed her eyes and threw her head back before snarling and sinking her teeth into my shoulder. 
 
 Fast forward a few months and I'm back to wandering the wilderness alone and watching my dream crumble. Too many of the survivors turned out to be criminals who grew into warlords without a strong law enforcement presence to stop them. There are n't enough good people left to build my new nation. The intellectuals must've sealed themselves away in a vault or something, because the smartest people I've seen so far are the gangbangers who took a water tower by force and used it to extort an entire survivor camp. Now it's just me versus the bad guys. 
 
 The other night I got to meet a couple more of them in person. It was a moonless night and I was stumbling through the woods back to camp when I caught a flicker of orange in the distance through the trees. As I approached, some muffled cries could be heard up ahead. In the glow of the fire I could see a battered blonde woman in torn clothes, gagged with a bandanna, with her hands bound together and tied to an overhead tree branch. Three unsavory characters were sitting nearby, arguing about who went first last time. They had left their guns out of reach on the table near the side of the camp I approached, but it was the machete that caught my eye. 
 
 Five bloody minutes later, I cut the woman's bonds and offered her some food, but she just stared wide-eyed at my wounds for a minute before hurriedly grabbing the guns and driving off in the thugs' pickup truck. I wish she would've stayed, or just spoken before driving off. Instead, I was left in solitude, silently chewing a steak and wondering if I should have just maimed the last miscreant, just to have someone to talk to again for a night. 
 
 Before I started getting sick, I would've picked the bad guys off one by one with my rifle from a distance, asking only for food, water and ammo as payment. The silent night would have been my ally. But now, I can hardly walk; my hands shake so bad I could n't hit a man at 50 yards anymore. I'm a withered husk of my old self, but my appetite has almost eclipsed my capacity for thought. My guts burn and churn, and only one thing seems to quiet them down: Justice.
