The first ti we ate human flesh, we didn’t cry.
We didn’t speak.
We just chewed.
The screams outside had faded hours ago. The city had gone silent in the way only the dead could make it. No sirens. No birds. No wind. Just the occasional growl and distant, hungry moan.
Inside the cold, caved-in pharmacy, there were five of us.
Two children. One broken mother. . And her—Asha.
She found the body. Fresh. Still warm. A soldier who’d probably bled out trying to drag himself to shelter.
Asha said, “We can’t bury him. We can’t leave him. We have to survive.”
And then, like it wasn’t the first ti she’d said it, she added:
“We fought. Now we feed.”
The kids were asleep. Their stomachs growled louder than their whimpers.
I looked at her in the moonlight. Her face was all bone and resolve.
“No,” I whispered.
“Yes,” she answered.
I turned away.
She started anyway.
The sll wasn’t what I expected.
It didn’t sll wrong. That made it worse.
It slled like roast at. Like sothing your mind could lie to you about.
Make it easier.
She handed a strip. It stead in the cold.
“I didn’t fight this hard to watch you starve,” she said.
My hands shook as I took it.
We locked eyes. We didn’t break gaze as I bit.
After that, everything changed.
We stopped seeing walkers as just monsters. We stopped seeing the dead as just dead. Every corpse beca a question:
Could we? Should we? Would we?
We didn’t kill to eat. At first.
Only scavenged. Only what was “left behind.”
But lines blurred when hunger sharpened.
When the mother died—collapsed in the corner, eyes open and dry—we waited one whole night before deciding.
By then, the kids had stopped asking questions. They just ate what was handed to them.
We were all changing. In ways mirrors couldn’t show.
I hated Asha for how easily she led us there.
I loved her for how fiercely she protected us.
She was our spear. Our fla.
And when she whispered prayers over every body before she carved,
I almost believed we were still human.
Then one night, we heard a voice outside.
Not groaning. Speaking.
A survivor. Alive. Ard. Alone.
He stumbled into our shelter, laughing through tears. “I made it,” he gasped. “I made it.”
And Asha looked at him like he was a feast.
Not right away. Not obviously.
But I saw it. The calculation behind her kindness.
That night, I wrapped the kids in blankets. I told them to sleep deeper than they ever had.
Then I turned to her and said:
“If we fight again, it won’t be side by side.”
She nodded. Slowly. Sadly.
We didn’t eat him.
But we didn’t help him either.
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