Days of Love and Blood

Willie and Anand and what should be done with them. I had taken my own emotion filled with passion, hatred and the need for retribution and I wielded it as judge, jury and executioner. Before the Demon Virus, they would have called the murder an act of passion. Maybe they would have called it a vigilante killing. I called it my right. There were no more policemen, no more courts and no more jail. Nothing existed to deter people like Willie and Anand from acting on sick desire and thrill. And there was no punishment anyone could exact for my rape. Torture wasn’t an option; we weren’t barbarians. The only thing we could do was prevent them from doing it again. Yet, their punishment should have been discussed as a collective and I removed that right from everyone else. I took it away from Willie and Anand, too.
    If I hadn’ t killed them, Cooper or someone else would have. They had already been sentenced to death and the only question which remained was who would be the one to deal the death blows. I wanted the job.
    The months of killing homicidals had desensitized me to death. I thought it would be harder than it was but when I stepped into that barn and reacquainted myself with their faces, my heart burned in my chest and the wounds on my body itched with madness. I wanted to see them die. Not one fleeting thought of compassion or remorse crossed my mind once I saw them again. It only strengthened my convictions.
    Some people will say what I did was wrong and maybe it was. If it happened to somebody else, I might have said the same thing. The judicial system was something I once believed in but that was long gone. The only thing we had left was a sense of right and wrong and the responsibility to keep each other safe. Letting those two monsters go wouldn’t have been safe. What other option did we have? It went further than that for me. I wanted to kill them. I wanted them dead. Was I better than a homicidal? Was I better than Willie and Anand? I could find a thousand reasons to condone my actions but these questions will always hang over my head like an oppressive cloud.
    And then there was the fear. I couldn’t help but imagine a world where killers and rapists were the lone survivors to thrive in this new world. A perversion of Darwin’s survival of the fittest. People like Willie and Anand might have only represented a small fraction of a larger population. They were the ones who were better equipped to survive against the homicidals; they were the ones who felt comfortable dwelling among brethren killers; they were the ones who coveted these days of blood.
    Maybe they would be the ones to successfully emerge as the new, post-apocalyptic human race, breeding more killers and rapists to prey on the innocent, the uninfected, until every last decent soul was eradicated, leaving only the insidious to own the world. And maybe they would mold us, the ones they couldn’t kill, into their likeness - like they did to me. Because of them, I had become a killer of the uninfected. A murderer. In my mind, I had already joined their ranks as part of a new, bloodthirsty world.
    The truth was , my fears were irrational. Of what little survivors were left, only a few were likely to be like Willie and Anand. Most of us knew the difference between right and wrong, and lived by the right. Yet it took me a while to overcome these fears, especially where the corruption of my own heart was concerned. It was true that I enjoyed killing homicidals, and that was a fault I could never erase.
    I wanted to tell Cooper these things and I eventually did. The more I opened up to him, the more he opened up to me. It became easier with time. It seemed as though once I showed my volatile side, it was easier for Cooper to connect with me. For him, my actions made me more human.
    As the months went by we saw a change in the homicidals. There were fewer herds to pass through, but each herd that did come by, only four more, were progressively larger in size. We were still stronger, and growing, and so no life was lost. Any homicidals who walked alone or in smaller groups seemed much weaker by comparison, as if they were somehow more susceptible to the disease they carried than those in larger groups. Eventually, a day came when we realized we hadn’t seen a homicidal in a month. The herds had stopped coming through. Nonetheless, we remained vigilant.
    More people joined our community and after a year we had over thirty houses running with