You were a survivalist before the apocalypse. Ignoring your peers’ (or lack thereof) commentary about your paranoia was well worth it, considering the toilet the world turned out to be.

Everyone in your neighborhood had evacuated to the city when the virus had spread nationwide, (stupidly) putting their faith into FEDRA. They never came back.

Not that you cared. If anything, you were thrilled! You wasted no time setting up complex traps and fencing around the neighborhood to ward off infected as well as raiders.

You had unlimited food, generators granting you electricity to live comfortably for years if you pleased. And the best part? It was only you.

Well, at least until this afternoon.

While you were eating your lunch, cameras picked up movement from outside. Something had activated one of the traps. Wasting no time, you grab one of your guns and put on some protective gear. Whatever it was, an infected most likely, had fallen into the pit covered by false grass.

You head out to the backyard, planning to finish off the infected and reset the trap. As you approach. You hear a voice call out.

“I’m not infected!” A voice bellows from the pit. It was so unexpected you nearly jump out of your skin. A person? All the way out here? To make it this far they had to have miraculously skirted past the infected in the area.

You finally look into the pit, which was about ten feet deep, give or take. The man’s clothes are disheveled. He had a small beard with shoulder length hair. No visible injuries, but still a risk.

“I’m…” He swallows, his hands raised. “I’m just trying to get to the Boston QZ…”

It was a gamble, but after a few minutes of internal deliberation you lower down a ladder to allow him to climb out of the pit.

Even though you could tell by just looking at him that he hasn’t eaten in days, he was still considerably larger than you. You take three steps back, keeping your gun pointed at him.

Finally coming up to the surface, the man sucks in a large breath, looking around at the enclosed property behind you. You seemed to have shelter, security. He looked at your figure in a non-creepy way. You weren’t emaciated. You looked far from it. Which led the word FOOD to light up in his mind.

“Thank you… my name is Jean, we came from—”

“Boston is that way…” You cut him off, curtly pointing your finger in the opposite direction he arrived from. “If you go now, you can make it by nightfall…”

Jean looks over his shoulder, back into the empty plain that will surely kill him at some point or another should he go back out there. He then looks back at you, before in another moment of baffled silence looks back over his shoulder again.

“I’m hungry…” Is all he could say, his face blank yet his eyes hard as he stares you down, holding out his hands in an effort to show that he is not a threat. He was never one to beg, but his death was sure to come if he spent one more night out on his own. If not by clickers, then he would starve. “I haven’t eaten in three days. I know that doesn’t sound like a long time, but—”

“Look. Jean, was it?” You deadpan, not moving from your spot nor lowering your weapon, you talk over him again. “If I let you eat here then every bum is going to come around here looking for a free lunch. And this is not an Arby’s…”

For a moment, he awkwardly stood there with his arms hanging at his side. He knew he was at your mercy and his only chance of survival at this point, but he still couldn’t help but acknowledge your weird argument.

“Wh— Arby’s didn’t have free lunch. It was a restaurant…” He shrugs, causing you to narrow your eyes in what seemed to be shock at his audacity to contradict you. At this point, he knows he’s two seconds away from either being shot or turned away, and he needs to plead his case.

“Alright! Please— look, I’m not gonna tell any bum or vagabond or whatever that I found this place!” He rushes out, mustering up the most convincing expression he could. Because he was telling the truth. You were quite literally his last hope.