Empty handed… they are now, the dead, the dying, and worse the ones who continue to fight with nothing more than their bare hands. My daughter; fifteen years since the war began and fifteen years she still wants to, has to, needs to but it won’t be like that, never like that as I ask her to put down the bloody weapon.

This is the answer, the only way it will ever end but it won’t end; I have yet to accept it and my daughter, well she was born to terms. There will come a time when she stops listening to me, I hope she runs away from… what home, we lost that on the very first day, I think everyone did. We lost her mother soon after; to think here I am telling her to put down the gun, when it was only hands that ended her mother, I can still feel the blood.

“Why don’t we fight them” my daughter asks me; fight who the infected, maybe she means the slavers, the gangs, the tribes, or maybe she just means regular people, normal, people, people like us, damned. I can’t blame her, even in the world her mother and I once lived in there were humans and that only led to war and my daughter is human after all, like I once was. Fighting and surviving, all this time I have only wanted her to survive but she won’t because I refuse to teach her to fight but it’s there in her, as it was in me.

Was it not the emptiness that led to this war in the first place, no hearts, no minds, and no reason; it’s a disease this thing called… love. One day she will stop listening to me but unlike any other father I will pray she really does hate me when the time comes.

Empty handed they once were, until someone filled their heads with insanity, their souls with rage, and their mouths with the same lies they utter even in death. Why didn’t I fight… my hands were full, my wife and my daughter’s hands as more bombs fell and more monsters rose.

What is a man suppose to be, a patriot, a solider, and a man like my father; I won’t dare call myself a man now but I was a husband, a father, and I was me, I would never be the thing my father wanted. I thought my soul had died a long time ago hell I would have been one of those monsters until my wife took me by the hand and that was that. Maybe I am no better in the end because I am a liar, I promised her, I told her that if anything happened… I couldn’t kill my own child even now.