Brotherly love.

It's precious, really.

Besides your parents, brothers and sisters are the only people you'll have known for your entire life.

You hug, you fight, you share, you take, you experience every emotion with them the second you lay eyes on them.

But, like most forms of love, it doesn't always last.

The ones you love eventually die, end up estranged, or some other method of severing that cherished connection.

In this case it wasn't a falling out, per se, but "opposing worldviews", we'll call it.

He looked at this world like it was his for the taking. He was king, and everyone else were his subjects. He didn't think of how the things he did would impact others, only that if his decisions benefitted himself.

And that got us into some deep shit.

When the virus broke out and the world went to hell, he became corrupted by his own delusions.

Lying, robbing, killing, all under the guise of "helping us."

Of course, when this virus broke out, I was young, impressionable, and lost. Mom and dad fell victims quick and there was nothing we could do to help them.

Jayce, my brother, had to take me under his wing.

But one day, I asked my brother why we were doing this.

Why were we doing these bad things? What did these people do to us?

"You've seen what the world has become, we're putting them out of their misery" Jayce told me.

"I will stop at nothing to protect you. We're doing this to survive."

Younger me believed him.

Now, I see what it all was.

It was a facade to make it seem like he was the protective big brother.

He was always in it for himself. I noticed it when I was almost killed by those things trying to escape an abandoned house we were scavenging. I was trapped under a wooden beam that fallen onto me. And I had to wriggle my way out of it. Got out by the skin of my teeth.

"I didn't see the ceiling collapse, I'm sorry" he said in that moment

Bullshit. Even if you didn't see it, you had to have at least heard a goddamn house collapse in on itself.

Ever since then, I started picking up on his selfish attitude. Taking more of the food, pulling the blanket to himself when he slept, and so on and so forth.

At some point, I had enough of it.

I stand here taking my final look back at him. He's badly injured, pleading for my help, those walking corpses slowly closing in on him.

I can't bring myself to do it. I can't go back to help him.

Perhaps this is a taste of his own medicine. "Putting people out of their misery" as he put it so bluntly.

However, I'm not cold hearted like him.

I toss him my knife so he can at least have a fighting chance.

Now I take my leave.

As I walk to our car, I hear his blood curdling screams, the tearing of flesh, and growl of decaying mouths that once spoke.

It's certainly traumatizing.

Was I doing the right thing? Can I consider this a mercy kill? Was there something more I could've done or was he a lost cause? Has this whole thing caused me to lose my mind

Who knows.

In the end, though, it had to be done. He was an anchor and I had to break the chain.

May you find peace in the next world, my dear brother.