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1.

Do you love?

The death angel had followed me for three days.

Beautiful? No, far from it.  But she was in far better shape than the crawlers I had been avoiding so far.

She was mostly unmarked, a large bite mark on one arm.  Her blue jeans and a red tee-shirt were rotting off of her body, but what I could see of the rest of her was intact.   A face crusted with dirt, knotted long blond hair. Mid twenties, maybe.

I could almost see how she had been turned by looking at her.  Her home or where she had worked had been overran during when the outbreak had peaked.  A bite from a stranger or even a former loved one. Her pulling away, running till she found someplace safe.  Time and infection had done the rest. Daddy's little girl, well loved during life, was all alone and wanted the only type of love that she could now understand.

I held the rifle close. I still had close to three hundred rounds of twenty two ammunition left in the box, a full ten round magazine in the rifle and a spare in my pocket. I wasn't too worried about the walking dead unless a large group caught me out.

She was patient. Waiting.  Wanting.

I aimed.  The front sight of the rifle centered on her face.  I held my breath and started squeezing the trigger.

There is more to life than taking another breath or taking a bite of food.  I had not found anything to make it so since everything fell apart.

When I took a breath, I could only smell the dead.  When I ate, even good canned food, all I could taste were ashes.

"No, not today.".

Daddy's little girl reflected my own feelings too much.  I pushed in the safety and slung the rifle over my shoulder.

I closed the door to my refuge, a lone farmhouse  along a country road, surrounding myself in darkness.  Thumbing a match,  I lit a kerosene lantern that had been left by the people that had once lived there.

The angel? I left her to the darkness off the coming night. I looked through the window and watched her standing in the long driveway of the home, holding her arms around herself as if to provide herself a semblance of caring that no one else would give.

Hold me. I am so alone. Be with me.

I should eat.  I knew that.  The couple that had lived here had kept a decent pantry.  I had enough canned goods to live on for a month at least.

Sleep evaded me as much as hunger did.

Sometime during the night, she came close enough to the house to sing to me.  I fell asleep with her crooning promises to my ears.

Soon my love. I will hold you and you will not shy.

I woke suddenly as her song ended. Daylight was still hours away leaving me with little but my thoughts.

The people at Argus call them mercy angels because they promise an easy passing. Death angel, angel of mercy, or just mercy, different words meaning the same thing.  A final solace in a world with little enough of it to give.

I turned up the lantern. The top of it's wick was getting thick with residue but it still flared into incandescence as I rolled it up higher.  The folks that had kept this home and hearth together seemed more friendly even in their absence as I pulled an old Readers Digest from a shelf by the recliner.

I read till the sun broke over the countryside.  Still tired without wanting sleep.  Hungry without wanting food.

I rose and took stock of the morning.  She stood there at the edge of the lawn, the broken form of a crawler laying at her feet.  A death angel does not tolerate competition for those that it has chosen.

2.

Three months before, the big refugee camp in Tuscon had fallen, overran with an unending horde of the living dead. An old reserve captain fought his way out, dragging me and two others behind him.

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