Loneliness is a constant problem during the zombie apocalypse.
It's understandable. You spend every day running and fighting for your life and every night hoping that the hordes don't tear down your door while you're sleeping. You might be with friends and family members if you were lucky. Hell, it'd even be alright if you're with people that you don't know. But you will always feel a little lonely. But spending the zombie apocalypse alone..that would be quite the sad fate. You will always feel hated, hunted, scared, and alone. And you will never have a shoulder to rely on, never anyone to converse with, never someone to back you up.
But this wasn't the case for Francis. So why did he feel so lonely?
He felt a little lonely when he found Bill, Louis and Zoey, but it was great to have people fight with and survive with. They were unstoppable. Francis didn't have to try hard to hide his loneliness. He was having fun surviving with his new comrades and friends.
But then Zoey wasn't careful. She didn't hear the hunter ready to pounce on her. How could she have; they were fighting a horde and steadily losing, and began making a hasty retreat when she was pounced upon. That was Francis' last time seeing Zoey. Bill wanted so bad to help her, but Francis and Louis knew that the group would have lost him too if he did. They had to drag the screaming Bill away from the dying Zoey and get him back to the safe room. Bill didn't talk for a while after that.
He felt lonelier when it was just Louis and Bill and him. Morale was dampened, Francis wasn't making as many jokes as he did before. They were all sad at the lost of Zoey. He had to try hard to not show it.
And then Louis just disappeared. Or at least that's what it looked like. A Tank can punch hard. And if the punch from the Tank didn't kill Louis, the fall from the 30 floor Mercy Hospital definitely did. Avoiding a similar fate involved jumping into the rescue helicopter Louis almost reached and escaping from the hospital
Since the crash of their infected pilot, Francis and Bill had been simply walking and surviving. The attitude had changed. The daughter figure Zoey was shredded, the unrelenting optimist Louis was a spot on the highway. They were by themselves.
And Francis felt very lonely.
Francis considered himself manly, masculine. He loved to drink, rode a motorbike, loved to go out shooting. Not to mention that he'd done pretty damn well so far surviving a zombie apocalypse. He tried to not let these feelings of loneliness get to his head or affect him too much.
He did have Bill, the old Vietnam survivor who had made an impression on everyone when he proved to be a valuable asset to the team despite his age. But the relationship between the two was pretty unclear to Francis, as they would both poke at one another's flaws. Francis was never sure if Bill really meant the stuff he said. Their losses had improved the relationship somewhat, but not in many noticeable ways. Bill had always been a no-nonsense kind of guy, and it was growing on Francis. Francis wasn't normally so somber.
But Francis had been a fool. A zombie apocalypse is not a time of freedom, of breaking into buildings and doing whatever he damn pleased, of having fun shooting off every zombie he saw. An apocalypse is hell on earth. It took the deaths of his two last friends to learn that.
He had been pathetic before. He needed to protect what he had left. If not for his sake, then for Bill's.
