Chapter 6: The family and the dinner

Lee was just moving from one hellhole to another now.
He was glad. He had never hated Larry. Yes, he had found him an asshole. More than that.
But it took a lot to really get Lee to despise you. Sleeping with his wife was one such thing.

He knew what he did was wrong. But not even till today he regretted it. There were far more important things to regret. Things that happened after people started eating each other.
And exactly that last thing was facing him now.
If he could puke, he certainly would. But somehow something prevented him from doing so, even if the sight was gruesome enough.

He was sitting at the head of a long table. Far longer than the real table had been back at the dairy. It was set for a nice diner, salt and pepper, plates, cutlery. Everything was neatly arranged.
Except for the food.
There was blood. So much blood everywhere, the sight alone was enough to make Lee sick.
Not to mention the smell.
There were random pieces of meat laying on the plates and in giant pots. Lee didn't need to see the skin on them to determine it was human meat.
What else could it be considering where he was? He was nowhere.
The rest of the room was one black void. There existed nothing outside of this nightmarish dinner table. Except for them of course.

On the exact opposite side of the table were 3 people. Lee knew them. He had murdered one of them, deliberately caused the death of the other and left the last one to be eaten alive.
'I am the cause of their deaths.' Lee knew, looking at the table grimily. 'And this was the reason why I had to.'

The St. John family continued their dinner undisturbed, though they had undoubtedly spotted Lee already.
He felt like an intruder, he wasn't supposed to be here.
He had done everything he could to keep his group from becoming something like this.

"Did it never cross your mind, that it was too perfect to be true?"
Andy's voice was slow, like there was something fragile in the air that should not be broken.
"After seeing everything you had. Devastation, betrayal, cruelties. Did you truly think you had found a safe haven were you could erase those things. "

"Was it not the lord who said, 'eat whatever is sold on the meat market, without ground of conscience'?"
This time it was Brenda St. Johns voice which spoke up, quoting the bible.
Lee knew, he had once been a god-fearing man. Long before any of this happened.

"What you did was not the same." Lee decided. "That was not meat. It were humans, it was cannibalism."
"That was survival!"
"It was MURDER!"

Danny's hand came crashing down on the table with a heavy thud. The previous caution was gone, there was now a tense feeling in the air left.

"Look me in the eyes." Danny said
So Lee did, and with shock he observed the pool of blood that had formed on Danny' chest. On the same place were Lee had struck him with a pitchfork.
He was as much a murderer as the people opposite him, yet he could not compare himself with them.
Danny continued.
"Look me in the eye, and tell me without faltering, that you would have that little girl of yours waste away from hunger, knowing there was perfectly fine flesh to feed her with, because it was against your morals."

Lee gulped, a most disturbing image struck him.
Clementine, lying on the ground, thinner than any child should ever be. It reminded him of the boy in the attic. The one he himself had killed and buried next to a rotted dog.

But an even more disturbing answer formed in his mind. Of course he would not.
He may deny it on the outside as much as he wanted. Fool himself, and everyone around him that he could stay perfectly human in a world of inhuman intent.
But deep inside, would he let himself die, knowing he could prevent it by killing, something he had done plenty from the start of the infection?
So he pulled the only card he had left to defend his decision:
"This was not 'perfectly fine flesh.' These people could have lived, Mark could have lived, if it wasn't for you…"

That was the difference between them, Lee realized. He had known Mark. He had been his friend. But what if it had been a total stranger, as Mark had been to the St. Johns. What if there were no feelings of companionship between them.
Would Lee still object? Would he still be 'human' enough to stop himself?
If he would even kill Veron for wanting to take Clementine away from him, would he not kill to feed her?

But instead of giving in to these thoughts, he just stood up and looked the 3 people opposite him in the eyes.
It just clicked in Lee's mind.
He didn't have to give this people any justification, nor for what happened on the farm, nor anything he had done.
"If not for you, we may have starved. If not for us, you may have continued living in 'piece'. But what happened, happened. There is no way back, I know that better than anyone. I'm done wasting my time with people who see no reason."
So he turned and walked away into the darkness.