Chapter 1363: Story 1363: He Was My Monster

He wasn’t a monster when I met him.

No claws. No growls. Just a crooked grin and a devil-may-care laugh. A man who could patch a wound with one hand and fire a shotgun with the other. He once protected me from a pack of biters with nothing but a crowbar and a ridiculous cowboy hat.

He was my hero.

Until the day he became my monster.

It started with the bite.

He didn’t tell me at first. Covered it up like it was nothing—just another bruise in a world built on bruises. But I saw the pain behind his eyes. The tremble in his fingertips. The silence that replaced his jokes.

He didn’t cry. He didn’t rage.

He just said, “I’ll hold on as long as I can.”

And he did.

Longer than most.

Long enough to teach me how to load every weapon we had. Long enough to leave me a handwritten map to the nearest survivor outpost. Long enough to whisper, “Don’t remember me like this.”

But I do.

The day he changed, it wasn’t violent.

He didn’t attack.

He sat on the porch of our safehouse, shirt off, skin fevered and glistening under a dying sun. His eyes were glossy, distant. The man I loved was slipping under layers of rot and hunger.

But he was still there.

“Promise me something,” he rasped.

I nodded, blinking back tears. “Anything.”

“When I go… don’t run.”

So I didn’t.

Not when his voice cracked into groans.

Not when he clutched the railing, snarling like a caged thing.

Not even when he stood, taller, darker, no longer human—and stared at me with eyes that no longer held my name.

He was starving.

And he was mine.

I lifted the pistol.

My finger hovered on the trigger.

But he didn’t charge. Didn’t scream.

He just… cocked his head. Like he was waiting for me to finish the story we started.

I should’ve ended it.

But I couldn’t.

Because beneath the blood and the bones and the broken mind—was the man who once kissed me under a shower of ash, who sang to me when the generators failed, who carved my name into a rusted wall and said it would outlast us both.

So I did something foolish.

I walked to him.

Held out my hand.

He snarled—sharp and low—but didn’t bite.

He pressed his forehead to mine. Just for a second. Just long enough for some shattered remnant of him to whisper through that contact: I remember you.

I locked him in the barn.

He sleeps there now. Wandering in circles, growling at ghosts.

I visit him every day.

I feed him what I can.

Because he’s a monster now.

But he was my monster first.

And in this world of rot and ruin…

that still means something.