Simon is hurt

They've been closing in on us for a few days now and we’ve been moving as fast as we can, but Simon’s leg is broken and each day he’s getting worse.  We don’t have a whole lot of time to rest, the next stretch is fields and flat ground for a few miles so we need to take advantage of that while we can.  It’s becoming apparent that Simon’s condition is not improving and the prospects of recovery aren’t promising. Already I can see him showing the signs of infection and sepsis, without medicine he’s done.  It won’t be long until we have to address this reality and decide what to do.  These things are never easy, and Simon has been with us for a while now.  We will miss his hand in our struggle, but we will not let him be the end of us.  It’s never easy to have these conversations, the kind we never used to have.  None the less we’re forced to see things for what they are, that is if you want to stay alive.  There’s always a question of whether we tell him or not, if there’s any merit in giving him a choice in how it goes down. Sometimes it’s best to do the right thing, to end it for him swiftly when he least expects it.  There’s been plenty of time when we’ve given people the choice to be left behind alive and hope for the best.  But leaving people like that to become just another corpse…. Well, it’s never sat well with me.  Not just because it adds one more body to the problem, one more dead to walk and chase us through these woods, but because it’s an awful thing to do to a person.  To leave them to find the answer to the question we’re all terrified to figure out…  What it’s like to become one of them…

We’re going to have to start climbing when we reach the hillside and it won’t take us long to get to the cliffs where we can rest.  Once we get there and everyone can see how bad it’s getting, that’s when we’ll do it.