- "My way or the highway" works until you're alone and dead on the highway.

  - Sometimes you have to trust another perspective, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

  - Dip your toe in the pool. Just don’t forget how to swim on your own.

  [Jules' Edit]: Told ya. Teamwork makes the dream work. Even if that dream is surviving a meat-eating apocalypse.

  ---

  We found a warehouse tucked behind a strip of dying trees. Big place, half-collapsed on one side, but the other half looked untouched. It screamed “trap” to me. Too quiet. Too easy.

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  I wanted to move on.

  Jules didn’t.

  “There’s food in there,” she said. “You smell that? That’s preserved beef jerky and freedom, my dude.”

  I smelled something. Might’ve been jerky. Might’ve been death. Hard to say.

  We argued. Not a yelling match—just that tight, quiet kind of disagreement where neither of you want to be wrong but both of you kind of are. She said I was being paranoid. I said she was too reckless.

  In the end, we compromised. We checked the place her way—with stealth and speed—and we exited my way—through a busted skylight with a pre-rigged rope.

  And yeah. There was food. Not a lot, but enough to make it worth it.

  Even scored some powdered drink mix. Grape flavor. God-tier loot.

  That night, she offered me the last bag of jerky. I split it down the middle and said, “Fine. But if I die from zombie jerky poisoning, I’m haunting you.”

  She smirked. “You’d make a terrible ghost. Too polite.”

  We laughed. It passed.

  But I couldn’t shake the feeling that next time… compromise might cost more than beef jerky.