Night Shift at the End

Acid spitters stopped wasting venom on armor and aimed for food stores instead. The world was not ending anymore; it was competing. Humanity had been demoted from owner to prey, and Eli's people survived by becoming something no ecosystem had predicted: organized, grieving, armed, and unwilling to surrender each other. The pause before the next violence mattered because it showed what the apocalypse had not managed to erase. Someone always tried to clean a wound with boiled water. Someone always divided the last food into portions too small to satisfy anyone but fair enough to prevent murder. Someone always told a joke that died in the air and then, a moment later, made a tired stranger laugh despite themselves.