The Walking Dead, Survival Rule: Actions Have Consequences

Tales of the Walking Dead season 1

If your sins don’t find you, your guilt will. 

Looking back on the Tales of The Walking Dead finale, one could make the argument that all of the paranormal activity Idalia and Eric were experiencing was really just their guilt over first killing Maria’s group and then accidentally killing Alma, eating away at them, and driving them insane.

It’s not an unusual argument to make, honestly. Guilt can do terrible things to a person if not kept in check, causing psychological and even physiological side effects over extended periods of time, and I highly doubt this will change when the dead start walking.

This is part of the reason why I advise refraining from being the sort of person who’d rob, rape, abandon, betray, murder, or cannibalize people in the zombie apocalypse because, unless you’re a straight-up sociopath, doing these sorts of things will eventually get to you. Sure, you can justify taking food or supplies if you’re really desperate or using lethal force to defend yourself, but everything else? Yeah, no amount of willful ignorance will be strong enough to hold back your own conscience nagging you about that. It might dull it for a while, but sooner or later, you will come face-to-face with whatever thing you know you shouldn’t have done.

What that might cause varies, but I’d imagine depression would be the first thing on the list, perhaps followed by addiction (I’d imagine alcohol would be the most easily obtainable thing to get) to try to quiet the ghosts you’d be haunted by. While drinking might serve that purpose for a while, it will, over time, affect your ability to function properly and, after even longer, start wearing away at your liver, heart, and brain. Of course, if you’re so drunk that you’re barely coherent, you won’t have to worry about cirrhosis or dementia killing you because the dead will likely get you first.

Even if you don’t fall into addiction, guilt can still find a way to destroy you. If you go long enough being haunted by your bad decisions, you may decide to quiet the voices more directly and just commit suicide rather than go another day under those conditions.

Doing the wrong thing in a zombie apocalypse is often the easier path, but it’s only easier in the short term because, eventually, it will come back on you. For some, it might be a person coming back to take revenge, but so long as you’re not a total monster, that avenger may not get the chance, as your own guilt may do the job for them.