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chapter twenty-one | the good ole drinking days
LAUREL REMEMBERED THEIR last day at the quarry camp. She remembered cleaning up the mess that occurred the night before when the herd of walkers came through. Everything with Jim seemed like that all occurred years ago. But, it was only a few weeks ago.
And It happened all over again.
Laurel's shirt was drenched in sweat as she and T-Dog lifted the bodies of random walkers into the bed of the truck and separating Hershel's loved ones in another pile with once-white sheets covering the bodies.
She would never get used to this horrid smell or the intense loss feeling that hang in the air after death.
Death. Laurel knew explaining death was always tricky. How do you explain it? Death means the soul was gone forever, or maybe traveling to another being but the body stays to rot— to give something back to earth, she guessed. But, is that true? Does the soul really leave? It's tricky to explain and understand because we don't know anything about what happens after death until we unfortunately do.
Laurel just imagines death as black. Like the color, because how else do you imagine it as? Well, maybe, she thought, you could imagine it a person, or a place, or an event that occurred. But for her, when she thought of death, she just sees black. Like the light of the soul finally went away and left the dead behind in the darkness that was too thick to see through.
Laurel remembered the CDC and what Jenner told them when they first got there. He couldn't explain why the end of the world happened or how but he kind of explained what this virus was.
As she stared at the walker's rotting face, she could picture what it... they used to look like. A brunette male who was fairly large but not fat, more like tall and muscular. You could tell he had a hard-working job that required a lot of muscle. Maybe he worked on one of the farms nearby. Who knows.
"Laurel, you good?"
Laurel straightened her back, looking back up and coming back to the present. "Huh? Oh, yeah, I'm good." She flipped her hair over her shoulder and reached down to grab its legs.
T-Dog nodded, bending down to grab its arms and together they lifted the body and threw it into the truck bed with the rest of the bodies. They only had a few more left before they moved on to Hershel's family to start the funeral.
As T-Dog went to help Andrea with a body, Rick and Dale walked up and Laurel leaned on the truck with a huff as her arms were weak from lifting so many dead weight.
"A few more trips," The sheriff informed.
Andrea groaned, "we got lucky. If that barn had anymore, we could've been overrun."
The two threw the body in the truck with a grunt.
"Good thing Shane did what he did when he did," T-Dog commented.
