The easy way out.

That’s how you had referred to the tub full of skeletons found in yet another abandoned building you were searching through. People who had taken their own lives in avoidance of what might become of them should they be infected. In your mind, it was a lot easier to just off yourself than to face the horrors of the world, just for it all to kill you in the end.

But Joel was quick to shut that down.

“It ain’t easy,” he tells you. He is looking solemnly down at what is left of the bodies. “Better this than turning into one of those things. Or being put down by somebody else. It what they thought was right for them. But trust me, it ain’t easy.”

Something about Joel’s tone makes it sound like he knows firsthand how not easy it is to go this route. You study him intently as he speaks. The look in his eyes. The way his voice peters off at the end of his statement. How does he know it isn’t easy?