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When Carl kills himself, he’s alone. Sunlight filters through dirty windows and his eye focuses on the door of the church, tries his best to see through it. His family is out there. He wants to see them again. The gun is cold against the skin of his palm and Carl longs for Michonne’s calloused fingers to cradle his own instead. Carl takes a second to turn the gun over in his hands, take it in one last time. He twists the silencer, makes sure it’s secure. Checks the chamber, sees it’s half full. There’s no going back now, he knows. This decision, the choice to shoot himself and spare his family the trauma, has weighed on Carl’s chest since the second those undead teeth sunk into his abdomen. A song his mom used to listen to, before the end of the world, echoes in his dying mind. It’s far away, he can’t quite place it, can’t connect the dots between lines, but he knows it. Something about death bringing us back to God, about falling, thousands of feet into the ocean.
When Carl kills himself, he feels it. The pressure of the silencer against his bandaged temple, the thumping of his heart against his ribs, against the bite. The pain is white-hot, searing, blinding. The smoke burns his bandage, and the bullet cracks through his skull, stretches the tissues of his brain until they snap. Carl feels it for half a second and then he’s gone. His plane hits the surface of the water, cuts through it, and he sinks.
And then we’ll get down there, way down to the very bottom of everything, and then we’ll see it, oh, we’ll see it.