Zedler, M.D. // Daryl Dixon

Chapter Ninety-One: Test

•ninety-one•

Beatrix

As soon as the door is shut behind me, I take five seconds. I close my eyes and shut everyone else out for five seconds. For five seconds, I am on a beach somewhere in Costa Rica with a mimosa in one hand and a book in the other, letting the breeze blow through my hair. Daryl is beside me, and life is great.

After my five seconds are up, I return back to the real world.

"Come on, Beatrix, don't shut down!" Michonne is yelling in my face when I snap back int reality.

"Rick, what kind of bullet was that?" I immediately go into turbo mode.

"I-uh," he stutters, unable to find his words. I don't blame him. I want to be like that, too. "I don't know."

"Was it hollow point or was it FMJ? I need to know," I grab his face, forcing him to look at me. "I need to know what I'm working with, Rick. Think."

"It's hollow point," he finally says, and I want to punch something. Of course it's hollow point.

I turn back to see Carl laying on a gurney, a bunch of supplies surrounding him. The first thing I do is pull my hair up into a tight bun and put on a surgical mask and clean gloves. The last thing he needs is for me to breathe something into his open wound.

The world around me fades away, no longer existing once I sit down on the stool and focus on Carl's eye, or lack thereof. It looks bad, really bad. The good thing about a hollow point bullet is that it doesn't usually go through and through, so his brain should be okay. The bad thing about a hollow point bullet, though, is that once it makes an impact, it breaks apart into a thousand little fragments, and I'm going to have to pick each one out of his eye socket.

"Denise, I need a sterile environment. Nobody in or out until I'm done, okay?" I ask, and the girl nods. "You know how to start an IV, right?"

"Yes," she says, sounding somewhat confident.

"Okay, hook him up to a bag of saline. We need to make sure he has enough fluids," I sit back and look at Carl, my heart breaking more and more each second. "And can we drape his face, please? I can't look at him."

Denise nods again, rummaging through the supplies until she finds some drapes to hand to me. I take them and cover up Carl's face, except for his eye, of course, while she starts his IV. It occurs to me that nobody else is here. They all must have left, but I have no idea where they went. That isn't my problem, though. My problem is Carl.

After everything is set up, Denise puts on her mask and gloves to sit beside of me and help. With a deep breath, I go in with hemostats, tweezers, and my scalpel. Piece by piece, I have to pick out each of the bullet fragments. If I miss one, it'll get infected and he'll likely be septic. No pressure, though, right?

Every once in a while, I'll have to use the hemostats to pull back a flap of skin or use the scalpel to cut away dying flesh. Some spots have to be sutured up to keep from injuring the rest of the eye, and I even have to move some eye tissue to cover up the small part of his brain that's close to coming through.

The process is a long and tedious one, taking hours on end. Every so often, Denise has to get up and send someone away that tries to come in. I'm not sure where they're going to go with all of the walkers, but once again, not my problem.

Luckily, Carl stays out cold while I work on him. It's much easier that way, because if he was awake, he would definitely be screaming in pain.

After several hours and many, many bullet fragments, I finally think I'm done. When I stand up to look at it, it looks pretty bad still. There's a whole crater in his face where his eye used to be. Unfortunately, I'm not a plastic surgeon so I can't make it look beautiful, but I do think I saved him. I think he's going to be okay. He just has to wake up.