THINK ABOUT LIVING | Daryl Dixon

012 | Blame It On The Sense of Hearing

━━━━━━ CHAPTER TWELVE ━━━━━━
Blame It On The Sense of Hearing
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

          SHE WAS BACK IN FRONT OF THOSE EMPTY SILOS, in the back of the abandoned barn, arms empty. Standing there alone, she looked down perplexed at the thin hospital gown covering her body the best it could. A stubbornly pitched ringing persisted over her hearing, increasing ever so slightly as soon as she attempted to raise her sight. Looking ahead through spotted blurs, the same silhouette at the margin of the forest started to focus in for her.

Unlike that ghostly presence whose stable stilness struck Mallory aware of how cold she really was, the surroundings were but a flicker away from changing. Like a half unscrewed lightbulb, the luminescence of the field dimmed itself in flashes to almost look like a hospital corridor, should she squint instead of blink.

Sound came out — it sounded like her voice, though her lips didn't move in the slightest. "Matt?"

A hand grasped her arm and rocked her whole perception with an earthquake-like tremor, just to get her to turn around. An overlapping choir of a familiar voice calling her name in a crescendo met her, right before she distinguished the surroundings have settled on the hospital corridor. Mallory looked right in Dr. Densmore's eyes and though the urge within her chest was to turn around and stare at that ghostly silhouette instead, she couldn't help but wait for Dr. Densmore's moving lips to synchronize with the sound of her calling her name.

The synchronization didn't happen and the sight was horrifying due to it.

As she was watching, intently terrified, a car honk blasted out of the doctor's mouth and crumbled the whole charade of Mallory's all too frequent 'dream'. Her dizziness carried over to reality, as she had been sharply awakened by an absolutely unbearable ear pain. That car honk was real. Her sight started being obstructed by dark spots, but Mallory sought frantically, like any person devoid of reason right after being forced awake, to stop the source of the sound. It was the last thing she expected to reach to the side only to have to pick up Daryl's limp-heavy hand from pressing on the honk on the steering wheel.

With much struggle, Mallory made out that Daryl had fallen asleep while driving.

Perhaps she should be grateful that once asleep he pressed the honk, not the gas pedal.

There was no time given onto her by their circumstances to even properly assess this lucky situation however, because as her ear ringing started to fade, she became quickly aware of a new sound. Knocking. She couldn't quite place the origin of it, no matter where she looked. Mallory unbuckled her seatbelt to eye the windows of the car, even squint out in the pitch black darkness filled with the white noise of rain, barely pierced by the dirty headlights casting a short yellow hue ahead.

Then the "knock" caused a glass-crack and Mallory turned around, looking right at the back of the car.

"Shit," she cursed, eyes going wide as she identified a Walker — or two — trying to break through. With no hesitation whatsoever, Mallory kicked her door open, hand already closed in a fist around the handle of her knife. She stepped outside into the rain and couldn't even close the door properly or straighten herself up to be on guard through this still barely bearable noise that a corpse bumped right into her and swept the ground from under her feet in the process. She felt the bruise that was going to form on her back, the tremor of the hit between the back of her head and the ground leaving her thoughts scrambled too, but above all of that stood her fight or flight instinct.