THINK ABOUT LIVING | Daryl Dixon

014 | Pretending to Forget

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Pretending to Forget
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          A TWENTY MINUTE DRIVE AWAY FROM THE TOWN, Daryl had to pull over, panicked as much as Mallory was surprised to find that she has started bleeding heavily again from the gunshot wound it so seems both of them had forgotten everything about. It was but a waste of time to scold her for saying nothing about the pain she was obviously feeling — Daryl was no stranger to the aches of a gunshot wound, when you feel that initial uncomfortable sensation build up into a burning flare pulsing paralyzing jolts in muscles surrounding the entry wound —, so he said nothing about it and focused on getting her to a safe zone again.

Fortunately, he happened to stop in a quiet, albeit absolutely ravaged neighborhood that, save for a couple of straying Walkers, seemed to have been left uninhabited after continous raids stripping it bare of any supplies of true significance.

In terms of picking a house to enter, Daryl was not picky in the slightest; hurry alone reduced his choices to one, so he picked Mallory up — she was paling, far too weak to protest anymore to anything at all, especially something that she was well aware she enjoyed — going for the closest house to where he parked the car.

Before he set her down, she let him know there were only two Walkers inside, one downstairs, in the basement, and one upstairs, in a room to the right. Leaving her down on the dust-filled couch in the living room that he tried his best to clear with his foot of any trash or objects with better days behind them, Daryl went on to follow her directions in securing the house for them — the Walker upstairs turned out to have been in the bathtub.

Since the sweep was quick and almost effortless compared to what would come next, Daryl gathered anything that he could use to patch Mallory up, rejoicing at something as little as finding one bottle of alcohol in a work desk's drawer in the basement or a couple of unused pads forgotten in a bag at the back of a wardrobe that he reckoned could supplement well the bandages they had left. Along with a thinner bladed knife and a pair of tweezers, he returned downstairs; the supplies he needed for the sutures, he had thankfully kept from their last close endeavor to death by bleeding out back in Atlanta.

Mallory had busied herself up in his absence into taking off her shirt — or rather prying it off her skin, as mud and blood proved to be a truly glue-like combination between flesh and synthetic fabric — and then engaging in a light read of a magazine that had been dropped on the ground and stomped over by dead and living alike most definitely. She was pleased to see the date on it be 24th August, 2010. A time before everything started.

Though her silence worried him, Daryl was mostly grateful to have Mallory pay attention to something else other than what he was doing to her wounds without even the slightest pain relief medication. She flinched almost constantly and he didn't find it in himself to complain about it, because frankly, he would have expected screams and tears, not just mere flinches away from his needle and his touch. He focused on cleaning the wounds, only removing the shrapnel that wasn't already too deep. Most of it looked like it could stay there and scar inside safely; in fact, he was planning on making sure she doesn't strain herself too much with moving so it heals properly.

Mallory set the magazine aside when Daryl looked like he was almost done with cleaning everything, the part she considered to have been the most painful. "If you're waiting for me to apologize about going out to save that little girl, it's not going to happen."

Daryl exhaled slowly, somewhat grateful she decided to break the silence between them, a tension that has been building up since they left the town and that had haunted him into deepening the void his guilt was forming in his chest. "What's done is done," he said. "I'm just glad you're alive," he added shortly after, stealing a glimpse at her past the curtain of heavy strands of hair draped around his bowed head. I could never really be upset with you anyway, he thought, yet regarded instantly he better not say such a thing, should she get the idea that his heart could take more of these dangerous encounters.