Panacea - {Daryl Dixon Fanfiction}

Day 220 - Paranoia

"I don't like him." Gabry had been repeating ever since they'd left the Governor's apartment. "He looks at me like...like he's hunting." Merle rolled his eyes and helped her shrug into an overcoat. She was being a bit melodramatic by making these analogies all morning, or at least he thought so. No, he wasn't a fan of the Governor either, but her mistrust was aggravating.

"You're going to have to get over that, darlin'." He said, and clapped her over the shoulder.

"He took my knives, what do you expect?" She looked at herself in the mirror and scoffed. "I'd rather have a hoodie." She said, hating the way the hunting jacket was heavy and stiff.

"You're going to have to get over that, too."

She frowned.

"I will find you a hoodie. Damn." Women. World goes to shit, and she's still complaining about clothing. "Don't matter what you look like. Sure Milton will take you as you are."

"I don't want to be a guinea pig."

Merle rolled his eyes for the ump-teenth time. "Find somethin' else to gripe about, will ya. Let's get goin'. S'posed to be going out scouting with Martinez."

He opened the door for her, indicating she needed to get a move on.

"Merle?"

"What now?" He turned to face her where she stood in the middle of the apartment. She fiddled her thumbs anxiously, and that jacket looked like it was going to swallow her up.

"Do you really think he's still alive?"

Merle hadn't stopped thinking about his brother for one day. It haunted him, the not knowing part. "I thought you weren't. Yet here we are."

She wasn't sure if that was supposed to make her feel better, but she followed him without question to where this man Milton would be "examining" her. It was a dark space in a warehouse on the edge of the little town, and there he had rigged up an examination table. She was impressed with the amount of electricity he was able to generate, but she kept her eyes focused into Merle's back as they walked in.

"Hi, Gabry, right? I'm Milton Mamet." He extended his hand to her, and little nervous, himself, under Merle's intimidating gaze. She shook it, and he led her over to the table. "Hope Woodbury has been welcoming enough," he cast a side glance to her chaperone, "get comfortable, I'm just going to ask a few questions before we begin."

"When you're through here, just send 'er back over." Merle said, and then gave Gabry a nod goodbye. She felt like a child being left on their first day of school.

"So...you knew him before this?" Milton asked once Merle had gone.

"Yes."

"Extraordinary that you found him through all of this." Although, he didn't seem to think it was so "extraordinary" that she had known the loud-mouth redneck, but more or less that she had been able to find someone she knew, at all. "Have you been feeling any pain?" He asked while he pulled on a white glove. "Anywhere around the bit or elsewhere in your body?"

"My muscles have just been sore, like when you get the flu. The bite just feels like a bite. I can't say any of it is...noteworthy."

He noted it anyway. "Any other symptoms such as vomiting or fever? Nose bleeds, even."

"When Bexley-" She paused briefly, wondering where that girl could be at this moment, and if she were okay, but she continued, "-when she found me, she told me I had been unconscious for almost five days. She also told me that I had a fever and looked like death."

Milton hastily scrawled all that down and then wrote something off to the side. "Anything note worthy about the walker that bit you? Anything in the eyes, the way it walked or smelled?"