Still Alive

CH17: Maggie & David

"Ah! Not so rough..."

"Hold still then."

Currently, Maggie and David are in the bedroom of the apartment they had broken into.

Maggie grimaces in pain as David adjusts the makeshift splint for her sprained wrist.

Thanks to the previous day's efforts to escape the horde of infected, Maggie's injury seems to have worsened. Her left wrist is swollen, with bruises marring the fair flesh of the surrounding area. Even picking up objects with her injured hand has become a painful chore.

David had wrapped her wrist in a piece of cloth cut from a t-shirt and rested the splint (a small board he had axed from one of the cheap-looking wooden drawers in the apartment) on the joint below the injury. Using several thin strips cut from the same cloth, he then fastened the splint tightly in place to keep her wrist secured.

"That should do," David says, examining his work. "Hurt anywhere else?"

"No, thank you," Maggie replies, getting up from the chair when he pulls his hand back.

David frowns as he watches her take her backpack from the table beside them and sling it on with her good arm.

"I told you, you don't have to do this," he says as he stands and gets ready himself. "I can do it alone."

It is Maggie's turn to look at her companion sternly.

"That's out of the question."

David harrumphs, but he knows there is no point in pushing the argument. After all, he had long learned that stubbornness is a trait they both shared.

"Good thing we're going to a pharmacy then. We'll grab you some painkillers while we're at it."

Maggie remains silent during the rest of their preparations. When David moves to the adjacent room, she hears Adele fussing over him and reminding him to be careful. David simply grunts in response. After a while, she hears him follow up with his own reminder for the child to stay in the apartment and out of sight, a matter that he and Maggie had explicitly discussed with Adele the previous night.

Before Maggie leaves the room to join them, she peers out the window overlooking Orchard Road and, using their binoculars with her good hand, she scopes out the area.

The neighborhood has resumed its eerie silence now, with just a handful of the infected shambling along the road. Unexpectedly, the car alarm that had sent them on a frantic run for their lives had actually done them a favor. Thanks to the noise from the vehicle, most of the infected wandering about outside had been pulled away to Eastwood Road; and while that had been life-threatening for them the day before, now it has left Orchard Road in an agreeably less populated state.

With fewer infected to worry about, they should be able to accomplish their mission with less trouble than she originally anticipated.

Looking over at the Frieder's Mart across the street, she can also see the front of the supermarket which has fallen into partial ruin. Most of the large glass windows that line the front of the building have been shattered and one of the automatic doors seems to have been violently pulled out of place, which could be both good and bad things.

Good because it means that the building is easily accessible. Unfortunately, that's about as good as it gets.

In the past, they'd broken into homes and various commercial establishments that were in the same (or worse) state, and usually that kind of broken-down facade meant one of two things: 1) that others had gotten into the place already and that whatever was worth taking had already been looted and/or 2) that the place was probably crawling with the undead.