The clinic was quiet.
Initially, it had been crowded and chaotic once Noah and Tara were brought in and placed on two elevated gurneys, but then it was hauntingly quiet.
Noah's arm was gone, Bandit having chopped it clean off in the field after it was absolutely mangled by a walker.
That was the only part of the story that Amity had gotten so far.
After Noah and Tara were laid down in the clinic, she had gotten to work.
With her little medical knowledge, assisted by Carol who had a bit too, they focused on stopping Noah from bleeding out though Bandit's make-shift tourniquet had done its job and kept him alive up until that point.
Soon enough, Pete had arrived and Amity told him to attend to Noah, knowing that Tara's head injury, if fatal, would be fatal still if Pete looked at her or not.
They didn't have the kind of medical equipment to do any invasive brain surgery.
Carefully looking the woman over, Amity ruled out her having a depressed skull fracture, so that was promising at least.
Her head wound had obviously bled heavily on the way back to the community, but now all it would need was cleaning up and fresh bandages which she was more than capable of handling.
Something she had to tell Bandit as he hovered behind her, his hands trembling and his eyes wilder than Amity had seen before.
He wanted to help, wanted to do something. She knew that. Amity could already see that he was blaming himself for not keeping their two family members safe.
Pausing a moment, Amity reached out to him and gave his arm a gentle squeeze just as Deanna entered the clinic.
Her grief-laden eyes seemed to sweep emptily over the room, barely taking note of Noah or Tara and instead focusing on Nicholas who was sat in a chair in the corner before turning to Glenn, sat on the ground with Maggie kneeling between his legs with her arms wrapped around his shoulders as his head bowed, and finally, Bandit.
Her gaze seemed to make the man straighten, his chin rising a bit, and as if she had spoken to him, Bandit told Glenn to get up and come on.
Nicholas was told to follow as well by Deanna and moments after the four were gone, Maggie too rose to her feet.
"I'm gonna go find Rick. He needs to get over to Deanna's for this." Her friend explained and Amity nodded.
That was nearly 3 hours ago.
Now, Amity sat in the chair that Nicholas had occupied.
Pete had left nearly an hour earlier once he had said there was nothing else for him to do but wait.
Amity sent him away at that, saying she would watch over them and fetch him if something happened. She knew that she wouldn't be leaving the clinic either way and she would rather sit alone in silence than with Pete restlessly milling about the place.
Drifting over both of her friends, her gaze settled on Noah.
He was a bright kid, full of hope, and he never failed to remind her of Beth.
Beth had sacrificed so much so that Noah would get a chance.
Looking at him, Amity was just about to let her eyes fall shut for a brief rest when she noticed something weird around his bandage on what was left of his limb.
Shooting to her feet, Amity rushed to the young man's side and had to steady herself against his gurney when she took in the sight of the dark red rash-like marks that were beginning to peek out from beneath the bandage.
She didn't know the whole story, but Amity knew what a normal infection looked like and she was intimately familiar with what the walker infection looked like. It seemed that during whatever had gone down on the run, there had been too much time between Noah's bite and Bandit being able to hack his arm off.
Noah was infected.
Sure, he had the risk of infection just from the removal of his limb and normal infection could kill someone, but Amity knew that the dying from the virus from the bite was almost unavoidable.
She was looking at a dead kid on the table.
He was as good as dead.
But... she had avoided it.
The sound of the door of the clinic opening had her startling, stepping back from Noah and turning around with wide eyes to see that it was Bandit who had entered.
"How'd it go with Deanna?" She asked but her friend said nothing, instead, he was crossing the room towards her.
Bandit stopped at Noah's bedside, his eyes raking down the young man's body and stopping as her's had on his bandaged limb.
"I wasn't fast enough." He said simply as if he already had expected as much.
The trembling was back.
Amity watched as it started in his fingertips and seemed to travel up his arms until his whole body was practically vibrating.
Stepping around the gurney, Amity reached out for him. She wrapped one arm around broad shoulders the best that she could reach, her other settling on his chest as she leveraged him away from Noah's prone form and towards the chair that she had previously been sitting in.
"Bandit, I need to know what happened out there." She told him softly, all but forcing him down into the chair before kneeling next to him.
She wrapped his big hands in hers, squeezing them gently as she searched his face and willed him to meet her eyes.
"We got trapped and it all went to hell fast. Those two fuckers..." He trailed off, seeming to struggle with himself for a moment before continuing, his hands tensing between hers.
"Aiden started popping off rounds like a madman. The walkers were armored and he was just going blind. I saw the explosives that were on strapped to one of the hostile's vests and I called out to tell him to stop, Glenn even backed me on it, but the kid just... he didn't fucking listen. Fucking boot."
His hands were fists between hers now, but Amity could see that he wasn't really angry. Or maybe he was, but not in the way that one might assume.
He was angry for and at Aiden for being reckless and getting himself killed. He was angry at himself because he didn't think he did enough to stop it.
"Shit blew to high hell and Tara was down for the count. Aiden was stuck to the wall like a damn pinboard. We got Tara out of there and to an office in the back that had provided some protection. We held it down while we did some shitty field med work on her head... and then we heard him. The kid. He was run through, stuck to that wall, and yelling for help."
Amity tightened her grip on Bandit's hands, not letting her gaze waver from her friend's as he told her what happened. He was always the strong one. He was always holding her up and standing tall and not letting her stumble. It was her turn to be there for him.
"You don't leave a man behind. We don't. So we went out there to get him and it was a damn shitstorm. Fired a flare to distract him and we were trying to pull him off but he wasn't budging, he was screaming, and that rat fucking bastard left his friend when the walkers were coming too close. He said that they had left their group before, that it was who they were, and Aiden confirmed it. He whispered it to us like his last confession then we had to go."
Amity wasn't surprised to hear that Nicholas was a coward, but she was surprised to see how deep cowardice ran in the veins of Alexandria. They were all so fucking soft, and it had gotten two of their own people injured, maybe killed, while making them lose who knew how many people from their own ranks.
It wasn't sustainable and it wasn't right.
"And then?" She gently prompted, her eyes flickering to Noah before returning to Bandit.
The Marine sucked in a deep breath, shaking his head slowly before pulling one of his hands away from her grasp to rub roughly over his close-shaven head.
"Nicholas bolted like a rat out of his hole and with Aiden... there was nothing to be done so we took off after him. We find the guy rushing out a revolving door towards the parking lot which is flooded with walkers. We've got nowhere to go but out and he's trying to come back in. Noah and Glenn push into one section of the door just as Nicholas pushes back into the other and I'm- hell, I thought I was done for. They were closed in and safe for the time being, but Glenn... I owe him and Noah my life. They pushed on their door and Nicholas was screaming all to hell that they were going to kill him, but it gave me enough space to get inside the door with that little fucker. So now, Noah and Glenn had the guns, but Nicholas had the ammo. Mine was out and empty and he wasn't carrying any for me." He explained and Amity could see the situation playing out like a movie in her mind's eye.
It was terrifying to think of her friends in that situation, trapped between two hordes with only thin glass between them and death. Her heart was beating faster in her chest at the mere thought.
"But Eugene had already gotten Tara out and he came through for us. He drove that damned van through the parking lot, yelling and blasting that shitty music so the walkers thinned on that side. Glenn came up with a plan to bust the glass on his side towards the kind of clear parking lot so that they could get through then we'd push and be out. We'd load up, blow through the walkers to get through to the van, and then be out of there." Bandit said.
"But something went wrong," Amity stated more than asked.
Looking at Noah, it was obvious that something had gone wrong.
"Nicholas acted as you can expect a coward to act. For himself." Bandit told her, shaking his head. "When Glenn started trying to bust the glass, the doors were moving from the force. A gap kept opening on our side towards the inside the building where the walkers were and he freaked. I was between him and them, but it didn't matter. I tried to... I tried to fucking tell him that we'd be okay. That if he shut his fucking mouth for two seconds and helped me hold our side then Glenn would bust through and we'd all be ready to fucking go but he wouldn't listen. He lost it, started shoving his way out the door and exposing Glenn and Noah to the walkers on the inside. I grabbed him, tried to pull him back in but he wasn't letting up. By the time I got his head back through the door enough so that I could knock his ass out, Noah... he had already been grabbed. A walker took a bite out of his forearm before Glenn bashed its skull in with his gun and I knocked Nicholas out and shoved our doors back in place."
Amity pressed her lips tightly together as he spoke.
Noah had been bitten and was more than likely on his way to the afterlife already, and yet Nicholas was still walking around.
He had tried to sacrifice Glenn and Noah both, and yet he was still alive and well.
Amity would kill him.
He didn't deserve to live if Noah didn't get to.
"I tried to convince Glenn to do what Nicholas had done, to let the son of a bitch go to the walkers by opening our side towards the horde. I knew I'd have a fighting chance and that the sooner he got Noah to something that could take off his arm, the better, but Glenn wouldn't do it. He said he wouldn't kill us." Bandit scrubbed a hand down his face, blinking hard to clear the moisture that had obviously welled up in his eyes, but Amity didn't mention that she had noticed anything.
"By the time he busted the glass and we were in the parking lot., I had figured it would be too late but I hoped... I used my tact ax to take his arm off then made a tourniquet the best I could for it. We loaded into the van and I really really wanted to leave that fucking bastard out there but I knew that we couldn't. I knew Glenn wouldn't. It's a testament to how much he fucked us that I could even see Glenn consider it." Bandit told her, wrapping up his tale.
Amity felt like she was going to be sick.
She felt like she needed to hit something.
She needed to hit Nicholas.
That man better pray to whoever out there that he never came within arm's reach of her for the rest of his hopefully brief life or she would tear his throat out with her teeth.
"The infection doesn't mean that he's dead yet," Amity told her friend, causing his gaze to jump up to her with confusion before settling into disbelief.
"Bambi, you surviving that bite was a one in a million type of thing." He said slowly but she just shook her head.
"We don't know that. We won't know until we expand this community, until we find more and more people that could have had the same thing happen to them, or someone they know, that happened to me. Hell, we might never know because of how people get swarmed or conversely, don't ever get bit." She argued.
Pushing herself to her feet, her knees aching a bit in protest at the sudden movement, Amity pointed towards her office at the back of the clinic.
"I know you're not going to go home, big guy, but you need to get some shut eye." She told him seriously.
Bandit considered arguing, knowing that sleep wasn't going to come easy nor would it be pleasant, but he knew that she was just looking out for him so he decided to not make a fuss about it.
"What about you, Amity?" He asked and she gestured towards the bookshelves that were stocked with medical journals.
"I'm going to do some research, see if there is a way my immunity can help Noah." She explained, turning away so that she wouldn't have to see what was bound to be an incredulous look on his face.
She knew it was a long shot, but she had to have survived being bitten for a reason and maybe this was it.
With Tyreese, she had no equipment nor time to think something up, but now she had the community's resources to exploit.
The first order of business was remembering how to find out Noah's blood type, then she'd go from there.
Whatever she discovered, Amity wasn't going to give up on her young friend.
