Mila lowered her backpack to the ground and told Josh to sit down. She knelt beside him, emptying the contents of the bag onto the tile flooring so that she could find the first aid kit and sutures. After removing about half of the meds, she found them and added them to the array of medical supplies on the ground. Josh looked at her provisions with interest.
"That's a lot of medicine," he commented. "Where'd you find all of it?"
"That veterinary clinic, just down the sidewalk from here; nobody had looted it," she answered nonchalantly, putting them back. "I've got lidocaine. I'm gonna deaden this first, then I'll clean it and start with the stitches." She picked up the vial and stuck the needle of a syringe through the rubber cap, drawing out the necessary dose.
"You don't look old enough to be a doctor," he remarked warmly.
"That's because I'm not. I was a second year veterinary student when everything fell apart."
"Is that how you knew what to get from the animal hospital?" he asked, wincing as she inserted the needle into his skin.
"Yep." She pricked his arm several times along the length of the wound. "Be still," she commanded with a frown as his arm twitched.
"Sorry. It's just . . . I never have liked shots."
"You'd like them a lot better if I started scrubbing this thing without them first," she responded dryly. Mila flinched, removing her hands quickly from the wound, when he started laughing.
"You're probably right about that," he sighed. She shook her head slightly, annoyed that he kept interrupting her work by moving. Daryl had told her to take care of him, and his incessant tweaking complicated the endeavor unnecessarily. After all, she still needed to redeem herself in whatever way she could for her mistake earlier that day with Glenn and the walker.
She scrubbed the wound with surgical sponges and hydrogen peroxide which fizzed considerably from between the edges of the cut. Next, she applied the nitrofurazone paste once she had the wound as dry as she could make it. The blood mixed with the bright yellow gel causing it to become a dirty orange color as she held up a sterilized needle so that she could see to thread it in the dim lighting of the store. She began by stitching the bleeding vein and continued at the end closest to his elbow but it was not long before he recoiled again after he looked to see what she was doing.
"Move again and this is going in your good arm," she said, holding up the needle threateningly with a glare.
"Sorry! Sorry! I shouldn't have tried to watch. It makes me really antsy to see that going into my own skin is all. It's not like I can feel it." With that, he looked away towards the windows at the side of the building where Zach had mentioned they broke in and breathed deeply through his nose.
Mila rolled her eyes. "Of course you can't feel it, it's deadened," she mumbled, but he did not seem to hear her or, if he did, he ignored her. Mila sewed the laceration shut stitch by stitch, frowning at the slight pucker of skin around the last one. "I'm done," she announced, running a finger over the final stitch, dissatisfied with its appearance. Mila looked up from his arm to meet his eyes. He had been watching her thumb over it and had not moved while she did. She withdrew her hand quickly as if his arm had suddenly burned her, and he cast her a lopsided grin. There was little color in his cheeks due to the blood loss that he had suffered for the past day and he was still sweating. "I think you're fevered. This," she tapped his arm, "is probably already infected." From the arrangement of plastic bottles on the floor, she chose one that was much larger than the most of the others. "This is amoxicillin. Please tell me you're not allergic to penicillin." He shook his head. "Good. You're going to take a 500 mg capsule BID- that means twice a day," she added patronizingly as she dropped a purple and pink pill into his palm. He seemed unphased by her rudeness as he tilted his head back and popped the medicine down his throat with a cupped hand over his mouth.
"Thanks for this," he said with wide, puppy dog eyes. "You could be saving my life here."
"We've still got a long way to go before we're back home. Don't thank me yet," she said, leaving him with the bag of medicine as she walked towards the place where Sasha stood watch.
"Did you get him fixed up?" Sasha asked calmly, her arms folded across her chest as she leaned against the glass window.
"Yeah." Mila sighed through her nose, disappointed in herself for feeling the need to ask. "Sasha, if you don't mind, I have a favor to ask," she said, eyeing the lightly-burdened bag over her shoulder. Sasha said nothing in response, only making eye contact to acknowledge that she was listening. "My backpack. It's . . . a lot more full than I would have guessed. It's getting a little heavy. And, with us not knowing if we'll have to run when Daryl and Glenn get back, I was hoping that maybe I could give some things to you. . . ." Her voice trailed off, anxiously awaiting Sasha's reply.
"Well, I guess that whole 'whatever's in the clinic will be lightweight' argument was a bluff." Mila had wholly expected her response to be curt, considering that she had contested her original say of going into the hardware store first in favor of the clinic. A tinge of worry that she had come off as insolent had gnawed at the back of her mind since she had thought back to it. However, the response bore with it a good-natured tease, so Mila relaxed, relieved, and returned Sasha's small smile with her own.
"Yeah. Sorry if I sounded like I was trying to trump you out there. I wanted to do some good today."
"You did. That's a lot of meds. We wouldn't have known what to get without you here."
Mila looked at the floor bashfully. "Thanks. If you want me to, I'll just take your bag and sort it how I think is best." Sasha pushed herself off of the window with her hand and shrugged the backpack off of her shoulders, handing it over silently before turning back to face out the window.
"She's back," said Josh, still on the floor and leaning against one of the near-empty shelves. Mila ignored him and sank to her knees to organize all of the items from the clinic in front of her. She decided to keep the first aid kit in her bag since it was her personal one and also kept the majority of the pills and the otoscope and stethoscope, but moved the sutures, Fura-zone, bandage materials, syringes, and all of the liquid drugs to Sasha's bag, wrapping the bottles delicately into the T-shirts that she had picked up. The discarded paper towels that had once swaddled the bottles, she stuffed into as many pill bottles as possible to keep them from rattling so badly. The only one left on the floor was the amoxyl, which she tossed to Josh with a sidelong glance. She weighed the bags against one another, one in each hand. Although Sasha's now looked a bit bulkier, they were equally heavy. Smiling at her work, she shouldered hers and returned Sasha's.