A tall, lithe figure comes sauntering around the back of the black truck, his leather clad hands snapping against each other in the stillness of the forest. His long legs carry him leisurely over to the group as he continues to slowly and steadily clap. Lupe is already well under impressed with their display. These men all dress like Mad Max rejects and look just about as genial. She doesn't want them around her sister or herself.
He finally turns to face Lupe and Alma directly, and they both took a knowing step back. He has dark, slicked black hair, peppered with grays at the side, pale skin gone tan and almost leathery, with a salt and pepper scruff along his sharp jaw. They know exactly the type of man he is on sight. He got everything he wanted and hurt people to get it. It made the sisters wary, but no less sure of themselves. They so readily recognize the narcissism in the smile, eyes, and swagger, because they'd seen them all too many times before. Those cocky eyes all faded to a milky white eventually. The sisters look forward to adding his to their count.
He takes them in judiciously, eyes roving up and down, and taking his time. Alma is only seventeen, but she is tall and shapely like their abuelita on their father's side. Lupe is short and squat like her mama, but it doesn't stop her from adjusting to block the stare. Both have dark black hair like their parents, skin the color of the desert sands after a rain, and fierce brown eyes in their rounded faces. All of which they directed purposefully at the man while took his fill. He focuses on Lupe who doesn't hold back her glare.
"Now what do we have here?" His voice is fine whiskey and cigarettes, like that douche bag Don Draper.
Mustachioed bitch steps forward, his voice a snarl, but shaking, "Found these girls in the woods. That fat one killed Tom, rammed him right into the truck without making a goddamn sound and snapped his neck. We didn't even see her comin'!"
Lupe carefully watches and absorbs the interaction, ignoring the dig for what it is: male insecurity and fatphobia. It is glaringly obvious that the leather clad Douche Draper is the head of this jolly band of misfits. Mustachioed Bitch is someone he cares to talk to. Her and Alma killed not only Tom, but a couple others too. Lupe doesn't smile, but their distress does bring a little warmth back into her heart.
The Big Boss sends an odd look of disappointment towards the two sisters. Almost sympathetic if it didn't stretch so uncomfortably on his features. It looks laid unevenly over something else beneath it. Lupe and Alma are sure it's a bleak nothing, just an endless consuming shadow.
He speaks, "I'm Negan and this Mustachioed Bitch to my right is Simon. You two seem to have scared the pants right off him." His grin is too wide. "Luckily, I got my own girl to protect me. So forgive me if I'm not quaking in my boots, even after that magnificent slaughter you just committed."
Negan gives an empty chuckle that echoes through his line of men. The two sisters do not respond.
He clears his throat and leans towards them with an almost genial smile. "Names?"
The sisters don't flinch or move, they just wait silently. Lupe just needs a chance and Alma wants to be ready.
"Negan, off with the kids gloves, they're killers!" Simon snarls.
Negan turns and the smile wipes right off his face as he glares at Simon. They hold the glare, one deadly and one wild, respectively. It takes a few seconds, but Simon sews something unhinged back up inside that human suit he's wearing. Stomping back off to the firing line, he mutters curses under his breath. Negan huffs through a half smile and turns back to Lupe and Alma.
"Now then…" Negan starts, loping towards them casually. The thing slung in the crook of his elbow is a classic wooden Louisville Slugger with the entire barrel wrapped in gnarled barbed wire. It's clean as he shoulders it, and that makes Lupe even less impressed.
He notices her stare and smiles, eyes going wide. "Oh, you must excuse me!" he jeers. "I am just one rude asshole, I didn't even introduce you!" He unshoulders the bat and taps the end in his opposite hand. "You like her? That's my girl!" He takes a full, fast swing. The bat buzzes as wind whips through the threaded metal.
"This here is Lucille. My pride and joy." He kisses the tip of the bat. "Normally, killing my men means a pretty intimate session with my girl here, for all of the participating parties. See, she doesn't like murderers in my territory." He stands in front of Lupe with the bat back on his shoulder. "And you? Oh," he groans, bowing his body with the sound, "I think Lucille wants to intimately know each and every inch."
Lupe frowns further. With so much equipment and so many men, she and Alma should have found a camp nearby. There weren't any farms, residential or business buildings in the surrounding ten or so miles. She doesn't think their base is nearby. The way he speaks is the biggest insult and red flag. Her, her sister, and the people they've harmed before are all negligent to this Negan's ego. The earth they tread is spoken of like a trinket, something pathetic enough for him to possess. Something familiarly colonizing shines in the bottomless hazel depth of his gaze, it is soulless and cruel.
"Thing is, I don't like harming women, and I don't like when my men do it —,"
Negan is interrupted by Lupe's derisive snort.
He glares at her for just half a second before trying to resume his ploy. "Now since this entire scene puts me in a difficult position," his voice hits an aggressive bark, but he does not see them flinch, which only starts to irritate him further, "I'd like to ask for your names and an explanation. Before I get upset and decide it's wiser to break both of your legs and leave you to die."
Lupe stands her ground. She stays coldly silent and unaffected, other than annoyed. She almost wants to smile at him, to show him she doesn't care if he does such a thing. They'd survive. It didn't matter how. She would always make sure they survived. Alma, still curling at her back, grips her shirt tighter.
"Names!" Negan finally roars, but the two girls still do not flinch.
"I'm Nita," Alma says shakily, giving the childhood nickname of her other nickname, because Mexicans can't stop themselves. "This is Dita," she supplies a distortion of the name Lupe hates. Lupe doesn't care so much. She never planned on telling them their names, real or fake. She reaches back to grip Alma's arm, hoping that she knows what she's doing. Lupe has to trust Alma. She is just as smart, or maybe smarter. They need each other for balance and survival. They have to trust each other or there's no getting out of this alive.
"Nita and Dita…" Negan drags his tongue against his smiling teeth.
Lupe snarls, "Keep your old ass fucking eyes off her, she's a kid."
"Don't look like one…" one of the nameless men snorts along the firing line.
Lupe lunges forward. "Well she is!" she growls, hovering somewhere near rabidly. "¡Hijo de mierda! It doesn't matter what your sick fucking mind thinks about it! Keep it to yourself, you rotting piece of garbage!" Alma holds her back by the belt loop.
Negan outright laughs at her response. He looks back at his man and smiles. "She sure the fuck told you." He turns back to Lupe. "Apologies then, I tend to be a mite bit more voracious than the standard man, if you catch my fucking drift. My men seem to follow suit. It's not often we cross paths with women such as yourselves."
"What? That can shoot your pathetic asses? Maybe the first thought all you have about something shouldn't be wether you can fuck it." Lupe smiles grimly. "Might wake up on the wrong side of a blender."
Negan laughs again, swinging the bat off his shoulder and pointing it right at Lupe. "Dita, I like your fire. Now explain to me why you and Nita killed so many of my men."
Lupe doesn't say a word, but Alma pulls on her shirt, edging her on. She sighs and tried her best to remain calm. "First fucker got handsy with her and gave her the wrong type of look. The rest were just reactionary to our justifiable self-defense."
Negan grins. "That's stone cold. You killed my man for a look?" His tone reaches the height of incredulity.
"I did," Lupe snaps and Alma fists her fingers in the shirt at her back, twitchy with anxiety.
"Elucidate then for me Dita," Negan's tone goes hard and cold, but there's an edge of interest peaking through, "what could you possibly have seen in one teensy little look?"
Both of the sisters know what one teensy little look can mean. Growing up brown and Latinx, it was common to receive sexual threats, especially from adults. Instead of being seen as a child, they were a buxom stereotype or a spicy caricature, just there for entertainment and consumption. The look is why her sister screamed when she did. She knows.
Lupe concentrates on Negan's gait as he gets closer, armed with just the bat and a large buck knife at his waist. The group behind him has all their guns trained on the sisters, but Lupe can't tell if any of them are worth their shot. These men weren't stealing out of desperation or begging for help. They walked right up into their space as if it were their own, immediately threatening the sisters' safety. These men are a menace to be eliminated.
Lupe can't help her eyes flitting around the space as Negan draws closer, his bat inching towards her and her sister. Alma grips the shirt at Lupe's back with a shaking hand, an infantile habit her burgeoning adulthood could never erase. Something roiling in Lupe's veins screams for safety, for wide open spaces and isolation. His grip isn't overly tight around the hard wooden handle. If he get near enough to Lupe in this state, the bat won't help him at all. But she doesn't want him anywhere close to either of them.
"It's the kind of look that hurts kids," Lupe spits at him and he freezes, just as she'd hoped. "I got plenty of those looks growing up, so I've got the experience as to what follows," she snarls grimly. Her words are laced with disdain as she continues, "Would you let your men look at you like that?" She stares straight into him, forcing him to confront it. Her face twists in disgust. "Have you been letting him give those looks to kids back at your camp? Is that the way you run your shit?" Her scowl is fierce and serious. "I'd be happy to find a way to snap each and every one of your fucking necks, if that's the case."
Negan smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. They are sharply assessing, narrowed and ravenous. Lupe doesn't want to tangle with any of them if she doesn't have to, not immediately. She does want to throw him off his game. He seems like the type that yearns for control, obsessed with possession. She would rather die than give him the satisfaction of her fear.
He laughs again and replies, "How do think you'll manage to accomplish that, hm?" He leans forward, his tone pedantic, "You seem new to the area, suspiciously unafraid and unfamiliar of myself and my men, so let me clarify something for you."
He lunges closer and the barbed wire bat points right at Lupe's nose, forcing her head back at an uncomfortable angle. Her face stretches and her eyes widen, and Negan drinks in the blankness of her stare. "I'm King Shit in these parts. Everything you see belongs to me. Everything you have now belongs to me. I've got the guns and the cock to subdue every living or dead thing for the next fifty miles. You're now property of Negan and the Saviors. So I need to you shut that beautiful mouth of yours. You may have balls, but it's my dick that gets wet. And I always find a way to get my dick wet."
Lupe's chin quivers and Negan had a heart beat of pure, unadulterated triumph. It is immediately crushed when she sputters right in his face. She laughs uproariously as she flails backwards, her voice ringing in the dead silence. She pushes her sister back as if to ask for space, really, getting her farther from Negan. Bent over at the waist, hands on her knees, Lupe keeps laughing, a bright and trilling sound that fills the forest with some Disney shit type of glee.
"You —!" Lupe tries, but can't stop laughing. All of the men with guns are starting to look just as confused as Negan. "Oh! Oh!" She laughs and slaps her thigh, huffing for a breath. "Stop! Stop!"
Her face twists with a delighted incredulity. "You — you actually —?" she swallows and huffs with a smile, "— You actually think you're the first group of men out here," she circles her arms at the empty space around them with a patronizing grin, "at the end of the world, who's tried this?" She guffaws loudly.
Her smile quirks with something bleak, but she sounds no less incensed, "The first to threaten us with your shitty firing stances and pathetic, unwashed swamp crotch? Hard fucking pass, my dude." She smiles and stands right back up again, arms open wide. "Go ahead…" The smile drops instantly. She stares at Negan, boring into him. Stone faced, and without any lingering wisp of doubt, she orders, "Try me."
Negan allows the fading grin on his lips to bloom again. That little one is impressive and even manages to rattle his cage for a moment. The grin felt strong until he looks over at the taller one. She just stands there behind her sister, waiting. She isn't shaking. She isn't visibly scared. In fact, before she looked down at her sister's boots, Negan could have sworn she was grinning. Something chills him at the thought.
"Quit staring at her before I give your men an opportunity for career advancement," Lupe snarls and Negan tears his eyes away from the younger one.
He glares at Lupe, finally getting sick of her shit. "What do you think you'll do?" He storms forward again and catches her before she can step back, too distracted with pushing the girl farther away. He snags Lupe's chin with the barbed wire tip of his bat, lugging her forward and tilting her head up. "Hm?" he growls deep in his throat, dragging it out until it rumbles all the way through to the tip of his bat. Rage building, he roars, "What could your insignificant little ass do?!"
Lupe rips her chin away from his bat's burning hold, leaving deep scratches along her skin that start dripping blood down her neck. She didn't even flinch. She didn't make a sound. In the instant of shock still reigning on Negan's face, she slaps his bat away and it flies to the forest floor. Stepping closer makes it harder for him to strike her with his long noodle ass appendages. Luckily, she's too short for the head butt she'd see coming from miles anyway. She stands close enough that if anyone shoots at her, they definitely risk hitting Negan.
Lupe leans in close to Negan and her tone is soft as silk, "I'll destroy you." She gazes up into his eyes meaningfully, her tone leisurely, "I don't care how long it takes, or how I have to do it, but I will." She tugs him closer by the belt. His knife is already in her hands, with the tip pressing into his gut. Her eyes flare and the brown in them comes alive, like a pack of wolves leaping to the chase. Her words are sharp and perfectly clear, "She's safe or no one is." Lupe pulls her hand back and starts the plunge.
Negan smiles in the split second it takes for Alma to shout as Lupe is tackled. She writhes on the ground as more men pile on, starting to punch and kick her. She grabs legs and arms, scratching, biting, and pounding on joints and groins if she can reach them. The men attempt to wrangle her, but she moves like swords getting shoved in a garbage disposal. Her ferocity is whipping up a storm of rage and frustration.
Grinning, Negan just watches on. He likes her. She has an undeniable fire that he wants to contain and mould. Both finds will be valuable assets if he can manage to get their homicidal asses in the truck. It'd been a boring year so far. He could use a distraction from the burgeoning summer heat.
Negan turns and finds himself with the worst end of a gun leveled at his face. His smile drops as he glares down the black barrel into the eyes of Alma.
She's steady, not wavering a single inch. The young girl's eyes light up much like the older one's did, and he has a mighty strong suspicion. "Tell them to let her go or I'll shoot you," she snarls
"Darlin' —,"
"You're men started this!" Alma screams, maintaining her aim perfectly. Her voice goes hard and cold, she doesn't even blink, "Let her go and we will come willingly, as long as you promise not to hurt us. If you really mean that your men won't harm women, that you're truly Saviors, we'll come."
"No!" Lupe howls. She gets a hold of someone's knife and jabs it into the closest thigh she can reach before she gets slapped. She manages to get her teeth around her assailant's first knuckle when he tries again.
"Now!" Alma shrieks at Negan.
Negan is entranced by the way Lupe's teeth sink into that Savior's skin. It hasn't mattered how hard they punch her in the head, she's refusing to let go. Because of his distraction, Alma turns sharply and lets off a shot. It hits another one of Negan's men in the shoulder, a bit too close to the heart, and he topples to the side. Lupe starts thrashing harder against less hands. Negan whirls back to the younger sister.
Alma growls, "Let her go now or I'll kill every single one of you!"
In the hush of the moment after her words, Negan knows she isn't lying. He knows it's not just the older one that needs to be watched out for. "Back off!" Negan shouts and the commotion almost stops, aside from Lupe's frantic snarling. "They're coming back to the Sanctuary willingly." Negan smiles and nods at Alma.
The men all scramble off of Lupe who is still trying to get her last hits in. Alma throws her rifle at Negan's feet in a huff and storms over to her sister. They wrap each other up in the tightest hug they can manage.
"¿Por que?" Lupe snarls as her sister helps her to her feet. It's more out of pain than anger. "¿Porque vamos con ellos?"
"Porque nuestro camión está oculto. Sólo porque vayamos, no significa que tengamos que quedarnos," Alma replies as they limp past the group of men tending to their own. They throw some glares at the two sisters as they stumble towards the large black truck.
"Ay," Lupe replies with a pained grunt, "pero, no sabemos nada de ellos, ni a dónde nos llevan."
"Quizás. Pero tienen armas y gentes. Necesitamos tener cuidado," Alma shoots back as they continue.
"What are you two chatting about, hm?" Negan sidles up next to them as they approach mid truck.
"We're reassuring each other," Lupe replies through grit teeth.
"We're scared," Alma adds in an expertly shaky tone.
They get stopped on their journey by Tom rising from the dead. He pops right up like a stepped on daisy. The bend in his neck is at a near ninety degree angle and his head bobbles to the side. He groans and hisses like all the dead do, reaching out for the group of three, flanked by Saviors.
Negan sighs and raises his bat, readying to swing, but he never gets to follow through. The older one moves the younger back and does a full swing kick, knocking the undead's face right up into the metal undercarriage's sharp edge. There's a loud crack as the fresh skull splinters, the tiniest of squelches as the head dislodges, and the body drops with a thud.
Negan's voice is a soft huff of laughter and a deep well of doubt, "Don't look so scared."
Lupe sends him a burning glare and takes a threatening limp towards him. "Forgive me if I'm not quaking in my fucking boots."
Alma scrambles right back under her sister's arm and holds her tight as she forces Lupe through the rest of the journey to the back of the truck. Alma jumps inside first, reaching up to grasp the top of the truck as she extends an arm for her sister. Lupe grabs her at the wrist and hefts herself up, but pauses halfway when she realizes Negan's hand is on her waist. She whirls around with her free hand, smacking his touch away instantly. Grabbing onto Negan's lapel, she yanks him up onto his tiptoes as she hangs from the trusted and undeniable strength of her sister's grasp.
"Keep your men away from me and my sister," Lupe bites out with utmost venom before shoving him back.
It's hard enough Negan actually has to place a foot down behind him to make sure he didn't rock back too far. He grins a little too intently as the two shuffle to the back, where the bench seats are. Deep into those shadows where he does his absolute best work.