The Sanctuary has survived a week without flowing water and electricity. Though, survived is a crude word for what they're doing here. Negan wouldn't be surprised if people started getting sick soon. They've got close to two hundred people jammed inside this stone sardine can. They're running dangerously low on water. They're almost out of food. They're shitting in buckets. The Sanctuary never functioned like this and it was driving Negan into a murderous delusion.

There's more of the dead in the area than usual. He still has men on the outside gates, watching the perimeter. He's not ignorant enough to pretend that doesn't matter. He'd send men out to clear the woods, but keeping the fences stable is difficult enough. They get the undead piling up in spots. The thin metal bends. The corpses rile each other up, making more noise. He tells his men to pick them off, but more and more come. They just don't stop. It seems like the world is running out of humans. The universe must have decided Negan was too enthusiastic about shaving down the numbers and deserved some retribution.

Negan didn't think he deserved that though. When mother nature trampled all over her promise to sustain humanity, he decided fuck his promises to her World Order. He had dragged the living, kicking and screaming into their new miserable existence. He kept them alive. Though that didn't seem to matter.

His people are getting restless. The Saviors are getting frustrated and annoyed by the common folks' complaints. The workers can't do much work if they're not allowed out of the building. Even trying to tend to the gardens resulted in a rush of the dead, snarling and hissing, shaking the chain link, and attracting more. Negan is running out of water and he knows it'll be rebellion soon if he doesn't do something. Their last run was good, they found ammunition and some food, but still no water. Water was good as gold these days. Maybe better.

Negan is run down. He doesn't have a right hand man anymore. With Simon, Negan never really needed to find himself a left hand man. Simon was torn to absolute shreds at the Satellite outpost. It's something that still keeps Negan up in the middle of the night. The horrific amount of blood and how many pieces were torn off, it haunts him. He'd had to put a bullet in Simon's head to put him down once and for all, though he wasn't really capable of going anywhere. And Simon isn't the only good man he's lost.

A few of his most trusted Saviors had been sent out with teams to scavenge and collect from other communities. What was brought back stretched what they had, but not by much. Some of the scavenging groups hadn't even returned. It had been a problem for weeks with all the increased dead. Negan can't be bothered sending out search parties, because he worries they won't come back either. His Saviors are dwindling from the massive force they once were. He is dangerously close to things slipping through his grasp. Negan is dangerously close to losing everything.

Possibly even his mind. The food, the water, his dying men, and the unruly workers, it was all an enormous stress. Negan is barely eating and drinking, and sleeping less. He's tried a few times to go out there himself. He doesn't think he can anymore. He wants to believe it's the sleep depravation causing waking hallucinations. He is almost desperate for just sleep deprivation to be the reason he's hurtling towards a dreadful instability.

He keeps seeing her.

Dita.

Hilltop fought to defend themselves from the undead horde he sent crashing through their gates. As retribution for the attack on the outpost, he broke down their defenses, set fires, and left a locked down car blaring Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, Second Movement. Negan watched through binoculars as the people scrambled and screamed. The chaos was excellent until that sick bitch climbed in a tractor and crushed the car. He could have sworn he saw Dita standing in the flickering firelight, looking distant and empty. Staring out into the darkness, still as stone, it was like she saw him too. The shudder that ran through him made him lose his target and she was gone.

On his way back from an Alexandria collection, before things got really ugly, he could have sworn he saw her shambling through the woods. She was dirty and bloodied, reaching out to his trucks as they drove by. He even stopped to look around, but couldn't find anything. He wouldn't dare tell his men to scour the forest. He'd gone through too much forcing himself to let her go. He couldn't allow that obsession to take hold of him again. The wild goose chase after her ghost wasn't worth the effort any longer.

But Negan saw her, he knows it. He believes she's haunting him and he probably deserves it. That woman proved he was weak in so many ways. His entire community knew who she was, what she was capable of. Every single person knew that she was exactly what Negan didn't want in his world. But how wrong they were. She is everything he wanted. She brought him to his knees. She proved he was vulnerable and faulty. She proved right everything he despised about himself. He lost control and everything fell apart just because of her. The linchpin to his control. He had an iron grip on things before she showed up. He should have heeded that ice cold warning she gave him the first day they met. She was right. She would destroy him. He had such a need to break her, and still does. He wanted her so bad, it cost him not just his soul, but everything he worked for too. She is his reckoning.

That is particularly unacceptable to Negan. He still has a fire burning in him that wants to scorch through this world. He wants to pay it back for taking so much from him. He wants it to suffer just like he does. He also wants to stop it. He wants to hold the world in the palm of his hand and squeeze it till its very last breath. Negan wants to fight back, or maybe just fight. So he does.

The sun starts to rise as he stands from his desk and wipes his face. He blinks dry eyes that feel like gravel. The ledgers he went through showed that inventory should stretch them a few more days. He tries to breathe easy, but he can't yet. He should probably find enough Saviors and regulars to help him retake this world of theirs, before time runs out. They could go out and take out the undead, clear the forest, and start to rebuild. He wouldn't let the Sanctuary fall. It's all he has left.

The loud blare of a horn to the tune of 'shave and a haircut' shocks Negan from his contemplation. He looks around the room, thinking he may have imagined it. He turns to the window at his back and has to block the sharp rays of the sun as they crest over the hills and trees. He looks down into the shadow of them at the edge of the forest. There's a line of semi trucks parked scattered amongst the trees, stretching across the front end of The Sanctuary. His eyes narrow and he sees four figures, standing on top of a central truck. In the middle of the group, one person has a bullhorn that made the offending sound. They raise it to their face and their voice calls out.

"People of the Sanctuary…" Rick Grimes says with his hard southern drawl, flanked by King Ezekiel, Maggie, and Glenn, "We've come to make a deal."

His voice echoes through the silent dawn. The dead groan and hiss like it's a round of applause.