Chapter Fifty-Two
"What did you think of the Hilltop?" I asked Daryl once we were home. By home, I mean in our own house, not just in Alexandria. I didn't think he would be up to talking about the place with anyone else around.
"They're weak. There's a reason this Negan guy is able to take advantage of them." Daryl slipped his vest off and then his shirt before coming to sit before me on the bed. Wound up and ready to spring all the time as Daryl was, he carried a lot of tension in his back.
"And what do you think about Negan?" I started rubbing Daryl's shoulders. For just a moment, he tensed up even more before relaxing into my touch.
"I don't reckon it'd be hard to scare the people that live at the Hilltop. Negan's probably more talk than action."
"You don't think he'll be like the Governor?" My question came out as almost a whisper.
I forced myself to focus on the scars crisscrossing Daryl's back, the older ones silver and the newer one, from none other than one of Negan's men from the motorcycle gang, still puffy and red. I was trying to keep myself from crying. Even with the Governor long dead, thinking about all of that brought up a fear in me.
"No. The Hilltop is an easy place to bully. Probably any regular Joe could scare Gregory into giving him things. Same with all the other people there, 'cept maybe Jesus."
While we were at the Hilltop, one of Gregory's own men had stabbed him. He claimed Negan had said he had to, if he wanted to get his brother back.
But then a fight ensued, and Rick killed the guy who stabbed Gregory, so all was square in the end and Gregory owed us for Rick saving his life.
He wasn't going to trade with us before then. Gregory thought what we had was nothing.
"Jesus said Negan killed a kid in front of them, though, remember?"
"Yeah, intimidation. Reckon he did it more for show than anythin', to make them scared enough to listen to him. It's all for show. You shouldn't be worryin' so much."
Daryl had promised Jesus that we could take Negan and his men out. Jesus took the deal to Gregory, who was thrilled about it. I think Gregory only liked the deal so much because it came from Maggie rather than Rick.
I was still rubbing Daryl's back, lost in thought, when he turned to me and pulled me into him.
"I won't let anything happen to you," Daryl said, his words muffled against my hair.
"I know. I just still get scared, is all."
"If you didn't get scared, I'd be worried. We're gonna come out of this on top, and I'm gonna get me that damn cow."
If Daryl was trying to make me laugh, it worked. One of his stipulations he'd laid out for Jesus was wanting one of their cows.
"Maybe if we get a cow, Carol will stop puttin' vegetables in those cookies she makes."
"You can't even taste those vegetables, you big five year old." Just knowing there were vegetables in Carol's cookies freaked Daryl out a little bit. Every time he was given one, he would turn it over and inspect it before taking a bite.
All jokes aside, I wasn't looking forward to what Daryl and Rick had agreed to do for the Hilltop. I really just wanted things to stop—why couldn't they stop? Why couldn't we just rest for a while?
Rick's rationale during the meeting when he addressed the town was that Negan would have found us anyway, so why wait? Why not take the opportunity to hit him before he had the chance to hit us first? Plus, once it was all said and done, the Hilltop would trade with us.
I will admit it was decently good logic, but I still didn't like the plan. I was getting tired of fighting, considering it was all we had done since the prison.
The plan was all set. And we had to do it immediately, as there was a time limit on how long the dead guy's brother would be kept alive.
In the morning, we dressed with weapons as well as clothes. All of us were going in heavily armed. I mean, we were on a mission to take down a group of people that our new allies considered highly dangerous.
"One day I'm just gonna cut all this hair of yours off," Daryl threatened while I was pulling my boots on. I felt him tuck the loose hair from my pony tail into the collar of my jacket. He was not going to let me forget the time a walker had grabbed the end of my braid in the prison.
"Go ahead, but trust me, if you do that you'll be living with a weird looking cotton-ball head."
My curls were too big and unmanaged for cutting them off, unless I wanted a literal lion's mane around my face.
Daryl chuckled and waited for me to finish dressing. Together, we headed out to load up into the RV.
"Gabriel is coming?" I asked Daryl in a confused whisper. Last I had checked, Gabriel was too afraid to tell his own shadow 'boo', let alone face a walker, or worse: an actual human being who wanted him dead.
"Guess so. Rick's been teaching him some stuff." Daryl whispered back to me.
"Maggie's coming, too…?" That genuinely did not make sense to me. But there she was, handing Glenn bags as he loaded the RV. "Shouldn't she stay and rest or something?"
"I reckon."
I looked around at everyone else who was going: Rosita, Abraham, Michonne, Heath, Sasha, Aaron, Carol…everyone else made sense. Jesus and another guy from the Hilltop were also joining us on the mission.
I did a double-take when I saw Carol, though. She was in the act of tossing a cigarette butt on the ground and stomping it out.
Carol had been known to lecture others, including Daryl, about smoking before, and yet she just had one in her hand.
"And Carol is smoking. I don't know what the hell is going on anymore."
Daryl snorted. "Get used to it. Nobody does."
What Rick wanted to do on this outing was deliver Gregory's head to the Saviors—but not his actual head, because that is frowned upon when you've just made a new alliance with people. Rick wanted to use a walker's head, as a trick. The head was just an excuse to infiltrate their compound and take them out.
"We're going to take a look around. Try to get a feel for how many people are in there. We like how it looks, we go in a couple of hours before dawn. The guards outside'll be tired. Everyone inside'll be sleeping. We don't like what we see, we head back, make a new plan. They don't know who we are. We'll keep Jesus in the shadows. This is how we eat."
Rick kind of sounded like he was talking to himself as much as he was talking to us before we went in.
"This is how we eat. We roll out at midnight."
It was not yet dark—we needed light to hunt for a walker that would pass as Gregory—and we were on the road. It seemed our days of camping on the road would never be behind us.
While the idea of cutting off a walker's head and passing it for a still-living person was pretty good, the one that was used was a convincing Gregory. That is, after the hair was cut and Rick beat it up a little bit to disguise the features.
Even though we had quite a few hours left before midnight, no one but Maggie slept. The rest of us surveyed the area, scouting it out. None of us had been out that way before.
I followed Daryl while he followed some deer tracks.
"These are good hunting grounds."
"Well, luckily for you, they will soon be uninhabited hunting grounds, so we should be able to come back here."
Once Rick's watch read midnight, we headed out to a gray building with a huge satellite in the back. This was the Savior's bunker Jesus had told us about, the one we had to wipe out in order to solidify the trade agreement with the Hilltop.
Maggie was staying back to guard the perimeter, with Carol staying back to guard Maggie. That made a little more sense, but I was still surprised that Maggie was out there at all.
"Stop right there!" A man's voice yelled when the car drove up to the building. "Announce yourself, asshole!"
"It's Eddie from Hilltop! It's done!" Jesus's companion yelled back. I honestly hadn't known his name before then.
Only Eddie was in the car. The rest of us were hidden in the trees, waiting for Rick's signal to move forward.
"Step out!" Standing beside Daryl, I watched as Eddie got out of his car and held the walker head high.
"Is that it?" The yelling man asked.
"Yeah!"
"Bring it here, shit brain!" I blew my breath. These 'Saviors' sure had pottymouths. They talked like Abraham. Two men came out, pointing their guns at Eddie as he brought them the head to examine.
Now that they were closer to him, the man wasn't yelling at Eddie. We couldn't hear what they said, but we watched as Eddie took the fake Gregory head out of the canvas bag we had stuffed it in.
I think we all tensed up when one of the Savior's took the head from Eddie and seemed to examine it for a moment…only to shove his hand into what was left of the neck and use it as a puppet.
When one of the Saviors went outside, leaving Eddie alone with the other, Rick set the plan in motion. He tapped Daryl on the shoulder. We all knew Daryl was the quietest, with his hunter's strides. He walked quickly and silently from out hiding spots, coming up behind the Savior and cutting his throat. Once he was down, Daryl sunk the knife into the Savior's head, so he wouldn't reanimate.
Daryl waved us in and we all emerged from our hiding spots, rushing the bunker. We moved quickly, removing the dead Savior and making ourselves scarce before the other one could come back out.
The other Savior brought out the Hilltop resident they had been holding captive. Before anything else could happen, Michonne ran the Savior through with her sword.
From there, things happened fast. Once inside, we split off to find and kill the Saviors in the bunker.
"Check the doors. Find the arsenal. We take them out," Rick whispered. In a stroke of luck, the bunker had electricity, so we weren't hunting for these people in total darkness.
The quickest and quietest way to get rid of all of those Saviors was going to be to take them out the same way we did walkers: penetrating the brain.
While one or two of us entered a room to kill the Saviors, the rest of us would stand watch with our guns raised and ready.
When it was my turn to go in, I went into a room with Daryl. I knew what the plan was. I knew what I needed to do. But hearing the words from Rick's mouth earlier and doing the deed proved to be two very different things.
Almost as soon as we were in the little room, Daryl had killed his Savior. I was having a harder time with mine.
My knife was ready, gripped in my hand, but I couldn't make my hand move down the way I needed to. Try as I might, it just wasn't happening. The effort was actually making it shake.
I had killed before. I knew that. But it had been in self-defense. I guess what we were doing then was technically self-defense, or it would prove to be in the long run. But before, the people I killed had been actively trying to kill me. Not sleeping.
I glanced behind me. Daryl was waiting for me to do it. I met his eye and shook my head a little.
He understood. Daryl came up beside me, but he didn't take his own knife out again like I thought he would. Instead he wrapped his hand around mine where it was on the hilt of the blade.
Holding my hand steady, Daryl pushed it down forcibly, making the knife enter the Savior's head with a gross squishing noise. It made my stomach turn.
"You gotta do it, Livy," he whispered against my ear before kissing my temple.
Suddenly there was an alarm blaring, making us both jump a little and then rush out of the room. Someone had been caught. They knew we were there.
