If it were just me, I thought as I lay in bed that night, then what Negan had told me wouldn't be such a head scratching shit storm of bullshit to have to contend with. It wasn't just me, however, I didn't make decisions JUST for me. Like I'd told John before he became a gruesome mess, I didn't think with my vagina, even if I'd used cruder terms.
Another night with shitty sleep, I realized as I lay awake contemplating what this new entity had confessed to me about his past. This time it wasn't due to pent up sexual tension, oh no, this time it had to be all about his possible psychotic tendencies. What else could I consider what he'd described?
A harem of women who were picked because of their partners, men who needed to be kept in line, through use of their women? A few who came along for the 'perks', which I gathered were freedom from his points system for supplies and who am I kidding, look at his ass- it wasn't like having him available for sex would be a hardship if you were willing.
The tributes, as he'd called them, having other communities forced to give his people half of their supplies for so called safety? The fuck? While I knew that the world beyond our gates and boundaries was fucking ridiculous, this was madness. It was absolutely fucking bonkers. We'd had a few stragglers, a few broken and frightened survivors from groups that had fallen to other larger groups- groups like Negan's Saviors, integrated into our population. We weren't soldiers, even if we had surplus weapons and trained to use them, a part of the tour that Negan wouldn't have been given yet. Thank God.
We'd had others, actual feelers or leaders of communities come to make peace or ask for aid. Switzerland, I said, and I meant it. We had what we needed, we gave what we could, but that didn't include bodies to fight a war that wasn't ours. Keeping our people safe, keeping our land safe, that was all we would do. Helping others with supplies, without causing undo pain or suffering on ourselves, we would do. Above and beyond that? No. Not while I was in charge. And I had been. For a very long time it felt like.
As for his idea of punishments? I agreed with him that wrongdoing had to have an answer and consequences, but maiming people? Killing people? Not for something as simple as infidelity. Disloyalty? A woman who didn't want to be with him screwed someone she loved, I would bet money on that being the case, and so that man would bear the proof of it forever? That was a step too far. The doctor being cremated alive? I sighed as I considered John's death, a death that I'd contemplated even as I'd had sex with the man. Was I any better on that front? Probably not. I wouldn't even try to pretend otherwise, not even here in my own bed alone.
I drifted off, thoughts of whether Negan and I were alike or different, and how the fuck I was supposed to decide what do do about it.
I was with Ian, having lunch only days into my two week stay, when we heard the screaming. Alert as any physician who did a stint in an emergency room can be, I was on my feet and heading in the direction of the shouts with the ginger giant on my heels before either of us said a word. The chaos that met us was insane. Students couldn't seem to decide which direction they wanted to go in, and they also couldn't seem to choose whether running or gawking was the best choice either.
Listening for a beat, I heard the screams rise up louder from the direction of the clinic, a place I'd been shown early on, since it was simpler for the interested students to meet me there or in Ian's office than anywhere else on campus. Pushing through the bodies of the coeds, I forced my way to the clinic, hoping to see a cause for the screams that was an easy fix, but instead I saw the start of the end of the world as we all knew it.
No one would ever be able to say who was Patient Zero, if it had been the student with the chest cold that had turned viral to the point of pneumonia which then drowned them in their own fluids, or if it had been someone else. All I knew for sure when I opened the door, was that everyone was technically dead, yet strangely animated, and killing the required headshots, which was simpler than anyone might have assumed since they appeared more interested in eating- flesh and people, than actually taking stock of a human about to smack the shit out of their brain matter with a blunt object.
Within hours it had spread, or perhaps it had already been going wild and I'd been busy doing my fucking job, all I knew was that the student population started to dwindle quickly. Apparently trying to convince coeds to self isolate and quarantine goes about as well as telling toddlers to NOT eat crayons that smell like food. The dean and president of the school were making pitiful noises about how their hands were tied, but all I could see and hear was useless nonaction and excuses. Taking control, telling students who had vehicles and knowledge of their families' whereabouts and safety to head home, while others who had nothing to go on to stay put, we managed to head off the stupidity at the pass.
Soon, I had Michael, Aaron, and Justin helping me along with Mimi. We managed to inventory what we had, corral our student body alongside the educators and people who kept the college running, and we figured shit out. Runs to find supplies, with maps of the areas surrounding us, stockpiling weapons, ammo, along with medication, shelf stable foods, we also ransacked libraries to get more information on how to keep self sustaining and growing.
Our population grew, shrunk, and grew, like any other, I imagined. People still made stupid choices, they left because they thought something better might be beyond our gates or they died because they got stir crazy. We added to our population through births, people showing up and asking to be allowed to join us, or sometimes runners finding stragglers in deserted houses or towns. I kept them as healthy as I could, with Joe and Raine giving me as much aid as they could. I wanted to train more, but again, my time was spent putting out fires when it wasn't spent staring at walls and wondering when the boredom would kill me dead.
The sunlight woke me, the tension was so heavy in my body that I knew my day would run exactly like the day before, and I also knew that I had no fucking idea what to do about Negan.
On one hand, he was dangerous, that much he admitted to. On the other, I understood why he was, or had been. Every single one of us, once the world went batshit, made choices we might not have made before. I took an oath when I became a doctor, yet I hadn't blinked when I bashed the brain out of my first walking, moaning, biting corpse. If Negan was still dangerous, in the way he had been, wouldn't he have shown it by now? Or was he waiting for me to give him the keys to my kingdom to make his move?