AN: This is my very first Walking Dead fanfic so I'm a little nervous. This story is going to be a mixture of the comics and television series, so I'm playing it pretty loose with the setup of the Sanctuary. Special thanks to my buddy, Martyrfan, for beta reading this chapter for me.
Recently Re-edited: 4/11/21
Disclaimer: I don't own the Walking Dead
Retrospection, or, "the fancy way of saying 'probably shouldn't have done that'".
~O~
Everyone had that moment where hindsight came calling and they had the choice to decide whether something they had done was a good idea or bad idea.
Absently picking at the callous on her palm between her pointer and middle finger, the unseen observer of the room, peering out through a dusty grate at the people below, wondered if she would ever have that moment.
Because it was harder to decide these things, given the current state of the world.
Ordinarily, back when things made sense, sneaking into a box truck that belonged to a group of men armed to the teeth, in-bound for an unknown location, would seem like a very bad idea.
However, the world had ended in spectacular fashion not too long ago and the survivors of the first wave still needed to eat, and when you were cold, starving, and on your own, you were in the kind of mindset that would have you following the grim reaper right into the underworld so long as he was holding a ham sandwich.
Additionally, it would also seem like a bad idea to sneak off said truck and stowaway inside the large factory where the scary men had staked claim. A factory that was filled with even more men, and a staggering amount of less scary, but still possibly armed, men and women workers. The observer was one amongst many a stranger, with no real way to defend herself other than her sharp machete and her equally sharp wit, and both would amount to nothing against a loaded assault rifle with the safety switched off.
But it was either deal with the living or deal with the dead, and she had decided a long time ago that dealing with the living was better because they were usually easier to reason with. People may be more unpredictable than the goblins, but between the two of them, there was a higher chance of weaseling away unscathed from a group of living people than there was a horde of dead ones.
And it had happened just like that - her sneaking into the van and stowing away in the factory.
She had been on her own for a long time, keeping mostly to herself while every now and again getting picked up by a group that was friendly enough to let her tag along for a while. She would make nice if they were civil, compare notes about occupied areas and possible supply caches, and even travel with them for a bit before moving on when they were eventually overrun by either the goblins or another group.
She had literally traveled across the country in search of some sort safe haven, a place to set up roots, but whenever she thought that she had found a place, it would be blown away like the house in Ray Bradbury's 'There Will Come Soft Rains', and each time she had barely managed to escape from becoming a silhouette on the wall.
No place had been safe or stable enough to stand against this new world. Virginia had been a cautionary hope, at best. Just because it housed the nation's capitol, didn't mean it didn't crash and burn like the rest of the country.
That night she had been walking along a highway in rural Virginia, with nothing on her except a backpack filled with an empty water bottle, a roll of duct tape, and a machete strapped to her belt.
Ahead of her, she spotted a car wreck. Three goblins shuffled nearby, but they were easily taken down and she was free to search the wreck. Upon investigation she had found that it was empty, but she could tell that it had happened recently. She could still smell the burning rubber wafting off the asphalt and see spilled gasoline on the ground. To her disappointment, there had been nothing worth taking. None of the goblins she took down looked fresh enough to be newly turned, so the occupants of the wreck must have survived and abandoned the car with their supplies.
She had been about to move on when she heard the sound of approaching vehicles through the deafening hum of crickets and cicadas. The wreck happened at an incline on the highway so she couldn't see, or be seen by, whoever was coming until they crested the hill. She dived into the surrounding forest, narrowly missing the headlights that shined to life on the wreck as a military jeep and a box truck lulled to a stop.
Several figures piled out of the jeep and started assessing the remains of the car. Low murmurs of conversation could be heard, but nothing comprehensible from her hiding spot in the forest. All she could do was stay hunkered down behind a bush and ready herself to bolt further into the forest if needed.
She eyed each figure, studying them as they milled about the road in an unified fashion, holding their assault rifles and handguns at the ready. Four of the men went to pick through the wreck while two took point and rear to watch for goblins. They hadn't looked like service men, but they held position like they were. She saw the one man still standing by the jeep pull something from his belt and hold it to his face. The sound of static filled the air. A walkie-talkie.
'What's the hold up?' A voice buzzed through the radio.
"Nothing, boss, just a wreck on the highway. Looked like it just happened, thought we'd check it out. No sign of anybody, though."
'Forget it. I'm not in the mood to deal with stragglers tonight. Just get back to the Sanctuary, fucking post haste.'
"You got it, boss," the man released the talk button and put the radio back on his belt. He whistled through his teeth. "Alright boys, wrap it up! We head out in two."
It was hard to tell through the darkness, but with how clear the frequency had been, and how utterly barren the surrounding area was of other human life (she knew, she had checked), suggesting a very wide radio range, it sounded like the man had an AN/PRC-148. A military grade radio. Definitely not something you would find in the boys' toy section at Walmart. These men, whoever they were, were well armed, well communicated and well organized, which suggested that they had come from a much larger group with a massive setup somewhere.
She looked at the truck, the open and unguarded back of it, and made a completely uncharacteristic decision.
Distant growls in the forest behind her spurred her on as she snuck out and jump into the back just as the engine roared to life. She hid among the supplies, making herself as small as possible, and waited, listening to the radio playing up front and feeling the gentle vibration of the road speeding by beneath her. The entire ride her heart had pounded in her chest with 'what did I just do, what did I just do?' on repeat in her head.
Sneaking off the truck had been easier than she could've hoped, they hadn't unloaded it when they reached their base. She couldn't see or hear much of what was going on outside, but she had been able to just barely make out the sounds of goblins growling, a chain link fence rattling and men shouting. She sat poised behind a stack of boxes in the back, ready to face the consequences of her foolish, impulsive decision once the truck stopped and the men found her hiding in the back.
Only, they hadn't. The truck pulled into a garage and the men climbed out. She had waited with baited breath, expecting the back to fling open any second, but the voices of the men only grew quieter as they left the garage, leaving the bounty inside the truck, untouched.
She waited for as long as she could stand it, listening for movement. When ten minutes passed without anything happening, she crept out of the truck and into the garage. She kept her head low as she searched the garage before eventually venturing outside. The ride had been long, but it was still dark outside, giving her cover. With her footsteps light and her attention alert, she left the cover of the garage.
If she had known beforehand that the group took in people on a regular basis, then maybe she would have made her presence known at the truck.
If she had known so many people lived in the compound, safe from the goblins, then maybe she would have left the vents and slipped in with a group of new arrivals.
She could stare in awe with them, pretend she was seeing the factory for the first time and no one would be any wiser for it. She could have gone through the orientation and be given a job where she would work for points to support herself, and maybe build a life for herself in this so-called Sanctuary.
But she hadn't.
She knew from the moment that she had spotted the men on the road that something wasn't right about them. She hadn't made it this far on her own by not trusting her instincts. Her instinctual drive was what gotten her through the worse of this supposed apocalypse, more so than any blade or firearm. She wasn't big or strong by any means, but she was quick and clever.
From the garage she had found the main building, and from the main building she had found the vents.
Like any factory, the Sanctuary had an industrial ventilation system. Old and dusty and full of cobwebs, but still big enough for someone her size to crawl through, and stable enough to support her weight. She had used vent systems in the past to escape goblins and hostile groups, but those had been inside smaller buildings, like stores and emergency stations. Never had she crawled around inside a system as big as the Sanctuary's.
She had spent the first day just exploring, learning where each vent let out to and the different routes she could take to get to different locations. She had constructed a map in her mind, putting mental pins in the routes that led to the kitchen, the armory, the makeshift marketplace, the showers, the common rooms, the boiler room and anywhere else that might house anything useful to her.
Her movements were constricted to just daytime, when the Sanctuary was at its loudest and no one could hear her moving around, but she made the most of what she could. Once she had learned the vents like the back of her hand, she started making plans to leave and gather supplies.
During her expedition, she had come across an old maintenance hall with no outlet that seemed like it had once been used for storage, but was now left abandoned. She had picked one of the rooms to sleep in and made a little bed behind a cluster of plastic water barrels filled with rusted machinery, using an old tarp and some packing foam. It wasn't much, but she had been confident that there was enough material around her to build it up once she had gathered supplies.
It was foolproof - in theory. Because foolproof suggested that the folly of a fool wasn't possible, and she was definitely a tenacious one, so it was more like a halfcocked hypothesis than a solid, reliable plan. She had been using the vents to get around for what had to be almost a week by then, and she still hadn't worked up enough nerve to steal anything more than bread and apples to keep from starving, or use the restroom when she absolutely needed it.
When she wasn't taking measures to survive undetected, she did what she did best; she watched. Watched the daily activities of the Sanctuary. Watched the people and how they interacted with each other. Watched their behavior and how it changed in different situations. In addition to looking miserable from sunrise to sunset, they seemed to constantly be walking on eggshells, terrified that one wrong move would get them punished. They kept their heads down in the presence of higher ups and talked only amongst their own.
She was on the outside looking in, but that was nothing new.
It wasn't perfect. The vents were dark and drafty even on the warmest nights, and hot and stuffy on the coolest of days. They were dusty and full of all sorts of creepy crawlies, and the boxed in atmosphere made her feel even more isolated than traveling by herself in a dead world. If the vents weren't so vital to her new situation, then she was sure she would have developed claustrophobia. (Not to mention all the asbestos she was probably breathing in, but really, everything about this new world could, and probably would, kill her much faster than cancer ever could so she didn't waste energy worrying about it.)
No, the vents were far from ideal.
However, after observing how the people lived in the Sanctuary as opposed to her, it was difficult to decide just who had it worst. Because while she felt like a raccoon trapped in someone's crawl space, at least she didn't have to personally deal with the people who ran the place. The Saviors.
They were the not-so-secret police that worked for the man who ran the Sanctuary. (Negan, his name was, if the gossip she had heard through the vents could be trusted.)
She had spied on many of the saviors around the compound, but she had yet to spot the head honcho. In all honesty, it was hard to tell. She tried to pick out any men who could possibly be the boss, but the saviors were a boiling pot of human garbage and their pecking order was way too arbitrary to follow. Each new face acted bigger and more in charge than the last, so it was hard to single out the assholiest of the assholes and identify their leader.
Looking to the workers for any indication was pointless as well. People kept their eyes to the floor and questioned nothing - said nothing as they did hard work for little pay - did nothing when a savior stole people's stuff just because they could and started beating on someone for no reason. They were lemmings.
It was typical follower behavior; letting yourself be stripped of all individuality at the command of the first person offering a solution.
That wasn't bitter thinking on her part. She understood why some people would chose safety over freedom (fear, love, desperation), but she had never been a follower, and she had no one to lose but herself.
Still though, despite the brutality and Big Brother vibes, the Sanctuary was an impressive setup. By far the most stable and efficient one she had come across since the world went down the drain.
They had everything; electricity, running water, working plumbing, a formidable armory, solid walls, strong fences, a marketplace with an assortment of lost treasures from the old world like Suave shampoo and tampax, and food. The food was by far the best. Just from what she had seen in the cafeteria, she knew that the compound had a sizable agricultural operation somewhere on the grounds. In the mornings she could smell eggs and biscuits cooking through the vents, smell the grilled cheese for lunch and hear the chopping of crisp vegetables for dinner.
From her high perch inside the ventilation shaft that ran through the cafeteria along the ceiling, she could currently see the full spread of the serving line. Tonight they were serving some sort of stew with slices of bread, and a helping of vegetables for those who could afford them. At the end of the line, there were two piles of apples which she assumed were green and red respectively, judging by the way some people would considered each pile before picking one up, but because of her deficiency, they all looked like a murky green to her.
It was very impressive, and even more so that there was enough to feed so many people on a daily basis.
It was hell for most of its residents, with a tyrant leader on one side of the fence and hungry corpses on the other, but it was a necessary hell. She considered herself fortunate that she had found a loophole in the embargo, finding a way to live inside the Sanctuary without breaking her back working for points.
Again, it wasn't the most ideal setup. She knew that she was in the very heart of enemy territory. No matter how much she stole and got away with it clean, nothing could make her forget that. She wouldn't get overconfident. She wouldn't kid herself. If she was caught by the saviors, they would kill her and she knew that. It could all come crashing down over her head at any moment. But she still maintained her belief; being with the hostile living was better than begin out amongst the walking dead, and she planned to stick around for as long as she could.
Which, unfortunately, may not be very long at all, because word around the compound was that the Sanctuary had a rat problem - and Sam took offense to that.
AN: If you enjoyed the first chapter, make sure to tell me in a review so that I know to continue. Next chapter will be spent fleshing out the Sanctuary and the ventilation system better, hopefully helping out with any confusion. Sorry that there was no Negan in this chapter, but he's going to show up real soon.
~Scorpiofreak~