IMPORTANT A/N: I have changed the rating of this story to M. If you are not interested in rated M stories, please click away.
TW: This chapter details gore, the beginning of a r*pe, and violence. It spans basically the entire last part of this chapter.
If you'd like to skip it, I'll leave this **** right as the scenes are about to start. Stop reading the chapter there.
It wasn't that she had expected the trip to be easy, per se. She hadn't even expected it to go smoothly. What she had expected—prepared for, even—was an angry and majorly dehydrated Merle Dixon. She'd brought along supplies for that. Water. A few protein bars. A small first aid kit with bandages and ibuprofen.
Instead, they'd found the padlock and chains on the door broken, and his severed hand lying on the ground. He'd cut off his own hand to escape. They'd then followed his trail of dead walkers that led them to the kitchens, where it was clear by the evidence he'd left that Merle had managed to cauterize his own wound and slip down the fire escape.
From there it was anyone's guess. Technically he could be anywhere in the city by now, though it was likely that he was close by due to blood loss alone. If he had his brother's penchant for tracking, he might even find them before they found him. Wouldn't that be a surprise. She'd learned to expect the unexpected.
They were gathered in an office with the blinds drawn, waiting as Glenn looked around for a way to draw out his map and tell them his plan. Rick deemed it necessary to collect the bag of guns before launching a full-scale search for the missing Dixon brother, which surprised Nicole. Wasn't the point of the trip to save Merle? To fix essentially trapping him like a sacrificial lamb to the walkers?
Now they knew for certain that he was mortally wounded and on his own, the trail having only gotten more savage as they followed it before it abruptly went cold, and instead of splitting up to track him down, Rick wanted to... pause the search and double back for the bag of guns.
Nicole picked at the cuticle around her thumb as anxiety and the feeling of wrong swirled around in her chest. Every time she looked at Daryl's face, she didn't see what she would have expected. He didn't look angry, or even impatient. He looked... oddly blank. Resigned. He hadn't spoken a single word since he was unilaterally shut down when it was decided to prioritize the guns. And Nicole couldn't shake the feeling that, if it had been Shane, she wouldn't bother to wait for backup—let alone for guns.
She would have already been long gone. The fact that Daryl was willing to cooperate with them said... a lot, and she couldn't help but wonder whether Merle would have done the same or if he would have gone off alone like her.
Maybe Daryl needed a distraction. She shifted where she stood and cleared her throat. "What I can't figure out," Nicole said to Daryl, "is why the hell you wrapped his hand up like a turkey sandwich and brought it with you."
Daryl scowled at her. She felt quietly satisfied that she had broken that weird non-expression fixed upon his face like an ill fitting mask.
"Thought he might like to keep it in a jar," Daryl sneered back sarcastically. "Ain't that what people do after surgeries?"
"It ain't exactly a kidney stone, Dixon," Nicole said, earning her another hateful glare.
"Besides, does it really qualify as a surgery?" T-Dog interjected. "That requires some type of preparation—forethought."
"What other choice did he have? And ain't all this your fault, anyway? I don't know if you should be talkin'."
"But back to my point," Nicole said. "Why take the hand? He already cauterized it. Who knows if it's even possible to reattach it at this stage. When we find him, it'll be more about keeping the man alive than anything. Helping him recover. Not to mention convincing him to let us do any of that."
Though she had fully expected him to snap again, something about what she said seemed to catch Daryl off guard. He didn't sneer or rattle off some smart-ass response. Instead, he looked perplexed about something.
"What?" She snapped, unable to stand his scrutiny any longer.
He shook his head. "Couldn't just leave it. What's it matter?"
"Seemed odd, was all."
"Yeah?" Daryl challenged. "What business is it of yours?"
Nicole put her hands up, backing off. She decided to go ahead and actually take a few steps away from him for good measure.
"Okay, guys." Glenn waved a hand to draw everyone over. On the linoleum, he had drawn out a rough map using a sharpie from a nearby desk.
Using other makeshift props, he explained his thought process. She, Daryl and Glenn would go to the alley behind the tank. Glenn would run out—alone—and grab the bag of guns. From there he would either turn back and rejoin them in the alley, or if walkers cut off his path back, then he would continue forward two alleys down, where Rick and T-Dog would wait, just in case.
Nicole rubbed her lips together thoughtfully before blurting out what had been bothering her for the past thirty minutes, interrupting Daryl and Rick even as they praised Glenn for his strategy. "Look, I have to be honest—this whole thing feels like a giant waste of time."
Rick and T-Dog both frowned at her, and Glenn looked a bit hesitant, like he thought she was going to criticize his carefully drawn out plans. "Nicole?" Rick prompted. "What's wrong?"
"I know we said we'd bring back guns," she hedged. "But I honestly assumed it would be something we sent a few people to retrieve while the rest of us helped Merle back to the van. And now we know he cut off his own hand and could be blacked out in an alley somewhere slowly dying, and our response is to stop everything to grab ammo from a hoard of walkers?"
Daryl grumbled something that couldn't have been friendly under his breath, glowering at Rick and the others meanly.
"Nicole," Rick said apologetically, in that same tone everyone uses to try and mitigate an argument before it can begin. "We don't even know where he went."
T-Dog shook his head in bemusement. "Somethin' tells me that man is long gone. He was on his own, and there ain't no way he stuck around on the odds one of us decided to cash in their good deed for the year to save him."
"Where would we even start to look to find him?" Glenn posed.
"How about the alley connected to the fire escape," Nicole shot back.
"This isn't the woods," Rick cautioned. "People don't leave paths the same way out here as Daryl is used to tracking."
"Weren't you a sheriff?" Nicole scowled. "Wasn't part of your job looking for missing people?"
Rick paused. "That's different."
Daryl narrowed his eyes skeptically and T-Dog glanced sideways at Glenn.
"I mean—" Rick stammered, "it was more in the sense of combing through security footage or tracking down witnesses. It's not like he left a credit card trail for us to follow."
Daryl snorted. "Merle ain't never had a credit card in his life." Then he paused. "Least, not one with his name on it, anyhow."
"Great," T-Dog dryly quipped, and Daryl shot him a dirty look that promised pain.
"But he busted out one window, didn't he?" Nicole noted. "And he left a line of dead walkers as he went. We could probably just look for that."
"So what're we waitin' for?" Daryl quickly pounced on the opportunity, his eyes alight with the realization that someone other than himself was willing to find his brother.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Glenn raised his hands. "We have a plan."
"We agreed when we decided to come out here that we were gonna get Merle and a bag of guns," Rick reminded them, causing Nicole to glare.
"Look, it's not like we didn't try," T-Dog interjected. "Besides that, no one is saying we drop the search entirely!"
"But she's right," Daryl said. "The longer we wait, the colder his trail gets, the harder he's gonna be to find. At least we know where the bag is."
"Yeah, but for how long?" Glenn pointed out. "What if someone else happens to see a bag with 'Sheriff Department' written across it in big, yellow block letters?"
"Not to mention the rifles stickin' out the top," T-Dog muttered.
"And speaking of other people, what if Merle ran into trouble?" Rick gestured as he continued. "Walkers, or even a group of strangers? We don't have enough ammo to deal with that."
"Really? I have a gun and a knife, you have a gun, and Daryl has a crossbow. Unless you intended to slip back into that tank and figure out how to drive it, we seem fairly armed to me."
For a beat, no one had anything to say to that. Rick and Nicole locked gazes, engaging in some kind of battle of wills.
She raised an eyebrow. "Rick, you know I'm right. His life is worth more than a bag of guns. It has to be."
Another beat, and then Rick shook his head. "We can't leave those guns in the street. They're not doing anyone any good there—" he held up a hand to silence her as Nicole began to argue again. "And they can mean months' worth of protection for the group."
"So this is how it is?" Nicole crossed her arms. "You're decided?"
T-Dog studied the ground, looking some mixture of troubled and ashamed. Glenn looked between Rick and Nicole like he couldn't decide who to agree with.
"I fully intend to continue the search." Rick stared back at her, his jaw set.
Nicole hung on, hoping to give someone, anyone at all, ample opportunity to change their mind. When that didn't happen, she merely scoffed and shook her head.
She turned away and they watched as she went to grab Shane's deputy bag off the ground. She dropped it on the desk and dug through its contents until she found two more of the long, white coats they had used the day before.
"There." She balled them up and threw them at Rick's chest. "This should help that plan of Glenn's go off without a hitch."
Glenn groaned and rubbed his face. "No, not again! Really?"
Rick looked down at the coats, dumbfounded. "Where'd you get these?"
"It was a good strategy," Nicole admitted. "So I grabbed some more of those coats for future use. You guys walked right through the streets of Atlanta yesterday. You were basically invisible. If it hadn't been for the rain, it would have gone off without a hitch. Y'all think that bag of guns is so valuable? It's gotta be worth going through that again."
"That's debatable," Glenn grumbled under his breath, glaring at the garments like he might set them on fire with his gaze if he only tried hard enough.
"And what about you?" T-Dog asked Nicole.
Nicole swung the strap of the deputy bag over her shoulder. "I'm taking Daryl and we're going back to that alley to start the search for Merle."
"Absolutely not—" Rick began, but surprisingly—it was Daryl who cut him off.
"Why not?" He gestured at Nicole. "She just made your job a hell of a lot easier; all ya gotta do now is snag another walker and then stroll right out and pick up the bag. Shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes, if you're smart about it."
"We can probably shave that down even more," Glenn agreed. "If you guys want to just wait—"
"We are done waiting," Nicole all but growled. "You guys, go. Do what you gotta do. You know where to find us when you're done."
And with that, Nicole turned and walked out of the office, Daryl following closely behind her.
Nicole poked her head out the window and peered at the rusted fire escape, careful of the jagged glass that was still stuck in the window above her neck. There was about a six inch gap between the staircase and the building. It didn't look very far in theory, but her heart still tried to claw its way out of her throat at the thought of swinging herself over the ledge and onto the stairs.
She ducked back into the room and cast around for something to use to knock out of the rest of the glass. "What are you doin'?" Daryl demanded as she reached around him to grab a mop that rested against the wall behind him. "What, d'ya go blind and stupid in the last five minutes? Stairs are that way!"
Ah, she thought, there's that impatience. Her lips twitched as she waved the mop head at him in mock salute and then swung it around to knock out the rest of the glass.
Daryl seemed to want to shout at her to watch it, but notably resisted, merely choosing to glower at her as she used the mop to clear away all the rest of the broken glass for them. Once it was off the ledge of the window, she deemed it as good as it was going to get.
Nicole tossed the mop aside and reached up to secure the deputy bag more tightly across her body, and then straddled the ledge. "Well," she murmured, glancing back at Daryl with a short sigh. "Here goes nothin'."
She jumped off the side of the window and clambered on the stairs with more noise than she had intended. Wincing, she peered out at the alley to double check that there were no stray walkers lurking under the stairs waiting to strike.
"Move back," Daryl told her, and Nicole backed out of the way so he could copy her movements and join her—though he ended up making a lot less noise on his landing than she did.
She peered down at the alleyway as they descended. It looked dirty, trash and dumpsters all along the edges like any alley in Atlanta. The street outside teemed with walkers, as usual, but there was a chain link fence that was still locked with a chain and padlock which blocked any from joining them.
They both turned away from it as they finally stepped on the pavement. Nicole continued to take the lead as they made their way down the alley, looking amongst the piles of trash that had been ripped open at some point for any sign of Merle.
"Hope you don't expect any kinda thanks for this," Daryl grumbled, and Nicole glanced at him cursorily.
"From who, Merle?" She snorted, but Daryl didn't comment. "Not in this lifetime. I just think that if it was my brother, I wouldn't want to wait around either."
He made some kind of derisive noise and then went quiet as they reached the mouth of the alley.
To the left, the alley led back out into another big street—this one somewhat less crowded by walkers than the main street behind them.
But to the right, there was a back stoop for some kind of business. The door looked to have been kicked in by someone, and just beyond the doorway lay a walker sprawled out with its head split open.
Nicole and Daryl met each other's gaze from the corner of their eye and without having to acknowledge it aloud, they quietly stepped across the alley to hurry up the stoop.
At the doorway, Daryl reached out his arm to block Nicole. He jerked his chin towards the room and made a motion with his crossbow to indicate that he wanted to do the initial sweep. She shrugged a shoulder at him and stepped out of his way.
It was dark and hard to see. The smell of the dead walker stole some of her attention as they stepped over it, but she tried to hold her breath and focus on the kitchen they'd just entered.
Whatever the place used to be, it looked more like a slaughterhouse now. Blood was everywhere. Most of the cabinets and drawers hung wide open, their contents yanked out and spilled across the counters and floors.
"What happened here?" She murmured.
"Shhhh," Daryl hissed at her.
Nicole made a childish face at him that he ignored, his eyes trained on the saloon style door that, if she wagered a guess, would lead behind the front counter of a diner.
Daryl edged closer, his crossbow held aloft ready to fire at a moment's notice. She followed suit with her gun, checking to make sure it was loaded and the safety was off.
Suddenly, she heard it. Voices.
Her eyes blew wide but when she looked to Daryl he was already pressed against the wall beside the door, breath held as he listened closely to whoever was out there. He flagged a hand at her and motioned for her to do the same on the opposite side of the door, and she quickly complied. Her heart pounded in her chest so loud she struggled to hear anything useful.
"—just got here! The party's barely even started, I ain't ready to leave yet."
There was the sound of a thump, followed by a grunt. "When are you gonna learn that there's a time and place for everything, moron?"
"What'd you call me?!"
"Shut up! Look!"
"Holy shit..."
There was a long pause and for a second Nicole was caught in a blind panic that they had somehow been spotted. Her wide eyes turned to Daryl, and his unwavering gaze pinned her in place even as she tightened her grip on her pistol. She clenched her jaw so hard she felt something give a painful click, holding her breath as she strained to listen to what was happening in the other room.
"I can't believe it," the first man said with a laugh. "The bastard's alive?!"
"It looks like it but he might be one of them, we should go—"
"Wait! Look. They're arguing!" Then came an almost boyish giggle, followed by him smacking his friend in the shoulder. "Oh my god, dude, look at him wave that thing around—"
Daryl's unfocused gaze sharpened and he looked at Nicole with a silent question on his face. Nicole frowned and shook her head, motioning at him to stay put.
"Shit!" They both hissed in sympathy, as though they had seen someone get hurt. "Damn, that'll leave a mark. You know Martinez is gonna be pissed about that later."
"Who cares? I hate that asshole." Nicole's eyes widened when she heard footsteps. "He deserves it, clearly. Can't even handle some delirious hillbilly with a missin'—"
And with that, Daryl flung himself through the doors. Nicole swore under her breath and made to follow but the door swung back and slammed painfully into her forearm, nearly causing her to drop her gun.
She swore again and kicked the door open just in time to see Daryl blow past the two men and out the front door. She caught a glimpse of a huge military vehicle in the street—one without the cover over the bed, which faced the window at an odd angle. The vehicle had been parked sideways on the street to block more walkers from getting through.
And there, flinging himself over the side of the vehicle, was Merle Dixon. Daryl dove into the fray on the sidewalk, but he was quickly surrounded by three men.
She didn't get the chance to see what happened next. From the corner of the diner furthest from the exit stood two men, with a look in their eyes that made her grip strain on her gun.
"Well, well, well." One of the men was rather short in stature, with a buzzcut and a gold tooth. "Look who came to crash the party after all."
In her head, Shane's voice was screaming at her to turn around and make a break for the back door—to flee before it was too late—but the sight of Daryl caught in a grappling hand-to-hand fight outside with three men kept her rooted to the spot.
"What's your plan here, mama?" Asked the one with the gold tooth. "Think you can get a shot off at me?"
She switched her aim to his friend, and the man's face darkened into something meaner.
"Think you can threaten us?" He continued. "We don't take threats lightly in this day and age."
"Think about it," added the taller man. "Be reasonable."
He was right, she realized with a sinking feeling. Nicole knew that they were hilariously outgunned. In the back of her mind, she prayed that by some miracle—Rick and Glenn would come busting through the back door with a hundred pound bag of guns slung across their shoulders.
But something inside whispered, telling her that it wouldn't happen. That she couldn't afford to bank on that. And she knew that even if Daryl won out there, there was still the matter of retrieving his brother—and she was still inside alone, cornered by two men who didn't even really bat an eye at the gun in her hands.
"See, we got somethin' else that you don't seem to have," smirked gold tooth. He gestured to his friend. "We got each other's back."
She pointed the gun at him with renewed vigor, but it only caused him to sneer at her. As though to prove how little he took her as a threat, he began to walk towards her.
Nicole squeezed the trigger and the bullet ricocheted off some metal part of one of the chairs right next to his hip. He finally flinched and his friend ducked, his hands over his head.
"Hey!" Hollered gold tooth. "Ohhh," he darkly laughed and shook his head. The smoke from her gunshot cleared, the acrid scent of gunpowder mixing with the copper taste of her own fear that clung to the back of her throat. "You really shouldn't have done that. I told you. We got each other's backs."
Nicole's eyes widened as the taller man stood straight again, pointed his gun at her, and pulled the trigger.
Nicole dove to the side, but this wasn't a movie and she didn't have super speed. Pain exploded in her side and she felt something in her ribs crack. She was blown forcefully into the table closest to her, where she rolled across the top before crashing on the floor.
Adrenaline made it impossible to tell just how bad the damage was, but her trembling hand felt numb and wet with blood as she prodded experimentally at her side. The shot had grazed her, but it was a substantial enough hit that she felt she might pass out from the pain.
****"You BITCH!"
When she summoned enough strength to lift her head from the ground, she was momentarily confused by what she saw.
Gold tooth was gone.
No, not gone. On the ground.
She saw his boots, followed by his legs and his unconscious body—his taller friend knelt on the ground beside him with his hands hovering over the man's head. Nicole realized belatedly that his hands were also wet with blood.
"You—" she gasped, unthinking. "You shot me!"
He snarled and struck his fist out at the nearest thing, which happened to be a chair that he sent toppling over. Nicole's hands shook as she fumbled to get them under her.
Then he was yelling, shouting something in a language that she couldn't understand, racing to get to her even as she slipped in her own pool of blood in her haste to get away.
She wasn't fast enough to avoid him, and his hand fisted in the hair at the back of her head. Calloused fingers scraped and yanked so hard to restrain her that she felt several strands of hair ripped out of her head. Nicole twisted, ignoring the pain she felt as yet more hair wrenched from her scalp, and brought her elbow up to crack in his face.
His nose crunched satisfyingly and he howled in pain, but somehow managed to hold on.
And at that same moment, another man appeared before her—she hadn't even noticed him enter the diner—and made a grab at her waist. She lifted her foot just in time and landed a kick straight to his chest which sent him flying back into a booth behind him.
The man behind her wrapped both meaty arms around her and shouted something else in that language from before. As the younger man pulled himself out of the booth, whatever the guy restraining her said caused him to look at gold tooth's unmoving form nearby.
His eyes flashed and he looked back at her damningly. "You little bitch," he snarled, and lunged forward to smash his fist straight into her face.
Her head snapped back and banged onto the nose of the man holding her. He dug his fingers painfully, deliberately into the gunshot wound in her side.
Her knees gave out and she sagged in his hold. White hot pain erupted behind her eyelids and she might have screamed.
Then she was being hauled backwards, her feet skidding across the tiled floor. They stopped right over top of the body the floor and Nicole twisted her face so she didn't have to see it.
Once again, the man grabbed her by the hair on the back of her head and forced her to look down at the body below them.
She felt that she would be sick, her stomach cramping violently at the sight of the man with a gaping bullet hole in his face. Right where his mouth should be. Somewhere, mixed in the blood and the pulpy mess drenching the tiles on the floor, was probably a gold tooth, she mused distantly.
Everything felt detached, unreal, like this wasn't actually happening. A hysterical laugh she didn't really feel bubbled out of her throat and then her head snapped to the side as one of the men backhanded her.
Her ears rang so she only heard muffled voices for a moment, her blood rushing in her ears.
"—can't take her back, but we sure as hell can't let her go either. Not after what she done!"
"I told you guys," snarled the young man in front of her. "I told you that the streets of Atlanta are too fuckin' dangerous!"
"Save it, Martinez! Save that I told ya so shit for someone who gives a damn!"
They continued bickering back and forth as they dragged her, kicking and screaming out of the diner and towards the truck. There were several other slumped bodies in the back of the truck—she couldn't tell if they were dead or unconscious—and she rasped in another painful breath to prepare for another scream.
Suddenly, she couldn't breathe. One of the men had wrapped his arm around her neck in a chokehold, and she felt pressure in her head like it was about to explode, her toes barely hitting the ground as he lifted her up. Something grabbed her hands and she realized, too late, that they had handcuffed her to the railing on the truck.
The last thing she saw, before she passed out, was gold tooth's body as one of them laid him in the truck bed beside her.
When she eventually regained consciousness, she groaned in pain.
Everything hurt. Everything felt sore or stung, burned like someone was pouring vodka over the open wound on her side. It hurt so bad that she could feel it throbbing in time with her heartbeat. Her hand ghosted over the wound but didn't dare apply pressure or touch it, for fear of making it worse.
Her nose ached painfully too, and the skin under her nose and around her mouth felt dry and tight—slightly itchy—like she had some kind of drool or blood dried and cracked around it.
The room she was in, she realized as she lifted her head to cast her gaze around, was dark. Pitch black.
Her breaths came faster, unsteady and stuttering. She could feel the beginnings of a panic attack setting in. Her heart raced and fluttered uncomfortably in her chest, and there wasn't enough air to breathe—
She shifted and realized that she was lying on what felt like dirty concrete. Nicole patted around her and felt her fingers brush against paper and what might have been trash. Where was she?
Before she could contemplate it too long, a door opened.
Light poured in from outside and she flung a hand up to block it. Then the door slammed shut again, and she blinked rapidly, her heart thundering in her chest as she tried to move into a crouching position.
There was a flick, the sound of a light switch being flipped, and then she squinted against the less harsh flickering fluorescent lights.
The man from the diner moved across the room without looking at her. He had changed clothes, she noted, now wearing a long sleeved shirt with black pants and thick boots. The beanie he'd worn was gone from his head, as well, leaving a buzzcut mohawk bared under the lights.
She noticed that he also had tattoos up the sides of his neck. Before she had the chance to really study them, he grabbed a chair from the corner of the room behind a desk and dragged it across the cement in front of her.
Then he reached down to grab her arm, but she darted out of the way.
He let his hand fall limply in exasperation and then turned his gaze skyward, as though gathering his patience.
Then he glared at her hatefully and grabbed at her again, faster this time, his grip on her upper arm punishing enough to bruise. He flung her into the chair.
"Stop," she managed, her voice cracking from strain and disuse.
"Shut up," he immediately snapped back. "Shut the fuck up."
How long had it been? Where were they? She felt as though it had been hours, but it was still daylight out.
Nicole looked around and tried to swallow past her dry, aching throat.
"What happened to everyone else?" She eventually asked as he came around to sit in front of her on the desk.
"They left," he told her. "Went back to camp."
Her eyes sharpened but she carefully kept her face blank.
One of his eyebrows rose. "What? You're not curious about our camp?"
She narrowed her eyes at him.
"You should be." He folded his hands together almost thoughtfully. "If I was in your position, I would be very curious. How many of us are there? Am I hopelessly outnumbered? That is, unless of course, you've already accepted your fate."
"As far as I can see, there's only one of you here now."
"For now," he agreed ominously. "That won't last long."
She glanced around the room again. "So what's your plan?"
"My plan," he started, suddenly moving off the desk to lean over her, "is none of your business."
He hadn't restrained her, she noted, which made it easy for her to reach up and shove him roughly. He staggered back a step but he only looked to have enjoyed himself as he began to circle her like a predator.
Nicole moved to stand up, but his hand came down upon her shoulder and forced her back into the seat, the arrested motion causing the wound in her side to catch sharply.
She couldn't help but gasp and cast around, her mind blanking with pain. Her hands ghosted over the wound again, never quite touching, and she regretted all of it when he finally came to stand in front of her, his gaze knowingly moving away from the wound on her side.
He looked away from her. "I spent all morning digging a grave," he told her, a ring of keys dangling from his fingers. "For my friend. The one you killed."
Her mind felt fragmented, slippery as it willed her not to think of it—to acknowledge what she'd done. She wanted to ask about Daryl. To see where he'd gone. To ask what he meant by 'all morning'—had it been a whole day?
But she wasn't sure it would be wise. Did he even know about Daryl? He'd been in the diner with her the whole time, after all, and only saw Daryl as he streaked past them and out the door after Merle.
If they'd managed to escape without her, maybe the man knew very little of Daryl.
Maybe it would be better not to bring attention to him, because if she did, they'd realize that he meant something to her and it'd put them on the trail of the rest of her group.
So she only watched as he leaned down by the cabinet of drawers under the desk, and stashed the keys in the top drawer. It squealed awfully, the sound like nails on chalkboard as he crammed it shut again.
"Nothing to say about that?" He sneered, eyeing her. "No, I can see it doesn't seem to bother you. How sick."
"You shot me—"
"You shot first," he growled. "And I aimed to injure! You aimed to kill."
Never pull the trigger unless you're willing to kill, Shane's voice echoed in her mind. She shuddered at the thought of her brother.
"And I guess you were just gonna injure me and then let me go, is that it?"
He smiled meanly, though it was more a baring of teeth than anything. "No," he acknowledged as he stalked closer to her. "I was going to do much more than that."
She shoved at him again, but this time he caught her wrist.
"Guess you want me to finish what I started," he snarled.
He yanked her by the wrist out of the chair. It fell backward with a clatter, and he kicked it out of the way as he pulled her against his chest and tried to get his arms around her.
Nicole ducked under them, breaking his hold on her wrist, and darted out of range. He followed closely behind her, hand fisting once again into her hair—apparently his favorite move—and pulled her back by the head. She felt panic and disgust well up inside her as he grunted and pressed into her from behind, breathing in the scent of her hair deeply.
She struggled in his grasp, but his arms were like iron bars pressing unforgivingly into the raw wound on her side. Instinctively, her body jerked away from the pain and pressed her further into his hips, and his arms tightened even more as he outright moaned, his hand sliding from her arm down the front of her stomach.
Nicole let out a scream of anger and disgust as she lifted her foot and stomped his toes as hard as she could, but was shocked when it felt like she stomped an ingot of steel.
His laugh was guttural and deep as he inexplicably let her go, watching through hooded eyes as she scrambled to spin around. "You women," he muttered. "You're all the same. Can always count on you to make the same moves."
He lifted a foot, wagging it mockingly at her as she stumbled against the desk behind her and tried to fumble past it. "Steel toed boots," he added, right before he reared his leg back and then swung it forward.
Nicole dodged at the very last second and her eyes widened when his toe went into the metal cabinet under the desk so hard that it left a deep dent.
Her heart wedged in her throat and she lunged past him to make a dash for the door. His boots clapped the ground like thunder as he gave chase, and right as she reached the door something smacked into the wood right above where her hand had to go to grip the knob.
A dagger wobbled under the force with which it was thrown, its tip sunken into the flimsy wooden door.
She spun around and ducked out of the way as he made another swipe at her. His knee came forward as though to catch her again, closing the distance between them.
Nicole formed a fist with her hand and allowed momentum to carry them both forward, turning her whole body into the force of the strike as she punched him in the crotch. Steel toed boots, but no cup, she thought viciously.
His breath left in a whoosh and he fell forward. Her horrible miscalculation meant that he fell, not to his knees, but on top of her and pinned her against the door.
His hands gripped her upper arms so tightly she couldn't lift them. Nicole tried to raise her knee again, but he let go of one of her arms to block it.
She bucked underneath him to try and push him off, but he bore his full weight into her with a growl and pressed his arm across her throat, causing her to gasp and choke for air.
"That wasn't very nice," he told her in a whisper, his eyes dark and hateful. Fear, cold and pervasive, curled deep in her belly.
His other hand moved from her arm to her stomach again, fumbling to fight her clawing hands away as she futilely tried to stop him before he could actually lift her shirt.
Tossing her a look of warning, he pressed his arm hard enough against her throat that she felt some bone in her neck pop, and she saw stars dancing along with black spots for a long moment. Then the pressure abated momentarily as he pulled away, and she as she sucked in air greedily, she realized in horror that he had somehow managed to shove her pants down past her knees and—
She felt bile rise in her throat as he forced his body at an angle, forward, one leg shoving brutally between her legs. His free hand wrenched her other thigh away to open her legs even as she desperately tried to squeeze them together.
Some distant part of her realized she was biting her lip so hard she had broken though the skin, and her blood ran down her chin and caused her to choke even more.
And as he began to force himself on her—inside her—she felt one of her grasping hands wrap around something hard and jagged, and pulled.
His head snapped up when he realized what she'd done, but before he could move to stop her, she brought the dagger he'd thrown in the door into the side of his neck.
He staggered backward, away from her, slipping out of her—
She gagged with him and clawed at her bruised throat as he collapsed and pawed at the dagger protruding from the side of his neck.
She must have blacked out. When she came around to consciousness, she was lying on her side, her side screaming in pain, and the lights continued to flicker overhead.
Nicole opened her eyes fully and blinked to clear her vision, her eyes feeling dry and sticky. The silhouette of a body registered not far from her—a knife still stuck out of the side of his neck, but with a river of blood under him. His face was frozen in slack-jawed horror. He seemed to stare hatefully at her with glassy, unblinking eyes.
One of his hands was outstretched toward her. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt herself crumbling, against her will, into a ball. It was this motion that made her realize that her pants were still down around her knees, one leg down at her ankle. Apparently she had tripped over them in her haste to get away and ripped them, because when she tried to yank them back up, she realized there was a gaping hole in them.
Nicole was still trying to wriggle out of them when she heard it. Behind her, where the man still lay, she heard gurgling and froze. Slowly, she turned her head around and saw him.
He was dead. But the fingers of his outstretched hand were moving.
Or—was he dead? For a moment she thought he was alive and a new surge of adrenaline roared through her brain—but then she realized—he had turned.
The hows and whys fell to the back of her mind. All that mattered in that moment was distance. She tripped a little as she fell back, no pants on, side burning with the heat of a thousand suns, her lips throbbing—and she spotted the dagger still buried in his neck.
She lunged at him just as he tried to sit up. His hand came up to grab her by the hair again and the rage it sparked fueled her enough to wrench the dagger free just in time to stab him in the side of the head right as the door flew open.
Nicole fell back with a shriek and cowered away, her hands immediately raised as though to block any strikes headed her way.
After a beat, she paused, her heart racing, and lowered her hands. There, in the doorway with his crossbow aimed at the ground, stood Daryl Dixon.
She realized several things in that moment.
One, how it must look, to find her and a dead man locked in a room alone together.
Two, she had no pants, and as she looked down and saw the already-forming bruises across her arms and thighs, she surged to her feet and screamed, "GET OUT!"
Daryl stiffened, averted a wide-eyed gaze, and whirled around to slam the door behind him.