AN: Thanks so much for the support last chapter, and shout out to the-lights-there and the guest who reviewed last chapter. I really appreciate the feedback.
Recently Re-Edited: 4/11/21
Disclaimer: I don't own the Walking Dead.
A Day In The Life, or, "Cobwebs are not part of a balanced breakfast."
~O~
Mornings were the hardest.
Sam had been hiding in the Sanctuary for almost two weeks and it hadn't gotten any easier to pull herself out of her warm sleeping bag and up into a cold vent.
In addition to not being a morning person, the worst part of her day was crawling into the vents first thing in the morning. All the dust that she had kicked up crawling around the day before would settle overnight and be fresh and ready to irritate her sinuses. A person could only inhale so many spider webs before they went insane.
The back of her throat itched with the urge to cough, but she forced it down as she crawled through the west wing vent shaft. It was daylight; there were enough people making noise to drown out any that she made, but it would be just her luck that some savior on break would be leaning against a wall and hear her hacking up a lung.
She needed to shower and mornings were the best time to go. Her knees ached as she changed vents for a route that led to the east wing of the main building. One of the vents there would open up to a supply closet next to the women's locker room. When she got to the desired grate, it popped out easily from where the screws were already loosened, something that she had done to all the grates during her first week in the Sanctuary. She breathed a mouthful of slightly fresher air as she crawled out, pulling her shower bag out behind her.
Some of the vent exits ran along the ground while some were up higher in the corner of rooms; it depended on which area she was in. This supply closet vent was near the ground, giving her a break with putting the grate back in place.
Looking inside her bag, she double checked that she had everything before leaving the closet; her towel along with her toothbrush and toothpaste, generic soaps, deodorant and hairbrush, all of which she had gotten from the marketplace.
She didn't lead an innocent life in the Sanctuary. She stole things, all the time. Everything in her little hideaway was stolen, all taken from the kitchen and the marketplace and even from people's rooms - via the vents. At night, she would use them to get into locked rooms and take supplies. She took only one or two things at a time to keep the constant theft more inconspicuous, but she was still taking things. Things that workers needed and worked hard to get. It was necessary but also guilt-inducing, so she had mixed feelings about the situation.
She didn't care about stealing from the saviors, because chances were stealing was how they got their stuff in the first place, but she didn't want to take from the workers unless she absolutely had to. She only took necessities on a regular basis, like food and toiletries, while keeping her sticky fingers for luxury items like books and nicer clothing to a minimum.
Sam closed her bag and made for the closet door. She cracked it open just enough to peek her head out, listening for footsteps as she scanned the hall. When she didn't see or hear anybody coming, she slipped out. She walked towards the shower area, taking in everything as she went as she typically did.
Her deficiency made the Sanctuary look even more depressing. She saw the world in murky greens, pale yellows, greys and blues, so whatever coloring that the Sanctuary might have had beyond bland concrete and rust, it was lost on her. Everything looked pale and lackluster to her. It added an extra layer to the overall gloom and doom atmosphere.
Contrary to her initial observations, though, she realized that the Sanctuary wasn't all that bad for some people. If you weren't a savior you could still lead a decent life, as long as you had the right job and were friends with the right people. It operated much like the old world did with the rich bigwigs on top like the saviors, the middle class of able-bodied workers, and then the people living in poverty, consisting of mostly the elderly and disabled. Deja Vu.
She passed workers in the hall, but didn't make eye contact. She arrived at the women's locker room without incident, stepping into the tiled room and picking a bench to put her stuff down. After stripping her clothes off, she hung her towel on a shower stall hook before stepping in and closing the cheap, papery curtain behind her.
The pipes groaned in baritone agony when she turned the water on. She could hear them clanking around behind the wall. The shower head rattled hard and water that was barely lukewarm squirted out - first a foul brown and then a dubious clear. She stepped under the spray and leaned her head back, letting the water soak her hair and cascade down her body.
From the other side of the curtain she could hear women walking around, using the sinks and lockers. She wasn't as jumpy as she had been when she first started leaving the vents for things other than food and potty breaks. Thinking back, she almost smiled at how paranoid she must have looked, walking among the workers with her shoulders drawn up to her ears and flinching whenever someone so much as looked in her direction.
Learning to blend in had been easy. Taking precautions, she made sure to hide the features about herself that drew the most attention. She was a half-and-half mix of Irish and Native American. Her skin was a pale toffee color, a perfect blend of her parent's, but she got her straight nose and overall facial structure and blue eyes from her Caucasian mother, so her tone could easily be mistaken as a tan that one would get from working in the gardens. Her black hair she got from her father which she kept stuffed under a cap. She wore clothing stolen from the laundry; plain and baggy so they swallowed up her frame, making her entirely unremarkable.
There was an advantage of hiding in a place where everyone was terrified of stepping out of line; they were always too busy looking at their feet to notice a stranger's face.
Still, she was careful to avoid people, only making conversation when she couldn't turn around and walk away. In those instances it was usually a savior who approached her, and nine times out of ten they were only hitting on her. Once they realized that she wasn't taking offers, they would lose interest and leave her alone. However, on the off chance that they weren't trying to flirt, it was a savior telling her to do a job, which she would without protest.
Occasionally, she would get roped into doing work around the Sanctuary, if she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she didn't fuss. In fact, it helped lessen her guilt a little and gave her a chance to be around people. She wouldn't talk to any of them, of course, but it was nice to listen to the sounds of life, gossip and laughter, as they worked along side each other. It gave her a rare feeling of normalcy that hiding the vents made impossible.
Whenever someone asked for her name, she would give them a false answer that changed with each person. She would then make note of their face and keep watch for them so she could avoid another encounter. It didn't matter how rude or friendly they were, she avoided everybody. She couldn't have people getting to know her, it would only make her distinguishable, and then by extension - traceable. That was why she also avoided developing a daily routine. She randomized her schedule as much as she could to make sure she was never in the same place at the same time on any given day.
It was all about confidence, really. She could go just about anywhere accessible to the workers and do just about anything as long as she acted like she knew what she was doing. If she told someone that she was supposed to be there and they saw that she meant it, they didn't question her. She wondered if that made her come off as a savior.
Briefly, she had considered promoting herself from pseudo worker to pseudo savior for access to more secure areas like workshops and the armory, but she wasn't going to risk a run-in with Negan, at least not until she knew what he looked like. Total anonymity was still the best policy right now and she wasn't going to give it up. Nobody looked twice at her.
Well, except maybe the blonde.
The one with the scarred face.
There were a couple of people whom Sam had marked with red flags in her head, and the blonde was one of them. A red flag meant avoiding that individual at all costs because of potential exposure. The reason the blonde had a red flag was because Sam believed that he suspected something of her, that he had taken note of her face and realized it didn't look familiar.
She had been outside the main building last week, taking in the surroundings for the first time and watching the outer fence, observing how the posted guards operated. She had been pretending to be part of the gardening crew, kneeling next to a patch of tomatoes while covertly glancing around from underneath an obnoxiously big sunhat. The blonde had appeared next to her out of nowhere, kneeling down and grabbing one of the tomatoes without so much as an "excuse me".
She jumped at the sudden invasion of her space and turned to glare at the offender, only for her anger to turn to surprise as she got an unobstructed view of the left side of his face. It was badly scarred, a gruesome burn that left the skin gnarled and sensitive. There were patches of pink, peeling skin that showed how new the injury was. She didn't mean to stare, but the blonde caught her and gave her an ugly sneer.
He opened his mouth to tell Sam to get back to work, but then stopped short. Confusion twisted his features into something less aggressive as his eyes moved over her face, too critical for her comfort. Her heart seized when she realized that he was trying to place her. He wasn't going to be able to, obviously, and she dreaded what conclusion he would draw from it.
Fortunately, his train of thought had been derailed when his radio buzzed to life on his belt. He turned away from her and answered, but as he left the gardens, she hadn't failed to notice how he glanced back at her one last time with that same look.
Later, she found out that his name was Dwight and that he was one of Negan's top men. He worked very close with Simon, Negan's second in command (and fellow Red Flag Holder), and presumably with the boss himself, so Sam marveled at the bullet she had dodged. She avoided Dwight like the plague after that. She didn't go anywhere without first checking that the blonde wasn't lurking about, because he got around, more than any other savior.
Shutting off her thoughts so she could finish showering before the water turned too cold, Sam lathered her hair with a little bottle of motel shampoo that she had pilfered from the marketplace, making sure to wash the dark strands thoroughly so she wouldn't have to come back again for a couple of days.
She rinsed and shut off the water, grabbing her towel from the hook and wrapping it around her to banish the drafty air of the shower room. She managed to get a free sink without much trouble and brushed her teeth. The woman using the sink next to her gave her a swig of her mouthwash in exchange for a little bottle of conditioner.
Once she was finished, she got dressed and brushed her hair. She slipped on an old pair of jeans with holes in both knees, a grey tank top and a baggy, button up shirt that she saw as beige but was probably actually some shade of green. She pulled on her boots and laced them up before packing all her supplies back into her bag. Her hat came last; a blue army cap that she stuffed all of her hair up into.
Feeling clean and reinvigorated, she gave herself a once over in the mirror before leaving the shower room.
Her goals for today were to explore the workshops and boiler room in hopes of finding machine scraps and wires for a couple of projects that she was working on in her hideout. Tools were also on the list, and maybe a few manuals to help her get a sense of what type of equipment they had in the Sanctuary, since she couldn't even begin to guess where she could find blueprints of its interior - if there were any. She even hoped to one day procure one of the saviors' radios so she could listen in on their operations.
There was still a lot to do and she didn't want to waste any daylight. She stepped out into the hallway, keeping her head down as she set out to start her day.
~O~
The cafeteria was where she saw one for the first time.
When the woman had stepped into the room wearing a dress, Sam thought she was an apparition. A hallucination of times long past brought on by breathing in too much recycled air from inside the vents.
She shined like a spotlight among the downtrodden people sitting at the tables. A freshly polished silver dollar inside a piggy bank filled with dirty pennies found on the sidewalk. Her dress was black and skin tight, barely reaching mid-thigh with a plunging neckline. Her hair was clean and dyed a solid red. Her face was painted with makeup and her nails were manicured, making her look like she had just come from the only beauty salon left standing in the apocalypse.
The tell-tale tapping of her stilettos got Sam's attention, even through the chatter and pot clanging of the cafeteria. It wasn't loud, but it was distinguishable, and when she saw the woman appear in the entrance way, she couldn't help but stare. Her jaw almost dropped like in the cartoons. It was shocking, to see a woman like that walking around a place like the Sanctuary.
Sam looked around at the other diners to see if they were just as thrown by this as her, but nobody looked up from their meals. In fact, it seemed like many of them were making a conscious effort not to look at the woman.
The woman stood by the entrance, rocking on her heels as she waited for something. After a few minutes, another woman joined her, dressed even more scandalous than her companion. She had on a lace tube top that was a color Sam couldn't perceive, with a pair of cut-off shorts and wedged sandals. Her short blonde hair was styled flawlessly and her eye makeup was done in a movie star fashion.
She came in with a cheerful bounce in her step, her cheeks flushed. She exchanged a look with the other woman. No words passed between them, but the first woman gave her a knowing smirk before they both started giggling. They linked arms and strolled towards the service line, cutting everybody already waiting and grabbing the attention of one of the kitchen staff. Sam watched in awe.
"Mocosos malcriados," a voice rolled.
She turned to look at the woman standing next to her in line; a middle-aged Latina with a round face and wide hips, wearing a gardening apron that stretched tight across her front. She must have noticed Sam's stare because she was also watching the women, but with a look of disdain rather than astonishment.
"Pardon?" Sam replied, arching one of her eyebrows.
"Them," she nodded in the women's direction. "Spoiled brats, every one of them, am I right?"
Sam wanted to ask who they were, but her gut told her that was a dangerous question. Nobody was paying the women and their inappropriate wardrobe any mind which made her believe that everyone already knew who they were, and that she should probably know, too. So instead she only nodded her head in agreement.
"The least they can do is put some clothes on when they come down here," the Latina continued. "I don't know what Negan has them doing up there in his rooms, and I don't care to know, but they don't need to be bringing it out here, getting these pervertidos more riled than they already are. It's us who suffer for it. You better watch your back when you leave here, honey, you hear me?"
The woman was a picture perfect image of the no-nonsense type. Her tone was stern and Sam could do nothing but nod.
"Pigs think they can get away with touching us so long as they don't stick nothing in. I don't think so," she spat, trailing off in Spanish. She kept switching between English and her native tongue, leading Sam to believe that the woman thought she was some sort of Hispanic, which wasn't an uncommon assumption. Sam was blatantly mixed, but what with was sometimes difficult to tell and people have made some creative guesses in the past.
Sam would have left the woman's words at that, but she wanted to know who those woman were, especially if they were involved with Negan. As they shuffled along in line, she tried to think of a way to get the Latina to reveal who the women were without directly asking.
"Is there someone you can report that to?" she asked, picking the conversation back up.
The woman turned her head and gave Sam an incredulous look, snorting. "You haven't been here long, have you, honey?"
"I guess not."
"Well, don't worry, you'll learn fast. Negan don't condone rape, but like I said, as long as they don't stick their dicks in places where they're not welcome, nobody cares. It's easy enough for the Jefe to tell a bunch of dirty, horny men to keep their hands to themselves when he's got seven wives to keep his pooch under the porch, but men get stupid when they go too long without sex. It's like serotonins or some shit, drives them loco."
"You mean 'pheromones'?"
The woman gave her a flippant wave. "Whatever. Brain chemicals."
The line shifted forward and they followed, filling in the gap. Sam looked back at the front where the women were still waiting.
They were Negan's wives?
Her nose curled up.
Granted, polygamy wasn't an ancient practice done only by long dead civilizations. It had been very much alive in some cultures before the outbreak, but it hadn't been in theirs, and Sam found it disturbing to actually witness such a situation.
Negan was obviously not above taking advantage of the fall of social norms. She wondered if he thought himself as some kind of king in the new world, having a harem of women to satisfy his every whim. He was either the most egotistical man in the apocalypse, or the most insecure; she doubted he would feel the need to have more than one wife, otherwise.
The Latina spoke again, drawing her attention back.
"Before all this went down, I was always wishing to be twenty years younger so I could get my figure back from high school, but now I'm actually glad my better years are behind me," she said with bittersweet amusement as she grabbed two trays from a parked cart and handed one to Sam. "You, on the other hand, I'm surprised he isn't down here sniffing at your heels as we speak. That man tracks pussy like a fucking bloodhound, I swear. Has he asked you to be a wife?"
"No, he hasn't. I haven't seen much him, just when I first came here."
"Lucky you."
"Would you think me a spoiled brat too if he did?" Sam asked, only to keep the conversation going rather than out of honest inquiry.
She pursed her lips before shrugging her shoulders. "Nah, I guess not. That was just me lettin' off some steam. His wives don't have to work for points and they get extra protection, and in a world like this, that shouldn't be taken lightly. So they have to suck some dick for perks - big deal. It's not like whoring yourself out for shiny things is anything new or nothing. I'm just saying they should cover their tetas so the rest of us don't have to deal with guys trying to hump our legs for the rest of the evening."
The corner of Sam's mouth curled up at the Latina's blunt language and she realized that was the closest she had come to smiling in a long time.
"I'm Gloria, by the way," she introduced.
Sam was saved from having to give out another alias by the wives finally receiving their trays. She watched as they took the trays and sashayed out of the cafeteria without thanking the kitchen staff. Gloria shook her head.
"Brats," she said again. "They get whatever they want."
"And go wherever they want?" Sam asked, thoughtfully, still looking where they had disappeared.
"Mmhm."
The line shifted forward again, but she didn't notice. Her thoughts stayed with Negan's wives. Something was nagging in the back of her mind, the ghost of an idea that had yet to form completely but begged contemplation anyways. Gloria looked back from where she was putting a bowl of stew on her tray and noticed that Sam hadn't followed her.
"Hey honey," she called, snapping the younger woman out of her trance. "Come on, you're holding up the line. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," she said, turning away from the serving line.
"Where are you going?" Gloria asked. "Don't you want dinner?"
"No, I changed my mind."
Sam left her empty tray on the counter, letting the people behind her fill in her spot in line. Gloria watched her until she disappeared out of the cafeteria like the women before. The Latina shook her head again and mumbled something in Spanish before turning back to her own tray.
~O~
Since first arriving, her hideout had grown from a pitiful hovel to a decent setup thanks to her scavenging. She managed to get her hands on a sleeping bag and pillow early on and she had re-purposed the old tarp as a roof for her little corner between a metal shelf and the water barrels.
Sam sat on top of her sprawled out sleeping bag with her back against the wall and her knees bent. In her lap was the wirey skeleton of an old radio. She worked a screwdriver at the screw holding the radio's tuning dial in place. The radio was too damaged to fix, but it still had good parts inside it that she could reuse. She was starting to build up her own little scrap yard. Scavenged parts lined many of the shelves and window ceils of the maintenance room, making it feel more lived in, even though an outside eye might see it as adding junk to junk.
Tinkering helped her unwind and process the day's events. Her method of choosing a device to open and strip, the meticulousness of it, soothed her racing mind enough to compartmentalize. It was familiar, age-old to the point where her hands moved with little conscious thought.
Before the world had ended, Sam had been in school working on her degree in mechanical engineering. She loved to build and invent things, spending her childhood tinkering with the insides of clocks and television remotes to see how they worked; a habit she had learned from her father who had been an all-purpose, blue collar handyman.
Always trying to make ends meet, her father did any and all jobs: from electrical to plumbing, mechanics to landscaping, locksmith to old-fashioned carpentry and everything in between. Going to school had just been a formality; everything Sam knew about mechanics, she had learned from her father.
Going into engineering seemed like the natural thing to do after graduating high school. It was something that she was good at and enjoyed doing, but it wasn't an easy field. Other than being a predominantly male field, she had a handicap that made her studies more difficult and made other people doubt her abilities as a competent engineer.
She was colorblind.
Personally, she liked to refer to it as "color deficient", because when she said colorblind, people assumed she meant like a dog because of the old myth, seeing in only black and white, but that wasn't what it was.
She had red-green colorblindness, or deuternopia sight, meaning that she had difficulty discriminating red and green hues.
It wasn't impossible, but it made distinguishing many colors a hit or miss process. Red was murky green, green was murky green, orange was murky green, yellow was beige(ish), purple was blue, pink was grey, and depending on the brightness and saturation, darker shades were either brown or black. She had inherited it from her grandmother on her father's side. She used to have special sunglasses that helped her see the color spectrum, but she had lost them during the initial outbreak when she was trying to get to an evacuation zone in Seattle.
Over the years she had developed a color intuition that helped, but her vision still literally paled in comparison to everybody else's. She had many skills, but seeing the vibrancy of the world was not within her capabilities. It made identifying important wiring and color-coded equipment harder to work with. She didn't let it hinder her, always working hard to get around it. It was a disability, but a small one, and if she were being honest, the least of her problematic self.
She was a highly introverted person and not very socially apt. Not awkward, but not outgoing, either. She preferred to observe rather than engage. She was the kind of person who understood machines better than people.
Being in the vents worked in her favor this way. She was never really good with people, even before. She didn't know whether it was because she had moved around as a kid, or maybe her resting bitch face, but she wasn't a very magnetic person. Most of the time she came off as quiet and aloof which could be mistaken as being standoffish, which could then be mistaken as being uppity and that could lead to several misunderstandings before she even had a chance to open her mouth. Not to mention she wasn't very great at small talk, either.
She was a creature of knowledge in every aspect. Before, her television had always been either on the Discovery channels or the Smithsonian channel. Her Netflix recommendations were full of documentaries and she read everything from textbooks to desk calendars, to the labels on cracker boxes and jars of jelly. She soaked knowledge up like a sponge and made parties awkward by sharing facts like how the Romans used urine to whiten teeth as an anecdote because Becky Miller from lab smoked like a chimney and drank coffee by the gallon and yet still wondered why her teeth were stained.
Putting the screwdriver aside, Sam took out the last useful parts of the old radio before tossing what was left into one of the empty water barrels; her junk barrel. She then deposited the parts into the soup cans that she had set up on a shelf to keep her equipment organized, dropping each piece inside with a satisfied smile. She was a bit of a packrat and she loved it when she added something new to her "collection".
With that done, she put away her tools and settled back down. As she laid back on her sleeping bag waiting for the sun to go down, she noticed a spider crawling on the side of one of the water barrels that flanked her hideout.
She picked up the pencil that she used for a book of word searches that she had stole from a savior's room and reached out to poke at it with the eraser end. The spider started, raising its front legs in defense, but stayed where it was. It moved its legs in a way that almost seemed indignant. Gently, she managed to coax it on to the pencil.
"Is that you who makes all the webs in the vents?" she asked the spider, holding the pencil up to eye level. "They keep getting tangled in my hair."
She watched it crawl along the pencil before dropping down to hang from it. She was careful not to breath too hard so the delicate thread the spider hung from wouldn't break. It was about the size of a nickel with a black body and long, gorgeous legs that curled elegantly into itself. The abdomen had a little white on it, reminding her of Miss Spider from 'James and the Giant Peach'.
"Don't worry, I forgive you," she said, mimicking Miss Spider's French accent, going on to quote: "I am not loved at all. And yet I do nothing but good. All day long I catch flies and mosquitoes in my webs. I am a decent person."
She stood up and raised the pencil towards one of the factory windows. There was a web in the corner where she placed the pencil on the ceil, leaving it there so the spider could climb off on its own when it was ready.
"Watch out for rhinoceroses," she told it before she sat back down on her sleeping bag and pulled her legs up to her chest.
She rested her head on her knees with a tired sigh, her eyes heavy but her mind still racing.
Her thoughts found the wives again.
~O~
The plan was beyond dangerous.
Dangerous, reckless and stupid.
But potentially a major breakthrough for how she moved around the Sanctuary and the type of supplies and equipment she could get her hands on. It was dangerous, but necessary if she wanted to continue thriving while hiding inside the vents.
She was heading straight into the dragon's keep and stealing its treasure.
It wasn't thrilling at all. It was downright terrifying. She dropped out of a vent on to a floor that was very much restricted. If she were caught, regardless of whether they believed she was a worker or not, she was going to be in trouble. The top floor of the Sanctuary was forbidden territory to everybody except Negan, his wives and his most trusted saviors. The consequences for being caught should have been enough to make her rethink the idea, and yet there she was lurking in the shadows of the top floor, looking for where the wives slept.
The plan was halfcocked at best. She still didn't know what Negan looked like, so in addition to severely overstepping his boundaries, she didn't know who she should be on the look out for. If Negan came walking up to her, she would have no idea whether to pretend to be a worker, or run and hide. The man had been just as elusive to her as she had been with his men, but not from a lack of trying.
Though his face was still shrouded in obscurity, from wandering around the Sanctuary, she learned a lot about how he liked to operate and the set of rules that he forced all his people to live by. She learned about the outposts that he had, showcasing just how far-reaching his influence was, and how he subjugated other communities of survivors, making them pay up to the saviors for protection. He was brutal and crass with a method of punishment that would have even the bravest of fighters falling into line.
She heard that he liked to curse a lot, but what exactly constituted "a lot" in a place like this? Sam herself didn't curse, so pretty much any cursing seemed excessive to her. She also heard that he wore a black leather jacket and a red scarf, but that wasn't helpful, either. More than a couple of saviors wore leather jackets and she couldn't see red. Her best bet was to keep an eye out for the baseball bat.
The horror stories of Lucille were mentioned just as often as Negan was. A Louisville slugger wrapped in barbed wire. Negan's weapon of choice.
It was his most prized possession, being almost an extension of himself with the way he talked about it as if it were an actual person. It was the cruel hand of fate to rule breakers and enemies of the Sanctuary. She heard workers speak of the way he used it to make statements, all the gory details about how he took pleasure in using the bat to beat people's heads in. When she had first heard about Lucille, she hoped it wasn't a foreshadowing of her own fate if she were ever caught. It was too gruesome of a way to die, only rivaled by being torn apart by goblins.
From her understanding, Negan didn't always have Lucille on him, but most of the time he did, so it was the best way to identify him.
Sam slipped into the shadows of the hall. Keeping her ears tuned into her surroundings, she began to explore the top floor of the Sanctuary, peeking into every unlocked door she came across. The objective was to find the room where the wives kept their clothing. She had no idea what the sleeping arrangements were, whether the wives had their own separate rooms or if Negan made them all sleep together in a bed like gross pride of lions. She was hoping for the latter because this late at night, it was more than likely that Negan was already in his bedroom, and she did not want to sneak directly into the belly of the beast.
After twenty minutes of blind searching, she came to a closed pair of double doors with light shining out the bottom. Crouching low to the ground with her footsteps light, she crept up to the doors and listened. There were voices on the other side, talking in soft tones that she couldn't decipher through the wood, but as far as she could tell all the voices were female. The wives. Double doors usually suggested common rooms so this had to be some sort of living room or parlor.
Still crouched, she moved past the doors and went further down the hall until she came to another single door. She tried the handle but it was locked.
Sam bit back a noise of frustration as she reached into the little satchel she brought with her and pulled out the poor man's lockpicking kit she had created from items she found around the Sanctuary. It consisted of a bobby pin, a few paper clips, a rusty dental periodontal probe that would have given her tetanus if she wasn't already vaccinated for it, and a credit card sized piece of plastic that she cut out of an empty bottle of Coke.
The door had a standard sub-par knob lock, one of the easiest kinds to pick. Taking out her pen light from her back pocket, she placed it behind her ear and angled it on the lock. She then took the thin piece of plastic and wedged it between the lock bolt and the door jam. Trying to be quiet, she pushed down on to the bolt and grabbed the handle of the door, wiggling it back and forth until the lock gave way and the door popped open. She smirked in satisfaction as she put her tools back in her bag and stepped into the room.
Using her pen light, she shined it around the room to find an average sized bedroom with a twin bed and nice furniture. The room definitely belonged to one of the wives with how it was decorated. The scent of perfume hung heavy in the air, smelling like a cosmetics department in a high end store. Sam hadn't smelt perfume in a long time and it was almost too much. The flowery smell attacked her senses like a foreign virus, making her almost back out of the room. She was too used to the smell of mildew, metal and rotted goblin flesh. She pulled the collar of her shirt up over her nose to filter the smell before shining the light again.
There wasn't a closet in the room, but there was a large, antique looking wardrobe next to the vanity. She opened it and shifted through the hanging clothes inside. In the very back she found a black dress, the apparent uniform of the wives, and slipped it off the hanger. Since it was all the way in the back, chances were the owner wouldn't notice it missing right away, if at all. It looked roughly her size so she stuffed it into her bag without a second glance before moving on to the display of shoes that the wife had running along the floor, choosing a simple pair of black heels to go with the dress.
Not wanting to spend anymore time inside the concubine's chamber than she had to, Sam closed the wardrobe and left. She moved to sneak back past the parlor doors, but just as she was about to clear them, one opened, spilling a portion of light out into the dark hallway.
Her heart jumped into her throat as reflexes kicked in. She pivoted forward, crouching behind the door that had opened outwards. A flash of panic and heat soaked her skin as her breath lodged in her throat. The wife who had opened the door lingered in the threshold. She must have been facing the other wives when she had opened the door because she gave no indication that she had seen Sam in the hallway.
"Where are you going, Sherry?"
"To bed. I don't care if Negan stays up all night, but I'm not doing the same. If he asks, tell him I'll come see him in the morning."
Sam stood petrified behind the door, listening to the exchange with her bag clutched to her chest. She clung to the shadows still giving her cover and prayed to whoever was listening that the wife wouldn't catch her. She was so sure that she would. Her eyes snapped shut and her body tensed to the point of pain as she prepared herself.
One of the wives answered before a chorus of goodnights sounded out. The departing wife, Sherry, returned the bid before stepping out into the hallway. It must have been a selective blindness or a failure to acknowledge her peripherals that had the wife closing the door without looking around and leaving in the opposite direction, completely missing the person standing barely three feet away from her.
Too terrified to move, Sam remained paralyzed against the wall without any cover except the darkness. Her eyes shifted, looking to the right and watching the wife walk away, unaware. Eventually she disappeared further down the hallway, but Sam could still hear her heels clicking against the floor. She didn't dare move until she heard a door in the distance open and then close.
She released the breath she had been holding, feeling lightheaded. Her legs felt like noodles as she finally peeled herself away from the wall.
As soon as she was clear of the wives' parlor, she took off down the hall, putting as much distance between her and the top floor as possible. Instead of using the vent, she took the stairs and didn't stop until she was two floors down.
Her back hit a wall again. Her chest heaved as she fought to gain control of her breathing, taking air in deep, nearly hyperventilating. Inside her ribcage she could feel her heart pounding from the adrenaline and the danger of getting caught. Part of her felt giddy that the first stage of her plan, though insane, had actually worked, but her hands still trembled as she clutched her bag tight.
Feeling she earned it, she took a couple of minutes to compose herself before pushing off the wall.
She turned the corner without looking and ran straight into the person coming in the other direction.
A soft 'oof' escaped her lips as her nose connected with a solid chest. The impact had her stumbling backwards with her arms still wrapped around her bag, no time to drop it and brace herself. She would have fallen to the ground if it wasn't for the hands that came up to grip her elbows, steadying her.
"Whoa, careful there, girly," a voice laughed. "Don't run me over!"
She didn't look up to see who she had ran into, she was no longer on a restricted floor so it didn't matter if she was seen. A pang ran up the bridge of her nose from their collision and her eyes watered.
"Sorry," Sam apologized, bringing up a hand to grip her nose.
The voice chuckled. It was a deep, rich sounding laugh that had her realizing that the person she ran into was male.
"Don't worry about it, I wasn't really looking where I was going, either."
She glanced up at him just long enough to catch his smile before looking back down again, taking her hand off her nose and examining it to make sure there wasn't blood. She sniffed, clearing away the last of the stinging.
"I didn't hurt you, did I?"
She looked up again, really taking in the man's face this time. He was an older gentleman, with dark hair and brown eyes. The lower half of his face was peppered with facial hair, clean and cut, neatly in order like his clothing; a spotless t-shirt with well fitting pants. Definitely a savior. In her mind's eye a red flag appeared above his head.
The concern behind the question sounded genuine, despite the gleeful smile on the man's face. If she wasn't still so frazzled by what had just happened on the top floor, Sam probably would have found the man's expression a little disturbing. She didn't like it when people's faces didn't match their tone of voice. It made her uneasy.
"No, I'm fine," she said, moving to step around the man.
An arm came up, blocking her.
"Hold up a second," he said, giving her another smile. "Where's the fucking fire, sweetheart?"
She didn't have the time for this. Each second she stayed out in the open, the more exposed she felt, and this man wasn't making her feel any more comfortable about that, regardless of his attempts to do so with his lax body language and disarming smiles. She kept her expression blank as she shook her head at him.
"I'm sorry, I have to go."
The man opened his mouth and stuck out his arm again to stop her, but Sam saw it coming and was ducking under it and making her way down the hall before he could do anything about it.
There was something laying on the floor that the man must have dropped when they collided, but she stepped over it without seeing what it was. She disappeared around the corner without looking back, walking with quick strides to the nearest maintenance closet with a vent, successfully escaping with her bounty.
AN: Sorry there wasn't really any Negan in this chapter either, but I wanted to further flesh out the concept of the vents and Sam's character before introducing the big man. Thank you for your patience, it really means a lot to me! And thanks again for the reviews.
~Scorpiofreak~