A/N: Hello, all! Sorry for not updating last week, it has just been...a Weird Fucking Time lately, and trying to find an opportunity to write was a bit of a struggle. Hopefully I'll be able to write more frequently now! Today's chapter song is "Lose Control" by Glass Animals and Joey Bada$$. The chapter itself is Beth-centric, and there's quite a bit of action in it, with one last POV character introduced at the end. Thank you so much for reading and reviewing, it really means a lot. I hope y'all enjoy!

4. Lose Control

"He left again, didn't he?"

Daryl grunted, jerking his knife through the hide of the deer. He caught it so close to the fence he didn't even have to field dress it, simply carried it inside, deflecting various compliments by asserting the "damn thing had a death wish anyway".

Beth nodded. Merle lived in the woods outside the prison, but it was easy to tell when he disappeared on one of his tracking missions. On each occasion, Daryl became unfailingly edgy.

Today was different, though.

"Michonne didn't go with 'im," Daryl said. "Didn't even know he'd gone."

The camaraderie between Merle and Michonne certainly could not be described as friendship, but their objective united them anyway. The Governor was out there somewhere. The idea of him continuing to breathe was intolerable to them. Daryl used to join them on these missions, but something changed a few months after the Woodbury survivors merged with their group. Beth was glad for that change. They needed Daryl at the prison, or putting his skills to work recruiting others, not sniffing out dead ends.

She understood, though. If it were Maggie out there alone, she'd drive herself crazy with worry.

"He can handle himself, you know," she said. "He's like you that way."

"Mmm."

"You're not thinkin' of goin' out after him?"

Daryl took his time answering. "Nah. He's gonna do what he's gonna do. No sense chasin' him all over the woods."

"I could go."

The words were out before she could stop them, and the way Daryl looked at her made her wish she could cram them back in.

"What?"

Beth kept her chin high. "I can go. Just me. That way you wouldn't have to send out…" Anyone crucial, she almost said. "I mean, I've been goin' out patrollin' with Tyreese and Maggie. I can handle myself."

"Patrollin' ain't the same as bein' out there. 'Sides, you can't track."

Something sparked in her chest, something that had been growing there for a while now.

"I was out there, same as you, after the farm. I can defend myself, I know how to survive."

"Y'ain't goin', girl."

"You don't decide that. And don't call me girl, you asshole. You know my damn name."

But Daryl had already turned back to the deer. "Rick could decide that. Or Maggie. Your dad."

"…Are you serious? You're gonna tattle on me?"

"If I gotta."

He seemed utterly unconcerned now, sure that this threat would keep her from doing anything stupid.

She was tired of people keeping her from doing anything stupid.

She didn't let the plan manifest in her voice. She sighed and said, "Look, I know that was a stupid suggestion. I just…want to help."

"You do enough here. Don't worry about it."

On the outside apparently defeated, and on the inside seething, she went back to her cell. To pack her bag, to prep her weapons. To do more.

~m~

"So, I've been readin' that little guidebook you gave me, and I think I finally came up with my perfect Pokemon team."

Glenn chuckled. "Lay it on me, Greene."

They kept their voices low. The first three floors of the hospital were overrun, every available space crawling with walkers. The fourth floor, however, was strangely vacant, or at least the hallways were. Most of the doors were closed, which Beth supposed was good since behind every one she could hear the telltale growling of the dead. But there was something about this wing that left her unsettled, the way she felt jarred awake by a nightmare in a quiet room. Like there was a piece to the darkness she was missing, a piece that glided closer in the corner of her eye but that she could never truly see looking dead on…

"As my starter," she said, shaking the feeling away, "Squirtle."

"Really? I thought for sure you'd pick Bulbasaur."

"I actually was goin' to, but…I really like Blastoise."

Soft, listless thumping from a nearby room. A body in the dark, separated only by a wall, perhaps knowing where she was in spite of that wall, perhaps following her…

"And who else?" Glenn prompted.

"Um. Vulpix, Butterfree, Jigglypuff…"

"Stop."

"What's wrong with Jigglypuff—"

Glenn put a hand on her arm. "No, I mean…"

He pointed ahead, to a room on the right. The door was ajar, revealing nothing but darkness beyond. Beth stiffened.

Someone's in here with us.

The thought occurred out of nowhere, insistent enough that she glanced behind her. Empty halls and the abstracted noise of walkers. Yet when she turned back to Glenn and saw the tension on his face, she couldn't dismiss it.

He drew his gun. "Stay close."

Beth covered him as they crept into the room, tracing its contents with their flashlights, listening for movement. An array of desks and shelves had been shoved inside a long time ago. Dust veiled everything, but underneath, Beth spotted glass vials and pill bottles and gauze and syringes.

She hesitated. Glenn did, too. Everything they needed, right in front of them. They couldn't leave without those things. Who knew if they could find it anywhere else? But…

Someone's in here with us.

The feeling climbed her spine, but when nothing happened, and then even more nothing happened, they edged further into the room. Beth scoped the right side and Glenn the left, taking twice as long as they normally might have to clear it.

There was no one else in the room, not even a walker. But the feeling of being watched lingered…

No, not of being watched. Not that.

It was just…a presence. An approach.

She couldn't shake it as she reached into the first shelf, carefully extricating a bottle of Percocet. She half-expected a hand to shoot out of the darkness and grab her wrist.

Stop being so paranoid.

She began scooping everything into her pack. Amoxicillin, doxycycline… They were going to return home with an incredible haul. Once her bag was full, she hurried over to Glenn.

"'Kay, I've got everythin' I can carry. You good?"

"Yeah, just—" He grunted, struggling to open one last drawer. It squealed in protest. Beth scanned the room, worried the sound might alert…something.

A glint caught her eye. Something hanging from the ceiling a few feet away. She couldn't tell what it was, whether it was large or small, but something about its angle opened a pit in her stomach.

The drawer pulled free with a screech. The glint on the ceiling swung down like a pendulum.

Beth lunged, shoving Glenn to the floor. Pain ripped through her shoulder, just inches from her neck, as what looked like a metal claw cut through the space where Glenn would've been. In the same moment, the door slammed shut, jarring them both to their feet.

"Shit. Shit, are you alright?" Glenn said.

"I'm fine." Blood trickled down her back, but they'd have to examine the damage later. "We have to leave."

Glenn retrieved his bag from where it landed in the fall, and Beth cut the cord to which the metal claw was attached. She wasn't sure why, only that her heart was pounding and they had guns but very few bullets and someone was in there with them.

She gripped the claw in white knuckles as they raced for the door, fully expecting someone to be there waiting to ambush them. So there was a moment of wild relief when they made it through.

The sound greeted them first, much louder than before, and then the smell. Glenn pulled to a halt so suddenly that Beth barreled into him, nearly cutting him with the claw.

Where before the hallway was empty, it teemed now with walkers. Some kind of chain reaction had been triggered and all the doors flung open, letting out rivulets of the dead like a cracking dam. They certainly weren't alone anymore.

It was a trap.

~m~

Sneaking out took more patience but less spy music than Beth anticipated. It was mostly a matter of waiting—waiting till she knew the tombs were empty, waiting for the guard shift, waiting till she could dart into the trees unseen—and it was all a bit anticlimactic if she were being honest.

Being outside the prison, however…

Memories rushed back with every sound, amplified because she was alone, and because she couldn't stop thinking about Maggie and her dad when they discovered she was gone, and holy shit this was a stupid idea. What the hell was she thinking? She knew how dangerous it was; a whole year on the road had to have taught her something. But here she was in spite of those lessons, clumsily tracking what she was only marginally sure was Merle through a forest that promised walkers, under a sky that promised storms.

Why was she out here?

It was about Daryl, and how he looked when he talked about his brother, like he was talking about someone who wasn't around anymore.

No, it wasn't about that.

It was about Merle's stubborn ass, about how he'd actually been putting forth an effort to be better, while simultaneously wasting those efforts chasing a ghost.

No, it wasn't that, either.

It was about Maggie, and how much Beth would worry herself sick if she were out here alone, hunting down the man who could've been the end of all of them.

But it wasn't even that.

It was about Beth, and the way Daryl dismissed her, and the way Merle laughed when she asked him for fighting lessons, and the way Maggie looked at her like she was still a kid.

She was tired of feeling useless, feeling helpless, feeling like there were only tears inside her.

There was fire inside her. There was bite. She had to prove she was an asset, or they'd just keep protecting her till the day they died doing so.

Like they could if they come out here looking for you? she thought.

But how else could she get the point across? They weren't letting her do shit back at the prison except take care of the kids and help garden and occasionally go on walks around the perimeter. It was like every time they looked at her, all they ever saw was the same girl who put that glass to her wrists.

I am not her.

I am not a dead girl.

This thought kept her moving even as the doubts pressed in, even as the sky rumbled its discontent.

In fact, it kept her moving right up to the moment she stepped through a blackberry patch and found there was no solid ground on the other side.

The thought became ironic as she slid down the ravine, right into the thick of about twenty walkers.

~m~

"Left! Left!"

Beth turned, skidding on the blood-slick tile. The converging walkers drowned the roaring of her own pulse as she ducked into the stairwell, Glenn right on her heels. A few rotten fingers snapped off as they pulled the door closed.

Glenn's flashlight clicked on, illuminating the empty space. They were alone, at least as far as Beth could tell.

After a moment, he nodded to the claw in her hand. "Is that…?"

Now that she had a chance to examine it, she realized it was essentially a small rake, with a handle and a thin metal bar to which four scalpels had been crudely soldered.

"A weapon's a weapon, right?" she said.

"I mean. Yep."

"Someone knows we're here."

"Maybe. Those traps could be old. Whoever set them could be dead."

"We can't just assume that. If someone's here, where would they be?"

There were sharp things coming to life inside her, prodding her to action. If they went down, there were at least a hundred walkers waiting for them. If they went up, a four-story drop at minimum and uncertainty.

"They want us to go up," she said. "If…if they're herdin' us, they'd be drivin' us up because the first three levels are full of walkers."

Glenn's expression tightened. "We couldn't make it out by going up anyway. We could maybe scale down a window, but… But they know we got in here in the first place. They know we can get past the walkers. Why do they think that would stop us now?"

Shit. He had a point.

Frustration boiled over. "Well, we can't just sit here! We…we could—"

Below, a door creaked open. Glenn and Beth froze as snarling filled the stairwell. Whoever set that trap was around after all, and now they were—

"They're lettin' the walkers in," she whispered.

Glenn grabbed her free hand. "Come on."

No other direction but up. Beth wondered what was waiting for them there.

Another door slammed as they crested the fifth landing, and above their heads, a low crooning, like a hungry coyote. They stumbled to a halt and shone their lights up.

A face peered down at them from what looked to be the eighth or ninth floor. At first she thought it was a walker, but only the face was decayed; the hands and arms looked perfectly normal, a living human's body.

It's a mask. They're wearing a walker's face for a mask.

Another figure appeared, and another, each one wearing a face that used to belong to someone else, each one on a different floor. And on each forehead, a painted W.

Not coyotes. Wolves.

The fifth door opened. Glenn lunged for the Wolf before they had time to attack and forced them back into the hall.

"Come on, Beth!"

The Wolves above yipped and hollered, their footsteps like thunder as they clamored down the stairs. The dead rose from below in a putrid wave, frenzied by the noise and the smell of Beth's blood.

She darted onto the fifth floor, where Glenn wrestled with the Wolf.

She didn't let herself think about it as she raised the claw, but she felt every rushing heartbeat as she drove it into the Wolf's skull. His body slumped. Blood pattered her legs.

You can't think about it. Not until after.

The others would be on them in seconds. Ignoring the turn of her stomach, she yanked the claw out of the Wolf's head. "Which way?"

~m~

She landed on a walker, crushing its skull against a rock without meaning to. It was probably the only thing that gave her enough time to roll sideways, away from the majority of the dead. Stagnant water soaked her, so cold it knocked the breath from her. Rocks battered her but she didn't stop.

At least not until she slammed into the thick roots of a fallen tree.

"Shoot," she hissed and tried to get to her feet.

Pain sent her right back down. A sprained ankle or worse, but there was no time to check. The walkers closed in. Panic propelled her under the log, though its branches were thick and tried to hold her back. She clawed her way through them, gritting her teeth as they snapped and skewered her.

But she emerged on the other side, dripping mud and blood and sand, still in one piece. Grabbing hold of a sturdy branch, she hoisted herself off the ground, hopping on one foot.

The sky opened. Icy rain needled her face. This was turning into a fine adventure.

The walkers piled against the log, the force of their hunger and combined weight crushing the ones in front. Beth sighed shakily and pulled her knife from her belt. With them all in one place, there was no reason not to kill them.

She finished off three before a hand wrapped around her injured ankle. She jerked back instinctively, but the hand held firm, and pain flared all the way to her knee as she toppled to the ground.

The walker dragged itself along the streambed, jaws snapping as it drew closer to her foot. She kicked out with her good leg, and though she dented its face, she didn't have the leverage to deal a death blow. She could lean up, stab it with her knife, but she'd have to let it get closer to reach its skull.

Tears blinded her, and when she blinked those away, the rain blinded her. This was what she got for sneaking out, apparently.

Something splashed into the stream. Beth barely had time to look up as a shadow loomed on her left, and barely time to draw breath as that shadow kicked the walker in the head and sent it sprawling. Another kick splattered its head against the ravine wall.

Shock held her in place. She stared, trying to reconcile the fact that she wasn't about to die after all, or at the very least lose a foot. The stranger stood facing the fallen walker. Layered in such dark clothing, cloaked by a hood, it was impossible to tell anything about them.

"H-hello?" Beth said. The snarls of the walkers nearly drowned out her voice.

The stranger twitched but didn't respond.

Beth pushed to her feet, leaning heavily on the ravine wall. Her ankle throbbed a nervous beat.

"Um. Hey. Thank you."

Cautiously, she inched forward.

"I—"

Quick as a blink, the stranger drew a metal rod from their back and held it out like a sword.

"Don't come any closer."

Beth halted. "Okay. I-I'm sorry."

The stranger turned fully to face her, angling the metal rod toward Beth's throat. By its pointed tip, she realized what it was.

It was a fire poker.

~m~

She'd had enough of elevator shafts for one lifetime, that was for certain.

Fortune was in their favor, since they only had to shimmy down three floors to the actual box, but trying to do that quickly was trickier than she expected. By the time they reached the roof of the elevator, every muscle in her body quivered with tension and fatigue.

Glenn got them into the elevator, and subsequently out of it, in no time at all. Beth made a mental note to ask him how he seemed so expert at it later.

The second floor was crawling with walkers, but as they raced down the hall, it appeared they had gambled correctly. Most of said walkers were distracted by the Wolves, who had chased down the stairs after Glenn and Beth but now had to fight their way through the dead.

Poor planning, Beth thought and almost laughed.

In the nearest open room, they tossed a monitor through the window and jumped out, two stories being much more manageable a drop than four. The car was parked on the opposite side of the building, and it wasn't the only one now. Two other rundown cars and one motorcycle sat around it; Beth guessed the Wolves had probably hidden in the woods nearby, and rolled out once they saw her and Glenn enter the building.

But the sight of the motorcycle sparked something in Beth's chest. She pulled out her knife as she ran, and when they reached the car, she turned to Glenn.

"Their tires. Slash their tires. I'll just be a sec."

"Beth—"

"I'll just be a sec!"

Glenn let out a huff that he might've intended to be words, but drew his knife and followed her advice. Beth hovered over the motorcycle.

Merle had laughed when she'd asked how to hotwire one, but he'd taught her anyway. She laughed now as she coaxed this one to life. Turned out she owed him more than she thought she did.

"Beth, we have to go," Glenn insisted. The hospital doors burst open as he spoke, disgorging a rush of Wolves and walkers.

"You take the car," she replied. "I'm takin' this."

And so she led the getaway, roaring through the night with her stolen goods and her wild, beating heart.

~m~

She arrived in time to catch a glimpse of the Alexandrians as they sped off down the road. Fury lit her belly like a bonfire. Her Wolves wandered the parking lot, looking a little like NPCs as they dispatched the dead.

She strode toward them, whistling to catch their attention. They bowed their heads at the sight of her, evoking a mental image of dogs with their tails tucked.

"What the fuck happened?"

"We're sorry," one of them said, like that was an explanation.

She grabbed him by the throat, digging her nails in deep. "Two went in, and two fucking came out. What. The fuck. Happened."

She listened while her Wolves filled her in on what they knew, which wasn't much. The sheep were slippery, they said. We'll get them next time, they said. We're useless fuck-ups, they may as well have said.

She nodded when they finished. "I see. Well. We set a new trap. And we try again. Right?"

The Wolves seemed taken aback, though it was hard to tell with the masks obscuring their faces. After a moment, they nodded, a visible wave of relief running through them.

"Right," one of them—Stewart, she thought his name was—parroted.

She drew her machete and severed his hamstrings. He collapsed with a scream. She watched him, head cocked, body angling into a predatory stance, before sinking her teeth into his throat. His wails gurgled into silence.

Once his body stopped twitching, she looked up, not bothering to wipe the blood from her mouth.

"Reset this trap," she commanded. "The Alexandrians won't trust it, but someone else will. And if it fails again, you pathetic shits will become permanent residents of this place."

They bowed their heads low and spoke in trembling unison.

"Yes, Alpha."

A/N: One thing I'll note about my version of Alpha is that she's less an interpretation of her canon character, and more like one of my OCs up and decided to take on her role (if that makes sense). If you're familiar with my other series, I'm sure you remember she's got an entirely different story than canon Alpha (and there will be alterations in this AU as well), but if you're not, I hope you'll enjoy where I take her and how I write her. Anyway, thanks so much for reading. Stay safe and until next time! xoxo