Negan took a bite of the tranmustated bread he'd snatched from Edward and made a face;
"Shit needs salt." He growled, before handing the remains off to Ash, the young Savior beside him. She was far less picky, and wolfed it down in a few bites, smiling happy at the extra free sustenance filled her belly.
"It's probably poison." Arat pointed out, making the young girl go pale. The older woman was trailing them, with the strange and apparently magically powered teenage boy, Edward, between her and the two other Saviors. She glanced at the lockers that lined the hallway of the barricaded school they'd tracked the kid to; the dingy, blue-painted metal lockers were pockmarked with trails of bullets holes.
From the front of the odd group there came a cheerful tinkle of metal in metal as Negan kicked a handful of brass shell casing down the hallway before glancing back at Arat, as if to say "yeah, I see it too."
Something had gone down in this school.
But where were the bodies?
Negan swung Lucille, his barb-wire wrapped bat down off his shoulders and into his arms, cradling it like a soldier might hold a rifle at the ready.
"Where the fuck is that…a-ha! Library!" he called as the four of them finally reached the destination they had been searching for; the school seemed to be a multi-tory mix of grades and class levels and sprawled across a wide area.
They'd walked down form the upper floor where Edward had been making camp, passing another group of Saviors on the way; Edward had been surprised when the rough looking people had half bowed to Negan as they passed by; he'd seen enough bandits and gang members on Amestris to have pegged Negan and the other two as suck when he'd first seen them, and nothing about these heavily armed and rough looking people they had passed had done anything to change his mind on that, but the odd, almost reverent way they treated the club carrying Negan was…disturbing.
The young alchemist had been mostly silent since they'd left the classroom, with Ash explaining mostly through pantomime but partially through her own rough Amestrian that they were trying to find a way ti help translate and Edward quickly realizing that until they did the girl had pretty much exhausted her ability to translate.
But now he let a small hope fire itself up inside his chest; maybe, just maybe he could begin explaining himself properly, and figure out just what these armed and menacing strangers were about. Right now he guessed he was somewhere between being a curiosity and an out and out prisoner. He was fairly certain he wouldn't be free to go, but if he made a break for it he'd just be back in the reanimated infested alien world and just as alone as before.
He was pretty much stymied. But at least, no one was clapping in him chains or pulling off his auto-mail or tying him up and calling him short like that smug, murderous, godwful little shapeshifting homunculus bas-
"Er… du bist gut, Edward?"
Negan turned and saw Ash had been looking at the strange little wizard kid in the black outfit and had asked him something in her halting, high school level German. Looking ta the blind kids face, probably why he suddenly looked like he wanted to chew throw solid steel in a fit of inhuman rage...
"Fuck, Ash, what'd you say to this kid?"
"What? Negan, I didn't…"
"Damn kid I'm just kidding you. Lighten the fuck up." Negan gave the girl a light shove as he stopped and turned around to face Edward, who still seemed to be fuming quietly, before roaring "Stilgestanden!" at the top of his lungs, making the young man freeze, wide eyed, resentment forgotton. Negan grinned and nudged Ash while Arat glared at him from behind Edward, "I learned that shit from Medal of Honor."
"Medal of what?"
Negan huffed, but stayed quiet; the constant thumping of the nearby undead had picked up, "Locals must be close." He said, looking at the closed double doors to the library, "Looks like I pissed off the librarian." He looked at his companion and gently tapped her rifle with the end of Lucille; Ash nodded, eyes widening a bit in fear, but she slung the rifle and drew a long-bladed knife from her belt. Negan turned to look at Edward, eyes cold and calculating, "Maybe we just shove him in there with it, see what he can fuckin' do. He is a wizard after all. Could be a real fuckin' surprise."
"Boss you really think this kids…" Arat asked, not wanting to say the word "magic", with Edward looking back and forth between the grim Saviors, uncomprehending.
"Not at fuckin' all. 'Course not. But like I said; dead people are walking around trying to fucking eat us. It does push back the fucking bounds of reality or some shit. Least he's not an alien." Negan laughed at his own joke, "Let's see about smashing this deadite in here, get that kraut language dictionary, and then we can talk."
"Er…we're not really going to shove the poor fucker in there alone, are we?"
"Why Ash, you volunteering to go in first instead?" Negan asked
"No, I…"
"Great! Way to take fuckin' initiative! Arat, keep an eye on bleach-blonde Harry Potter. If he looks at you weird repaint the fucking walls with his brains." Negan stepped forward and carefully pushed open one of the doors with Lucille.
The young savior gulped and went in, knife at the ready, with the big man right behind her, casually twirling his barbed wire wrapped baseball bat. Edward watched them go, losing sight of them as the door swung closed; he hadn't understood anything the young bandit o or her leader had been saying to each other, but from the loud pounding inside the room he could tell that this was where the reanimated that had been making all the noise was located and he guessed they were going to go deal with it; although how they meant to kill something that was already dead was beyond him.
He started to turn to glance back at the woman who had stayed out with him, presumably to make sure he didn't escape, but froze when he heard the metallic click of her pistol being cocked.
"Sorry!" he gasped, before locking his eyes on the doors the other two had gone through and not saying a word. Shortly after the noise inside stopped and the girl stepped out, cleaning her knife with an old newspaper
Arat pointed a hand over Ed's shoulder, silently beckoning him to get moving. Seeing little choice and not quite even sure quite what these people even wanted, this language barrier was getting ridiculously annoying. He started to think up ways to start teaching. Ash better Amestrian in hopes that she would learn and be better able to translate but he would be the first to admit that he was a lousy instructor and was drawing a blank, but when stepped through the doors, his whole train of thought abruptly derailed.
He found himself standing in an immense room lined with shelf upon shelf of neatly arrayed, if dusty, books, still lit with gentle orange light from the setting sun that filtered through the barricaded windows.
How had he missed this? Admittedly, his focus had bene on finding food and after sifting through the empty cafeteria he's found in this school his first day and after that he'd been ranging as far away as he dared in search for sustenance, but still; books!
Maybe, just maybe there was a book in here that he could use to help translate? The girl with the rifle had to have learned her elementary Amestrian from somewhere, maybe if he could find some kind of dictionary-
He spotted the corpse just then.
It hung limply off a door near the one he had just come through, both hands and its rotting forearms attached to the long crash bar handle of the heavy door with rusted length of chain; it's greenish skin and oddly patterned, mottled clothing were speckled with some sort of white, moss-like mold as well the tattered, mottled clothing it still wore and rotten bits of flesh hung down in streamers from where it had been tugging against the chains that bound it to the door.
The reanimated humans head was slumped to one side, and Ed could see black, oil like blood and coils of brownish-grey viscera that it took him a moment to realize were the former persons brains, all oozing from a gaping wound in its almost mummified scalp and skull.
The alchemist blinked, once, twice.
And then retched as he leaned over and puked on the floor.
The three Saviors looked on in confusion; they were two years into the apocalypse, and the sight of a rotting walker was as common a sight as they could imagine.
"Holy fuck, this one's a little sheltered ain't he," Negan said; he didn't even grin. Didn't smile. This kid was strange as hell and his sudden reaction to a dead rotter was a shock, "Anyone else get the feeling he hasn't seen this before?"
"Think he's maybe been in a bunker?" Arat, "Or some kind of shelter?"
Negan watched Ed; he'd bene keeping an eye on the kid to see if he would react to any of the Savior's conversation in a way that would show his German-only language spiel was just an act, but just like the kids light and magic show upstairs, he wasn't getting any sign that things weren't exactly as they appeared.
Curiouser and curiouser.
"Alright, Ash, stay with the magician. If he throw up again, hold that magnificent blond hair back for him, yeah? And leave that dead rotter alone. We don't know why it was chained to that door and I honestly do not give fuck enough to find out right now. Arat, spread out with me and see if we can find…"
The other Savior had found the dusty racks of the library's card catalog and was thumbing through it; she pulled out a yellowed card,
"English to German for Beginners, section 5, row three shelf 4." She stated flatly, "Let's hope it's not checked out."
Negan snorted in amusement before moving off behind Arat to find the indicated shelf and hopefully start a better job of figuring out the who and what this kid was.
"Ash. You still stay here. Keep an eye out." Arat called back over her shoulder.
Edward holding unto the cluttered, dusty library desk, breathing hard and looking down when the older bandits left, leaving him to look up in confusion we he collected himself and looked up to find them gone.
He took a breath, held it, and looked back over to the dispatched reanimated…and found the younger girl with the rifle crouched down next to the corpse, pulling on a bar of right yellow rubber gloves and beginning to rifle through its pockets.
Ed stared in disbelief as she casually went through the stinking, rotting mess of its gore slicked ton clothing, checking its pockets, and making happy, appreciative noises as she came up with a magazine of ammunition of some kind, a few loose bullets, a folding knife, a wallet.
The body was still wearing a battered version of the ammunition belt and support harness Ash was wearing, and she eagerly began to sift through that, pulling out a dusty pistol from a holster on it's thigh ad some more ammunition from a side pouch.
Ash tugged on the body to get to the front of its loot-laden belt and ammunition vest and the corpse slumped and fell away from the door; the chains that secured it were only wrapped to the door, probably held tight at one point but they had decayed and loosened enough that they suddenly fell loosely to the floor with a metallic clatter.
The girl shot a fearful look over her shoulder in the direction the other two had gone, but Ed watched the door as it slowly fell open, propelled by a battered mattress that had been wedged on the other side, which had no doubt been cushioning the blows of the swarm of rotting, stinking reanimated that poured out of the doorway.
Ash screamed and Edward leapt forward.