The first word that came back from the scout had been a runner on a motorcycle late the next morning- it seemed that the band of Saviors tracking Ed and Ash's attackers had strayed out of the range of their radio network
Ed had been glued to Negan since he had awoken, dreading and hoping for any news; the dark, grim-faced Arat and her scouts had taken Ash with them; while he had just met her a few days ago, and notwithstanding the greedy girl had a few screws loose and a mean streak, the bonds of friendship set fast in this world of the undead. Any reports would undoubtedly reach Negan first, and that proved to be the case as the runner caught up to the Saviors leader as he and Ed had emerged from the Sanctuary on the landing above the old factory's forecourt.
"Arat got a line on 'em, that girl led us to the spot where she and the Magician got jumped. We spread out and followed the cleared roads back to a couple spots near the highways where someone could set up a camp."
"That fast?"
"Yeah, the assholes are pretty fucking sure of themselves."
"Well, here's hoping there isn't a reason they're so fucking sure of themselves…"
The scout thought about it for a second and then nodded when he took Negan's meaning.
"You want me to head back to Arat?"
"Nah. Stick tight, she'll be back soon."
The leather-clad scout nodded, going off to check his motorcycle.
Negan didn't deign to watch him leave, instead leaning forward on the metal railing that edged the platform and looked down at the gathering of Saviors below, motioning Ed to follow. When he leaned up next to Negan, Edward found himself looking down at the gathered Savior's gang members below; a small group clad in denim and black leather clustered around a line of heavily chromed motorcycles, a few cars and heavy trucks, and some overly large vehicles that looked like a cross between the two.
The Saviors ranged from heavily armed and well-equipped like the guards at the Sanctuary, to others clad in leather and black clothing like the motorcyclists, to some that appeared to simply be wearing vaguely outdoorsy-looking garb or street clothes.
Edward wasn't quite sure what effect the ragged bandits would have on the enemy, but their undisciplined, menacing aura certainly…vaguely worried him.
"We'll see if it's enough," Negan said, as if reading Ed's mind. He idly tapped Lucille on the railing.
"Oh, glad to see you've got that stick of yours back, it was weird seeing you without it yesterday. That thing's sort of like your third leg or something…"
Negan froze, choking on laughter,
"Something funny I said?"
Negan shook with soundless laughter,
"Yeah." He managed to answer.
"Are you gonna tell me what it was at least?"
"Nope." Negan said as he stood up, "You sure you're ready for this?"
"For what's going to happen when Ash finds that bastard's camp?"
Negan nodded.
"Yes, I'm ready to..." Ed trailed off. He wasn't so naive as to not understand what was going to happen, but he decided he was going to ask, anyway, "What are we going to do when we track them down?"
"There could, or could not be a couple more parts to this equation, but, basically, we are going to ride these pricks down, beat them into submission, kill who we fucking have to, and then take what they've got. If any of them are left standing, they get to walk down the fucking road without so much as a pocket knife and try their luck with the dead."
"What if they give up without a fight?"
"Then we kill the ones that jumped you and skip to taking everything they have and sending them out to die."
"They might not all be guilty, those ones on the road might have…"
"Then they are fucking guilty by fucking association, Eddie. You do not tolerate assholes like those in your group unless you're the scum of the fucking Earth. Now, case is fucking closed. We're moving onto goddamn sentencing."
Negan glowered at Edward,
"You got anything to arm up with?" he demanded, changing the subject. Deciding to drop it as well, for now, Ed answered;
"Just this." He said, pointing to one of the daggers Ash had given him, which he wore on his heavy waist belt, "And these," He took a small handful of pre-drawn alchemical circles out of his pocket, as well as his black sharpie.
"You got a gun?"
Ed thought distastefully of the weapon he had temporarily taken up on the road. It might have been back up in his room if Simon had taken it there instead of appropriating it, but he felt no need to check.
"No."
"Good, keep it that way until you know what the fuck you're doing. You're liable to trip and shoot yourself in the fucking head with it or something."
"Hey, I'm a soldier, I learned enough…"
Negan snorted and looked at the teenage alchemist,
"Yeah, I'm sure you paid attention when some bored asshole tried to teach you some basic military bullshit."
While that hit uncannily close to the mark, Ed felt obliged to stand up for himself, despite having had all of three weeks of training after becoming a state alchemist; training that had been entirely in a classroom, and had, indeed, been taught by a bored asshole.
His defense fell silent, however, when Simon pushed open the doors behind them. He spared a disdainful glance at Ed before announcing,
"Arat just got back into range and radioed; they found 'em and she's on the way back."
Negan had led Edward to a room deep in the bowels of the old factory where he had set up a makeshift meeting room- the bare concrete walls had been so covered with maps and hand-drawn sketches that the room almost looked like it had been wall-papered by an insane cartographer, while a heavy, battered table with a single shaded light bulb dangled down over it, sitting in the middle of the room, surrounded by a dozen mismatched chairs
Negan sat at the head of the table and sat Lucille down in front of him- judging by the crisscross pattern of scratches across the surface by his seat, it was the standard resting place of the weapon whenever the bandit leader was holding court.
Ed bit down a pithy comment and looked at the maps covering the walls, finding that they had been wrapped in some kind of clear material- Ed guessed it was some type of the ever-present plastic this world was so enamored with- hopefully, they didn't try putting it in their food, but he wouldn't be surprised at this point. In any case, the clear sheet that overlaid the maps allowed the Saviors to draw and mark on them, judging by the smudges, erase those markings later on, though Ed didn't know what kind of ink could be used to do this.
As Negan's lieutenants trickled in, Ed looked at what he could only guess was the main map used by the saviors. He had gathered from conversations with Ash that the province- or state, he remembered -where the Sanctuary was located had once been called Virginia, and as Ed traced the outlines of the outsized map, he used that as a starting point- a blue star scribbled in the map must be the Sanctuary. It sat near a sprawling city- so big it took up the top part of the map and part of that of another state map folded and tacked on top of the main one, with this one being another province called Maryland.
The city he gathered, was called Washington DC- and scrawled over it in red and orange ink were a field of skull and cross bones, save for a small blue square at the tip of an outer suburb labeled "Therapy". Ed had no idea what that meant, so he passed it over, following a web of green markings that the Saviors seemed to utilize to indicate safe routes, radiating out from the Sanctuary to blue boxes, marked with names like "Ramirez' Outpost" or "The Garage" with a small note indicating what the outpost was for- mechanics, weapon storage, living quarters, and so forth.
Other boxes were done in black ink, with names like "The Library", "The Ranch" and "The Hilltop". Several of them were crossed through with red X's. and smudged notes- with one on a bridge near the coastline, he could still make out sent Simon and Arat to take care of it .
He frowned. Ed could well guess just what that meant…he was going to demand some answers when he spotted a hand-drawn map tacked onto the landward side of the larger map of Virginia.
Scrawled across the map in red colored pencil were the words Eerie Country while below it, half-finished markings in pen and pencil highlighted roads and a few towns. On the plastic covering above one small village near the border was written Ash spotted a kid near the school . This, then, was where Negan had found him, and Ed could trace the route from the hand-drawn map back unto the one of Virginia, with that tree-top outpost they had passed being the final blue box K before dropping off unto the hand-drawn part of the map. Ed wondered at that- every other map was nearly perfect, enough to make every member of the Amestrian military high command green with envy at their precision, though few of them appeared to be military maps. At the very edge of the hand-drawn map, where it spilled across into another state map, this one in the usual perfectly machined style of the others and called West Virginia, a box had been scrawled in red ink, with " What the fuck is a Dante?!" written inside of it. Naturally enough, this caught his attention but his thoughts were interrupted when Negan began to profanely call the meeting to order as the dark-skinned Arat came through the door, seemingly fresh from her arrival back to the Sanctuary.
There were several empty seats at the table but Ed hesitated to sit down- besides Negan, Dwight, Simon, and Arat, there was a twitchy, angry-looking man who looked like he might be from Xing, a grim-looking woman with steel gray hair, and a man clad in heavily stained denim whose greasy hair clung to his head, trying way too hard to look tough.
Ed decided to forgo such illustrious company for the moment, or, at least, he tried.
"Ed! Sit the fuck down, you're making me nervous standing around in the shadows like that!"
Ed lowered at Negan but was put on the spot to either start off whatever would happen if he ignored the big man's orders in a room packed with his top henchman or sit down. He found himself too tired to start a brawl with his supposed allies. He sat, with the nearest open seat being between Arat and the man with the greasy hair.
He didn't smell any better than he looked.
Arat stood and slid a heavy, outsized piece of paper out of her pocket before unfolding it across the tabletop. While the gathered Saviors used an overflowing ashtray, a pair of handguns, and a mostly empty whiskey bottle they had been passing around to hold down the edges of the curled paper, the man next to Ed took a stubby, hand-rolled cigarette and lit it- Ed nearly recoiled when he caught wind of the foul-smelling tobacco the thing seemed to be made from.
Ignoring the obnoxious Savior, Ed looked down at the map- this seemed to be the general theme of the afternoon -and found a hand-drawn sketch of a clearing with a tight circle of oblong shapes drawn up in the middle of it, surrounded by woods on all sides, with a single road leading into the clearing.
"We tracked down the assholes that tried it out with Ash and The Magician," Arat began, "Wasn't too hard, the assholes have a giant-ass convoy of semi-trucks they're traveling in. I guess that bulldozer was what they were using to clear a path down the highways and roads so they could keep moving."
Arat drew her finger around the circular formation of rectangles,
"They've drawn up their tractor-trailers into a fortress, looks like what's left of a horde scattered all around this field they pulled into, though I have no idea why the fuck they would have stopped there and sent out the bulldozer to clear the way…"
"They do up those semis like that bulldozer Ed scrapped?" Negan asked,
Arat nodded, pulling out a different sketch to fold open on top of her map; on it was what to Ed's eyes was an impossibly huge truck with a wheeled rectangular cargo container attached to it, its sides, wheels, and cab, covered with plates of what he guessed was some kind of metal, topped with crude spikes and rolls of razor wire. The box had two boxy guard posts atop it, like bunkers.
"Oh my, someone is quite the artist," Simon put in, "They take any license with this or…"
Arat shrugged.
"No, huh?" Simon blew a breath out, "This could be tricky."
"We could cut 'em off, starve 'em out." The gray-haired woman said,
"Yeah, if we knew how much food they had, which if they eat it all, means no take for us at the back end anyway."
"We can't rush them, that open ground…do those bunkers on top of the trucks cover the whole field?"
"Yeah. Full coverage."
"If they just put down a horde like Arat said, they gotta be low on ammo."
"Well, you're welcome to take your happy ass into that field to find out. 'Sides, we're running low on rounds too."
Ed was silent, ignoring the squabbling bandits as he looked at the map, bored out of his mind. Then he remembered his conversation with Negan earlier in the day. That instructor…what was his name…Ed had barely been awake, having spent all night flitting through libraries in search of references to the Philosopher's Stone…but what had he…
At times, you may be called to support assault during military operations. As a State Alchemist, it is your duty to understand how the regular military operates and how it uses the newest weapons to conduct operations… he had droned. There has been a map behind him. A map a lot like this one, showing how alchemy could be used with…yes that might work…
"Hey, Negan," Ed blurted, "Do you guys have any …what's the word… maschinengewhre ?" Where was Ash when he needed her?
Negan seemed to understand him, oddly enough,
"We might have a couple. Why?"
Ed laid out his plan, using the half-remembered lesson he thought he would never use, but knowledge, it seemed, was never truly wasted. When he finished, the Saviors aside from Dwight, Simon, and Arat, looked skeptical, but Negan's predatory grin kept them quiet.
"Look at you, Eddie. All General Patton and shit. You really down for this?"
Ed nodded,
"You know we're gonna kill a whole lotta motherfuckers, right?"
"They still might surrender."
"Too bad for them if they do." The greasy-haired man almost brayed.
"Timmy shut the fuck up." Negan ordered, standing up, "Ed, you and Dwighty boy get ready."
"Jaime…god I'm sorry, cousin," Matthew muttered out loud, looking out through the quiet night at the distant, shadowy tree line from his guard post. It had been three days since the encounter on the road with that little bitch and…whatever her friend was.
Paul and Jared were the only others to come back from the fight on the road, and Paul had a shattered right arm from where that girl had got him, while Jared was plenty shaken up. Hector, Jaime, and Esme, though…
Matthew adjusted his faded green John Deer cap and turned to glare behind him, into the heart of his group's encampment. There was one particular RV that drew his ire, near the center, amongst the handful of others that sheltered in the space in the protective circle of semi-trucks and trailers that was the portable fortress that had seen the group keep safe in a mobile fortification, all the way from the highways around Ontario, down to the tip of the southern United States, here in Virginia.
That old hag Linda, ex-forces bitch that she was, fancied herself the leader and Matthew would grudgingly admit she had held things together well enough and turned a blind eye where it needed to be turned, long as nothing happened in the camp, he could have his fun.
That was what was supposed to happen yesterday, but instead…Jaime had been his last blood on this earth, and all Linda could gripe about was losing her precious Dozer. They might have been stuck with no way to clear the highways, but a replacement could always be found, and he knew heavy equipment well enough to run one, even if Hector had been their normal bulldozer operator.
Matthew grit his teeth; that was it. Linda knew he'd be the obvious replacement for Hector, she didn't want him to gain more power in the camp!
He forgot his lamentations for his fallen relative as this new train of thought sprang forward to dominate his sullen mind, convincing himself that none of this was really his fault.
Until gunfire roared out from that distant tree line.
The thudding bark of heavy machine gun fire filled the formerly still air of the early fall of Northern Virginia, as tracer fire lashed out across the flat fields of what had once been a horse farm, but that now provided a perfect field of fire, with nothing between the concealed gunners and their target, the circle of drawn up tractor trailers; these vehicles had seen their operators and the group that sheltered inside through two years of the end of civilization; they had been armored with sheet metal, corrugated roofing, barbed wire, and sentry boxes, like the one Matthew was currently lying flat inside and pissing himself in, that had been placed on their roofs to act as observation posts and defenses.
But the weapons currently opening on them had been designed long ago to reduce any target short of a concrete bunker or main battle tank to shredded ruins.
The big fifty-caliber guns that played across the fields ripped through the improvised armor of the trucks like a warm knife through butter, shredding steel, chrome, tin, and iron sheeting clean through in some places, ripping through the walls to tear into the soft contents they sheltered.
Screams rent the night air.
A motorcycle broke through the tree line, closely followed by a pair of raised pick-up trucks, their high wheelbase and four-wheel drives tearing up the dirt as they followed the bike, bouncing across the uneven ground.
Despite the covering fire pouring out from the big fifty caliber machine guns, answering shots began to ring out from the laager of trucks, single shots at first, then an isolated burst of automatic gunfire, and finally the answering roar of a trio of machine guns, their reports tinny and weak compared to the Saviors guns, but that provided precisely no consolation to the assault group that swept across open ground as they began to swerve and zig-zag to avoid the returning fire.
But suddenly, the motorcycle swerved to its side and the passenger leapt off, his long blond braid still waving in the wind and trailing behind him like a personal battle banner, as he fell to his knees. He laid out a piece of paper and clapped his hands together- suddenly, blue fire illuminated the clearing, so bright and concentrated it nearly blinded everyone, and the gunfire abruptly ceased as a huge ramp of earth tore itself from the ground, stopping at just the right height that those on top of it could look down from its parapets into the vehicular fortress below.
The people in the trailing pick up trucks quickly dashed up the rough stairs that had been alchemically molded for that purpose, as Saviors left their vehicles, whooping and shouting in triumph as they reached the top and began to pour fire onto the defenders.
But those safe in the guard boxes included the machine gunners who trained their weapons upwards, pinning their attackers down as they began to chew through the earthwork ramp.
Ed had followed behind the Saviors from the trucks, Dwight trailing behind him, and had almost been bowled over as a woman tumbled down from the platform above, her ragged plaid clothing and equipment stained red as she limply rolled downwards.
Ed moved faster, with Dwight behind him telling him to slow down. He reached the top in time to find Arat and her band loading stubby, round bullets into short weapons with almost comically large tube-like barrels- but it wasn't funny when a Savior raised his weapon and fired it with a thumping, hollow report, followed by a crashing explosion from somewhere inside the camp, followed by frantic, panicked screaming from what had to be children, so piercing it somehow carried over the cacophonous roar of gunfire.
Ed stepped forward, intent on stopping this until a Savior on the parapet spun backward, spurting blood from a severed artery across the alchemist's face just before Dwight tackled him to the ground and bullets cracked through the air where he had just been.
Thus, he kept his mouth shut when, with a volley of those odd reports, the Saviors launched a barrage of explosives into the heart of the truck fort.
And another, and another, until all was silent.
"That's right you sorry shits," Negan's voice boomed out, and Edward looked up to find that the Saviors leader had appeared and was standing on the parapet, yelling into an electronic bullhorn that carried his voice across the now silent battlefield, "You cocksuckers had fucking enough yet?"
One of the trucks on the far side fired up and began to back up, creating a gap.
"We surrender!" A woman's voice called out from somewhere inside,
"Then get your asses out here!"
"No, you come in, let's talk, please, we can work something out."
"There's no way in hell you're about to go in there." Ed snapped, "It's gotta be a trick."
Negan nodded,
"Maybe."
Ed looked back at him and raised an eyebrow,
"Arat, as soon as we get to that gate smoke what's left of those guard houses on the trucks, just before we go in. I'll have Timmy's dipshits come out of the woods and get ready to get up on the trucks after you do."
Edward had tagged along with Negan's small party, with Ash falling in beside him seemingly from nowhere.
"Surprised he's letting you come along." Whether she meant with the group going into the camp or with this attack in general, Ed wasn't sure.
"I'm pretty sure his desire to keep me alive to keep using me was just barely beaten out by wanting to see if I got myself killed pulling off that plan."
"Well, we're not out of the woods yet," Negan cut in, just as they reached the gap in the trucks, before raising his radio to his lips, "Arat, hit 'em."
The grenade launchers coughed again, and the remaining guard posts went up in small explosions and bursts of debris, just before Negan led the way into the camp, with the distant roar of motorcycles sounding from behind them.
The inside of the camp was filled with smoke from burning vehicles that had been caught in the Saviors barrage, and a woman in faded Canadian military fatigues stood close to the entrance, lowering,
"You bastard! We'd given up…"
Negan cocked his head,
"Did you really?"
The woman's face hardened further, her brown eyes narrowing as a grim sneer spread across her hardened features,
"Now!" she roared, and a wave of yelling men and women emerged from the smoke to charge at the Saviors, weapons clutched in their hands.
The woman darted behind her charging followers, shouting something about taking them alive, but Ed barely heard her, as three assailants singled him out, doubtlessly considering the unarmed teenager to be easy prey.
The alchemist disabused them of that notion in four swift motions; he sidestepped the first attacker, throwing out a leg to trip her, followed through with an uppercut kick that caught the second in the gut, folding the obese man up like chair as Ed's boot sank into his flabby stomach; he was almost caught off guard by this, nearly losing his balance, but he caught himself just in time to swing around and block a wild swing from the last attacker, who had wildly lashed out with a heavy wooden club that shattered across Edwards automail.
The man had a split second to look surprised before the sharp crack of Ash's rifle sounded from behind Ed and the man pitched backward. Ed stepped back to bring himself in line with the Savior, just as she fired off three rounds in a rapid-fire series of shots into the back of the woman Ed had tripped.
Ed may have objected, but before he could, clouds of smoke began to billow as someone inside the camp threw a handful of hissing, sputtering smoke grenades into the melee. Ash cursed, firing off another series of shots into the general direction of the camp interior before letting her rifle fall on its sling across her chest and drawing her handgun and a knife.
"Watch my back!" Ed shouted, not bothering to look to ensure the girl had done as he'd asked as he pulled a sheet of paper out of his top pocket, letting it fall even as he reached his hands together with a sharp clap, bringing them down to the ground on top of the etched transmutation circle.
Blue sparks lit the smoke, flashing like a strobe as Edward's customary spear shot forth from the ground, assembling itself for battle.
Matthew crouched behind the rear wheel of a pickup truck well away from the chaotic fight that had erupted by the entrance to the camp. He did his best to ignore the wetness in his jeans as he pressed himself to the rubber and metal- someone, he didn't know who but he'd surely find out, had dragged him down out of the ruined guard post he'd been cowering in, losing him his rifle in the process, and thrown him into a knot of people Linda had prepared to ambush whoever their attackers sent through the gates to parlay.
The plan, he had gathered, had been to snatch them up and use them as hostages to force safe passage from their group. Judging by the sounds of battle, that strategy was going middlingly well at best. He decided to stay put, wait it out, and settle scores with whoever was left of the assholes he'd been surviving with…suddenly, his hair stood on end and a loud, electric crackling noise sounded over the din of battle.
The spiteful man had been far too preoccupied with staying as low to his fortified position as he could when Edward had used his alchemy to create the ramp-like siege work that had brought Mathew's group to its knees. Now, hearing that sound, and feeling that same sensation like he had on the road just before Jaime had died, the red tint that fell over his vision drove all careful plans of self-preservation from Matthew's mind as he got to his feet. His knuckles went white on the grip of the small .380 caliber handgun he had drawn without even realizing his hands had been going for it.
He stood, spotting the blue lightshow flashing against the cloud of smoke, and charged.
Ed snapped up his spear and looked around, scanning for targets, trying to understand by sound alone how the battle was going, but found grunts of pain and bestial shouts to be poor indicators of victory or defeat. Shadows swirled around him, as the choking smoke was aided by the pitch black of night and even by the few fires burning in the camp to cast an all-consuming blanket of confusion across the combatants.
Next to him, Ash raised her handgun and fired at something, and Ed had just enough time to be thankful that their opponents didn't seem to be using firearms before he was made a lair as a wild-eyed man with a ragged, unkempt mop of red hair and stained clothing emerged from the smoke like a fury.
He opened fire, holding his small handgun outstretched and to one side as he cranked off a round- and only one, as the spent casing caught in the breech, and the weapon jammed.
That single bullet rang true to the man's not-quite aim, though, and smacked straight into Edward's thigh- low on the left side. It rang off his automail, deflecting off that solid Rockbell construction, spun, and fell to earth unnoticed, but the little bullet had put a dent in Ed's leg, and he felt it. The bullet may not have penetrated but with his nerve endings carefully melded into his prosthetic he felt the pain of the shot, and it was Edward Elric's turn to see red.
He spun his polearm up in a wide arc, catching the man's hand as he still held the gun outstretched, dumbly pulling the trigger, still not having had enough time to comprehend what had happened. And in an instant, Edward showed the offensive value of that good Rockbell engineering as he smashed the solid metal cap at the end of his spear across the man's hand, the augmented strength of his automail arm giving the blow enough force to shatter almost every bone in it.
As the jammed pistol slid out of his hand, Matthew watched his shattered appendage flop uselessly at the end of his arm. Like a child who was overjoyed to pull parts off insects until the tiniest bit brought them to squalling tears of fearful agony, the bullying rapist was brought low at the first taste of the pain he dished out.
Screaming and shrieking, he fell to the ground.
Ash looked at the wailing man for a moment, before raising her handgun again. She recognized the man.
Ed moved to stop her, perhaps not yet understanding what was happening. As he did, through a clearing of the smoke, he spotted Negan. The Saviors leader had a writhing victim pinned up against the side of a trailer near the entrance, pushing the bloody tines of Lucille's barbed wire wrapping into the hapless man's neck as he choked the life from him.
A young man was creeping closer to him, unnoticed.
He held an axe and was raising it to strike.
Ed didn't have time to think, he had only years of training to guide him, and in that moment running high on anger, on pain, and on something feral and old and deadly that grew deep inside him, he acted.
That fine Rockbell engineering snapped back like a ballista, and Edward threw his spear with every ounce of strength he could muster.
It smacked into the boy's head with a wet thud , the impact and the razor-sharp points on the tip and the wide-bladed wings of the pointed weapon driving through bone even as the impact drove the boy's head back to side, with the tip penetrating just deep enough to pin his head against the corrugated metal side of the trailer he'd been edging along.
Negan froze, even as the life drained out of the man he'd been strangling, as he looked over to find the body of the unseen attacker swaying limply, like an obscene marionette. He turned to see Ed looking wide-eyed as the alchemist gazed in mute shock at his handiwork, but then the cloud of smoke closed again, and a knot of brawling combatants that had been knotted up by the narrow entrance to camp suddenly split open and swept the field into utter bedlam.
Ed found himself alone in the choking smoke, having been pushed apart from Ash. He struck left, right, right again, battling shadows. Someone had ahold of him, and then Edward's knife was in his hands, and then it wasn't. A woman's face he didn't recognize loomed out of the smoke, and he headbutted it, grabbed ahold of her with his free hand as his automail was trapped by something heavy and limp that he was having trouble getting free from. He'd been driven halfway to his knees but now stood again, and looked about wildly, seeking some ally to guard his back.
Suddenly, a shrill, two-tone whistle cut through the smoke, followed by another, and another and one was sounding from his lips as he joined in, and then the cry sounded from above him, to left, the right, all around.
"Hey, assholes!" Negans loud voice sounded in the smoke, "You fucking done, or are you fucking done ?"
Silence, and then,
"We give up! Fuck…we surrender!"
"Are you fucking serious for realsies this time?"
"Goddammit, everyone stop fighting!"
The battlefield fell silent, and then Negan called,
"Fuck this smokey shit, Eddie, you alive?"
"I'm here!"
"Can you do something about this crap or what?"
"Yeah!" Ed fished a circle out of his pocket, still breathing raggedly as he fought to regain control of his body from his own adrenaline.
"You fuckers, get on your knees. Now." Negan's voice wasn't shouting, but had taken on a dangerous edge, "Hit it when you're ready, Ed."
In a billowing storm, Ed used a trick he'd learned from watching Lyra. He'd been intending to use this array to help clear debris or something along those lines but, with a few quick alterations, he used the sudden, mildly powerful windstorm to drive some of the smoke from the battleground.
The modified circle did its job well, but it left enough of a remainder to shroud the enclosed space of the truck fort in a low cover of smoke that mixed with an early morning fog that was rising as the sun crested the horizon. The smog left the heads of the Saviors kneeling opponents gazing up from it as their attackers stood partially obscured, like demons gazing at sinners in the pits of hell.
The walls of truck trailers were ringed with more Saviors, who trained their weapons downwards, looking on with cold eyes as they waited like attack dogs for their master's call to attack.
Negan surveyed the field, and, finding Edward nearby, he called the Saviors of the ground to start rounding up the survivors of the attack and taking them to the center of the camp.
As he waited for his followers to ready the ground, he strode towards the alchemist, pausing only briefly over the body of an obese man with a bruised stomach and knife jammed in his throat. Recognizing the hilt as that of the blade Ed had been carrying, he yanked it free and presented it back to its owner when he reached Edward.
The alchemist regarded the weapon with wide eyes and a tightly drawn expression, but he took the blade and used the back of one pant leg to wipe the blood off it before sliding it back into its sheath.
Negan grinned and gave Edward an approving slap on the back. He waved Ed to follow him as a few Saviors picked their way through the bodies, delivering sharp coup-de-gras to the skulls of the dead and carrying the wounded either out of the camp or to its center, depending on their allegiance.
When they reached the center of the camp where the Saviors had rounded up the surviving outsiders, Negan spotted Ash looming over a man with a broken hand as Simon looked on at the crowd with a small smirk on his face.
"Hey, boss."
"Simon, good to see you." Negan said, pleasantly, "This all of 'em?"
"Man, woman and child…well, I left them out of it, actually. They're in an RV over by the wall," And under the guns of the Saviors, he didn't have to say.
"Good. I want to make this shit quick." Negan strode over to Ash, "That the guy?"
"That's the guy."
Negan drew the enormous Bowie knife from its sheath at his side, and presented it to Ash,
"Deal with that prick."
Ash lashed out like a striking spider as the sobbing man cried out in panic and fear until the girl kicked him across the face. Two enormous Saviors appeared as if from nowhere and pinned the man down as he sank into a bank of smoke and fog that still stubbornly clung to the ground, mercifully obscuring him from view.
Time seemed to slow, the world became almost hyper-focused, every color too bright, sound too loud, as Ed grasped what was happening.
The Saviors laughed, catcalled, and yelled encouragement to Ash as the wounded man's shrieks grew frantic.
Ed felt something tug at him, calling him to act, old instincts from a more civilized place. Then he heard an ugly voice in his head,
Nothing you can do but watch Blondie.
Ed's mouth hardened as he remembered the man's words on the road.
After a moment, the man's howling trailed off to a steady, keening wail, and Ash seemed to be finished.
Negan had been watching the woman in the fatigues, who had been staring defiantly back at him, her gaze unwavering.
Then Ash stood and raised a gore-slick hand and lightly tossed something wet and slick with blood at the woman, striking her just above the eyes. She seemed to grasp immediately just what had struck her and cried out in disgust and terror, her cool composure gone in an instant.
Negan chuckled while some of the more sadistic Saviors cackled like hyenas as the woman shot to her feet, frantically wiping the spilled gore and viscera off of her face. Instantly, one of the onlooking members of Negan's gang grabbed the middle-aged woman and forced her back to the ground.
"Did anyone fucking tell you we were done?" Negan demanded.
"Why are you doing this?" a man shouted from the crowd; which one was obvious, as he caught a boot to the gut and another to the knee after tumbling over.
"Really? Really? We picked this particular asshole to carve up and you still don't understand what's going on? Are you people all just that fucking dumb?"
The crowd of kneeling strangers was silent.
"I'm gonna be charitable and decide you're all ashamed, instead of confused 'cuz this asshole was just doing what you all do?"
"We don't..." the woman in the military uniform began, "He wasn't…we're not all like that…" she frantically began, hoping this was about revenge and not an excuse.
Unfortunately for her, to Negan and the Saviors, it was both.
"Oh, I get it, as long as it happens somewhere else, it's fine?"
"I, we, need that man, he's a mechanic."
"Was he?" Negan asked, looking over at the bloodied form of Ash's victim where he still lay groaning on the dirt.
"So you've lost your bulldozer and your mechanic?"
The woman was silent while Negan grinned down at her,
"Look, I don't know where the fuck it is you people came from, frankly, I don't give a shit. You're not going any farther, which means you're here, and here, you fucking work for me."
Ed's vision cleared and he affixed Negan with a glare that the man didn't see; there was only so much he could take, even with this group, a point where self-defense crossed the line.
The woman looked up at Negan, trying to find that resolve but she looked around at her terrified followers, felt the warm blood splattered across her face, and saw the scattered bodies of her best fighters on the ground and her head fell,
"Nah-uh, pay attention, I'm only gonna explain this once." Negan growled, crouching down to get to eye level with the woman, "You work for me, I fucking own you, I own your people and I own your shit. When we come, you're kicking up half your stuff to us. If it's light, you get back out, you gather more, you steal more, you make more and you catch up. If you don't," Negan brandished Lucille, "If you fight back, you die. If you run we find you, kill whoever the fuck we want, and then your right back fucking to it." He shoved the woman over and stood, and Ed stepped forward, ready to snarl his objections to this cruelty, when Negan pointed Lucille at him and continued,
"Eddie is going to be running this shit-hole for me, which means when he comes to collect, he's me. You fall behind, you beg him for mercy like I was right back here picking one of you fuckers to beat to death."
Ed froze and the woman leveled his terrified gaze at the alchemist.
"And keep in mind the only reason you're not all fucking dead is that he crumpled that half-assed Killdozer of yours like a fucking tin can and made sure nutless over there had to keep his pants on. So don't fuck with him or he'll make the very earth its-fucking-self swallows you whole."
Negan looked around,
"Normally when we do this, we only kill one or maybe two, but you people pissed me the fuck off. We're gonna clean this shit hole out of anything that takes our fancy, so each of you is gonna get a friend to show around. If you try anything stupid, you die."
Negan waded into the crowd of kneeling people, seeming to grab a woman at random as his followers closed in and did the same. He motioned Ed to follow him.
"Sorry to spring that shit on you, Ed, but I wanted to make sure you could sit in on manager's meeting's without it being fucking awkward, I hope you understand. Noting like the fast track up the ladder…" he kept up this odd corporate speak dialog until they rounded the corner of an RV, out of eyesight of the main group, and then he promptly shoved the woman, who had seemingly been ignored until now, against the side of a mobile home, "You have been making eyes at me the whole fucking time I was standing there, what the fuck do you have to say?"
The woman looked to be somewhere in her mid-twenties, with long black hair and darker skin, and her almond-shaped brown eyes widened with fear before hardening as she set her mouth grimly,
"Linda's been kidnapping people." She blurted.
Negan looked confused, shared the look with Ed, and turned back as Ed stepped forward,
"What do you mean?" the alchemist asked.
"We met a group to the West of here, said they'd trade for people…for girls and women, especially. Linda had been sending out guys out to hunt for…people."
Negan raised an eyebrow while Ed looked confused,
"I swear, I can prove it."
"How?"
"They gave us an advanced payment, stuff that was just made, things that haven't been made since the dead walked."
"What's your name?" Ed asked as Negan let the woman go and she straightened the rumpled sweater she wore as best she could,
"Natalie."
"I'm Ed, the big guy is Negan…where are these people? Were they back with others?"
"And why the fuck are you telling us this, Natalie?"
"Because you seem like you'd give a fuck."
Negan grunted in annoyance,
"So you think we let these people go and…"
"We'll protect them. Give them someplace to go, or take them back to their homes." Ed said, "And we won't hurt them, or follow them back where they came from and rob them blind."
He looked pointedly at Negan, who feigned an innocent look and placed a hand over his heart,
"I am just shocked and offended…"
"I think anything is better than where they would have ended up if Linda and her guys sold them. Those people were…off."
"You're talking like you weren't a part of this group."
"You don't understand…the way things are around here…"
"Don't care. Where's this stuff they gave you?"
"He means, 'where are the people you captured?'"
"Actually, they're both in the same trailer…" The woman pointed. At one of the trailers in the direction where the Saviors had first struck, and from which they had been pouring heavy machine gun fire into the camp, straight through the bullet-riddled sides of the fortified cargo hauler.
Ed's eyes widened as he cried out in panic. And dashed off, with Negan behind him, dragging the woman and yelling something he wasn't listening to as Ed's mind raced, this was my plan, my idea, they might be dead because of me .
That the pile of bodies the Saviors, and he himself, had already racked up never even crossed his mind showed just how far Ed had fallen in this new world; that he could still care about people he'd never even seen showed how much of himself still hung on against the odds.
Ed fumbled with the unfamiliar latch on the trailer, letting Negan catch up along with a few curious Saviors. Any survivors of the group they had attacked who were nearby seemed to be studiously looking at the ground.
Negan flipped the latch up, and stood back, dragging Edward away.
"You open it." He ordered Natalie, standing well away in case the door was booby-trapped.
The indigenous Canadian woman sighed and pushed the rolling door of the trailer upwards.
The interior was badly lit by early morning sunlight streaming in through the trails of bullet holes that crisscrossed the sides and the smell that wafted from it was nauseating, a mix of spilled canned goods and unwashed humanity.
Ed ignored it and nearly leaped inside; pushing past pallets of goods stacked on either side of the interior, his clothing getting wet and stained by the slowly leaking contents of the cargo around him where the fifty caliber machine guns had blasted right through it.
"Hello, is anyone there?"
"Yes!" a woman's voice cried from the back of the trailer, "Yes, we're here, please, help us!"
Ed almost dashed forward, but Negan was behind him holding him back,
"You got a light?"
Ed struggled to pull his flashlight from his pocket in the cramped trailer, but he got it out and clicked it on, the beam playing across an improvised cage of scrap metal and heavy wire at the back of the cargo box.
A woman in dirty clothing and holding a little girl was standing up against the bars,
"We won't hurt you, please, help us!"
Negan couldn't hold Ed back anymore, and he pushed forward, balancing the light on a stack of boxes as he took a piece of paper out of his pockets and managed to lean it against the bars.
"What are you doing?"
"Just stand back." Negan barked from behind the alchemist, who slammed his palms together and in a crackling storm of energy, dissolved the door lock into a pile of scrap.
"The key was by the door, Eddie." Negan growled, before pushing the cage open with Lucille, "No go forward easy, okay? All of you stand the fuck back!"
Besides the woman and the girl, there seemed to be only a few others in the cage, all of whom stood well back from the bars as Negan and Ed entered,
"Are any of you hurt? Is anyone…dead?"
"No, we're fine. Just scared shitless…"
"C'mon, out. Straight back. My people are the scary-looking ones with guns, stick with them until I get out." Negan stood to the side with Ed, letting the stream of people exit back the way they had just come.
Ed breathed a sigh of relief when no one seemed to be hurt after all. He smirked and looked up at Negan,
"So, how's it feel to be a hero by accident?"
"How's it feel to have come up with a plan that let us kill sixteen people while only losing four?"
Ed's smirk faded. He might have had a response, but then a quiet voice called from the very back of the cage,
"Pipsqueak."
He snapped his head around, realizing the voice had spoken in Amestrian and he could swear he recognized its harsh tones…
A shadow reared up and Ed got a look at a pair of furious, purple eyes with reptilian pupils as Envy leapt at him, only to be intercepted by Negan and sent sprawling back to the dirty floor after slamming into the wall.
Envy tried to rise, but Ed shoved him back down and set his boot on the homunculus' chest…only Envy wasn't a homunculus. He was breathing rapidly, shallowly, his black clothing was wrinkled, dirty, and torn while his alabaster skin was covered in bruises and filth. Even his wild mane of pointed green locks were matted.
Envy didn't look like a pale, life-like doll imitating a human anymore.
He looked alive .
Ed watched a gash on Envy's head slowly oozing blood. There were questions rippling through the alchemist's consciousness: how is he human? How did he get here? How…how…
But they all coalesced when he spotted the wound, into one simple declaration;
If he bleeds, I can kill him.
"Take a picture, shrimp, it'll last longer…"
Ed blinked, and without taking his gaze off of Envy, reached his hand back and took ahold of Lucille, just above Negan's grip on the baseball bat. Negan hesitated but yielded to the alchemist's gentle tug on his weapon. Ed swung the bat in a quick arc, getting a feel for it.
"Ohh…scary, what 'cha gonna do with that pretty boy?"
"Not sure what you said, but I'd shut the fuck up. He's already decided what he's gonna do, now he's just deciding how bad it's gonna hurt."
Ed looked down and raised Lucille over his head in a two-handed grip.