the lioness [negan]

A New Dawn

The distant roar of the dead brought Ruby sitting immediately up right, alert and well awake from her prior slumber. Any sense of drowsiness dissipated as she found her hand reaching for the knife that was strapped to her thigh, an action that was anything but foreign to the woman. Her crystal eyes scanned the clearing of trees until they found the source of the disturbance: a pair of walkers in the distance, their rotten and concave bodies illuminated by the dawn of the new day.

Ruby had just enough time to gather her belongings, slinging a worn back-pack over her shoulder in a moments notice as the knife lay steady in her clenched fist, cool to the touch. She trekked over to the dead, bringing the knife to their heads with a sickening crack in two swift movements, not even managing to break a sweat in the process. She wiped the blood on one of the remains of the their shirts, the knife once again glistening before it went back to being strapped to Ruby's thigh.

Her slender fingers wrapped around the straps on the back-pack, releasing a sigh she found herself to be holding before moving on towards her true destination: The Compound. It was certainly not Ruby's favorite place to be, but in exchange for her going on supply runs they provided her with a roof over her head, decent food, and clean water that only a fool could deny at this stage in the game. Even the part of her that wanted to be on her own, practically screaming out at her, survival tended to rely on the number of people on your side these days, for it was not just walkers that threatened your life, but other humans as well. If only her father could see what the world had fallen to. If anyone was cut out to survive this new age it would have been him, but cancer is a bitch and he died before shit even had the chance to hit the fan. 

On the plus side, she did not mind being useful for the people of The Compound even if they were ungrateful for her work; it gave Ruby a sense of purpose, something she strongly clung to in recent days. Up until this point she had never belonged to a group of people in this apocalyptic hell, if she could really even call it "belonging". Ruby knew that it would always be every person for themselves if things were to go downhill and it would always be that way.

As she approached The Compound she stepped back, remaining hidden amongst the trees and becoming one with nature as she watched what began to unfold before her eyes. There were many trucks in the distance, headlights ablaze with even more men surrounding those trucks. More than seemed humanly possible to count. They were all in a circle in front of The Compound, as to what was happening in the center was a mystery to Ruby and she certainly was not going to stay and find out.

With a spin on the heel of her boots, she turned around to way she came from only to find she was now faced with a man who whistled out into the open air, signaling to the others of his group no-doubt. Ruby lunged for the man with a roar, the knife that she considered an extension of herself now lodged in the socket of his eye before he could even blink. She pulled it out grimacing before she was slammed to the ground with the force of someone pulling back on her hair. Ruby growled out, dusting herself off to face her assailant: a stocky man with a rather large gun aimed at her chest, his eyes glancing over her body as he snarled out towards her. "Oh, he's gonna love you."

A few more men came into the clearing with guns ready and loaded to kill. Ruby would not go down without a fight, an action which would make her father proud. As two of the men reached out to hook their hands onto her, she plunged her knife directly into the thigh of the one man, perfectly slicing through his femoral artery. It was a killing blow and he would only have minutes to survive if the flow of blood could not be stopped. He howled out, doubling down in a ear-piercing screech that surely would attract the dead. Ruby cackled at his pain, before shutting the man up for good with a blow to the head.

"You bitch!" The end of a gun slammed into the back of Ruby's head with a force strong enough to send her knife flying. The same man that hit her had picked her up along with another man to hold her back. It would take two to hold her back, her eyes ablaze as she struggled to gain freedom from their death-grips, even with her head injury pounding like a war drum. She hissed and attempted to dig her feet into the ground as she was dragged through the woods, through a crowd of men, and into the center where she had no intention of ever setting foot.