Ellie Dixon

Seven Months

It had been seven months since my fun afternoon with Mama Rick. I was leaving my chicken coop with a basket full of eggs. I was locking up, the basket on my arm when I noticed two people running down my path that came from the road. I walked towards my porch and grabbed my binoculars from the floor, looking through them, I saw Megan and Carlos running towards my house. "Damnit." I muttered, putting the binoculars down and starting to walk towards them. I had my gun in one hand, and the woven basket in the other.

"Ellie!" Megan called to me. 

"That's close enough!" I raised my gun so they stopped when we were about ten feet apart. "I told you the next time I see you, I'd put a bullet through your head. The Saviours in general are bad enough, but I want nothing to do with the two of you who went against your own blood."

"Please, we're here to warn you." Carlos told me.

I rolled my eyes, and put my gun in its holster. "Warn me about what?" I asked.

"There's a herd coming this way. You probably have an hour before it runs straight through your farm." Megan told me.

I swallowed thickly. "You being serious?"

"We may have been Saviours before, and we realise we made mistakes, which is why we knew we had to warn you." Carlos stated. I blinked a couple times, took an egg out of my basket and threw it at his chest. He simply sighed as the runny substance ran down his shirt. "Please, Ellie. We don't know how to turn them around, but we know that you do."

"I just threw an egg at you and that's all you got?" I asked.

"How many times do we have to tell you that it doesn't matter how much you push us away, we're not going to stop caring about you." Megan said.

"Oh, that's rich coming from the girl who held me back as Negan was about to kill my brother. While he did kill Olivia." I retorted.

"We did what we had to survive." Megan stated.

"I know you didn't owe me anything." I said. "I get that blood doesn't mean shit when it comes to family... But it's the fact that you ruined lives just to preserve yours. I'm not innocent, I have blood on my hands. But, what I did I did to protect my family against people who wanted to hurt us. Olivia was innocent, the people in Alexandria were and are innocent and your people terrorized us."

"After your people killed an entire outpost of our people?" Carlos replied.

"We wouldn't have had to do that if Negan hadn't enslaved the Kingdom and Hilltop. He started this war and there's no denying that." I shook my head.

"You have your views, we have ours, that's fine. Just, please, listen to us!" Megan begged. "We may not be close but we don't wanna see our family die. You're my niece. His granddaughter."

I ran my tongue along my inside cheek. "Okay, you're going to come in. Point at a map where the herd is coming from, then you're going to leave and we never have to see each other again. Deal?"

Carlos nodded. "Can we get water too?"

"Sure." I agreed, turning around and starting to walk towards my house.

We stood around the island in my kitchen. I had a map spread out, they'd both downed their cups of water. Megan was pointing where the herd was coming from. "They're probably about here right now." Megan said.

I hummed. "Okay, I'll go cut them off and turn them around. How many of them are there?" 

"Maybe about eight hundred to a thousand heads." Megan replied.