Irresistible Danger

Savior or Monster?

It felt like you were swimming up from the bottom of a dark, grey ocean. Each individual sense seemed to return one by one, as if the hazy veil of unconsciousness was slowly being pulled back. When you finally reached the metaphorical surface, eyes blinked open to discover only more darkness. There were dim outlines of tall masses all around you, but the lighting was so low that you could only make out shapes, not details.

Why are you not in bed? you wondered, confused and disoriented. Your hearing then seemed to switch "online" because you heard a sort of buzz that eventually gave way to the sound of voices...wait voices? You tried to sit up, but felt instantly nauseous and laid back down. Where the fuck were you? It felt as if you were outside...the forest.

You started to remember bits and pieces of earlier, of walking through the woods...but what had happened? How had you ended up on the ground? The answer felt like it was right there in your brain, but yet still out of reach.

It was then that your sense of pain came back; it started as a dull pulse that gained in intensity, until the back of your head was throbbing with the mother of all headaches. You heard the voices getting louder, and your eyes caught a movement of light through the trees. Still unable to fully piece together what was happening, you laid there and tried to focus, tried to remember what had led to this...but to no avail. Closing your eyes, you took some deep breaths, but that did nothing to help the throbbing in your head. It wasn't an unmanageable pain, but it was damn distracting.

You must've started to drift back off into unconsciousness, because a flash of light passed across your closed lids, startling you back to awareness. Opening your eyes was a mistake, since the beam of light came back, this time centering on your face. You groaned and immediately squeezed your eyes shut in pain, the light seeming bright as the sun to your sensitive vision.

You heard a voice call out, "I found her! Simon, I found her!"

The voice sounded familiar, a voice you were certain you had heard not too long ago...but you couldn't quite place it. The light was gone from your face, but you still didn't want to risk opening your eyes, in case it came back. You heard what sounded like multiple footsteps come closer, then stop right beside you.

"I'll be damned, it is her," you heard another voice say. This one didn't sound familiar, at least not to your dazed senses.

"Thank God," the voice continued. "He would've killed all of us if we hadn't found her."

"Was she bit?" the familiar voice asked. You tried to mumble a negative, but found that speaking was too much work at the moment, and that you were still so exhausted...that it would be so nice to just drift back off to sleep and...

A hand roughly shook your shoulder, followed by a curt voice saying, "Don't you dare pass out again. If you die on my watch, I'll be fucked."

The unfamiliar voice then turned away and said, "Go get Negan; he should be searching west of us. I don't want to move her without his orders."

You heard hurried footsteps as the one man left, followed by the sound of strange whistling through the trees, almost as if it were a signal to someone. You heard a grunt come from the man still beside you, and then felt something heavy slide off your torso and legs, which helped you to breathe a little better.

You opened your eyes again, to see that the man was hunched over you, his face mostly shrouded in the dark. If he also had a flashlight, it was currently turned off. You squinted, trying to take in his features, but this only caused your vision to blur more. When you started to see two sets of his shadowed face, you felt the nausea hit.