I think I liked you better when you didn't have a knife in your hand, Peaches

The car wreck

Rain splattered the windscreen now, the wipers on Negan's truck going at full speed, as Arat navigated the darkened, sodden road.

It was hard to see now and even the dark-haired Saviour, as cool and collected as he usually was, hand his hand over his scrubby beard, within half a mind to tell the curly-haired woman in the drivers-seat, to turn back around.

Perhaps abandoning a fruitiness chase for a car, now long gone in this storm, was the best case for all of them. They could then go back to the Sanctuary, and Negan could wait it out, until the day after tomorrow- Blake's birthday, where he would take a drive back to Alexandria to fetch her.

Hopefully by then, the storm would have cleared in its entirety, and the roads would not be so dismal and treacherous either.

But as their truck, followed by larger van behind filled with several more Saviours, chugged along down the gloom-filled track, Negan still did not make to tug his hand away from his mouth, or indeed utter any words at all.

For something....some niggling feeling, was stopping him....

Something that he just could not put his finger on.

But it wasn't even a minute later, that Arat slowed the truck, leaning forward in her seat, peering out through the darkened windshield in front of her.

"Uh, boss," she uttered in a slow yet serious tone. "We've got a herd of dead up ahead."

Negan gave a frown and sat up a little straighter now.

He couldn't see shit in front of him through the rain-drop covered window, and so giving an irritable huff, the bearded Saviour, wound down the window beside him and stuck his head out, frowning through the darkness.

There was certainly something up ahead....moving....just off the road a little to the right....

But as Arat slowly eased the truck a little further up the track, it became clear that the female Saviour had indeed been right....

...for dragging themselves across the road ahead, in packs of two or three, had to be about twenty or so walkers of varying levels of decomposition.

A couple of them looked up at the headlights....throwing a light across the road ahead of them...but the majority kept on walking....drawn by something a little way off the path....

Negan gripped Lucille tighter in his hand, narrowing his eyes and squinting out at through the trees up head....at something which caught his eye....

Was that a light?

"You see that?" Negan said in a low drawl, pointing his barbed wire-covered baseball-bat through the window....towards the source of a bright light, just about visible, shining through the trees.....

...looking very much like light from a pair of car headlamps...

Negan clenched his jaw...his dark eyes darting through the rain at a gap obviously made by some sort of vehicle through the trees at the side of the road.

"Want us to go investigate, Boss?" said Danny to Negan's left promptly.

But Negan gave a small grin.

It had been a long time since he had been out here....with the threat of walkers this great...

It was something that really seemed to get the adrenaline pumping through him like nothing else.

"Actually, Danny-boy, you can follow my fuckin' lead on this one," he said wickedly, shoving open the truck door beside him, causing the sound of the rain hitting the asphalt below them, to echo through the cab. "And stay fuckin' tight. I don't want any of these fuckers creepin' up on me in the dark. We clear?"