The Last One | Negan

The plan seemed settled. It was solid. Almost nothing could go wrong. Not when so many people, vehicles, distractions, and group effort were involved.
All it took to decide on the rough details of it were a few days, two meetings, and a hell of a lot of TNT.

Rick was good at these things. His mind was practical and he had the brains to go over almost every detail. Eugene pitched in too, because...well. His brain was just a bit bigger. And then Negan, of course, added the few master strokes with his exceptional talent for plans like these. Mercer provided the rest that was needed. We all knew what to do, when to do it, and how. At least, on theory.

I found it extremely amusing how Negan kept stealing glances at me here and there while we were all discussing the details. I knew he was trying to seem very interested in what Rick was saying, concentrated even, with his slightly furrowed brows and fingers resting against his chin, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. That was the second time since last week that we saw each other, but we didn't have any time to actually talk except for during the meeting. Let alone anything else. I was craving to just grab him by the collar and do god knows what to him, but just like him, I had to be fully concentrated or at least pretend to be.

The meeting was being held in the Kingdom because it was closest to the starting point of the operation. Now, usually, we wouldn't bother with that herd, because it wasn't that close to either one of the communities, but its massive numbers were a bit concerning. There were so many dead ones that if they decided to roam around and exit the valley, they'd flood all the main roads between us and it'd be very hard to push through them. Especially when we used horses so very often. So we had to do something about it. The other concerning thing was the behavior of the rotters – walking in a spiral. Nobody had ever seen such a thing for those eight years and that was a major red flag.

Our plan resembled what we did with the walkers in the quarry, but included almost complete extermination – we were going to lead two-thirds of them away, take them towards an abandoned mine, lure them in with remote sound equipment, stuff them inside, seal it and then blow it up. The mine had four entrances and we planned on separating the herd into smaller groups so that there were no collisions that could slow us down. It was tricky though – we couldn't just block the crossroads like we used to. We had to put up stronger fences. Here came the Commonwealth's part – they were going to take care of that in terms of materials and equipment. Workers from all communities were going to participate so that the workload was equal. Rosita's knowledge of explosives combined with the expertise of some guys from the Commonwealth and Negan's personal bomb technician, provided an almost foolproof plan for ending the massive herd in the mines. They were going to gather a team and stuff so many explosives down the corridors and different levels of the mine that it was going to go down with a big bang. Of course, that was not the best idea, because it was going to create a very loud explosion, but there was no other option. The mine was already very dangerous and almost completely destroyed, our scouts reported, so the team had to be very careful when lining the TNT sticks and other bombs. Sealed or not, we had to disperse pretty quickly out of there, because the hit wave was going to be a serious one, as Eugene had declared, and could, I quote, blow our faces off. There wouldn't be any faces to blow off if we stayed in a radius of less than two miles. After we were out of immediate danger, they were going to set the bombs on, which would create a domino effect and the whole herd of thousands of walkers was going to be buried under the rubble forever.

The other third was gonna get led far away towards a cliff where they could just fall down and die. I mean, die again. For real this time. The herd was too big to gather them all in one place and we had no other option. The mine wasn't big enough for all of them, but it was the biggest place we could find that we were okay with blowing up. So, that third had to be led somewhere else. And they had to go first until they were almost out of earshot because the explosion could bring them back towards us.