After collecting himself, he goes out to clip off some barbed wire from a nearby fence to attach to his baseball bat, creating the new Lucille. He lets his guard down as Gabriel grabs his gun before locking himself in the trailer's second room.

In the years since the defeat of Pamela Milton and Lance Hornsby, Maggie has been forced to abandon the original Hilltop due to the damage from the Whisperers ultimately being too severe to repair, instead relocating the community to a rural factory complex in either New York or New Jersey. Negan is being hunted by marshals from the New Babylon Federation for supposedly committing five murders, but Negan himself states that things didn't go as the marshals claim that they did. While looking for cancer drugs for his wife Lucille, Negan was given a baseball bat by Laura for defense (the same baseball bat she used to knock him out, believing he was a threat), having no other functional weapons on himself.After the war and his imprisonment, Negan finds Lucille in the same spot that Rick cut his throat years ago. Negan grabs the walker and pulls it toward him, but Gabriel won't leave until he confesses his sins. At the last moment, Negan and Ezekiel manage to convince the soldiers not to let the warden turn them into murderers, and they turn on their hated boss. Negan helps Judith with her homework and tells her a story from his childhood where he tried to take in stray dogs only for it to go badly for him when she asks for advice with dealing with Magna's group. So far, that backstory has covered 16 pages over four issues, which is enough to clue us in on Lucille’s namesake.

He cannot bring himself to put his wife down; this act of weakness would continue to haunt him and thus Negan strived to become a much stronger person. The leader of The Saviors, Negan is a sociopath with a love for swear words who wield ones hell of a weapon — a bat wrapped in barbed wire that he affectionately refers to as Lucille. Rick, at this point, has been firmly subdued by Negan and allows all of these opportunities to pass by. Disappointed that Spencer "has no guts" for going to him while Rick is gone, Negan eviscerates Spencer with a knife while jokingly stating that "he did have guts after all.

Suddenly, a gunshot is heard, and Rick's gun is destroyed as well as those of the others who came out with him.