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What did you do?
Rags slapped her again. “I killed them!”
Another slap.
“I came back and killed them.”
Slap.
“Mom.”
Slap.
“Daddy.”
Slap.
“Everyone.”
Slap. Slap. Slap.
Mama Rat staggered backward into the arms of her men. Her face was so raw that tiny dots of blood sprang from her pores.
Tom stepped suddenly forward and wrapped an arm around Rags. She spun and pounded her fists on his chest, but he allowed it. Endured it. He used his free arm to gather her in, and while she screamed and wept, he held her to his chest.
Apart from the sound of her agony, the street was silent.
Then Joe Ledger said, “You people come here, hunting for little girls. Thinking they’re nothing but little girls. You don’t know anything, do you?”
Nobody said a word.
“Christ, do you know how much courage it took for her to do that? For a kid of her age to go into that house and do that?”
Silence.
“Do you know how much love it took?”
Rags stopped fighting Tom and wrapped her arms around him. Her knife fell to the ground, and she clung to him as if he was the only thing in the world that could keep her from drowning.
Ledger spat on the ground at Mama Rat’s feet.
“You think your numbers and your knives make you strong? Sister, you don’t know what strength is.” He pointed to Rags. “That? That’s strength. That’s power.”
He took a step closer, and now he was so close to Mama Rat that they could kiss.
“That’s hope,” he said. “Do you understand me? Are you capable of understanding? This girl . . . and Tom here, and a few others . . . they are the future of this world. They have hope, they remember what love is, and they have the courage to do what’s right.”
He shook his head.
“When I met Tom, he was already hunting you people. Like me, he’d heard about a pack of human lice who were taking kids, taking lives.”
In a movement that was too fast to see, Ledger drew his knife and pressed the edge against Mama Rat’s throat. He spoke now in a deadly whisper.
“Tom Imura is a good man, and hunting scum like you is killing him. He’s doing it because there are people trying to build something, trying to survive. He has a baby brother. He’s helping to put together a town. He should be back in that town looking after his brother and planting crops. Instead people like you have turned him into a hunter and a killer. Now he’s out here taking lives when we’re so close to extinction that every life is precious.”
He pressed the knife against her, lifting her onto her toes.
“I’m out here doing my part. Hunting, too, though unlike my friend Tom, I’m not as sentimental. I’m already a killer. I’m already a monster. Even before all this started I was out hunting monsters. Killing them. Monsters like you.”
