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That one arm lay in the last of the day’s fading light. Pale skin with red hair that was coarse as wire. A thick wrist, corded muscles. Blood. Beneath the gore the arm was crisscrossed with scars, old and new. Samantha had seen every kind of injury in her young life, and she could recognize the marks of violence. Knife cuts and other trauma. Whoever this person was, he’d been hurt over and over again. Some of the scars were so faint that it was evident they were very old, perhaps wounds suffered in childhood.
The figure spoke again. Hoarse, a damaged croak of a voice.
“Please . . .”
Samantha licked her lips. “Are . . . are you one of them?”
“Please . . .”
“Are you one of them? Are you a killer?”
The shadow-shrouded body moved, and with a hiss of pain and a grunt of effort, the man leaned his head and shoulders out of the shadows. He had pale eyes that seemed to reflect the fiery light of sunset. His face was lined with pain and white with blood loss.
“I’m a killer,” he said in a voice that was filled with darkness and cold winds. A voice filled with a great and terrible sadness. “But . . . not like them.”
Samantha said nothing. Her spear felt like it weighed a million pounds.
The man spoke very softly. “I’m . . . like you.”
“Like me?”
He nodded and gave her the faintest of smiles. “Like you.”
Samantha bristled. “You don’t even know me.”
He didn’t reply to that, but instead reached out his bloody hand. “Please,” he said, “help me.”
She took a small step backward. “Why should I?”
The man didn’t answer, and his hand remained out for her to take.
“Come out where I can see you,” ordered Samantha. “If I see a gun or knife, I’ll put you down like a dog.”
The man made a sound. It could have been a laugh.
But then he moved, his bulk shifting inside the bank of shadows. He got clumsily and slowly to his knees; then, with small grunts and hisses of pain, he managed to get to his feet. He took two trembling steps forward and then stood swaying in the fiery light.
“God . . . ,” breathed Samantha.
The man was huge, with massive muscles that seemed molded onto him like lumps of clay. His clothes were torn and slashed, and there were barely enough left to cover him. The ruined shirt and trousers revealed limbs and a torso that were covered with scars and old burns and what looked like healed-over bullet wounds. Even with all the refugees and survivors of the Fall she’d seen, Samantha had never once beheld a person who had suffered a tenth as many injuries as this man.
There was a fresh wound on his chest, almost directly over his heart, but it could not have been as deep as it looked. Blood was painted across his body and down each limb.
He looked down at her with the strangest and least human eyes she had ever seen. The irises seemed to be as red as the sunset, and they were rimmed with burning gold.
“What—what—happened to you?” stammered Samantha.
Those eyes were filled with sadness.
“Too much,” he said.
He carried no weapon, and despite his muscles he seemed on the verge of collapse. His face was pale, almost gray, and his lips were dry and cracked.
For reasons Samantha wasn’t able to explain, she stepped close to the man, reached out
a hand, and lightly touched the edge of the wound over his heart.
“Are you going to die?” she asked.
