Samantha took point now and led them down through the brush. The closer they got to the road, the more the trees and shrubs thinned out and the more a horror was revealed.
The wagon was an old-fashioned chuck wagon that had probably been looted from a cowboy museum. The sides had been reinforced with metal sheeting, and on the sides the words gunderson trade goods had been painted in bright colors. There were bodies everywhere. Humans and horses. They had been killed in ugly ways, and they’d been left to rot. The ground was splashed with blood and littered with shell casings from pistols and shotguns.
Nothing moved except the flies.
If any of the victims of this massacre had reanimated, their living corpses had wandered off.
The girls fanned out across the road, looking at the dead, checking the wagon, scanning the surrounding woods.
“Reapers?” asked Laura.
Tiffany nodded. “Has to be. Who else would do something like this?”
“Why’d they kill the horses?” asked Heather. Ida had found an old wild horse years ago, and they’d had it for seven years before it died. Heather was destroyed when the horse was found dead in its stall. She stood looking down at the body of a massive Percheron. “Why would anyone kill a horse?”
Samantha shook her head but didn’t say anything about the slaughter. She knelt for a moment and looked at tracks that were cut into the bloody soil.
“What’s that?” asked Laura.
“I don’t know.”
“A wolf?” asked Michelle.
“Too big.”
“A dog?” suggested Amanda. “Like a mastiff?”
Years ago, when the adults were still alive, a traveler had come through the area. A big man accompanied by a monstrous American mastiff. He’d stopped only for a cup of coffee before moving on, and afterward Samantha and the girls had looked at the prints left behind in the road. They were similar to these.
“It’s not a mastiff,” Samantha decided. “These are too big.”
They looked around at the darkening woods. There were so many strange animals out there. Wild creatures that had escaped from zoos or came in packs from other countries like Mexico and farther south. There was no way to identify these prints now, and no time to waste in trying.
Samantha said, “It’s getting dark. We need to find a place for tonight.”
One by one the girls turned away, sickened and saddened by the senseless death. Samantha watched them head up the road, moving off the road and preparing to cut across country. There were plenty of empty houses and old buildings everywhere, and they hadn’t seen a reaper now for almost two hours.
Samantha lingered for a moment longer, thinking about the killings. She wanted to find some justification for what she’d done. These dead bodies were proof that the reapers were evil.
Right? she asked herself. What I did to that woman wasn’t wrong. It was justice. Right?
The questions echoed inside her head like thunder.
She wiped at her eyes, turned away, and hurried after the others.
But then she jerked to a halt as she saw something in the thickening gloom. It was a figure sitting slumped over against a tree. Big, bulky, bleeding.
It was in near-total darkness, except for one slack, outstretched arm that was covered with blood.
The blood looked fresh.
Had it moved? Did the fingers of that slack arm twitch?
Was it a victim of the attack reanimating as a zom?
That fit the circumstances but not the timing. This massacre was hours old, maybe as much as half a day. Any dead would have risen.
Unless…
There were two real possibilities. A person who’d been injured and had recently passed, and was now reanimating. Or a person who was injured and perhaps dying. Alive, but badly wounded.
Samantha wanted to turn and run. This wasn’t her matter; it had nothing to with her. If it was a zombie, then dispatching it was a dangerous waste of time. If it was a wounded person, then it would be a drag on resources and a burden when efficient flight might be the only thing that would help Samantha and her little tribe survive.
She started to turn. She actually took three small steps away from the slumped fingers, but then she stopped again.
The hand twitched again.
Samantha backed away. She wanted no part of this; she wasn’t sure she could be a participant to another death. She’d had her fill.
She turned her back on the figure and began to jog along the path taken by the other girls.
“Please…”
It was a single word, and she could have imagined it.
Perhaps it was not even a word.
She stopped and squeezed her eyes shut.
The word echoed in her head.
Please.
Up ahead the other girls were making good time, but Heather, the last in the line, glanced back.
“Come on!” called the girl.
Samantha nodded.
But not to Heather.
She abruptly turned and walked back to the slumped figure.
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.