His hair covered most of his face, and the clothes he was wearing were frayed and thin and filled with holes. He was barefoot, too. Covered in…blood? Dirt? Hard to tell from here.
Where the hell had he come from?
Something crashed through the bushes behind him, and he startled, jerking around and taking a step back, and my heart stopped.
“Don’t—”
The brush and sticks and leaves of my pit trap fell away beneath his feet and he disappeared into the hole like he’d been sucked inside.
He cried out, and the terror in that sound pierced my heart.
“No!” I ran forward with my hand outstretched, like I could’ve saved him when I was too far away to do anything.
His cry ended abruptly, and my heart jolted in my chest.
One of the infected burst through the foliage, and I was out of the water in two seconds flat.
The most visceral panic ran through me like an electric shock, and I sprinted to the edge of the pit. The infected that were chasing him fell in after him, one by one.
I almost jumped down there before I remembered I wouldn’t be able to get back out if I did that. Not easily, at least.
“Fuck.” I rushed back to my pack where I had some rope, all the while cursing myself for not warning him about the pit as soon as I’d seen him. That should have been the very first thing I’d done—the very first thing—but I was so stunned to see another person. I honestly didn’t think he was real.
He could still be just a figment of my imagination. My lonely self finally snapping and conjuring what I desired most in theworld. This might all be some vivid hallucination, but it really didn’t feel like one.
“Please be okay,” I said, grabbing the rope and running back to the pit. “Please, please, please.”
I was tying the rope to the nearest tree when a weak voice drifted up from the depths.
“No!”
That one word contained so much desperate anguish that it raised goosebumps on my arms.
I tightened the rope, held it with one hand and looked down. My heart pounded wildly in my chest, then began to race when I saw him move.
He was alive.
He wasalive!
He’d fallen in between the spikes on the edge; he was so small that he’d avoided all the spikes around him.
His entire body was shaking as he shifted slowly in the dirt. Blood soaked through his shirt and was spreading across the thin material.
Blood? Why was he bleeding? Had he hit one of the spikes after all?
Gripping the rope in one hand, I jumped down into the pit. The impact sent a jarring pain up my shins that I ignored.
The boy growled in frustration and tried to crawl forward, but even if he had the strength to move, there was nowhere for him to go. His arms gave out and his face dropped into the dirt. The sound of soft crying made my heart feel like it was being split open.
“Hold on,” I told him.
Please hold on.
I edged around the spikes, reached down, and carefully lifted him. He’d stopped crying, stopped making any kind of sounds.The sight of him in my arms, so small and broken, ripped into my chest and squeezed my lungs.
Life is precious. Protect it.
“You’re gonna be okay,” I promised him.
