“You look like hell,” Sam said. He lifted the flashlight to Mara’s face, and she raised a hand to her head, tried to run her fingers through her hair but couldn’t because of the thatch of tangles.
“You’d look like hell too if—”
Something landed with a loud thud about ten feet behind them.
Sam pointed the flashlight at the ground near the right shoulder of the road. The beam illuminated the feet of a man sticking out from a pair of white pants. Baker’s pants.
CHAPTER 37
Sam swept the flashlight up the pants legs, but they were white only to the knees. From there the cloth was a deep, wet red, drenched in blood. Ping lay crumpled over the curb, his back accordianed at an unnatural angle, as if he had been poured in place. Sam ran to him and crouched down, shining the light into Ping’s unrecognizable face. His features were swollen into each other, the back of his head flattened against the asphalt. Grabbing him by the shoulders, Sam lifted and cradled Ping’s upper body, discovering his arms were missing.
Mara ran up to them as Sam turned to her, holding up his blood-soaked hands. “What did you do to him? His arms are gone! He’s dying!”
Mara’s eye filling with tears, she said, “I—I don’t think you should try to move him until we can get some help.”
“Help? Look at him! No one’s coming to help.”
Mara crouched down next to them and put two fingers on Ping’s neck. She felt a pulse, though it seemed weak to her. “He’s still alive. There’s got to be a way to help him. There’s always a way.”
She looked down, trying to compose herself, to blink tears away. Blood pooled around her feet.
“Where is Hannah? She healed him before,” Mara said, grabbing Sam’s shoulder, trying to get him to look at her.
Sam shook his head. “She’s gone with Mom, gone home. She didn’t heal him last time. She prompted him to heal himself. Ping’s unconscious. there’s no way to prompt someone who’s unconscious.”
Mara heard footsteps approach from across the road and turned to see who it was.
Sam grabbed her arm and said, “You can heal him. I know you can. You have to try.”
She shook her head. “I can’t—” She staggered away from him.
“Mara? Is that you and Sam over there?” It was Bohannon.
She stood up and turned. “Bo, do they have an ambulance out here somewhere?”
“They’ve got an army of cops, firefighters and paramedics down the road. Why? What’s going on?” the detective asked, as he approached. He looked past Mara’s shoulder and saw the body on the ground. “Lord Almighty, is that Ping?”
Mara tried to answer, but her voice caught in her throat as she nodded. She leaned into the detective, and he wrapped an arm over her shoulder.
“What happened to him? It looks like he got hit by a truck or even a train,” Bohannon said.
Sam turned and through gritted teeth said, “Can one of you please get some help?”
The detective pulled out a phone, tapped the screen and held it to his ear. “Yeah, it’s Bohannon. Look, I was wrong. We’ve got one down here. It looks pretty bad, massive trauma and bleeding. Send in a set of paramedics and an ambulance. Once they clear out, everyone else can come in and clean up.”
Bohannon slipped the phone into his pocket, put his hands on Sam’s shoulders and tried to pull him away. Sam resisted. Bohannon softened his voice and said, “Let me in here to have a look at him.” The boy relented and moved out of the way.
“God have mercy,” Bohannon said. He turned around and looked at Mara, conveying his grave assessment of Ping without saying a word.
She crouched down next to him and asked, “Is there anything we can do?”
Ping coughed, spitting up blood onto his chin. It ran down his neck onto his chest.
Bohannon grimaced and turned to her. “At least he’s breathing, but it doesn’t look good. He’s losing a lot of blood. The paramedics will be here in a minute, and we’ll get him to the hospital. Too bad that healer guy who fixed my broken leg isn’t around. Might be worth calling him and asking him to meet us at the hospital, ’cause I’m not sure a regular doctor can sew Ping back up. I mean, look at him. How did he lose his arms?”
“Keep it down,” Mara whispered and looked over her shoulder toward her brother. “Ping is the