The "body" twitched and sat up abruptly, and I suddenly found myself looking at a strikingly lovely woman wrapped up to her chin in a blanket. "Who's there?" she called timidly, staring in my direction.
I froze in panic, waiting for her inevitable reaction to my face, and silently cursed myself for being so careless. It was far too late to run or even turn my head; she was looking straight at me.
But the expected look of horror never materialized. "Who's there?" she repeated, and only then did I notice that her gaze was actually a little to my right. Then I understood.
She was blind.
It says a lot for my sense of priorities that my first reaction was one of relief that she couldn't see me. Only then did it occur to me how cruelly rough postwar life must be for her with such a handicap. "It's all right," I called out, starting forward again. "I won't hurt you."
She turned slightly so that she was facing me—keying on my voice and footsteps, I presume—and waited until I had reached her before speaking again. "Can you tell me where I am? I'm trying to find a town called Hemlock."
"You've got another five miles to go," I told her. Up close, she wasn't as beautiful as I'd first thought. Her nose was a little too long and her face too angular; her figure—what I could see of it beneath the blanket and mismatched clothing—was thin instead of slender. But she was still nice-looking, and I felt emotions stirring within me which I thought had died years ago.
"Are there any doctors there?"
"Only a vet, but he does reasonably well with people, too." I frowned, studying the fatigue in her face, something I'd assumed was just from her journey.