The Novice Prey & the Daring Prey

by S. J. Lewis

  She spent the night huddled in some underbrush, feeling very uncomfortable. She thought she was somewhere near one of her caches, but she’d have to wait until daylight to go looking for it. The weather was still on the warm side, so she didn’t feel chilled. What she did feel, besides her discomfort, was hunger and thirst. The hot meal she’d had at Smith’s had been filling, but that had been many hours ago. The memory of those plump, tasty sausages, perfect over-easy eggs and delicious home fries was all she had left, and all it was doing was sharpening the hunger pains she was having now.

  She sloshed the last few swallows of water around in her canteen before deciding to take just one swig. She’d really have to take more time to think about what she was doing before she went and did it. Having someone discovers her camp, if that was what had actually happened, was a stroke of bad luck, but it was one she should have allowed for. Well, she could recover from that once it was daylight and she could find one of her hidden caches. But she’d have to be more careful

  She thought back to what she’d done to Lynette, and that brought a smile to her face…even the part where she humped the skier and fondled her tits. She’d never done anything like that before, but it had felt good. She wondered what Lynette was doing, or having done to her, right now.

  With Lynette down, that left only Martina and Naomi to beat. Martina had to be on lots of lists, so the odds of her being run down had to be pretty good. That would leave just Naomi to beat.

  Of course, it could all go wrong and she could be captured. She didn’t like thinking about that. If she was, her only hope of winning would be to stick it out and hope that the other girls would bail. It kept coming back to that. And every time it did, it made her all the more determined not to get caught in the first place. She wondered how many lists she was on.

  She tried to make herself comfortable, and finally found that the only comfortable position there was sitting with her back against the tree. She drifted off to sleep.

  She came awake suddenly and completely. It was early morning, with the sun’s rays streaming in sideways through the trees. She sat still and listened. She heard nothing. Okay, so then what had awakened her? Could it be her mind’s own paranoia? Or was it just that she’d had all the sleep she needed and it wasn’t comfortable enough to go for another five minutes?

  Whatever. She got up and looked around. She was hungry and thirsty and those problems could only be solved by finding the cache that had to be around here somewhere. She started searching in a spiral pattern, working her way out from the tree she’d slept against. After an hour, she began to doubt that she was in the right place after all. She rested for a little while and resumed the search. Twenty minutes later, she found what she was looking for. This whole outdoor survival thing was pretty difficult, but the rush you got from getting something right, even a small thing, was incredible. She quickly rummaged through her stuff, pulling out her extra socks and clean underwear. Then she pulled out one of the survival meal packs. It was supposed to heat up on its own if you followed the instructions, so she read the instructions, followed them, and set the plastic package aside for the moment.

  She stripped down. Being naked outdoors wasn’t quite as disturbing to her now as it had been previously. She put on her fresh underwear and, after a minute debating the issue, put her shirt and shorts back on over it. She pulled on a fresh pair of socks and then put on her boots. They felt more comfortable with her only wearing one sock per foot.

  When she went to check her meal pack, she found it almost too hot to touch. She was hungry enough to hold onto it anyway and tear it open. Hot steam rose from the opened bag, and she smelled chicken and potatoes. When she peered into the bag, she saw that it was more like a stew than anything else. She went to her cache and found a spoon, then settled down to eat. It was surprisingly good, but that might have been due to her being so hungry in the first place. She finished it all off quickly, then topped it off with a long drink from one of the water bottles.

  Feeling much better now, Alexa considered what to do next. She now wished she’d taken the time to find out if Smith had any books to sell or lend, but the episode with Lynette had driven it out of her mind. Well, she could tend to her camp chores and then do some more thinking. She retrieved the folding shovel from the cache and set to work. Once the trash and certain other things were buried, she carefully concealed everything else and started hiking. She’d have to learn the lay of the land here, maybe find another stream in case she needed water later, and keep on the move, at least during daylight.

  She spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon making a leisurely exploration of the area. There really wasn’t much to see, and so much of it looked like so much else of it that she gave up on trying to memorize anything. She supposed she could develop her own mental map of the place if she had weeks to do so, but even if she was never taken she wouldn’t be here anywhere near that long.

  She broke for a quick lunch of a power snack bar and some water. Back in civilization she was used to having some sort of a salad with lunch, and she was already missing the taste of fresh greens. Maybe some of the plants around here were edible, but she wouldn’t know which ones. There had been a book about edible wild plants, and she’d almost added it to her studies, but after leafing through it she decided that it just wasn’t practical. For one thing, the book advertised itself as ‘Edible Wild Plants of North America’. That covered a lot more territory than she really thought would be useful.

  She kept exploring, heading generally southwards, and shortly before she planned to turn back for the day she came across the trail. At first she was pleased with the discovery, but almost immediately afterwards it disturbed her. She faded back into the brush and took quick looks to the right and left, up and down the path. There didn’t seem to be anyone in sight. A closer inspection made her think that it was probably a game trail. It was well defined, but narrow, and in places it was overhung by delicate ferns that would have been bent or broken by anyone walking along that way. Given that, it seemed likely that the biggest thing ever to come along this way was a rabbit.

  This was as good a place as any to stop and turn back. It was also as good a place as any to take a break for a little while. Alexa found a nice spot that offered a bit of cover along with some shade and sat down. It was almost unbearably peaceful out here. She could hear birds singing in the distance, the faint ruffle of a breeze through the trees, and nothing else. She wasn’t used to so much quiet. Back at home, no matter how ‘quiet’ it got there was always that constant background noise of traffic in the streets. It was always there, even at three in the morning, and you got so used to it that you didn’t even notice it. It seemed now that she could only notice it when it wasn’t there anymore.

  And then there was something else there. She heard the sound of footsteps, but couldn’t tell at first what direction they were coming from. Huddling close beside her tree, she waited. She had an almost overpowering urge to run, but until she knew what she was running from, and which way she should go, it seemed wisest to remain still.

  “Sure she went this way?” she heard a male voice ask.

  “Not anymore,” another man replied. “Even if she was headed in this direction, I don’t think she’d’ve come this far.”

  “Damn. So now what?”

  The voices were coming from the other side of the tree. Alexa kept very still, listening, trying to control her breathing. Were they talking about her?

  “Guess we go back and try and figure out which way she really went. Lemme have a look at the map over here.”

  The two men stepped into view barely ten feet away. They were both dressed in rough clothes, both sporting a few days’ growth of beard, both wearing backpacks. They had their backs to Alexa, who slowly, slowly, slowly crept further back behind the tree even as she kept a wary eye on them. One of the men pulled a folded map from his backpack and opened it. His companion moved alongside him so that both of them could read it
.

  “There’s no doubt she was here at Jackson’s yesterday.” One of the men pointed to a spot on the map. “And Jackson was definite about which way she went.”

  Alexa felt a tiny bit of relief. She didn’t even know where ‘Jackson’s’ was, so they couldn’t be after her.

  “Yeah,” his companion nodded. “Looks like she was headed this way, but there’s really nothin’ out this way until you get to the main road, and nobody’s allowed to cross that. So she must’ve changed direction somewhere between there and here, but what would make her do that?”

  “Maybe she saw somethin’, heard somethin’. I dunno. Maybe she just lost direction. I think we passed her somehow.”

  “Wanna go back and try to pick up her trail again?”

  “Might as well. But that area’s been walked over so much that pickin’ up a trail ain’t the problem. Pickin’ up the right trail is.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Hold on a minute. I gotta take a leak. Fold this back up, would’ja?”

  Peering warily around the tree, Alexa saw one of the men hand the map over to the other and then shrug off his backpack. She had one brief moment of near panic when he started carrying it over towards her tree, but all he did was prop it up against the trunk and then move away to relieve himself. As close as he’d come to her, he’d never even suspected that she was right there, close enough to reach out and touch. She was about to let out a silent sigh of relief when the other man abruptly stuffed the map into the backpack, right in front of her. All she ever saw were his hands, but she saw them closely enough to see the dirt under his nails. He hadn’t folded the map very well, so most of it was sticking out of the pack.

  “Gonna wait for ya over here,” Dirty Nails called out to his companion. Alexa heard him moving off. The other man was standing ten or twelve feet away, apparently taking aim at a sapling, his back to her. Before she quite realized what she was doing, she’d reached out and stealthily pulled the crumpled map from the backpack. The next few minutes she sweated out in a state of delicious suspense: Would they even notice that the map was missing? Dirty Nails hadn’t said where he was putting the map, and his companion hadn’t seen him stick it in the backpack. With any luck, each would think that the other had it until they were some ways away from here.

  It seemed that her luck was in. The one taking a leak finished his business, came back and got his pack, and set off with Dirty Nails back the way they’d come. Alexa peeked around the tree, watching until they were lost to sight. She waited for a minute or two after that before daring to get to her feet and creep off quietly in a different direction, still clutching the map. She felt an incredible high at having pulled it off, and wondered if the legendary Elf-Girl had felt the same way after some of her exploits. She wanted to laugh out loud, but settled for sitting on a fallen log and stifling an intense fit of the giggles. Then, every time she started to unfold her new map she started giggling again. She couldn’t help it, and she finally gave up on looking at the map at all. It was getting late. Oh, it wasn’t really late right now, but she was getting used to planning her activities around how much sunlight was left, or would be left once she got where she was going. She tucked the map inside her shirt and started back to her campsite. She had a couple of juice boxes stashed away there, and maybe she could open one or two in celebration. She wondered who those two men had been, and whether or not she was on their list. It would be just so delicious if she was, even if only as the secondary, not the primary.

  There was still plenty of daylight left when she reached her camp, so she decided to break open a juice box and have a look at the map. It wasn’t an especially large map, and it didn’t have as much information on it as she’d hoped it would. As she looked it over, she realized that before she could make any sense of it she’d have to figure out where she was on it. The only landmarks she had to go by were that little stream and Smith’s trading post. Unfortunately, the map showed a lot of little streams flowing through the area, most of them along an east-west axis. Some of them seemed to start for no particular reason and end for no particular reason. In places the blue line she assumed indicated a stream was broken into blue dashes, and she wasn’t sure what that meant at all. There was nothing indicating a road or a trail.

  She carefully spread the whole map open on the ground and weighted the corners down with some small stones so that she could study it at leisure while sipping her juice. There was nothing on it to indicate direction, not even an arrow pointing to a big letter ‘N’ and for a moment she worried that there was some trick to using the map that she didn’t know. But then she found a couple of square shapes clustered close together near the very center of the map with ‘Locke’ printed just beneath them. She quickly scanned the map for anything similar and quickly found one labeled ‘Jackson’. Maybe the map didn’t have north clearly marked on it, but didn’t maps generally stick to a rule that north was ‘up’? If this one did, then north was away from her, south was towards her, and west was…

  She had to think for a moment. West would be to her left, so she began looking for ‘Smith’ in that direction. She found it quickly enough and grinned. Okay, now she had some idea where she was on the map. It came as a bit of a surprise to her that they’d started her out so far to one side of the hunting area. There wasn’t anything to the west of ‘Smith’ before you got to the edge of the map. There was also nothing showing you where Gordburg was, or the main road. She settled for trying to pinpoint her location better on the map, and quickly realized that unless she came across some landmark it was a pointless exercise. She didn’t even know what scale the map had been drawn to. But the more she thought about it, the more strongly she felt that she had to be somewhere in the area of ‘Jackson’, which was probably another of those trading posts. Maybe she should drop in for a visit?

  Ah, but Lydia had warned her that doing so wouldn’t be safe after the first couple of days. There might still be a window of opportunity, but it would be getting narrower by the hour. Anyway, hadn’t she planned everything around never even being seen if she could help it? That still seemed like the best plan. But still…

  She left the map where it was and rummaged through her gear to see what was available for dinner. There were still three self-heating pouches, two marked ‘beef stew’ and one marked ‘chicken a la king’. After those were gone she’d be down to freeze-dried stuff and a couple of cans of corned beef hash. She pulled out one of the beef stew pouches and started it up. She didn’t know who had invented the things, but whoever it was deserved a statue somewhere.

  She returned to the map and studied it. She’d been planning to change her campsite tomorrow anyway, so why not drop by Jackson’s as well? If she was worried about someone telling the hunters which way she went when she left there, all she had to do was head in one direction until she was out of sight and then change course. Or maybe just keep heading in the same direction because the hunters might assume that she’d change direction once she was out of sight? Alexa shook her head. She didn’t want to over think this, but she was so new to everything that she couldn’t help it. She might have a map now, but there was still an awful lot that she didn’t know. For example: How many hunters were after her? Were there even any, given the competition she was up against?

  No, forget that. She didn’t know how many hunters or groups of hunters there were out here, but some of them had to be looking for her, and it was safest to assume that everybody she might come across had her on their list. Given that, there didn’t seem to be any good reason to go to Jackson’s at all. She still had plenty of supplies: There was still her third cache, sitting hidden and, she hoped, untouched in the woods. Hell: For all she knew the campsite she’d abandoned might be perfectly safe to go back to after all. No, there was no compelling reason to go to any of the trading posts. None whatsoever. Except…she wasn’t used to all this running around in the great outdoors. It had its moments, to be sure, but she found that she missed huma
n contact. She also missed hot showers, indoor plumbing, fresh, cooked food, cold drinks…the list went on. Surely it wouldn’t be too much of a risk to make a quick visit to Jackson’s, not if she planned carefully and thoroughly enough ahead of time.

  She quickly ran over what she knew: She’d be safe at the trading post even if hunters showed up as long as she didn’t stay too long. Okay, so what if hunters showed up while she was still there? Well, there was always the chance that they wouldn’t be after her, in which case she’d be able to leave without any trouble. And if they were after her? Well, that could be a problem. She might be able to just outrun them if it came to that. It would be better to outwit them, though. That was how that Elf-Girl had done it, wasn’t it?

  Yes, but she was Alexa Marx, not Elf-Girl. She was going to have to sleep on this and make some sort of decision in the morning. There was still a little daylight left, though, so why not move her camp now? She’d seen a couple of places that provided better cover than here. Besides, it would be good practice to see how quickly she could gather everything up and get a move on.

  It didn’t take that long, only five or ten minutes, if that, and some of that time was spent making sure she hadn’t left anything behind, even the least little bit of trash. She shouldered her pack and set out for the best site she’d come across: Some time ago, a big pine had toppled, taking a smaller tree with it. Underbrush had sprung up around the downed trees, and now there was a tangle of vines and prickly bushes hiding a space just a bit bigger than she needed to spread her sleeping bag. Even better, the pine still had plenty of needles on its branches. They were all brown, and came off easily, but if she was careful she wouldn’t disturb them and they’d provide even more concealment. She worked her way in, left her pack there and then went back to try and hide whatever traces she’d left behind her. By then the sun was down, but there was still a bit of light left to see by. She laid everything out and settled in for the night. After all her activity that day, it felt good just to lie there and relax. Even the noises of the night insects sounded restful. She didn’t think she’d ever come to prefer this sort of living to the city life she was used to, but she was beginning to feel more at home out here in the woods.