Free Crisis Event: Gray Dawn by Greg Shows, Zachary Womack

been after his food and water and respirator.
    She was about to toss his Swiss Army knife and keys on the ground when she saw the stylized wing logo on the black plastic tab end of one key.
    It was a Honda logo.
    The long haired man had driven a bike here.
    Sadie hadn’t heard an engine coming or going, and the Tall Man, with his two kids, wouldn’t be interested in a motorcycle.
    She looked around, but saw no sign of a bike. Everything had been covered in dust for a long time, and the only things that had disturbed it were animal tracks and human footprints.
    Sadie slipped her pack over her shoulders and grabbed her rifle. She jogged a straight line to the east for a few hundred yards, and when she saw no signs of fresh tire tracks, she returned to the body and jogged another few hundred yards to the west.
    Nothing.
    Since she would have noticed fresh tracks the way she’d come into town, she turned south and began to jog again. Sure, jogging was breaking the rules, but if she didn’t get the hell out of Youngstown fast, she’d be breaking an even bigger rule: don’t get caught out in the open with nowhere to hide, not enough provisions to wait out an adversary, and not enough firepower to hold that adversary off.
    She’d made a calculated risk, and now she was acting as she thought best: the Interstate was to the south, so that was the likely direction the long haired man had come into Youngstown. If she searched in that direction, she could find his bike.
    So she hoped.
    She’d gone six blocks, and was beginning to question the wisdom of searching for the bike when she found its tracks. The wheels had bitten through the dust and gotten down to the asphalt. A black ribbon had been left exposed in the one-inch blanket of gray.
    The ribbon ran north and south, like she’d expected, but then turned east at the place she’d found it—right out in the middle of an intersection, on a street that was choked with abandoned cars.
    Sadie followed the tire tracks east until they disappeared—right in the middle of the road. The long haired man had chosen a strange place to get stealthy, but she doubted he could carry a motorcycle in his arms. It was much more likely he’d hidden it somewhere and camouflaged it, then had dragged something over his tire marks. That he would go to such lengths made her even more suspicious about who he might be.
    Sadie began to sweep the area, walking a grid-like pattern, first one way and then the other, widening her search as she sought in vain to find his footsteps. She checked her watch again and found it was 3:07.
    She nearly panicked then, completely stunned that she’d been searching for over two hours without even realizing it.
    What if the people he was meeting came early?
    What if she was being watched right now?
    She couldn’t make herself stop feeling like she was being watched.
    Sadie pulled off her pack to take a drink and a quick rest.
    She should probably just take off now, or get to shelter and hide and hope that whoever came looking for the long haired man would miss her. If she could get into one of the abandoned businesses around here and go out the back, dragging a broom or weighted tarp or a flattened cardboard box over her footprints as she went, she could likely escape. Effacing your tracks in dust wasn’t that hard. The long-haired man had proven that. She couldn’t even find a three hundred pound motorcycle in it.
    But if they came with a good tracker, that was another story.
    Sadie scanned the buildings, looking up toward the sky. Lightning was flickering off toward the west, and it looked like there could be a dust storm coming in. If she got caught out in that she’d be dead for sure.
    She re-slung her pack, getting ready to head south on foot, bitter anger and disappointment rising in her chest.
    It wasn’t the first time she’d felt that bitter anger since everything had gone wrong, and it wouldn’t be the last. Leaving her car behind had made her feel