Free The Novice Prey & the Daring Prey by S. J. Lewis Page A

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