Free Tear of the Gods by Alex Archer Page B

from the tents and then slipped into the trees behind them, headed deeper into the woods.

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    When she felt she was far enough into the tree line to not give away her position, Annja picked up her pace, headed on a course that would take her directly away from the camp on the straightest line possible. She knew the police would be fanning out, looking for both the perpetrators and for any survivors, and right now she couldn’t afford to be detained as either.
    Once she was several hundred yards away from the camp, she stopped and took a moment to think about her next move. The staging area was out of the question; the cops would be all over the vehicles there in short order, if they weren’t already. If she couldn’t approach the cops and it was too risky to try and reach her rental car at the staging area, it seemed she had no choice but to travel overland until she found some alternate means of transport.
    Squatting on her heels, Annja drew a quick map in the dirt in an effort to help her get her bearings. If the camp was here, she thought, and the staging area here, then the road must go like this. She drew a line in the dirt that traveled parallel to the camp for a short distance before angling sharply away toward the southeast. There was only one major road in these parts and that was it, if she was remembering things correctly. That meant if she turned south at this point, she should eventually run into it. She wasn’t sure exactly where she would cross it, but cross it she would, if she just kept going south.
    “All right then, south it is,” she said.
    With her pack over her shoulder, she started walking again.
    It was hard going. The terrain was a mix of woods and marshland, which wasn’t the best possible choice. She had a healthy respect for the danger the marshy bogs represented, given what she’d recently gone through, and so she was forced several times to change direction, skirting the edges of the bogs rather than attempting to find a path through them. Each time she cleared them she headed south once more, but after the first few hours it was clear she’d underestimated the task ahead of her.
    By midday the sun was beating down and Annja had gone through the two bottles of water she’d snatched on her way out of the camp.
    If she had to do this for much longer, dehydration was going to start being a problem.
    The marshlands gave way to wooded hill country, which had its good and bad points. She was out of the sun more often than not, and no longer had to take these wide looping detours to avoid the bogs, but the constant hike up and down the hills began to wear on her.
    As she crested another hill, the trees fell away before her at the top and she found herself looking down a long grassy slope.
    There, below her, was the road.
    “About time,” she said, with not a little impatience. She’d known it would be a long hike, she just hadn’t expected it to take several hours. She was hot, tired, thirsty and more than a bit irritated. She almost felt sorry for whomever it was who eventually stopped to give her a ride.
    Annja descended the hill and, once on the roadway itself, took a moment to brush the dust and leaves out of her clothing and hair. It was going to be difficult enough to get someone to stop out in the middle of nowhere; she didn’t want to make it any harder by looking like she’d just spent the afternoon rolling around in the woods.
    Satisfied her appearance was as good as it was going to get, she set off walking along the shoulder, hoping it wouldn’t be long before someone came along to give her a lift.
    The first two cars, both driven by women, passed her without slowing despite her efforts to flag them down. Stopping to help a fellow female stranded by herself on the side of the road was too much effort apparently. As they roared on past, their gazes averted so they could pretend to themselves they hadn’t seen her, Annja took the time to memorize their license plates. If