Crisis Event: Jagged White Line Read Online Free Page B

The first rule of survival is ‘don’t get injured.’”
    “Oh,” Blakely sneered. He shrugged his pack higher onto his shoulders. Twenty minutes of hiking and he was already sick of this chick. “You’re gonna tell me about survival now.”
    “If you’re going to act like an asswagon I am.”
    After that, they walked in silence. Blakely scanned the girl’s tracks, looking out ahead to where they blended in with the gray dust. The road turned northward. Blakely pulled a map out of his windbreaker and studied it as they walked. Then he laughed.
    “You know exactly where she’s headed,” he said.
    Sadie shrugged. Blakely might not be just a military meathead after all.
    And I might be Mother Theresa.
    She needed to be careful, because she needed a plan to get away from Titman. That meant she needed Blakely unsuspicious.
    Their boots crunched over the dust as they walked, and the tension built as Sadie let Blakely’s supposition hang between them, unanswered.
    “Okay,” Blakely said. “I get it. You don’t trust me, and you sure as hell don’t trust those assholes. But did it ever occur to you that I don’t trust them either? Or like them?”
    “Yeah,” Sadie said, “but you’re following their orders. And I didn’t see you protesting when…”
    Sadie cut herself off. She’d felt an insistent, swelling balloon beginning to expand inside her chest—a mass of grief and shame that couldn’t be punctured or stopped.
    Don’t cry! Not in front of him!
    She thought about Mallick, and Getter, and what she was going to do to them if she got the chance—saw the multitool in her hand, the razor sharp knife blade extended, slicing through the goose-pimpled flesh of Mallick’s scrotum.
    She heard his screams. His threats. His pleading.
    She imagined herself merciless. Relentless. Remorseless.
    As she relished his screams in her mind, the balloon in her chest deflated, and the tears that had formed at the corners of her eyes dripped harmlessly down her cheeks, hidden by the respirator from Blakely’s unwanted attention.
    She noticed how sudden the division between Blakely and the other three had occurred. It had been almost instantaneous—once he’d made the remark about not liking or trusting her torturers. She was still angry at him for tackling her, for terrorizing her with a bag over her head. But her rage was no longer completely directed toward him.
    Besides. He was handsome, in a filthy, ruthless military meathead kind of way.
    “Just your hormones,” she whispered inside her respirator. “He’s one of them whether he admits or not.”
    “What?” Blakely asked.
    Sadie didn’t reply. She kept her respirator over face and maintained silence, refusing to look at the sergeant.
    A long while later Sadie stopped in the middle of the road.
    “What is it?” Blakely asked. The cop’s BMW bike had been parked in exactly the spot she was standing on. Now it was gone. What could have been Callie’s footprints were still there, though Sadie wouldn’t have bet money on the tracks being hers. The constantly shifting dust and gusts of heavy wind were effacing every track on the road.
    “Good thing you know where she’s going,” Blakely said.
    Sadie said nothing. She’d hoped the bike would be here, ready to be hotwired. She would’ve talked Blakely into taking it and they could have found Callie and the Geiger counter before noon. Then Sadie could’ve left the sociopaths behind.
    Even though she still wanted to kill Titman and his men, she was already resigning herself to the reality that it probably wouldn’t happen. The risk involved in attempting it was too great. She might die if she went up against them. And no matter what she did to them, they could never be “even.”
    Her two best option were to find Callie, get the Geiger counter for Blakely, and get as far away as she could, or to take out Blakely, lose the ankle monitor, and run.
    “That’s my girl,” her grandfather’s voice sounded