4338.209 · July 28, 2018 AD
Bait Worth Taking
Dawn reveals what the darkness delivered. The note under Claire's windscreen wiper is a map — crude pencil on receipt paper, a route she's never taken, a destination circled so heavily the paper nearly tore. It could lead to her children. It could lead somewhere far worse. The only certainty is that the man who hunted her through the night wants her to follow.
Claire survives the night locked in her car, too terrified to move until sunrise strips the shadows from the clearing. The note is a hand-drawn map on the back of an old petrol receipt — an X marking the property, a winding route northeast through scrub, and a circled square at the end that demands attention. She turns the possibilities over until they blur: a stranger who stalked her for hours and then offered directions, children who might be sheltering at the end of those scratched lines, a trap baited with exactly the thing a desperate mother cannot refuse. She follows the map through a hidden gap in the vegetation, along overgrown tracks that barely qualify as roads, until a corrugated iron structure appears in the distance — low, rusted, and waiting.
