[Runesmith]

She burst through the door in to a sunlit clearing, surrounded by tall Scots pines, beech and elm trees. Pine needles crunched under her bare feet as Nadine sprinted cross the clearing towards what looked like a foot path through the woods.

She was buzzed with adrenaline, and had no plan - her only intention was to get as far as she could from that cabin in the woods. She had no idea where she was heading. The most important thing is to run and run, screamed the primitive part of her brain responsible for survival.

The path was narrow, and lined with gravel that hurt her bare feet as she ran. It ended after a dozen meters in another clearing with a bigger wooden house sitting in the middle of it. The house looked decrepit, but was festooned with an array of high-tech looking satellite antennae mounted on a tall pole on the roof. An old Land Rover sat in the middle of the clearing, and a broad dirt road with deep wheel ruts showed where it had come from. The door was open.

Even as she burst in to the clearing, she realized her mistake. This is probably where the girl had come from. And if she lived here, then so did the man. She skidded to a halt and spun around even as the barking began, followed by a shout from that rough, masculine voice she was already familiar with.

In panic, she ran in to the thickets at the edge of the clearing and looked over her shoulder. A bearded man in a red baseball cap had appeared through the doorway of the house, carrying a shot gun. The barking was coming from the side of the house, and the dog was probably chained. Otherwise it would already be chasing after her.

Nadine plunged through the bushes, deeper in to the forest. The thick layer of pine needles cushioned her bare feet, but stones and roots jabbed in to her untrained soles at unexpected moments. She heard shouts behind her - several masculine voices. Then she remembered what the girl said. She had said, "They will give you a name." That implied more than one man.

The pine, spruce and larch grew tall, with hardly any underbrush, which made it easy to run, but very difficult to hide. She had no idea which direction she should be running. She was simply running away from the voices... and the barking. The barking was getting closer - they had probably let the dog loose to hunt after her.

Nadine had succumbed to the occasional bouts of "fitness awareness", and had at one point signed up for a gym membership that had proven almost impossible to cancel. The treadmill cardio was nothing compared to running in an actual forest off trail. Nadine was sweating heavily, and rapidly getting exhausted. She needed somewhere to hide.

She spotted a giant trunk of a fallen pine, surrounded by some thick bushes. Without a second thought, she clambered over the moss-covered trunk, and slid in to the thickets. As she squatted down and huddled in the thickest, darkest part of the bushes, she was grateful that it wasn't a blackberry or raspberry bush, so common in the black forest, that could have skinned her alive with the thorns.

The barking was getting closer, and so were the voices. She could hear the thudding footfalls crunching through the carpet of pine needles. She was praying they would run past, but to her horror, she could hear them slowing down. The infernal barking took on an excited tone. The footfalls were coming closer, carefully searching the area - they could probably see that her trail ended close to here.

Suddenly, she heard a crashing behind her, and the barrel of a shot gun poked through the foliage at the side of her head. The abject terror and the knowledge she was going to die in the next few seconds loosened her bladder and she wet her panties for the second time in a day.

To be continued...