The Hunt (19 page)

Another recoil, another flash of green momentarily blinding her. She closed her eyes for a second, and when she looked again the scene had changed. The two men were down. The one close by was on his knees, bent over with his face pressed to the ground, motionless. The other was also on the ground, but crawling quickly towards cover. He was a blur, shielded partly by a hump in the terrain.

Two bullets left.

Still deafened, but now with a sort of glee surging through her, she aimed again and fired.

Either she missed, or the bullet barely grazed him. She saw his squirming outline for a couple of seconds more, then he found cover.

She turned back to the first man and he hadn’t changed position. She briefly considered putting the last rifle round into him, but there was still one more Trail man out there somewhere, untouched, and now he’d be coming for her.

One shot left. She had to move.

As Rose stood, pins and needles tingled through her right leg. She tried to stamp it out but it weakened her muscles, turning a run into a crouching shamble. She kept the rifle to her shoulder, swinging it left and right so that she could see.

He’ll be waiting and watching. If he has night vision binoculars too, he’ll hunker down until he sees me, watches where I go, gets a fix on me. Then he’ll close in. And that gives me time to see him
.

She paused right out in the open and did a slow, methodical sweep of the mountainside before and below her. The shift in position had altered her angle, and she could see the second man again now, huddled behind a rock and shifting slowly from left to right. She couldn’t make out any detail, and didn’t want to dwell on him for too long. It was enough to know that he was wounded and down. She would finish him soon, but the third man might be using his wounded colleague as bait, waiting for her to draw close.

A pistol shot from this distance would not be easy.

She moved on, passing close to the first man and taking a quick look. He was dead, head misshapen and wet. His rifle had fallen close by, but she had no time to gather weapons or ammunition. Her element of surprise blasted away, she now had to assume that she was in the third man’s crosshairs.

Darting left and right, she headed across and up the slope to a position above the fallen boulder. She splashed through a stream, keeping the rifle to her shoulder, alternating looks ahead and around, and down at the terrain close by. If she tripped and he was watching her, it would take only a moment to settle his aim and—

She didn’t trip. She slipped. The rain had formed new streams all across the mountainside, and the rocks beneath were slick with moss. Her left foot went out from under her and she held out her arm as she fell, doing her best to keep hold of the rifle.

As she struck the ground, breath
whoofing
from her and arm smacking hard against a jagged rock, the rifle slipped from her grasp. It hit the ground with a crack.

When the second crack sounded, she knew she was being fired on.

If she hadn’t slipped, she would probably have been dead. She heard a bullet smack a rock behind her and ricochet into the storm, and she had to act quickly. No time to feel around for the rifle, especially in the chaos of the tumbling stream. No time to get to her feet with her wounded arm screaming at her once again.

She kicked at the ground and slid down the stream.

As she tumbled she tried to recall the area where she’d hidden away – the size of the boulder, the steepness and height of the rock wall it rested against, where the small waterfall had tumbled from. Then there was only water around her.

Before she had a chance to prepare, she struck the ground, slid, rolled, and fell again, this time down a gentler slope. She hit the ground again, and this time remained motionless.

Everything hurt. She’d banged her right arm, and the pain was all-consuming, a spreading flame that spread through her bones and muscles, setting her limbs twitching.

It’s only pain!
she thought, but mind over matter had its limits.
Got to crawl … got to get …

Another gunshot, but this time the bullet struck far away. He was shooting blind. Using his night vision binoculars to try to zero in, perhaps, but shooting and looking at the same time would be difficult.

Lost the fucking rifle!
But she still had the pistol. She had to draw him close, lure him in to somewhere she could see his shape in the darkness, the storm, and put him down before he could bring the rifle to bear.

Her chances were slim, but she shoved away the doubt. She’d got two of them, and the third would now be in a panic, however hard he was, however well trained.

The wind howled, a wilder gust that seemed to feed on the violence. Rain splashed from the ground around her, distorting her meagre vision. She gathered herself, then stood and ran in a crouch, this time away from the leaning boulder and the men she had shot.

No gunfire followed her. Maybe he was moving as well, in which case she might have a few moments in which to hide. She tripped and almost fell, carried on, drew her pistol with her left hand. Each footfall brought a pulse of pain, but now she was almost feeding from it.

Ahead of her, the view was split into the darkness of the mountain and the softer, deeper grey of the stormy sky. If she could get to a place where she was not silhouetted against –

A shadow rose before her, and even as she thought of bringing her pistol up to fire, a blast of blinding light erupted as the figure lit a flare. She squinted and fell, crying out as her damaged body was smashed and battered into the ground once again.

Gunfire cracked through the storm, five shots in rapid succession. She held her breath, but oblivion did not come. Gasping, there was no new pain to add to the old. She persisted in her wretched world.

Darkness had fallen once again, the flare cast aside. The shape had vanished from ahead and above. The stark line of the close horizon was as wild and inhospitable as ever.

Very close behind her, she heard a man groaning.

She was still clasping the pistol. It felt good in her grip, firm, something solid rooting her to the world. Everything else was fluid. Her pain seemed to project beyond her, affecting the black ground and the rain, the sweeping wind and the heavy mists that drifted across her vision, real or imaginary. She was shaking violently now, but unsure why; cold, pain, adrenalin?

Probably all three.

She tried to stand, not entirely sure that the threat was ended. Every movement jarred her arm, and every throb of pain pounded inside her skull, threatening to spill her onto the ground again. If she passed out she might die up here. And there was more left to do.

Looking behind her, she feared that a death had been taken from her. She felt lessened by that, as if her vengeance depended upon a certain quota of murders, a scale of spilled blood. Holt had told her that she needed to do all this for herself, and now she knew that he was right. He was a man who spoke with experience and history that she could never know. He was wise. She should have listened to him.

But who was that shadow that had intruded on the hunt? Just another perverted part of it?

The first man was less than twenty steps behind her. He’d been shot several times and now he was dead. She picked up his rifle, went through his pockets, found another handful of bullets. She checked her satphone. It was still functioning, so she stomped on his and left it. After picking up his night vision binoculars, she moved on.

The second man – the one she had shot – was still crouched down close to the boulder, also dead. She pocketed his spare ammunition.

Looking at the corpses she felt strangely empty, devoid of celebration or regret. Just blank. Perhaps pain was smothering all other emotions. Or maybe now that she was here, living her dreams, they could never quite reach the heights she’d hoped for.

It took her a while to find the third man. He’d crawled downhill, not far but far enough for her to have to search. She used the dead man’s night vision binoculars, and finally found him slumped against an outcropping, both hands pressed to his stomach. Gut shot. Good. That would hurt, but he wouldn’t die too quickly.

She moved in carefully, lifted his head, pulled off his ‘I♥NY’ baseball cap. It was a woman.

Rose gasped, clenched the pistol tighter. Grin? But no, this was someone younger and fitter, her build slim and lean. She coughed, looking at Rose with eyes that already knew her fate.

Rose crouched down beside her.

‘Let’s talk,’ she said.

As Vey hustled her from the back of the van and through the converted barn’s back door, Gemma did her best to look around and take in her surroundings. Holding her upper arm in a tight grip, Vey didn’t seem to care.

‘This is stupid,’ Gemma said. ‘You can’t do this, it’s not fair.’

‘We’re doing it.’

‘If I run and you shoot at me, people will hear, and if that happens—’

Vey squeezed her arm so hard that Gemma cried out. Ahead of her, in the building’s shadowy interior, she saw her mother take a step back towards her. Tom shoved her against a wall.

‘I have a knife,’ Vey said. ‘There are rocks beside the driveway. A puddle deep enough to drown in. Don’t think for a minute that there aren’t thirty ways I could kill you, silently, if you give me cause to.’

‘Bring her in,’ Tom said. ‘She’ll see too much.’

Vey heard him, and answered, but she did not take her eyes from Gemma’s face when she said, ‘It doesn’t matter what she sees.’

As she was shoved into the building’s cool interior, Gemma felt the last touch of sunlight on the back of her neck.

I could have killed him
, Chris thought.
Maybe that would have been better. Safer for me. A statement of intent to the other three still out there, if they even find Blondie
.

He’d often put himself in an imaginary position – his wife or kids hurt, and him facing the bastard who’d hurt them. It had been a painful daydream, but the result was always the same. Though he hated violence, and always had, he recognised the need for it. Like that time years back in the pub, punching the man who’d assaulted Terri. Nice words would not have worked there.

But he had no regrets. If Blondie didn’t die of exposure or blood loss, he’d have permanent injuries. Maybe internal damage from the broken ribs, and a knee that would never work properly again. If he really was a footballer, that was torture enough. The fact that the hunter had not hurt Chris – that the violence was all intent – didn’t change things. He was part of the reason that Chris’s family had guns to their heads, and that was as far as he needed to think.

If they’re even still alive.
But that was one thought too far.

Now that he was out on the mountain again, his energy restored from the food he’d been given, thirst quenched, and feeling warmer than he had for a while in the borrowed jacket, Chris felt a burst of optimism. He was running once more, albeit slowly, the beam from his head torch bobbing before him. The rain was just as heavy, the wind unforgiving, but he enjoyed the sense of isolation it gave him. For a moment he might have been all alone up here, master of his own fate instead of being steered and used by others.

He used that time to think.

He had a satphone now, and perhaps that would make it easier to call the police – Rose’s and Scott’s phones continued to have intermittent signals. But he could not see what that would achieve. If he told them who he was, all they’d want would be to talk him down. He could tell them about his family, but whether they believed him or not it would do no good. He suspected that they were being held in the greater Cardiff area, but it would take a lifetime to search that far.

Maybe they could track the signal from the satphone. He had no idea. He’d seen such things on TV and in movies, one policeman gesturing for the other to keep a killer or terrorist on the phone while they traced the call. But he had no concept of how something like that worked in reality. Perhaps the moment he connected with them, they’d have a real-time location for him. Then maybe they really would send the Special Forces up here to get him. If not military, then police. Hunted by sick and rich bastards as he was now, at least he had a chance. If anyone trained came to find him, he’d certainly be quickly caught or killed.

Knowing that the last three hunters could follow his position was useful. It would not be easy to escape them, but it also meant that he could push hard, giving himself a safety buffer and time to rest, refuel, warm up.

Nothing he’d done had improved the chances of him and his family getting out of this in one piece. He wondered whether Rose was faring any better.

His limbs soon grew used to running again. He watched the ground before him, leaping trip hazards, side-stepping holes, always alert for signs of a sheer drop or a rock wall to run into. As his feet came down and swept the ground behind him, he felt the connection with the land that he always loved. When he was running at his very best he always felt as if he were standing still, and it was the land itself being pushed behind him by his feet. A strange but satisfying feeling, and one that he experienced only on rare occasions.

Every fifteen minutes he surveyed the landscape, turned off the head torch, and crept a cautious twenty metres onwards. Then he paused and listened for any signs of pursuit. There was nothing but night sounds accompanying him. He enjoyed those brief moments when the head torch was off, imagining that his presence here was no longer acknowledged and the natural world around him was back to its basic, primal self. Even the light from the torch changed things – the way rain completed its journey, the reactions of night animals, the feel of the place. He loved the wilderness most when it did not know he was there.

He glanced at the satphone screen every few minutes. He’d turned on a simple application on the tablet screen that provided a digital compass, and he made sure he headed southwards as much as possible. The time would come soon when he would encounter a road, and soon after that there might be signs, place names, and a deeper understanding of exactly where he was. The brief glance at his damaged map in the hut had located where he was, and what he thought was probably the lake he’d swum across. But he knew that any map could only describe landscape in an abstract way. Being on the ground was the only way to truly appreciate and understand a place.

He’d seen that he was probably in the wildest, most inhospitable, and least populated part of Wales. There were valleys here where only the hardiest walkers and adventure sportsmen came, and which were so remote that farming them was an unprofitable proposition. The best roads were dirt tracks. Most buildings were ruins. The perfect place for a hunt.

He thought again of the ultra-marathon in the Lake District. The race description had labelled it as a tough off-roader, but with the bulk of the trails definable, made up of compacted gravels and well-worn paths. The description had been misleading. At one part of the course the runners had to cross a high area of marshland, probably only two miles in total but out of sight of any manmade influence, and sparsely marked with a few windswept flags. This was thirty miles into the race, and by then the field had spread out so much that Chris had found himself alone up there. Those couple of miles had felt like the wildest, most remote miles he had ever run. Up to his shins in wet, sticky mud, he’d fought every step. The wind had risen, intermittent rain showers hammered down. A mist rolled in from nowhere. He’d wondered how many unwary walkers had died up here over the decades and centuries, and then he’d started imagining that, beneath the mud, the hard layers he felt under his shoes were the mummified corpses of the missing.

It had only lasted for half an hour, but that was the most frightened he’d ever been during a race. His tired mind had played tricks with him, and finally running down out of the hills towards the cheering masses at the finish had been akin to finding himself again.

This place felt ten times worse, and he was more tired than he’d ever been. But he could not allow himself to become distracted. This was still a race, but at the end there was so much more than a medal, a tee shirt and a burger. His family was his prize. His own life hung in the balance more than it ever had. He had to embrace the wilderness, not be intimidated by it. Rose had brought the hunt up here for a reason, and he had to cling to that – it was the most likely place where he could win.

The time would come soon to try to make contact with her again. Scott’s phone had lost its signal, the hardy mobile Rose had given him was almost out of charge, but he had the satphone. All he had to do was discover her number on the mobile.

But first, he had to be safe.

Downhill, off the mountain, he followed rough paths worn into the landscape by cattle or wild ponies over the decades. Some had become streams in the torrential rain, and he skipped across these where he could, finding it safer to cover ground he could see. There could be rocks or holes hidden beneath the water.

As he followed one such stream, it disappeared. One moment it was tumbling beside him, the next its waters had vanished, and the torch reflected off nothing but a void of heavy raindrops.

Chris dropped, clasped his hands into claws, dug them into spiky heathers and wet ground. He slipped a little then came to a halt. He was panting hard, heart thudding. He turned and looked in the direction he’d been running. The light was swallowed by the night, the storm, and a million sparkling raindrops. The ground was gone.

He’d almost run off one of the cliffs.

He crawled uphill a little before regaining his feet and setting off again. He berated himself – he must have been running in a semi-daze, on auto-pilot, aware of the small circle of light before him and not thinking about what might lie beyond. He had almost made the Trail’s job easy for them. Kill himself and they’d dispose of his family, gather in the hunters, and go about arranging a new hunt.

He had to keep his wits about him. Couldn’t let his mind drift. But he’d been awake for almost twenty-four hours, and in that time he must have run thirty miles or more, including his early morning run for pleasure. That now seemed so long ago and a world away.

Chris had to tap into the endurance he had built over the years. He knew that he had a strong engine and a fit body, but as always he had to adapt. While his physical self drove forward, he had to remember at every moment that he and his family were in terrible danger. Endurance sport had a huge mental factor. Physical fitness was never enough, and now that had been complicated even more. But he could do it. Anything was possible, and he had to believe that now. Drive on, keep moving forward, keep planning, and save his family.

There were so many problems still to overcome – discover where his wife and girls were being kept, evade capture by the law, ensure that the hunt continued. But he would succeed. Failure was not an option. He
had
to believe that.

After moving forward for another half an hour he took a break. He needed a piss, and after that he hunched down in a small ravine and took out the phones. The one Scott had given him was blank. He pressed the button, kept his finger on it, waited for the screen to light up
…
but there was nothing.

‘Damn it!’ He almost threw the phone, then pocketed it instead. Out of charge, perhaps, but maybe he could try again later.

Rose’s mobile still worked. It took him a while to discover her preprogrammed number, but as soon as he did he entered and saved it in the satphone. Then he called.

It went to voicemail. He almost laughed out loud. What, was she busy?

‘Rose. We need to talk. One hunter’s down, not dead but out of it. I’m moving onwards. Heading south, I’m going for my family, and
…
you have to help me. You
have
to. I’m on a satphone now, you’ll see the number. Call.’

He disconnected, then examined the satphone closer. It had an emergency button. He guessed it sent a signal, SOS, to mountain rescue, pinpointing his location and automatically calling for help. It was tempting
…
but no one could bring the sort of help he needed.

Chris ate a little, then ran on into the night, keeping thoughts of his family close.

It was while he was being most careful that he made the worst mistake.

Maybe it was the intense concentration. Focusing on his surroundings might have imposed a form of subtle hypnosis, his attention so sharp and forced that it began to drift and haze. He didn’t even notice. He moved quickly forward, checked the terrain with his head torch, switched it off and moved again, and then the ground was gone, the cloudy sky and darkness switched and spun and changed positions, and he was falling.

His awareness of his surroundings vanished instantly, and darkness was the only solidity. Shock sharpened his reactions and he thought,
If I fall for more than
—

He struck ground hard on his left side. His outstretched arm took some of the impact, then his left leg and hip hit as well, smacking pain through his bones and joints. He didn’t believe he could make an impact sound like that without breaking something, but his breath erupted from his chest in a loud cough, and he couldn’t be sure whether or not he heard the snap or crack of bone.

He slid on something wet – not grass, something more slick – then slipped down a steep slope. Arms and legs waving, Chris tried to halt his movement.

Everything hurt.

He clawed his fingers and tried to dig in, but they scraped over rock, a white-hot pain kissing the fingertips of his right hand. The rifle over his right shoulder twisted hard against his back, stock pummelling his lower back and the strap pulled tight, burning against his shoulder.

The rucksack snagged on something and twisted him around, and for a moment he thought his fall had been arrested. Silence settled, the absence of scraping, shouting, grunting, and his panicked breathing faded in, shallow and hard. He was on his back looking up, and for the first time he thought the underside of the clouds glowed just a little brighter.

Then something tore and he was sliding again. He hurt, but did not know from where. The pain seemed to shift around his body as he rolled and twisted, as if it too were attached to the ground and he was the only movable object.

He hit a rock hard and the breath was smacked from him. Movement ceased, and as he struggled to breathe – that terrible, winded sensation that he remembered from occasional childhood fights – the sound of loose stones tumbling around him seemed to snicker at his situation.

Chris gasped in a huge breath, uttering a groan of relief when he let it out again. He breathed in several more times, and then the pain began to sing in.

His left side felt battered from the knee right up to his shoulder. His left arm had been twisted and the forearm felt odd. Perhaps it was broken. His right hand felt like he’d dipped his fingers into hot water, and coolness touched them as they began to bleed. There were other aches and bruises, and his right shoulder also felt hot and damp where the rifle strap was twisted tight against the skin. The rifle and rucksack were beneath him, pressed between his back and the rock he’d come to rest propped against.

Fucking idiot!
he thought, and panic began to bleed in around the shock. If he’d done some serious damage, broken something vital, then all this might be ended. He could not run with a broken leg. He could not climb with a snapped arm. Even fractured fingers would severely inhibit the ways he had to evade the hunters. Cracked ribs would slow him, bleeding wounds would weaken him.