The Hunt (27 page)

Grin’s arm was useless, flapping around like a dead fish as she tried to lift the rifle, protect herself. But Rose got there first.

She stood on Grin’s shoulder and pressed down. Grin screamed. Rose smiled.

Then her smile slipped. She looked back at the family crying and bleeding into the soil. They had already seen enough.
Done
enough. More than anyone, she knew how events like this could change people.

She snatched the rifle from Grin and smashed her around the head. The temptation to strike the nail, and complete its journey, was great. But she struck her across the right temple. The woman moaned woozily, head lolling to one side, and Rose hit her again.

And then she walked away.

She took a moment to hobble into the house and find Tom. He was slouched in the hallway, still conscious but bleeding out. Maybe he’d survive, maybe not, but he was no immediate threat. She aimed the gun at his face and he blinked slowly. Rose felt sick, tired, and something stayed her trigger finger. She searched through his pockets until she found the keys to the postal van and a flick-knife, then staggered from the converted barn.

Grin was still down and out cold.

Rose took a moment, breathing deeply, left hand seeking her new wound. It throbbed with each beat of her heart, and blood was making her jeans heavy. But she didn’t think there was any serious damage.

Time would tell.

She limped towards Chris, hoping against hope that she would not find something worse.

Chris was crying. His family’s tears merged with his own, diluted by rain, and somewhere there was blood. But he could not tell the difference, and one pain seemed to merge with another so that it was also impossible to tell where else he’d been shot. His sweet girls clung to him, Terri buried her face against his chest and sobbed. There were tooth fragments in his mouth and his face felt out of shape, burning and pulsing with every heartbeat. But he could still tell his family that he loved them.

‘Hey,’ a voice said. He spun round, still sensing danger. Rose. She leaned down, groaning, and slit the ropes still tying Terri’s and Megs’ wrists.

Chris tried to sit up. Terri helped, her touch firm but caring. Then she gasped when she saw the blood.

Rose crouched close to him, wincing, and appraised the wound. The bullet had glanced from his knee, scoring a bloody path through muscle and skin.

‘Be a nice scar,’ she said.

‘As long as I can run again,’ he said. He looked at her hip.

Rose shrugged, then nodded at the house. ‘The other guy’s in there, not quite dead. He stays alive, maybe it’ll make things easier for you with the police. He knows the Trail, and hopefully they’ll get him to talk.’

Chris was still not ready to think that far ahead. A few seconds, a few minutes with his family were all he wanted right now. This hunt was over, and whatever came next was the future.

The investigation would be an endurance test all of its own.

‘You?’ he asked, but he already knew. He looked past Rose at the woman lying on the ground with a nail in her head. ‘You should turn her in.’

‘After everything I’ve done?’ Rose sounded suddenly colder and emptier than she ever had before. Chris’s family winced away from the voice as if it could touch and hurt them.

He had no answer for her. She’d known the course she wanted to take, and he supposed she’d achieved more than she had ever believed possible.

With a little help from him. And from Holt.

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘Good luck,’ she said. Then she stood and limped away. With her one good arm, and with all her weight on her uninjured leg, she dragged the unconscious woman towards the postal van and sat her against the open passenger doorway. From the driver’s side she hauled her inside. Then she stripped off her own belt, leaned the woman forward and bound her arms tightly behind her. Sweating, pale, groaning with every movement, the effort was staggering.

She only looked back when she was almost ready to go.

After a long pause she said, ‘Have a good life.’ She was looking at all of them, not just Chris, and sounded like she meant it.

He watched as Rose reversed the van around and drove back down the rough road. The gunfire would have been heard by surrounding properties and down in the town itself, and the police would be coming.

He hoped she made it away before they arrived.

Alone at last with his family, Chris allowed himself to believe that he had won.

Each jolt of the post office van sent spears of pain through her hip and into her pelvis. Blood flowed and soaked the seat beneath her backside. But she did not care. She had already won, and yet she felt strangely resistant to delivering the coup de grâce. She tried to convince herself it was because Grin was still unconscious and she wanted the bitch awake when she killed her. But in truth, Rose realised that she was terrified of this being over.

The thought of revenge had given her something to live for.

The long, rough driveway gave way to a narrow country lane, its surface almost as uneven and potholed. Stone walls lined both sides, broken here and there by farm gates and stretches fallen into disrepair. She passed occasional grey stone houses, homes where families lived. There would be pets asleep inside, waiting for adults to return home from work and children from school. Perhaps a stew in the slow cooker. After dinner they’d take a walk in the fields, maybe aiming for the darker spread of forest that lined the foothills in the distance. Then they’d have family time in the evening, watching TV or playing a game, making sandwiches in readiness for their next, normal day. She envied them their normality.

She drove sitting in a pool of her own blood, a pistol warming between her thighs, and an unconscious woman breathing away her final minutes in the passenger seat.

An elderly couple walked along the road, and Rose accelerated past them. Glancing in the side mirror she saw the old woman raise a hand in greeting, and Rose switched on the hazard lights for a couple of flashes in response. Of all the vehicles she could have hoped for, this probably gave her the best cover.

So long as nobody wanted their mail.

‘Postman Rose,’ Grin groaned from the seat beside her, even managing a pained chuckle.

Rose picked up the gun and struck Grin across her wounded shoulder. The woman cried out. Rose grimaced against her own agonies, pleased that she made no noise.

‘Don’t speak,’ Rose said. ‘Don’t say a thing. I don’t want a conversation with you. There’s nothing you can say to me, so sit there and shut up if you want to live a while longer.’

‘They’ll hunt you down and kill you,’ Grin said.

‘Really? What, those three arseholes up on the mountain? The birds have already taken their eyes. The helicopter pilot? The skinny runt with the dogs?’ She glanced across just in time to see a dark look cross Grin’s features. Then the Trail woman put on a pained smile once more.

‘You really think—’ she began.

‘Just shut up,’ Rose cut in. ‘Maybe I’ll let you live. Give you to the police, a nice big public trial. Face splashed all over the papers, pictures of your wounds, that fancy tattoo on your thigh. That nail sticking out of your head. You’ll become notorious, infamous, and everyone everywhere will know your face. Do you have a family? I know you don’t have a husband, or if you do that doesn’t stop you spending time picking up young men to fuck. But you must have an extended family out there. Siblings, nephews and nieces, people you care about. Maybe your parents are even still alive, though Christ knows what they did wrong with you. So the Trail, or whatever’s left of it, what will they think of you dishing the dirt on them?’

‘They know I won’t.’

‘But I reckon they’ll do everything they can to make sure, don’t you?’ Rose shifted the rearview mirror so she could see the woman’s face.

Blood pooled and dribbled from her left eye, its lid drooping half-shut. Grin squirmed a little, arms trapped and bound behind her. She continued trying to smile through the pain. A sickly grimace.

‘Beaten by a young girl,’ Rose said. She laughed.

Grin did not respond.

They came to a junction and Rose had to pause, letting a car and a tractor pass from right to left. The farmer in the tractor glanced down at the postal van, and the smile slipped from his face. He shielded his eyes to see better, and Rose moved off the way he’d come, squeezing past the tractor and the stone wall. She lost the wing mirror on her side. Stone screeched against metal.

I’ve dreamed of this for years
, she thought,
and now I have no idea what I’m going to do
. Maybe it was blood loss and pain, tiredness and fear over what was to come next. She’d imagined having Grin at her mercy a thousand times. She’d use a knife on her, slowly, painfully. Garden implements, covered with dirt and dead worms, pressing into the bitch’s soft belly and exposed throat. Electrical wires taped to her sensitive parts and wired to several car batteries. Bricks to crush her limbs, ground glass fed to her in yoghurt, metal filings pressed into her eyes. Rose had sickened herself by imagining the things she wanted to do to Grin, but never in those daydreams did she see Adam and her children smile.
They don’t know me now
, she thought, that familiar idea. But she had come to realise a long time ago that she was doing this for herself.

For now she was just driving. She had no destination in mind. The idea of delivering Grin to the police
had
crossed her mind, but only briefly. So much would remain unfinished if she did that, so much left to chance, that it was not an option. It never had been. For now, she was simply looking for a suitable place for an execution.

She heard a sound that brought her instantly back to the moment – sirens. Sliding her window down a couple of inches, the sound came in clearer and grew rapidly louder.

Grin shifted in her seat. Rose smacked the pistol against her injured shoulder again, twice, three times, feeling the wet give in the woman’s body where bone had been broken and blood flooded the flesh. Grin screamed.

Rose leaned over, hooked her arm around the woman’s shoulders, and pulled her down into her lap. She pressed the pistol against her temple, nudging the nail protruding there. Grin whined.

The police car appeared around a bend in the road and roared uphill towards them. Rose slowed but did not stop, tried on a smile, then when the car drew closer she let go of the steering wheel and waved, spreading her fingers in an attempt to obscure her face.

The police car powered past without slowing. Rose breathed a sigh of relief and shoved the woman away, steering with one hand and using the other to push Grin back into an upright position. She did not fight or resist.

Rose glanced at her, back to the road, at the woman again.
She’s hurting. Hands still bound, numb, probably useless by now. And she’s barely conscious
. It didn’t seem to Rose that she was feigning. But she had to decide what to do, and soon. The further she drove with Grin trussed up beside her – with
both
of them bleeding and suffering – the more chances there were of something going wrong.

The road dipped down a steep hill, turned a sharp bend, and they were in a small huddle of houses and buildings. A shop stood on one corner, displays of fruit and vegetables on a rack outside, windows filled with posters advertising local events. A little chapel sat further along the road. Several cars were parked on either side, and a few people milled around, some on their own, a small group chatting outside the shop.

Rose slowed. They’d expect to see someone they knew driving this van. One woman raised a hand, a man smiled, and then the hand and smile dropped away.

‘I killed the kids first so your husband could watch,’ Grin said. ‘The girl, knife behind the ear, slowly. Then the whimpering little shit. Last kid, he’d crawled to your husband for help, so I grabbed his hair and—’

Rose plucked the pistol from between her legs and slammed it into Grin’s mouth. Teeth broke and the litany of horror ended.
Goading me teasing me trying to force me to make a mistake …

She almost pulled the trigger.

The woman and man still watched aghast, shocked, terrified, and they didn’t deserve to see anything like this. That was part of the reason why Rose’s finger eased from the trigger. But the main reason was that she was still in control. This moment was always going to be hers, and she would not let Grin dictate the time and manner of her own death.

As Rose drove quickly from the village, the woman beside her groaned, spitting teeth and blood. The police would be looking for them now, and the van that had proved such a convenient disguise would stand out, a bright red flag on the landscape.

A mile from the village she took a lane to the left, leading past a huddle of derelict farm buildings and down towards the valley floor. It was overgrown and unused, and several times Rose thought the van might become stuck. But then she reached a wider area beside the river, shielded by heavy trees and with a beautiful view across the valley to the hills beyond. She stopped the van, lowered the windows, killed the engine, and sat listening to the sounds of nature.

For a moment she turned away from Grin and pretended that she was alone, but then the woman snorted. Rose looked at her again. The woman was staring at her, smiling through gashed lips and shattered teeth, her tongue shifting like a swollen slug in the mess of her face. Perhaps she was trying to talk, but Rose no longer cared. She looked hard into her eyes, one clear, one bloodied, searching for a reason for all of this. But there was no regret there, no sign of weakness. Grin was already resigned to her fate.

Rose pressed her gun against Grin’s right eye and pulled the trigger.

The woman’s head flipped back against the door frame.

Rose fired again to make sure, and one more time just because she could.

She leaned back and closed her eyes for a few seconds. She no longer felt any pain in her hip or arm. She felt very little.

She considered simply leaving the corpse in the van and fleeing on foot, but whoever discovered it would be traumatised for life. So she took a good, long look at what was left of Grin, then went to search for somewhere to hide a body.