Hikers - The Collection (Complete Box Set of 5 Books)

by Lauren Algeo

  Today was exhausting. There’s no way I could keep up the happy smiling for long periods of time, it felt like such an effort. During dessert, my mind kept wandering to thoughts of hikers and my fingers were itching to get to a computer to check the news. I’m aware that I’ve become obsessed. Hikers have completely taken over my life, yet I also know I won’t stop. Even if I have to remain alone forever and give up any contact with friends and extended family, I’ll do it. This is my life now and I will find a way to kill them, no matter what it costs me.

  3rd January 2010

  This New Year I made only one resolution and you know full well what that is. I’ve been scouring the news for the past week, hunting for a lead.

  London is eerily quiet. I’ve tried travelling around, hoping to pick up a voice, but there’s nothing. I checked the news constantly throughout the day, only with the holiday season there seems to be a lot of death and tragedy, just none of it at the hands of a hiker. Unless I’ve missed things that are masked by drunken accidents and boozy fights.

  I found one case this morning. There was a girl killed last night near Brighton as she travelled home from work. She was hit by a speeding car on a zebra crossing, which according to a witness didn’t even slow down afterwards. The police presume it was a drunk driver and are appealing for more witnesses to come forward. There’s one other angle they should consider.

  The girl, Jessica Peters, inherited a lot of money recently from a deceased grandfather. She wasn’t married but I did a little digging online and found out she has a boyfriend of four years who she lives with. One who I bet she shares a mortgage and life insurance policy with, and he would benefit from her death. According to Facebook, they hadn’t been getting on well lately and it’s enough for me to get suspicious.

  If the car didn’t slow down before or after hitting her then the driver could have done it deliberately. An unknown person spurred on by a hiker, who was in turn paid by the boyfriend. The police would never link it back to him and he would get everything. The perfect crime.

  I’m going to pack a bag and head down there now. Next on the kill agenda is slitting the throat of a hiker. Disgusting, right? But I’ve barely given it a second thought. It’s amazing how quickly I’ve adapted to this life. I don’t think of them as people anymore, it’s all just clinical. In fact, the more I see what they’re capable of, the easier it is.

  My reasoning for trying this next relates to the blood. I’ve seen them close a stab wound and bullet hole before too much blood loss, but what if I cut the carotid artery in the neck and they lost blood faster than they could regenerate it? They would get weaker and weaker from the effort then hopefully die. It’s worth a shot anyway. That reminds me, I better get my hunting knife sharpened for the trip.

  I’m slowly losing hope that I’ll ever be able to kill one. This was the messiest one yet. Thank god I had an extra jumper in my rucksack ­– my clothes got completely covered in blood. The tan jumper I was wearing is ruined.

  The hiker was elusive for a couple of hours as I pounded the pavements but I eventually picked it up as it was finishing with a suicide victim. A man who’d drowned himself in the freezing cold sea over money worries. I found the male hiker just as he was leaving the scene. Thankfully he decided to rest as soon as it got dark so I didn’t have to spend too long waiting in the icy air. Gloves, hats and layers aren’t enough once the chill gets into your bones.

  The hiker found an empty house with a ‘For sale’ sign outside. He went round the back to the secluded garden to sleep. I gave it fifteen minutes then followed him. The temperature didn’t appear to bother him, as he had no coat on, only his thin, white shirt and black trouser combination. He was standing completely still by the fence and fast asleep. In comparison, I couldn’t stop shivering and my teeth were chattering uncontrollably.

  I got my knife ready and darted forwards from the shadows. I seized him by his hair and drew the knife swiftly across his neck, from left to right. The spurt of blood was incredible. It sprayed out forcefully and soaked my clothes before I could jump back. The hiker’s eyes flew open and focussed on my face. He made an awful gurgling sound as he dropped to his knees in front of me.

  He had one hand to his throat but the other stretched towards me, trying to grab hold of me with his bloody fingers. I kicked his arm away and staggered backwards. The grass around the hiker was stained red with his blood.

  I ran for the house and forced my way in through a side door. The hiker was too busy clutching his neck to stem the flow and didn’t see where I’d gone. I shut the door behind me then crept through the gloomy house and crouched by the dining room window. From that position I could see what he was doing in the garden.

  My heart gave a hopeful leap as he pitched forward on to his front. Was it working? My excitement was short-lived as he struggled back to his knees a minute later. He was covered in dark blood so I couldn’t see if the wound was healing, but the fact that he was starting to stand up told me that it was. He was recovering.

  I watched him stumble around, slowly regaining his strength. There was no attack on my mind so he must have thought I was long gone. After a while, he disappeared round the side of the house. Had he seen that I’d come inside? I held my breath and gripped onto the knife so hard my knuckles turned white.

  The side door didn’t open and the house stayed silent. I carefully made my way to the living room at the front of the house to scout it out. The hiker was standing on the pavement, leaning heavily against a tree. His head was whipping from side to side as he scanned the road for any sign of me.

  Eventually he began to walk to the right, along the pavement and away from the house. I watched until he was completely out of sight then I sank onto the living room sofa. My body was trembling badly and I stared dumbly at my filthy hands. All that blood and an enormous wound, yet he’d still managed to walk away from it. To be truthful with you, right at that moment I thought about giving it all up. It’s hopeless.

  I’m still in the house and am going to stay for the night. There’s some furniture but no one currently lives here. I’ve checked out the rooms upstairs and the wardrobes have been cleaned out. From the décor, my guess is that someone old was living here (who’s now either in a care home or deceased) and the family have been clearing the place out while they wait for a buyer. I should be safe to sleep here. It doesn’t feel as if I’m trespassing as no one will be turning up; I’m just borrowing an empty house for the night.

  It took me a long time to clean off the blood. Luckily the water is still on so I had a hot shower upstairs and tried to rinse it all away. The water turned crimson as soon as I stepped into the bath and I had to clean the stains off the white porcelain as best I could after. I ruined the only pale blue towel in there so I’m going to have to take that with me when I leave and dump it in a bin. Hopefully they won’t notice.

  I’ve been sitting on the sofa for the past couple of hours, mulling over things in my mind. I’ve checked in the garden several times and the dark blood is still there on the grass. How is it possible that he could recover from what I did? It doesn’t make sense. I know you can replace blood with transfusions but how could he regenerate it? There must have been a few pints lost before his miraculous healing. Is that scientifically possible?

  It’s hard not to try and think logically about hikers. They defy what normal people are capable of: strength, speed, mind reading and self-healing. Those characteristics don’t all neatly fit with anything I’ve been reading about.

  Perhaps they really are mutants and someone engineered them in a lab. They’re like superheroes gone wrong. Who was that comic book villain who tried to re-grow a limb and got turned into a giant lizard? One of the Spiderman ones I think.

  I’m so damn tired of this. I started out wanting to help people and so far I’m just seeing more of them die. I still don’t even know how many hikers are out there. My map back at the flat has about a dozen pins in. There can’t be too many or surely they
would have taken over the country by now? Wiped out all the humans and exist alone as one race. I’d guess less than a hundred as I can travel around for days and not hear any. Perhaps they have their own territories, one for each town? Although I’ve heard a couple of different ones in London, maybe they share it because there are so many people in the capital.

  My eyelids are getting heavy with exhaustion and I’m so hungry. I’ve got some bottled water in my pack but no food left. The cupboards in the kitchen are bare apart from the odd tin of something that went off a long while ago.

  I’m going to get a couple of hours sleep on the sofa then go back to the flat when the trains are running. I’ve secured the side door as an extra precaution. Let’s hope the hiker doesn’t decide to come back.

  11th February 2010

  Today is the first anniversary of Karen’s death. I’d been feeling a rising sense of dread all week and now it’s here, I’m just numb. An entire year since she was so cruelly taken from me. It feels as if I’ve been alone for an eternity.

  I woke up groggy this morning, after a restless night of bad dreams. In the bright light of day, I can’t recall them properly but there were lots of black eyes, whispered voices and Karen’s pain. It almost drove me to drink straightaway, however I was determined not to repeat what happened on her birthday.

  I forced myself to shower and get dressed then I took a trip to the cemetery where she’s buried. It was only mid-morning but Sue had already been there before me. There was a fresh wreath of yellow flowers resting against her headstone and a bunch of wild flowers on her father’s grave, right next to hers. I laid my own bouquet of lilies next to the wreath.

  The grass was damp yet I found myself kneeling down and staring at her headstone. Somehow it felt more like we were at eye level. I fought back the hard lump in my throat and stroked a finger over the delicate flowers.

  The cemetery was deserted and I found myself talking out loud to Karen. I apologised for not being around more often and told her all about my experiences over the last year without her: hikers, the murders, everything. I talked until my mouth was dry and my jeans were soaked from the wet ground.

  I know it’s strange to think that she would be somewhere, listening to everything I was saying, but I did. Not heaven or anywhere like that, just her spirit, close by, watching over me.

  After I was done talking, I just sat with her for a while, recalling memories of our life together and experiences we’d shared. I tried desperately not to picture how she’d been at the end, once the tumour had ravaged the rest of her body. Her paper-thin skin, sunken eyes and lank hair. I can’t tell you how painful it is to see a loved one suffer like that. The agonising helplessness. Knowing every day that she was slipping further and further away from me, and soon she would no longer be there at all.

  I was there at the moment she died. She was in a room at a hospice by then and they had told us that day to expect the worst. She’d been in and out of consciousness for most of the day, and I wasn’t sure if she even knew we were there half the time. She’d been extremely disorientated for days but had occasional moments of clarity that tore my heart in two.

  She worried about us during those brief spells – asking how I was doing and trying to care for her mother, even though she was the one who was dying. The nurses assured me that she wasn’t in any pain. They kept a constant stream of drugs in her system. Sue and I had both been sitting silently by her bedside that evening when she’d opened her eyes. They were clear and stared straight at my face. I’d known instantly that she was fully with us for a short while. I’d taken her hand and she’d squeezed it tightly and given me a small smile.

  She’d spoken to Sue briefly and told her that she loved her then she’d asked her mother to get her a drink. Sue had left the room and I’d leaned forward to give Karen a brief kiss. Her lips were dry and cold but they’d widened into a smile. She whispered that I’d made her happy, and how much she loved me. Her eyes were shining with tears and I think I knew in my heart then, even though I didn’t want to admit it to myself. She said one final thing to me: ‘Goodnight, sweetheart.’ It was more of a sigh and her eyes had fluttered closed.

  I’d kissed her tenderly one last time and gripped her hand until Sue came back with some fresh water. By then, Karen was fully asleep again and it was only a couple of minutes before the regular beeping of her machines turned to a constant, shrill alarm. Everything became a blur then. A nurse rushed in, quickly followed by another, and I was ushered towards the door, losing my grip on Karen’s hand in the process. Sue was crying hysterically as we waited outside the room but I was in shock. The lead feeling in my stomach taking a firm hold.

  I knew she was gone. She had woken up that final time to say goodbye to us. When one of the nurses came out shortly after, I was already certain of what she would tell us. Her eyes said it all – Karen had finally lost her battle. I know she didn’t suffer at the end. She went peacefully, with the two people she loved most by her side, but it still doesn’t make it any easier. She was too young.

  Looking back now, I wonder if her last hushed words had been ‘goodbye, sweetheart’ rather than ‘goodnight’. If she had known that it was time for her to leave us. At least she is at peace now, that’s the only comfort I can take. That she hasn’t had to experience the horror I’ve uncovered over the last year.

  I suppose if Karen hadn’t died then I would never have found out about hikers. The last few encounters have cemented what I’ve suspected for a while now – hikers choose people who are damaged. I don’t know if it’s because their minds are easier to manipulate after they’ve experienced some sort of trauma.

  Things like bereavement, bullying, losing their job, having a partner cheat on them – they all seem to be a common occurrence in the vessels the hikers choose. Perhaps the more damaged you are, the more readily you’ll comply to their murderous ways.

  I was certainly a prime target – absorbed in my grief and anger. That male used my feelings to make me listen to him. To trick me into believing his twisted logic. I never would have been seduced by it before Karen fell ill, and I don’t think I would now. He struck during my most vulnerable stage.

  I wonder if they travel around, flitting from mind to mind to find the most susceptible ones. Preying on the emotionally weak and confused. It’s a depressing thought, isn’t it?

  21st February 2010

  There’s another way for hikers to die! I can’t believe it after all the stuff I’ve tried, but the Grand is not the only one who can kill them. The one major problem is that it’s something else I can’t do. Well, I could, only it wouldn’t end particularly well for me either. The upshot is if a hiker is still inside your mind when you die, it dies too.

  I’m not sure how it works exactly but I saw it with my own eyes. Maybe it’s because their minds were still connected at the moment of death and the hiker was trapped inside.

  It was a male this time. I found him down in Bedgebury and he had a young boy in his clutches. He was whispering incessantly about how the boy was a waste of space and that no one cared for him. The boy was in his late teens and had been brought up in foster care so the hiker was playing on that. His only family hadn’t wanted him and neither had any others. He was a drain on society and should put himself out of his misery.

  Hearing it all made my blood boil, although I’m wise enough now not to intervene. The boy was, regrettably, going to die. You must think I’m awful for saying that, but I have to think of the bigger picture: the war, not the current battle. Killing the hikers will help save hundreds of lives, thousands maybe, however they can’t know about me until I’ve found a method that works. The more I expose myself to them, the greater the risk that they will talk to each other about who I am and what I’m attempting to do.

  The Grand can’t know about me or it’s all over. I’m hoping my exploits so far have gone under the radar and the hikers involved dismissed them as random attacks. They didn’t get a clear look at me so I
should be safe for now. I just have to put my humanity to one side when it comes to the suicide victims. Fob it off as a necessary tragedy to try and quell the guilt inside – the distracting emotion that keeps me awake most nights then haunts me in my dreams when I do sleep.

  The male persuaded the boy that he should shoot himself. He already had a handgun that he kept hidden in the bedroom of his grotty flat, so he should just take it in to the woods and end it all. The hiker made it seem very appealing.

  I trailed the boy at a safe distance to some nearby woods. Once we were in the secluded trees I tried to stay as far back as possible. He was following a dirt path so I dropped behind until I could no longer see him, although I could still hear everything the hiker was saying.

  He told the boy to turn off the path after a minute then stop at the small clearing. I was attempting to navigate where he’d left the track when I spied the hiker purely by chance. He was weaving through the trees, ahead and to the left of me. My heart leapt into my throat but thankfully I was in his blind spot so he had no clue I was there.

  I trod carefully through the undergrowth to follow them, trying not to snap any sticks with my heavy boots. Every sound seemed magnified in the woods. I could hear the chirping of birds, the wind rustling the leafy branches overhead, and underneath it all the constant barrage of abuse from the hiker. He was speaking fast now, with mounting excitement. He was going to have his kill very soon.

  I caught another glimpse of him ahead. He ducked down behind a large tree trunk then leant out to see something. I inched my way slowly closer until I could see the awful scene in front me. I hid behind my own tree to watch it play out.

  The boy was kneeling on the ground, with his back to me. I couldn’t see his hands but I knew they would be gripping the gun. The hiker was a few metres behind and to the right of the boy. He was facing away from me too as he focussed intently on his victim.