by T. J. Lebbon
Shouldering the rucksack, Chris hunkered down and crawled back into the rocks, keeping low, climbing one boulder and dropping behind another. Down the slope the helicopter soon rose into view against the mountain opposite. It looked so small and harmless, but he dreaded it coming towards him. It could act as spotter, hovering above him wherever he went and however fast he ran, and it would draw the five hunters towards him like moths to flame.
Maybe he could run faster than them, move across the terrain quicker. But with the helicopter above there was no escape.
That’s exactly what they want, he thought. Yet again the hopelessness of the situation smashed in. Any chance he had of saving his family involved becoming a trophy kill for one of those people behind him.
He wondered what it would feel like to be shot. Would there be pain? Would he know he was going to die? He wasn’t sure which he’d prefer – an injury that killed him slowly, awareness leaking away as darkness came. Or a sudden head shot, bringing death before he knew it.
The sound of the helicopter changed. He paused, crawled across a low slab of rock and risked a look across the valley. The aircraft was rising, following the line of the road back up towards the ridge where it disappeared. And the car he thought he’d seen up there – the BMW Rose had taken from the Trail people she had killed in his house – was gone.
More gunshots rang out. They whip-cracked across the valley, and though he listened hard, he did not hear any bullet impacts. They were already shooting blind, flushed with the initial excitement of the hunt.
He clipped the rucksack tight. In the hip pockets he found a handful of energy gels, and he tore one open and gulped down the sweet contents, placing the empty wrapper back in the pocket. Then he took a moment to examine the steep mountainside above him. If he climbed he would be slow, and an easy target if any of them happened to be a good shot. But if he moved along the slope to the south, he could just make out a slope of jumbled rocks and boulders that led up to a shoulder of the mountain. That’s where he would aim for. There would be cover there, and once up on the ridge he’d be able to make a better judgement about where he was and where he should go.
Heart thumping, feeling strong and yet terrified, Chris started to run.
Chapter Ten
vet
‘I was a vet,’ she said. ‘We lived near Chelmsford, nice little village, friendly community. We had good friends. Adam was a landscape gardener. The kids loved the countryside. I treated animals, put them down, made them better. It didn’t feel like I was making a difference, not in the scheme of things. But for every sad owner’s face I saw, there were a dozen happy ones. Sometimes it’s the pets that make a person’s life worthwhile. A little old lady with a scratchy cat, a young boy with his dog. You can tell a lot about people by their pets.’ She turned to Holt where he sat by her window, ever-present bottle of water in his hand. ‘You ever had any pets?’
‘No. But I am a vet.’
Rose snorted, then sniffed back a shuddering sob. Jesus fucking Christ on a bike, how she’d kill for a drink.
She’d pleaded with him at first, told him how the way to come down was by reducing her intake day by day. But Holt had shaken his head. He wasn’t the sort of man you argued with, or who did things by half. She’d only known him for three days but she recognised that already. Short, slight, bespectacled, hair greying, dark skin weathered and leathery and so lined she couldn’t tell wrinkles from scars, he projected the look of a bookworm, not a mercenary. But he had such stories.
She’d only heard a few of them so far, but he held the weight of many more. A red history, heavy with death.
That was in the Comoros, on an island called Anjouan. A man called Badak had already killed three families. He shot the men and women to death, then raped the children and hacked them to pieces with a machete. His men feared him as a demon. I tracked them for three days, shot two of his men from a distance. The others fled. A day later I caught Badak in a snare, tied him to a tree, sliced him from throat to cock, and stuck a lizard inside him. I filmed the whole thing and let the people see.
The stories were like a dark star within him, the black hole of his endless, terrible experiences drawing her with a dreadful gravity. They promised experience. He promised help. At last, she perceived a route out of the spiral she had descended into.
She saw a way to hit back.
‘Why are you helping me?’ she asked.
‘Am I helping you?’
Rose nodded. She was sweating in the steamy hotel room, shaking with alcohol withdrawal. Every time she closed her eyes she saw her family as she had found them. With a drink inside her, at least they were sometimes still alive.
But yes, he was helping her. For the first time in almost a year the future, however bleak, seemed further away than the next drink. She had cast aside initial doubts and suspicions, trying not to worry about just how she had bumped into him, how someone like him happened to find her. She’d even asked him. His response had been that, sometimes, people like them washed up on the same shores.
So she had assigned their meeting to coincidence. And he had made such promises.
‘At first I thought you just wanted to fuck me,’ she said.
‘Is that what most men want of you?’
‘Hah!’ She shivered, drew a hand over the sweat beading her brow. ‘Only if they’re desperate. And I’ve never let them. Not once.’
Holt shrugged and stared from the window. Rose couldn’t even remember the name of the little town where they had met, but here in Sorrento it was scorchingly hot, the streets bedlam, and the smells of delicious cooking and rank sewage wafted through the curtains with each breath of sea air. Her mouth watered and her stomach rolled. Four miles east of them people lived in cheap, chaotic housing, while in the harbour’s à la carte restaurants holidaymakers spent a local’s daily earnings on a plate of imported meat. A site of such contradictions seemed a perfect place to hide.
‘It’s been a long time since I had a cause,’ he said, turning to face her. He was very still when he spoke, only his mouth and eyes moving. Every movement was spare and necessary. ‘Sometimes my causes were convenient because they paid well. That’s the definition of soldier of fortune, I suppose. On occasion, just now and then, I believed in something. But what you tell me happened to you … ’ He sighed. ‘It’s the children. Not you. Not your husband. Don’t care what one adult does to another, because it’s the adults who run the world. We can make our own choices, mostly. But when the children are hurt, that’s when I become sad. And angry.’
The children, she thought. Less clouded by alcohol than she had been for a long time, yet shaken by the burning need she still felt for blessed oblivion, her memories were becoming richer by the hour. Molly, stabbed behind the ear and left sitting up as if still waiting for her mummy. Isaac, lying in his own blood. Alex, one little hand still clasped in his father’s and his face a mask of dried blood. There were flies on them. They’d been there for so long by the time she found them that time had moved on, and nature had moved in.
‘You have children?’ she asked.
Holt stared from the window, silent. It was as if she’d never asked the question at all. Maybe he’d had children and they were gone, but she could not ask him that. She knew how that would burn.
‘I’m ready to learn from you,’ she said. ‘Everything you know. All of it. And I’ll pay you, somehow, one day.’
Holt turned to her again and his face creased into a smile. He had a beautiful smile. ‘I have almost three million dollars in a bank account in the Seychelles.’
She raised her eyebrows.
Holt shrugged gently. ‘What’s a man like me to do with beaches and blue seas?’
‘How long will it take?’ Rose asked.
‘What?’
‘To train me?’
He laughed as if the very idea was faintly ridiculous. Then he looked at her, really looked at her for the first time, and she had never been scrutinised like
that before. It was so thorough that he must have seen into her, to those imprinted memories that she had never been able to escape. She was naked beneath his glare, stripped of clothing and skin, flesh and bones. He saw to the heart of her, and then he seemed to relax in his chair a little, drinking some more water as he looked from the open window once more. He stared out at the view across the city rooftops to the sea beyond. He seemed hesitant.
‘Holt,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said softly, as if answering a silent question of his own. Then he turned. ‘Yes. I’ll tell you some things that will help. A few tricks. How to fire a gun, how to fight, how to watch. Some knife work, some fist work. It helps that you’re already away from the world. And you have violence in you already, Rose. I see where it simmers. I’d say you’re halfway there.’
Chapter Eleven
ambush
As soon as they dropped off the hunters, Rose knew that the Trail would come for her.
She drove as hard as she could up the mountain road, and when the helicopter passed overhead and continued down the valley, she slammed on the brakes. Gun nursed in her lap, she used the remote wing mirror control to track the aircraft’s progress. It was not slowing or turning. Of course not, not yet. It had its cargo of rich arseholes to disgorge first.
Part of her wished that she’d stayed with that poor bastard Chris Sheen. She could have run with him into the hills, and by nightfall she could have killed at least half of the hunters, if not more. But mere blood was no revenge, even if it was the blood of those who’d murder someone for nothing more than the sick thrill. And it wasn’t the hunters she wanted, but those who’d sent them on their way.
The ones in the helicopter, for a start.
She hoped that Adam would be proud of the action she was taking. He’d understand, she was certain of that, because they’d once had the conversation that many couples have after a glass or two of wine, when life is good: If anyone hurt you or the kids, I’d happily kill them, he’d said. They’d laughed about it, imagining all manner of action-hero scenarios, and although she hadn’t verbalised it at the time, she’d always thought the same. So yes, she believed that Adam would approve.
Her children, though? Rose doubted they’d even recognise her any more. That made her so terribly sad. It felt like a betrayal, but as a mother she knew that sometimes a parent had to do what was right for their children, however cruel or harsh it might seem.
‘I’m still a mother,’ she whispered, and no voices rose in dissent. ‘That’s why I’m doing this. I’m looking after my children.’
She drove on, alert to movement or the flicker of reflected sunlight. It was possible that the Trail had placed other members to ambush her as she escaped the scene of the drop-off. With a sniper hidden on a hillside close to the road in both directions, whichever way she went she’d have to pass them. Even an average shooter would be able to put a bullet through her windscreen.
But she hoped they’d not had enough time to arrange anything. The whole hunt for Chris had been set to take place in the city south of here, so her enforced change of location, and her killing of three of their members, must have caused them a massive headache. Perhaps they’d take her sudden appearance as an unexpected bonus. But they’d be out of sorts, confused, and fucking angry. And that’s just how she wanted them, because the angry made mistakes.
She scanned the wild hillsides as she powered up the winding road towards where it passed over the ridge between two mountains. She’d already scouted out the place where she’d wait for them, on one of her several trips up here over the past few months. It had always been her own intended hunting ground for them when the time was right, and with good reason. She’d been here on holiday with Adam, before they were married, when their romance was a dangerous, passionate, exciting adventure, rather than the comfortable friendship it had become. When the kids had come along they’d allowed themselves to turn into parents rather than lovers, although the bond of love was still strong. But when they’d holidayed here together their love had been untamed, as tempestuous and unpredictable as the landscape and climate.
They’d hiked for six days, wild camping, bathing in streams, sleeping in a small tent and making love under the stars, buying food from farms and small village shops, and by day two they’d both known that they would be with each other for the rest of their lives.
Adam had been right, at least.
Keeping one eye on her mirrors, Rose drove the car up towards the ridge. She’d already noted the lack of other traffic. That could simply be down to the remoteness of this place, or it could be that the Trail had set up roadblocks. They’d not want anyone happening across their weekend warriors tumbling from the helicopter in combat gear and bearing rifles.
The dead man’s phone on the seat beside her started to ring. She ignored it. She’d considered ditching it, but there seemed little point. They’d be able to track it easily, but she had no intention of hiding from them. Not yet, at least. It rang off and went to voicemail. She’d speak to them on her own terms and no one else’s.
The road opened up on the left into a gravelled parking bay, and she slammed on the brakes and skidded the car around ninety degrees. From that angle she could look back down the valley, and the car’s nose was also pointing at the road, ready to go at a moment’s notice.
This is it, she thought. I’m in the thick of it now. She almost laughed, because already she was more visible than Holt had told her to ever be. The Trail knew who she was, where she was and what she was driving. Holt would have snorted in disgust.
But Rose wasn’t a mercenary. She wasn’t even a killer, not like him. Not cold-blooded, someone happy to end a life for a paycheque. Holt had always known that, really, but he’d chosen to ignore it. He had helped prepare her hands for blood. She knew that somewhere in there, unspoken and not acknowledged by either of them, he’d fallen a little bit in love with her.
This moment was when everything could go wrong. She was exposed and vulnerable here, and though the Trail didn’t exactly have the upper hand, the field was more level than she would have preferred.
She liked being hidden away below the radar, unknown, unseen, the shadow of a ghost.
But this part was always going to be this way.
She could see the helicopter further down the valley, sitting on a wide parking bay beside the road. Clouds of dust were whipped up by the rotors, swirling, dancing and spreading in complex and beautiful patterns. Through the dust she could just see the clumsy figures of the hunters, disembarked and already moving off onto the landscape. She glanced at the outcropping of rocks where Chris should have hidden. Beyond and above was wild country – his sort of territory, a place he was well used to. She only hoped he didn’t fuck up and get himself shot too soon.
A flash of memory jarred her. They came like this sometimes, especially if her mind was active, the thought of grief and revenge hot.
She was sitting on a rock on a mountainside, the view laid out before her beyond breathtaking. Adam was beside her. They’d been sharing a flagon of farmhouse cider that they’d bought from a local farmer – potent and cutting, quite vile, but it gave them a warm buzz that drew them even closer together. There were no roads, no houses, nothing manmade in sight. They were intruders here, and if Rose concentrated she could distance herself completely, be part of the landscape and understand just how wild this place really was.
She blinked and the memory faded, leaving behind the taste of foul cider on her tongue.
‘I hope you’re as good as I think,’ she muttered. If Chris got himself shot straight away, everything was fucked. And now she had revealed to the Trail that she was still alive.
They would not stop looking for her until they’d avenged their dead.
‘Come on then,’ she muttered. She picked up the gun, and when she blinked she saw the Trail woman’s head snapping back when she’d shot her in the face. ‘Head shot,’ she muttered, thinking of Holt, smiling.
&nbs
p; The helicopter lifted off. Rose tensed. When the aircraft turned and headed back up the valley towards her, she shoved the BMW into gear and roared over the brow of the ridge.
The road snaking down the other side followed the natural lines of the hillside, old stone walls protecting drivers from a steep drop on the left. The wall was holed in a few places, and Rose wondered at those stories. But not too much.
She’d already planned where she was going to make her first stand, and it took only thirty seconds to get there.
She stopped the car hard against the stone wall on the left, rock scraping against metal. Leaving the engine on, counting silently in her head, she grabbed the phone and gun, opened the door and dashed across the road, slamming the door behind her. She wanted them to think she was still in the car. That way, they’d come closer.
It would take them a minute to reach her, maybe less. She could already hear the distant thud of rotors echoing from the barren mountainsides.
The trees grew close to the road here, leading up a narrow gorge that widened into a deeper ravine in the hillside further up. She’d chosen this location because it would be impossible to land the helicopter – the road was too narrow, with looming rock bluffs threatening to catch the rotor blades, and the hillside was steep and rocky both below the road, and above, where the gorge cut into the mountain.
They’d have to hover closer to see what she was doing.
She climbed a rotten wooden fence and then moved in amongst the trees. It was cool in there, calm and quiet, and a startled sheep scurried away up the slope.
Rose hoped she’d thought this through correctly. She wondered what Holt would have thought of her plan, and for a moment she wished she were back there with him, haunting the hot bars and bustling streets of Sorrento like the ghost of the man he was meant to be, or had once been.
But she’d spent her time with him almost three years ago. It was time to be herself again.
