by T. J. Lebbon
‘I’d do my very best.’
John fell silent again, for much longer than before. Finally he said, ‘We want to see you try.’ The line went dead.
Shaking, skin tingling, Rose placed the satphone on the floor of the Jeep and stamped on it, again and again until it was in bits. Then she drove for a mile until she reached a bridge and dropped it into the river below.
Driving. She’d done a lot of that recently. There was nowhere she wanted to settle.
Dragging Grin’s corpse from the postal van, wedging it deep between rocks where hopefully it would remain undiscovered for a long time … there had been no epiphany there, no release, and no sense that anything like this could ever be over. Really, she’d felt nothing at all.
That frightened her.
She’d driven the van three miles further before dumping it and stealing a more nondescript vehicle. Then after leaving Wales she’d gone to ground for a couple of weeks and watched Chris regain some of his life. But only some of it. The infamy was instant, with the news full of his capture and the trail of bodies that led to it. His family’s incarceration was also reported, and as the details of where and why they had been held – and Chris’s role in their release – began to leak out, the whole tale became much more complex. He became notorious, and feted.
The media revelled in the story. Naked survivors shot and left in the mountains – one of them a minor reality TV character, another a retired football player – were not as innocent as they might seem. A couple of lovers who’d had their mountain bike stolen by the man at the centre of the story appeared on talk shows and signed a book deal. And several historical murder cases were being linked. A man on the Underground, tongue cut out; a woman in Cornwall, stabbed to death in an old tin mine, her corpse missing its hands; a body found in Liverpool minus its head.
The public loved it. Rose didn’t. Chris had found his family again, but she knew that he’d be changed in ways that could not be undone. She went through a series of feelings for him – jealousy, respect, pity. She hoped that the simple fact of his brief celebrity would protect him from any desire for revenge from the wider Trail organisation; if he and his family were harmed, that would be seen as final proof of his whole wild tale. In truth, she was quite certain that the overseas Trail cells would hardly be concerned at what had happened to their British counterparts.
Her, though. She had rattled their cage.
She hoped that the information she’d passed to Gemma would help ensure the family were treated fairly. It would also guarantee at least a dozen high-profile arrests for older murders, and the scandals would keep the press occupied for weeks, or months. Perhaps with so much going on, Chris and his family might eventually be left alone.
In the end, though, she became ambivalent to Chris’s story. It seemed that was the final tragic tale of her own life. They’d taken her family, and in doing so had stripped away most of what made her human.
So she drove.
Thirty-seven days later she looked out at an ocean far from where home had once been, and felt the sun burning her skin. She’d cut her long hair short and dyed what was left to a blazing blond. Her arm and hip had been treated by a friendly doctor she knew and were healing well. It had been amusing to take on a French accent. She dressed in floral dresses, very feminine, very not her. She used a variety of names.
She was lost.
The breeze brought the smell of the sea, and she remembered Adam once telling her that it was the taint of death. The scent of the coast that so many people loved was actually produced by countless dead bodies, brought in by the ocean and deposited on the beach, rotting. Rose smiled and breathed in. It seemed quite fitting.
She walked along the beach for some time before she saw him. He was sitting in an old plastic chair with his crossed legs resting on a sea-smoothed log. He nursed a clear drink in a glass in his lap. His hat was tilted over his face and his greying hair was dark again, but she knew who he was.
Rose found another chair waiting outside the small beach hut, almost as if it had been placed there for her. She dropped her backpack in the doorway and dragged the chair down the beach, leaving lines and footprints in the sand.
Sitting beside him, feeling the chair’s legs sink in, she came to rest. Neither of them spoke.
Perhaps for a while she could stop moving.
Heck needs to watch his back. Because someone’s watching him…
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The Hunt – Author Q&A
The Hunt is such a gripping read and the characters really come to life on the page. How did you go about researching the book?
I’ll talk a little about the endurance sport aspect elsewhere. But there were other areas of the book I needed to research and was keen to get right. Firstly the landscape, which I wanted to make as much a character in this book as the people upon it. I know my local hills and mountains in Monmouthshire pretty well as I love walking, running and biking in them. But the only way to know the real Welsh mountains of Snowdonia, both the geography and the feel, smell, and touch of the landscape itself, is to go there. I paid a couple of visits whilst writing and revising The Hunt, climbed Snowdon, hiked in the mountains, really tried to get a feel for the atmosphere of that place. It’s a popular holiday venue, and climbing Snowdon especially is difficult to do without having crowds of tourists around you. But it’s also a wild place, and with the aid of a good map it’s pretty easy to get off the beaten track. The ruggedness of the land, and the dangers, aren’t easy to imagine without seeing and experiencing them first-hand. Also the weather, which can change so quickly from inviting to inimical. It’s a beautiful part of the world, but to survive there for any period of time you have to respect it. And even an expert like Chris (in The Hunt) can make mistakes.
I was also interested in the psychology of someone who might want to take part in a human trophy hunt. I researched trophy hunts in Africa, read a lot about who takes part in them, and why. It was strange reading. I find it hard enough to understand why someone would take any pleasure from shooting a wild lion in the head with a high-powered rifle, even less so when the animal is wounded to stop it escaping, corralled, and essentially defenceless. It’s hardly a ‘me against the wild’ scenario. Going one big step further – to hunt humans instead of animals – was difficult, but it’s something I can see happening sometime, somewhere. Who knows, maybe it’s already happened.
There were also smaller areas I had to research – weaponry, computer and web technology, helicopters. All of my previous novels have been horror or fantasy novels, where a lot of the time I’m making up my own worlds, or my own pockets of existence in the world we know around us. This made The Hunt probably the most heavily researched book I’ve ever written.
You’re a regular participant in athletic endurance events. How much of your own experience did you draw upon when writing about the physical struggles Chris faces in the book?
This was a classic case of write about what you know (at least, I know a little bit about it). The inspiration to write The Hunt came from my love of endurance sport, something I’ve been passionate about since I turned 40 overweight, unfit, and wondering where the future would take me. I discovered running, then cycling and swimming, started entering races, ran my first marathons, competed in my first triathlons, and then completed my first Ironman race. It was a huge change to my life – one that continues now – and because I’m a writer, I was often looking for ways to incorporate my new-found love into my fiction. I’d been considering writing a thriller for some time, and the idea of combining endurance sport with a fast-paced chase thriller seemed perfect.
The Hunt is the result. There’s a lot more to the story, of course, but at its core it deals with a man able to keep ahead of those intending to kill him. He knows the mountains and trails, knows how to pace himself, under
stands the nutritional aspects of such a long pursuit. And for that, I dipped very heavily into my own experiences. I love triathlon, although I doubt I’ll ever trouble a podium, so I have first-hand experience of how much it can hurt pushing yourself to those limits, as well as what it feels like to enjoy pushing yourself. There’s a lot of me in Chris, actually, including his new-found fear of heights, and his moments of doubt and restrained panic swimming in open water. Everything seemed to gel really well in this novel. Writing was my hobby and has now become my living, and with The Hunt my new hobby of triathlon and endurance sports became my research!
What was the first book that really made an impression on you?
When I was maybe 6 or 7 I read Shadow the Sheepdog by Enid Blyton. There’s not too much I remember about it, other than being enthralled, and fascinated at seeing the world from a dog’s point of view (our family always had dogs). There were some sad bits in there, too, which I don’t think I’d been used to in what I’d read up til then. It was the first time I read a book again and again, and funnily enough my sister still has that copy. The second book is The Rats, by James Herbert. My mother gave me this to read when I was 10 or 11, and I never looked back. Herbert was a favourite through my teens, and many copies of The Fog, Domain, and The Dark were passed back and forth among me and my friends. I met him a couple of years before he died and thanked him for The Rats. The book introduced me fully to the horror genre, and is partly responsible for me doing what I do now.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently writing my second thriller for Avon, tentatively titled Every Man (although I suspect that title might change). I don’t want to say too much about it, other than it’s just as fast and furious as The Hunt. Anyone who enjoys The Hunt should love my new novel, and they might recognise a character or two from that book. The book’s coming together very nicely, I think, and I’m already having ideas for future novels of the same ilk.
About the Author
Tim J. Lebbon is a New York Times-bestselling writer with over thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and been shortlisted for World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards. A movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, will be released soon, and several other projects are in development. He lives in the Monmouthshire countryside with his wife Tracey, children Ellie and Dan, and his dog Blu. He enjoys running and biking in the hills, and sometimes he imagines he’s being chased. The Hunt is Tim J. Lebbon’s first thriller.
Find out more at www.timlebbon.net and @timlebbon
About the Publisher
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