Free The Hunt by T.J. Lebbon

ridge, and there at the top
…
was that a car? He wasn’t sure. It was too far to see, and from this angle the sun shone into his eyes. But he hoped that was Rose up there, paused to see what was happening.
    She could have stayed with him. Rose and her gun, her knowledge of what was going on, everything she knew about these people and what they wanted
…
she could have stayed and helped him.
    But she was using him, a lump of meat as meaningless to her as he was to these rich hunters she’d told him about. Her only aim was revenge against the people who’d murdered her family. To the hunters he was quarry, to her he was bait. It amounted to the same thing.
    ‘Fucking hell,’ he whispered, shaking, shivers passing down his back and tingling his balls. He still couldn’t quite believe it. People would pay to hunt
people
? Though he’d always regarded himself as a long-term optimist, he was also aware that in a society of millions there were bad eggs, twisted people with perverted desires. Whether sick or evil, or occupying the wide spectrum in between, these were realities that he did his best to ignore. They were the people he hoped never to meet, and who he was happy leaving alone in their own skewed realities. But he’d always known that such bad eggs sometimes crossed over into the gentle masses. It was one of his greatest fears.
    Today he had met them, and his world had changed. Rose was one. A bad egg, whatever the cause of her badness.
    And now, these others. The helicopter was filled with them. Rich people who might present a respectable facade for all but one day of the year, and today they wanted Chris Sheen dead by their hand.
    He dropped the bag and rucksack from his shoulders and opened the rucksack, rooting around for the phone he’d seen before. His hand delved deep, moving other objects aside until he found the familiar shape of a smartphone.
    He unlocked the screen. There was no service. ‘Shit. Shit!’ He stood, making sure he was still hidden by the rocks, holding the phone up towards the sky as if willing contact. He turned it this way and that, never taking his eyes from the top left corner.
No service
.
    Later. He would call the police later.
    Slipping the phone into the small, zipped back pocket of his running trousers, he crouched down again and opened the holdall. It contained a new pair of road-running shoes, useless to him up here. A woollen sweater that would hold water and become too heavy. A pack of sandwiches past their sell-by date and speckled with mould. There were spare socks and underwear which he slipped into the rucksack, but most of what the Trail had packed for him was useless. Of course. If what Rose had told him was true, they’d expected a chase through the city. Their aim would have been to make the hunt more exciting, not to give him anything useful.
    He shoved the Adidas bag down between two rocks.
    His shivering persisted. It was a warm September day, but in these mountains there was always a cool breeze drifting across the shadowed slopes. And after his sudden burst of activity, hunkering down motionless meant he was rapidly cooling.
Got to keep moving
, he thought.
If I have to start again quickly, got to keep warm
. So as he watched the helicopter he stretched his legs, massaged his muscles, kept the blood flowing.
    The aircraft’s big side door opened and people started to climb out. From this distance it was difficult to make out much detail. But Chris could see that they wore camouflage clothing, carried rucksacks, and he was quite certain that the objects slung on their shoulders were guns of some sort, not walking sticks.
    His blood ran cold, stomach tingled.
Like real hunters
,
he thought.
    Two people exited, three, and the fourth tripped and fell from the aircraft, sprawling in the dust. The others stood around and watched, not one of them going to help. The fallen figure stood and brushed themselves down. A fifth person jumped down from the helicopter, and