Free The Hunt by T.J. Lebbon Page A

the five stood around, seemingly aimless. At an unseen signal they hurried to the roadside, then slipped down into the ditch. There they waited. Someone shouted at them from the helicopter, gesticulating from the shadowy interior.
Don’t want them to be seen dressed like that, with guns. Too close to the road
. But Chris realised he hadn’t seen a single vehicle since Rose had left him standing there, and he wondered just where they were. He had been running in Snowdonia several times, but he couldn’t immediately recognise any of these peaks. He guessed they were more remote, in places where casual holidaymakers might not visit.
    Three of the five seemed to be overweight. Either that, or their clothing was thick and bulky. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought they were all men. One had already stripped off his camouflage jacket and tied it around his waist. He seemed to be wearing a black bandana around his head. A real Rambo character. One of the fitter-looking ones was tall and blond, standing apart from the others and shielding his eyes to stare up at the mountains.
    Chris wished he had binoculars. He delved into the rucksack again, realising he hadn’t checked every pocket. But though he felt around inside, he didn’t find any.
    It was as if Rose had given him not quite enough to survive, and on purpose.
    She wants me to lead them on, survive just long enough for her to do her thing.
He wished he didn’t think that, but he could not deny the logic of the idea. She wanted to kill the people she called the Trail; those who organised the hunt, not the hunters themselves. And to do so the hunt had to continue, and she had to draw them in. If he escaped too quickly and his family were killed, her own venture might be over.
    Until this happened to some other poor bastard.
    But he had his own reason to lead on the hunt and not escape. She knew that, and if what she had told him about her own murdered family was true, she knew it better than him. If he escaped, his family would die.
    ‘I need to stay alive. But I can’t escape.’ It was impossible. He could see no good ending to this, and he felt like curling up and crying it all away.
Man up
, Terri would have said, laughing ironically because over the past few years, when his love of the outdoors had led to new, more extreme adventures, he’d become what she sometimes called ‘gnarly’.
You’re just a bit dangerous
, she’d sometimes say to him, and he could tell that she liked that.
    ‘Harden the fuck up,’ he said.
    He looked down the hillside again, and three of the five hunters had vanished. In the few seconds that he’d spent looking through the rucksack and feeling sorry for himself, they must have spread out and started up the mountainside, secreting themselves behind scattered rocks and clumps of vegetation. He squinted and scanned close to the road, but he could only see two. Rambo was advancing slowly up the slope, making no effort to hide. Close behind him came another man, fat and already struggling.
    The helicopter started powering up. Something glinted from its interior, the sun glaring from glass, and Chris realised that they were looking for him. They must have spotted him as they were descending, and now one of the bastards from the Trail was trying to give the hunters a head start. He crouched down further, realising that the sudden movement was the worst thing he could have done.
    He didn’t hear the shouted instructions, because they were too far away. But looking between rocks, he could see the shape in the helicopter pointing directly up at his position.
    As the aircraft doors closed and it lifted away in a violent storm of dust, something smacked from a rock thirty feet to his left. It took him a moment to realise it had been a bullet.
    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