The Hunt Read Free

steered her away from her horrible dreams. For a time, at least.
    After eating a breakfast of fruit and yoghurt she pulled the pistol from beneath the mattress and tucked it into her belt.
    She brewed coffee and switched on her laptop. The caravan was small and basic but suited her needs perfectly. She’d bought a new fridge and decent bedding, but the van’s outside was as mouldy and worn-looking as when she’d first seen it. Five hundred pounds and it was hers. The farmer took a chunk of cash from her each week for ground rent and silence, and he was happy to ask no questions. That was fine. She never stayed in one place for more than a few weeks.
    Drinking strong coffee, humming quietly, she started scanning her usual news sites. But the memory of her nightmare was strong. She closed her eyes and breathed in coffee fumes, because every time she thought of her family the grief was rich, deep, and sometimes crippling. She dreaded forgetting them, though sometimes remembering was almost too much.
    But her dreams and memories fed her fury. She knew that her current existence was a form of self-imposed limbo, and everything she did now would lead to an eventual resolution. Perhaps then she could lay her nightmares to rest, and true grieving could begin.
    There was no news that drew her attention today. The usual political infighting, celebrity inconseque‌ntialities, far-away conflicts. She looked for murders or unexplained deaths. She sought news on kidnappings and shootings, unidentified bodies found strangely mutilated in city or countryside. Anything that might lead to the Trail.
    As usual, nothing.
    But something felt different today. Her nightmare clung on, and even though she had found nothing obvious on the net, perhaps today was the day to check again.
    Rose gulped down the rest of her coffee in one and then opened a new browsing window.
    She didn’t like doing this too often. She accessed the net via a proxy server in London, had a rolling defence protocol that would lock her out at the first sign of being tracked, used no identifying markers or traceable elements, yet she knew that they had far more expertise at their disposal than her. Rose liked to amuse herself by thinking about some of the online contacts she’d made and how much stuff she had access to that would give the heads of the CIA and MI5 panic attacks. But accessing the Trail’s own network was like dipping her toe into a river of alligators. It was only so long before she was noticed and they came for her.
    She would only allow that to happen on her own terms.
    She slipped by several firewalls and surfed communications she could not yet decipher. It was pretty standard traffic that she’d seen before, so she withdrew and re-entered under another address, creating an avatar that would easily be mistaken as a particularly intrusive trollbot, if anyone noticed it at all. Most trollbots’ aims were to spread viruses or collect information. Hers was simply to observe. She’d given it a variety of source links which flickered and rolled every three seconds – a sex-drug site; a Nigerian billionaire with money to get out of the country; a guaranteed tip to increase cock size. She hoped that, draped in the paraphernalia of a million other trolls, hers was all but invisible.
    While her laptop worked, she made more coffee. It was her one vice, and had been for three years.
    For almost a year after escaping the Trail and finding Adam and her children murdered, she’d drowned herself deep in London’s underworld. Her first thought had been to go to the police, but even then the shadow of the Trail remained over her, and the promises of harm they had levelled against her extended family and friends had felt even more real. They had proven themselves sickeningly brutal.
    Then came the revelation that she was wanted for her family’s slaying. In a way, that was the worst abuse of all – the way they had framed her, made a mockery of her love and grief.