Huntress

by Amanda Radley

  Sitting forward, she returned to the camera in the coffee shop, found a random day, and watched Cara’s arrival. She winced again at her overly keen behaviour towards the mysterious woman. She didn’t realise how obvious she had been until she had seen it repeated back to her.

  She watched as Cara sat at her usual table. Always the same table. Amy had come to think of it as Cara’s table.

  She really is a creature of habit, Amy mused to herself.

  Her expression softened as she watched Cara talking to her. Seeing the interaction on the screen was such a different experience to living through it. In real time, Amy was always nervous and terrified of saying the wrong thing. When Cara left, she often found herself struggling to remember the exact details. But the recording was unemotional, factual. The clarity it offered proved something that Amy had always wondered about.

  “She is flirting with me,” she whispered.

  She tried in vain to remember the exact details of the conversation as she watched Cara invite her to sit at her table. Cara was speaking in hushed tones, making Amy giggle and blush. Amy looked at her recorded self and smiled. She looked so happy. Cara looked like she was sharing a secret with her, leaning in close and whispering something. Amy felt her cheeks burn at the memory. She watched on, even as her recorded self turned away to avoid Cara’s intensely warm look.

  “What was that?”

  She hit the pause button.

  She stared at the screen, shocked.

  Slowly, she started to move the recording, frame by frame. Wondering if she had seen what she thought. She leaned forward, feeling the heat of the screen against her face as she carefully watched. Frame by frame she stared. Waiting for the moment.

  She hit the pause button.

  She sat back and swallowed nervously. The paused screen showed it clearly. It all became so obvious. Cara wasn’t flirting with the awkward, bumbling coffee shop worker with no prospects. She was distracting her. Waiting for the second that Amy turned away so she could attach something to the underside of the table.

  Amy swallowed again, trying to get some moisture back into her mouth which was suddenly bone dry. Tears were starting to form in her eyes. She quickly blinked, wiping the stray moisture away with her sleeve.

  She focused on the screen again and grabbed the speed switch with a shaky hand. She sped up the recording, flying through the day. She watched as blurs came and went. Happy to see the traitorous Cara gone. Happy to see Cara’s precious table being occupied by others. The shift change came in the afternoon. She watched as she left the services, waving to her colleague Daniel as she left.

  She sped up the recording even more. The evening crowd came in, and the place was busy with commuters on their way home. As quickly as the hundreds of customers arrived, they left. She watched Daniel work the lonely night shift, cleaning the tables and shutting down some of the machines in the shop.

  Something caught her attention, and she released the switch, resetting the playback to normal speed before quickly rewinding and watching the last customer again.

  A man entered just before the coffee shop closed. He placed an order for takeaway and gestured his cup in farewell to Daniel. Daniel said goodbye and then returned to the back room. The moment he did, the customer slipped his hand under a table, Cara’s table, before leaving. It was so smooth. So slick. As if he did it every day.

  She rushed through more recordings. Every morning, Cara arrived and waited for Amy to be distracted before placing something under the table. Every evening the man arrived and removed it. The man was tall with black spiky hair, but was always shielding his face from the cameras. He seemed to know exactly where each one was. He skilfully looked in other directions as he passed each lens.

  She blew out a long breath.

  “Fuck.”

  Amy didn’t know what she was looking at, but whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  “What were you up to, Cara?”

  She turned around to check that she wasn’t being watched before nervously dragging her fingers through her long hair. Looking back to the screens, she accessed the last day that she saw Cara. She watched as the now-usual occurrence happened. In the split second that Amy looked away, Cara placed something under the table. Amy sped time up and landed on the evening when the man came and removed the item.

  Leaning close to the screen, she blitzed through to the Monday morning Cara never showed. She played through the day at a faster speed, her eyes straining with the effort of tracking the fast-moving blurs. She slammed the pause button upon seeing one particular blur. A blur she would recognise anywhere. Cara.

  She looked at the time index and realised that Cara had come in on Monday after all. She’d just come in the afternoon, when Daniel was on shift.

  “Daniel. Shit, I didn’t think to ask Daniel. Stupid.”

  Cara looked different. She was hurrying. Gone was her usual grace as she stormed across the café, looking over her shoulder as she went. Amy found herself mesmerised by the image. Cara always looked so put together. Calm and impressive. But now she was a mess. She was frightened. She approached her usual table in the empty coffee shop and hesitated a moment. Amy leaned closer to the screen, she watched Cara look around. It was almost as if she thought she was being watched. A moment later she turned to leave, pausing to place something under a different table before she left.

  Amy felt her eyebrows rise at the change in procedure. Her hand went to the speed dial, and she watched the coffee shop carefully as she sped up proceedings. The evening came, Daniel cleaned as he always did. The man entered the coffee shop and placed his takeaway order. He didn’t look any different. Unlike Cara, he wasn’t stressed or scared, he waited patiently for his drink before gesturing goodbye to Daniel as usual.

  His calm demeanour left him when he looked under the usual table and found it empty.

  “Hah!” Amy laughed, feeling vindicated.

  Panic seemed to grow in the unidentified man as he frantically searched a couple of nearby tables.

  “Ooh!” Amy whistled low. “Warmer, warmer... nah, cold, cold... freezing, mate. Stone bloody cold.”

  He gave up and rushed away from the coffee shop without looking back. Amy slammed her hand on the pause button. She leaned back in the chair and thought about what she had seen. She feared that she didn’t want to delve too deeply into what had just played out before her. She’d uncovered something that probably should have stayed secret. But now she was too involved, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to let it go.

  She reset the cameras and screens to the way she found them and left the security office.

  Her mind was swimming with questions, but on top of them all she had one goal. That goal caused her to walk faster down the corridor. She sped along, bursting through the double doors and into the public area of the services. Ignoring the people who dawdled in front of her, sidestepping the wooden giraffe purchasing octogenarian, she entered the coffee shop. Ignoring the line of people hovering grumpily around the “Be right back” sign, she marched to the table at the edge of the shop.

  Blowing out a deep breath, she bent down and looked at the underside of the table. She gasped when she saw it. With a shaky hand, she reached up and unfastened the black object. She turned it around in her hand and swallowed. It was a USB stick, fastened with black tape. Discreet enough to be overlooked from a distance, hidden in the groove of the table.

  “Excuse me, are you serving?”

  Amy looked up at a man in his sixties. He looked down, completely ignoring the fact that she was grovelling on the floor and picking strange objects from the underside of tables. It was one of the fascinating social elements of the services. The services were a place out of step with the rest of the world. To its visitors, it wasn’t a place of importance, it was just a random building that people visited for urgent supplies.

  To this man, she was just a worker. Someone who pushed the complicated buttons on the machines that provided him with a hot drink.
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  It was the anonymity of the services that attracted Amy. She was just a worker in a building that people didn’t understand. The building was an oasis in a desert, somehow not real. The people who stopped at that building were vulnerable and honest. They were tired, hungry, and thirsty. They were people out of time, existing in a place that didn’t seem real. Everything between stopping their car and restarting their journey was disposable, wasted time.

  Amy stood up and smiled at him. “Of course, what can I get for you?”

  4

  Go, Go, Go!

  The morning had raced by in a sea of bewildered and tired faces mixed with complicated orders. Despite this, Amy loved serving members of the public. She had always enjoyed dealing with people. Even at a young age she had set up a shop in her front garden and sold all her toys to the neighbourhood children. Of course, her mum had been furious when she found out. Especially as Amy’s grasp of finance was nowhere near as good as her customer service skills.

  No two days at the services were ever the same. Some familiar faces appeared, but the vast majority were just passing through. Amy loved to watch the throngs of people and wonder what everyone’s stories were. Motorway service stations were magical places, places where people came together no matter their differences. During a long journey, it didn’t matter who you were, everyone needed to pee.

  Obviously, it wasn’t all fun. Amy was reminded of that as she cleaned the coffee filter, watching in disgust as large lumps of used coffee grounds fell into the bin.

  “Excuse me?”

  “One second, my love,” Amy called out over her shoulder.

  The other joy of the services was that it was her own little bubble. Her home away from home. She could be herself without fear of judgement. And if she was judged, well, who cared? She’d never see that person again anyway. If she wanted to use old-fashioned terms of endearment to strangers, she could. No one ever complained. It was an unwritten rule of the services. You could do whatever you liked when you were an oasis in the middle of long stretches of tarmac.

  She turned around, wiping her hand on her apron before looking up and smiling at her next customer. Recognition hit her and she faltered for a moment, struggling to keep the smile on her face.

  Luckily, he was looking around the café and not at her. Hopefully he hadn’t noticed her initial shocked expression.

  “Hi,” she said, attracting his attention.

  “You seen a USB stick?”

  Amy swallowed. It was definitely him. Tall with black, spiky hair. The man who took the USB stick from under the table every evening. She licked her lips as her brain struggled to give her any information to work with.

  She wondered if she should ask him where Cara was. Would he know? Maybe he was the reason she went missing? But surely, Amy pondered, he was a colleague in whatever Cara was doing. Her desire to find, and potentially save, Cara was warring loudly with her desire to get the intimidating man in front of her to leave.

  “Nope.” She popped the P loudly. She shook her head and pretended to look around the counter. “Nope, no USB stick. I mean, USB stick? Like a flash drive?”

  He looked at her and let out a sigh. “Yeah. Flash drive, memory stick, USB stick. Little black thing that plugs into a computer and saves files? I lost mine in here a couple of days ago. I really need to find it. It must be here.”

  She leaned one arm on the counter, trying to appear casual as she looked up at him. “Wow, that’s bad luck, um, no. Not seen one.”

  He looked at her, and Amy felt for sure he was reading her mind. Somehow, he picked up on her lies and knew that the USB stick he sought was in her backpack in her staff locker in the break room. The more she thought about it, the more she was sure that he was able to peer into her mind.

  He reached into his pocket, and Amy held her breath for a second. He pulled out a business card with just a phone number on it.

  “If you find it, call me. There’s ten quid in it for you.” He placed the card on the counter and turned and left.

  “Ten whole pounds?” Amy muttered under her breath when she was sure he was out of hearing range. “Whatever would I do with such riches?”

  She picked up his card and turned it over and back again. She looked at it thoughtfully. Despite the pathetic finder’s fee, he was clearly desperate for the USB stick. She wondered what was on it and why Cara was exchanging it with him.

  What do you put on a USB stick? She leaned on the counter and stared at the business card. I put holiday photos from Malaga on mine.

  She smiled to herself as she wondered if there were pictures of Cara on the USB stick. She shook her head. She was being silly again; this was a time to be serious. Cara was missing. Probably tied up in a basement somewhere, and Amy was the only person who could rescue her. The only person who cared that she was missing.

  Maybe the USB stick had information on where she was being held? Maybe she left it elsewhere for Amy to find. She had once complimented Amy on the thoroughness of her cleaning. Presumably she thought Amy would find the USB stick and launch an immediate rescue.

  Sadly, Cara didn’t know that Amy rarely cleaned the café. Most of that was left to Daniel on the nightshift. In fact, the only reason Amy got up at four o’clock in the morning was so that she didn’t have to clean. Working the morning and early afternoon shift meant that she was busy. And even when she wasn’t busy, she was still too busy to clean.

  It was two o’clock, and her last break of the day finally came. She hung up the sign on the till and hurried into the staff area. She pulled her keys out and unlocked the Hello Kitty padlock on her locker. It wasn’t strictly necessary to unlock the flimsy device; one good tug and it would fall open. Her theory was that the better the padlock, the higher the quality of the goods inside. Who would bother to break into a locker with a Hello Kitty padlock? Surely, most people would pity the adult who was poor enough to use the miniature padlock from the pink and glitter-coated diary they got for Christmas ten years ago?

  She heaved out the large backpack, cursing Kerry for picking today of all days to do a trial run for camping. With a struggle, she lifted the backpack to the table. She opened the top clasp and pushed aside clothing and supplies to look for her laptop.

  Of course, she knew she’d gone a little overboard with the packing. The last time she went camping she forgot her knickers, and she was damned if she was ever going to be caught out again. This time, some fifteen years later, she was prepared for any eventuality. Even if they were camping in Kerry’s dad’s back garden. Kerry’s dad was minted, so his back garden was similar to sleeping in Richmond Park. There was a high probability of animals. Probably only moles and the occasional badger, but Amy would be prepared nonetheless.

  Returning her attention to the task, Amy booted up her laptop. She looked around to check she was alone before pulling her Pez dispenser out of a small compartment within her bag. She opened the Pez dispenser and removed the USB stick. Her stomach still regretted the decision to eat all the sweets in the container to make room to hide the device. Still, sacrifices had to be made.

  She put the USB stick into the laptop and watched as it automatically opened. The folders and files had long, complicated names that made no sense to her. She cocked her head to one side as she looked at the data.

  “Is this code? Is Cara a programmer?”

  She moved her finger over the trackpad as she looked at the folders. She eventually decided on a random one and clicked to open it. Inside were more files comprised of more confusing file names.

  Amy scrunched up her face and navigated back to the root directory. She chose another folder and was confronted with the same complex file names that made no sense.

  “Hand it over!”

  Amy jumped at the intrusion. She shook her head and let out a sigh. She couldn’t believe that the freak from the coffee shop had followed her.

  “Look, Spiky, this isn’t even yours, okay? And this is a restricted area, so you need to leave.�
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  “Hand it over, now.” He took a menacing step towards her.

  “Um, how about no?” Amy replied cockily.

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a knife.

  “Whoa, what the hell?” Amy yanked the USB stick from the laptop and took a step back. She picked up her overstuffed rucksack and held it in front of her like a shield. If he wanted to stab her he’d have to go through half a metre of pointless packing.

  He laughed bitterly as he stepped forward. “You have no idea what you are getting yourself into.”

  She took a step backwards, and they slowly circled the cluster of tables in the middle of the room. She held the bag up protectively and gripped the USB stick tightly in her hand. Part of her brain was saying she should hand it over. The other part warned that he may kill her once he had it.

  “The second you plugged that USB stick into your laptop, it connected to the Wi-Fi and activated a signal. People are listening for that signal. You have no idea who is coming. You are mixed up in things you don’t understand.”

  “I’ve got a degree, a First, you could explain it to me.”

  “I’m not kidding around.”

  “Neither am I, don’t let the apron fool you. I’m a member of Mensa. Well, I was until I washed the membership card. Paper? Really? They couldn’t spring for plastic? Technically, I’m still a member. I just couldn’t prove it to you with the card. Not that I wanted to be a member of Mensa, I think it’s a bit pretentious. But, my mum, you know—”

  “Shut up! God, do you ever stop talking?”

  Amy opened her mouth to reply and point out that she often spoke to herself and even spoke in her sleep. But something told her that now was not the moment to volunteer that information.

  “Stop edging towards the door,” he ordered her.

  “Nuh-uh. Dude, no offence, but you have a knife, so I’m not listening to you. You’re probably a murderer.”

  “You want to test that theory?” he asked her.