Hikers - The Collection (Complete Box Set of 5 Books)

by Lauren Algeo

  ‘That’s it,’ he soothed the boy. ‘Just put the gun in your mouth and the pain will be gone.’

  My eyes flicked from one back to the other. The boy had on a dark blue hoodie and jeans, and the hiker had his traditional light shirt and dark trousers. My body twitched with the urge to run over and try to help the boy but I fought down the need. The boy was beyond my help; I couldn’t get myself killed as well.

  The hiker gave an insistent moan. ‘There you go… just reach up and put your finger on the trig…’

  The gunshot was deafening in the stillness and I stumbled back with the suddenness of it – my eyes not wanting to see the messy, red exit hole that appeared in the back of the boy’s head. He pitched forward onto the ground, and to the right of my vision, I saw the hiker’s body doing exactly the same thing. They both collapsed.

  Birds shrieked in the woods in alarm but I could barely hear them through my shock. Were both the boy and the hiker dead? I waited for a long moment with my breath held and neither of them moved. Had the bullet passed through the boy’s skull and somehow hit the hiker after?

  When I was sure the hiker wasn’t going to spring to his feet, miraculously healed, I began to walk towards them. I went to the boy’s body first, part of me still wary of the hiker and not fully trusting that he was dead. I knelt by his torso and gave him a quick once over, just to confirm he was gone. He was face down in the dirt but I didn’t turn him over for fear of leaving any unwelcome DNA. I tried to avoid looking at the horrific cause of his death. No one should have to go like that, but at least it was quick.

  Too quick. The hiker had been mid-sentence and clearly hadn’t expected the boy to shoot so readily. Is that why he’d also died? Because he was still fully immersed in the boy’s mind?

  I plucked up the nerve to go over to the hiker’s motionless body. Unlike the boy, there was no obvious cause of his death. He was also on his front and I poked and prodded as best I could with my elbow to confirm that the wayward bullet hadn’t struck him. Not that I really thought that could be the cause, I’ve shot them at point blank range and they’ve walked away from it. It had to be the mental thing.

  The hiker’s head was angled slightly towards me and his eyes were wide and unblinking. The black seemed to be muted in them so they were more of a dark brown. He was most definitely dead.

  I sat on the ground and stared at both bodies, perplexed. The Grand had been able to kill that other male using just his mind, and now this one had died because he’d been connected to the boy’s mind. There has to be some way for me to utilise that. Preferably without killing myself in the process… unless it’s possible to have more than one hiker in your mind at a time? Could I trap a whole bunch in there before I committed suicide?

  Those are the morbid scenarios that ran through my mind. I knew I had to get out of the woods, in case someone else had heard the shot and came looking for the origin of it, but I felt guilty about leaving the boy there, so close to the hiker who’d killed him. At least he’d extracted his own revenge on him, not that he knew anything about it.

  I settled for calling 999 anonymously and telling the operator that I’d heard a man shouting, followed by a gun shot in the woods. That would send the emergency services speeding there. I made myself scarce as soon as I ended the call. It would be obvious how the boy had died, and easy enough to find out who he was. The hiker would be a mystery for them, a John Doe with no identification or obvious cause of death.

  I travelled back to the flat and stuck another blue pin in my map. Looking at it from my position in the armchair now, it’s getting fuller. There are quite a few pins scattered around the south, and I guess if I took more trips north I’d quickly add to the tally up there.

  They may out number me a lot at the moment, but I know for sure they can die. I just need to find a way to speed up that process.

  6th March 2010

  I nearly died today. Death gripped me with his icy fingers yet I somehow managed to wriggle free. There’s something far worse than a hiker out there… a child hiker. I can’t quite comprehend it yet. It was a little girl and she was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. Stronger than the adults, and more deadly.

  I’m in a hospital bed right now, waiting for it all to sink in. Don’t worry, I’m ok… I think. My head’s bashed up and I’ve had to have stitches, plus I’ve got a broken rib and a couple of fractured ones, but my mental state is really damaged. You see, I took a tumble off a cliff tonight. Sounds pretty bad, right? It was far worse.

  I’m down in Newquay, in the Newquay & District hospital. I came here yesterday morning to find the hiker responsible for an increase in deaths. It wasn’t like anything I’d read about before – the papers called it ‘March madness’. There had been lots of suspicious accidents and suicides in the area over the last week or so. I thought maybe a hiker had gone rogue and I was hoping to find it so I could see how the Grand would deal with it. See if he killed it for disobeying him, so I might be able to decipher exactly how he did it this time.

  There seemed to be a central point that the chaos radiated out from – the Carnewas & Bedruthan Steps. I took a bus there this afternoon from Padstow and found a National Trust Centre on top of the cliffs. It was windy and cold, and I couldn’t detect any sound of a hiker. When it got dark and the Centre shut, I decided to find a room for the night. The hotel there was fully booked so I started hiking back to the nearest town, Trenance.

  After half a mile, I thought I heard the sound of a child crying. I dismissed it as the wind at first but then I heard it again. It was a little girl sobbing. It was creepy in the darkness and I should have known straightaway that something was off about it. The crying was coming from a field near the cliffs.

  I nearly ignored it and carried on walking, only a hidden paternal instinct kicked in and I couldn’t leave a child out there alone if she was lost. She might have wandered away from her parents at the hotel and couldn’t find her way back. It was cold and dangerous that close to the cliffs.

  She shouted ‘mummy!’ faintly and that spurred me into action. I crossed the muddy field towards the sound of her voice. It was nearly pitch black by then so I took off my rucksack to get out my torch and it was then I caught sight of her for the first time, silhouetted against the twilight sky. I called out to her and she turned towards me.

  She was dressed ridiculously for the weather, in a frilly short-sleeved dress, and she only looked about eight years old. I asked if she was lost and she skipped away from me, giggling instead of crying. Her long, curly hair was bouncing in the wind. I started to follow her, shouting that it was dangerous out there. She was suddenly in my head, telling me that it was ‘dangerous in here too.’

  I dropped my rucksack in shock and almost lost my footing. My body was instantly paralysed. I still don’t know how I didn’t see it. Her clothing, her dark eyes, her manner. The surprise was overwhelming. I never expected there to be a child hiker there; before today, I wasn’t entirely sure they even existed.

  I hadn’t heard any peep from her since I’d got to the area but she must have been there the whole time. The sound of her voice was chilling – sickly sweet and feigning innocence. Her power was undeniable though. She told me that she wanted to play. Her lips curved into an evil grin. She came closer and I got my first decent look at her.

  I saw that her hair was lighter; blond ringlets with a blue bow nestled in the right side of her hair. Her dress was like something out of the Victorian era, and she had a matching blue bow tied around her waist and ludicrous black, patent shoes. A ghoulish little girl.

  I was unable to move or speak with her inside my mind. Her presence was so much stronger than any of the adults. She wasn’t trying to hunt through my memories like they had though; she was only interested in playing a game. A flying game, she called it.

  The realisation hammered home. The people in the area who had supposedly killed themselves, including a couple who had jumped from those very cliffs, the girl had
been behind them all. Multiple suicides at her tiny hands. I tried to push her from my head but she didn’t budge.

  She took control of my limbs and I started walking jerkily to the cliff edge. All the while she was skipping in rings around me, wanting to see how far I would go. Chanting part of a nursery rhyme or something that I can’t recall now. The terror was too immense and I couldn’t think clearly. I wanted to throw up but she’d shut down my reflexes.

  Suddenly I was right at the edge with the wind buffeting against my body. I’m sure I would have crumpled under the pressure if she hadn’t held me strong. She pivoted me round to face her and I tried desperately to work out how far the drop to the sea was. It had to be at least fifty metres and I didn’t know if there were jagged rocks lurking below the surface at the base of the cliff, waiting to impale me if the impact alone didn’t kill me.

  The lights of Trenance were burning round to my right but I wasn’t sure if I could swim that far. It had been a long time since I went swimming and the open sea is a little different to a heated pool. Writing this down, it sounds as though I’d already given up at that point, and honestly, I had. There was no way I could force the girl from my mind, the blocking techniques I’ve been practising weren’t enough, so I resigned myself to the fact that I was going over the edge.

  I could have tried to trap her in my mind as I plummeted to my death in order to kill her too, but what good would one dead hiker do? I had to survive to try and kill the rest of them.

  The devil girl sulked that I wasn’t as fun as the other people she’d murdered. I wasn’t begging for my life or fighting her. I knew it was going to happen yet when she actually pushed me backwards (both mentally and physically), I fought to regain my balance. I teetered on the uneven ground then suddenly I was falling, with the child’s satanic laughter ringing in my ears.

  My body was released instantly as she vacated my mind. Clearly I was of no more entertainment to her as I was going to die, and she couldn’t be inside my head when I did. I plunged towards the choppy water; scrabbling desperately for anything I could grab hold of to stop my plummet. The world distorted as my body turned in the air, and I scraped my back and head against the rock wall but I didn’t register any pain then. My stomach had leapt into my throat with that horrible sensation you get on roller coasters; only this wasn’t a ride.

  Somehow the torn fingers on my right hand hooked onto a jutting piece of rock and I jolted to a halt. That one hurt. A jarring pain shot up my neck and my right shoulder was nearly pulled from its socket with the force.

  My head was spinning and I swung there for a couple of seconds. I hadn’t known my heart could pound that hard and adrenaline coursed through my body. It sounds strange but I felt exhilarated. I wasn’t dead yet.

  I worked out that I’d fallen nearly halfway down the cliff and I was still twenty metres or so from the sea level. There was nothing else around me to grab hold of – no rocks to dig my boots into so I could ease the pressure on my arm. I couldn’t climb down, and I definitely wouldn’t be able to stay in that dangling position for long. No one knew where I was so there would be no search party for me. My only option was to drop into the sea.

  I knew I could survive the rest of the drop but I had to get further away from the cliff wall in case there were rocks. I took my chances and kicked away from the wall as hard as I could, at the same moment I released my grip on the rock. Luckily it was enough.

  The impact with the water knocked the breath brutally from my lungs and searing pain tore through my ribcage. I hadn’t considered how cold the sea would be and I was instantly frozen. I kept falling down in the blackness and the tide flung my body wherever it chose.

  Eventually it seemed like I was floating in place, only I had no idea what way the surface was. I’d barely been under for thirty seconds but my lungs were already starting to ache. I opened my eyes to the stinging salt water and there was nothing but darkness. I started to panic and my heavy parka was weighing me down. I managed to shrug it off and it felt like I rose a little. My lungs were burning with the lack of oxygen and my entire body was numb with cold. I fought the instinct to breathe so I wouldn’t inhale a lungful of water.

  I’ve always thought drowning would be one of the worst ways to go. I knew exactly what was happening but I was unable to stop it. I was going to die in the endless blackness. Through the fog in my head I realised that I could hear a pounding sound: it was the waves crashing against the cliff face. That was the way up.

  I kicked for the surface, my chest hitching with the need to take a breath. I flailed my arms and hit the night air. My mouth sucked in the sweet oxygen as I broke the surface and I gasped in as much as I could. It’s amazing how much you take something as important as breathing for granted.

  I wasn’t out of danger yet though. The current was dragging me back towards the cliff face, where I would be trapped by the waves. I began to swim further out to sea as hard as I could. I was wheezing and spluttering, and the pain in my ribs was unbelievable. I couldn’t tell what the damage was through the numbness.

  When I was far enough away from the rocks, I began to swim round towards Trenance. I say swim, but it was more of a one-armed doggy paddle. Every stroke hurt and my head bobbed under the surface more than once.

  It felt like hours before I could make out a beach area with inviting lights. At last my legs struck solid ground and I managed to drag myself to the edge of the beach before collapsing. I’ve never been so physically exhausted. Even the fitness training to join the police force had been a walk in the park compared to that.

  I lay on the sand, panting and shivering violently. I wanted to sleep but I knew I had to get out of my wet clothes and find somewhere warm before the cold killed me. I struggled into a sitting position and went dizzy. When I touched the back of my head there was blood on my fingertips; I’d scraped my head during the fall.

  One thought of the evil little girl still lurking nearby was enough to get me on my feet. The lights from the road seemed so far away though. I focussed on one and walked unsteadily towards it. I knew that I needed to get to a hospital but that would mean questions about what had happened to me.

  I staggered to the top of the beach and saw a woman walking her dog. She was looking at me with that familiar expression: fear, wariness and a hint of alarm. I realise that I probably looked more drunk than injured. I tried to call out for help then my legs gave way and I dropped to my knees. The last thing I remember is the woman rushing over towards me then it all went dark.

  I woke up in the hospital bed that I’m laying in now. I felt extremely groggy when I opened my eyes and my head was throbbing. It hurt to take deep breaths. I was surprised to see the woman from the beach sitting by my bedside. She immediately fetched a nurse when she saw I was awake.

  The nurse was a large, Indian woman with a gentle manner and comforting smile. She told me they’d brought me in by ambulance and I’d been out of it for a couple of hours. They’d already stitched up the wound in my head but were waiting to send me for an x-ray to see if anything was broken.

  The woman from the beach was fairly young and she was staring at me with concern. It was an emotion I hadn’t seen directed at me for a while. She’d called the ambulance for me and been waiting patiently for me to come round. She told me, almost shyly, that she thought I’d tried to kill myself by jumping off the cliffs too, and that she’d wanted me to have someone there when I woke up.

  I assured them both that it hadn’t been a suicide attempt. A lie about taking an evening walk and slipping into the water from some rocks came easily to me and they were quick to accept it – they didn’t want any more tragedy in their town.

  The x-ray showed that I had one broken rib and two fractured ones. They wanted to keep me in for the night in case I had concussion from the blow to my head. The woman left after some gentle persuasion but she promised to phone the hospital in the morning to check up on me. I was finally left alone in the room.

  T
hat was an hour ago and I’ve been trying to digest the whole situation ever since. I feel sick with fear. There are child hikers, powerful ones who are apparently allowed to run rampant in towns. Does the Grand know what the girl has been up to down here? It’s all over the news so I’m guessing he does, but why is he letting the child kill people so publicly when they’re usually so discreet? Is he turning a blind eye while she explores the full strength of her abilities?

  The thought of creepy kids with black eyes wandering the streets makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. Do they have two hiker parents? Are they taught how to do what they do? I can imagine some freaky hiker school to train the future assassins. A satanic version of Hogwarts.

  I’ve checked this room half a dozen times since I got put in here but there’s nowhere for that little girl to hide. It doesn’t stop me feeling as if someone’s watching me though. I know she’s still out there somewhere. The worst part is that I have to go back up to the cliffs as soon as they discharge me tomorrow morning. I dropped my rucksack before my spectacular cliff dive and it’s got my laptop and belongings in.

  Just in case you were wondering why this part is pasted in, dear reader, my journal is in that bag too so I’m using some scrap paper from the hospital. I want to get this all down before I go to sleep and find it faded from my mind when I wake. Not that I think I could forget her blond ringlets, sadistic smile and frilly, white dress. That image will haunt me forever.

  The thought of going back up there fills me with dread. What if she’s still roaming the cliff tops, looking for people to kill? If she sees me, and realises I didn’t die from her little flying game, I’m going to be in for a lot of pain. Who knows what she is capable of?

  I need that stuff back though. I’ve already had to write off my keys and mobile phone – they were in the pockets of my parka, which is now at the bottom of the sea. Luckily I hid a spare set of keys outside the flat as a precaution so I haven’t got to smash my way in when I get back to London. The phone wasn’t that expensive so I’ll just have to get a replacement pay as you go one from the shops. I’ll lose my number and contacts but it’s not like anyone calls me. When I get a new number I’ll email Marcus and Trudy, and I guess, Sue.