The Hunt by T.J. Lebbon

a tree, sliced him from throat to cock, and stuck a lizard inside him. I filmed the whole thing and let the people see
.
    The stories were like a dark star within him, the black hole of his endless, terrible experiences drawing her with a dreadful gravity. They promised experience. He promised help. At last, she perceived a route out of the spiral she had descended into.
    She saw a way to hit back.
    ‘Why are you helping me?’ she asked.
    ‘Am I helping you?’
    Rose nodded. She was sweating in the steamy hotel room, shaking with alcohol withdrawal. Every time she closed her eyes she saw her family as she had found them. With a drink inside her, at least they were sometimes still alive.
    But yes, he was helping her. For the first time in almost a year the future, however bleak, seemed further away than the next drink. She had cast aside initial doubts and suspicions, trying not to worry about just how she had bumped into him, how someone like him happened to find her. She’d even asked him. His response had been that, sometimes, people like them washed up on the same shores.
    So she had assigned their meeting to coincidence. And he had made such promises.
    ‘At first I thought you just wanted to fuck me,’ she said.
    ‘Is that what most men want of you?’
    ‘Hah!’ She shivered, drew a hand over the sweat beading her brow. ‘Only if they’re desperate. And I’ve never let them. Not once.’
    Holt shrugged and stared from the window. Rose couldn’t even remember the name of the little town where they had met, but here in Sorrento it was scorchingly hot, the streets bedlam, and the smells of delicious cooking and rank sewage wafted through the curtains with each breath of sea air. Her mouth watered and her stomach rolled. Four miles east of them people lived in cheap, chaotic housing, while in the harbour’s à la carte restaurants holidaymakers spent a local’s daily earnings on a plate of imported meat. A site of such contradictions seemed a perfect place to hide.
    ‘It’s been a long time since I had a cause,’ he said, turning to face her. He was very still when he spoke, only his mouth and eyes moving. Every movement was spare and necessary. ‘Sometimes my causes were convenient because they paid well. That’s the definition of soldier of fortune, I suppose. On occasion, just now and then, I believed in something. But what you tell me happened to you
…
’ He sighed. ‘It’s the children. Not you. Not your husband. Don’t care what one adult does to another, because it’s the adults who run the world. We can make our own choices, mostly. But when the children are hurt, that’s when I become sad. And angry.’
    The children
, she thought. Less clouded by alcohol than she had been for a long time, yet shaken by the burning need she still felt for blessed oblivion, her memories were becoming richer by the hour. Molly, stabbed behind the ear and left sitting up as if still waiting for her mummy. Isaac, lying in his own blood. Alex, one little hand still clasped in his father’s and his face a mask of dried blood. There were flies on them. They’d been there for so long by the time she found them that time had moved on, and nature had moved in.
    ‘You have children?’ she asked.
    Holt stared from the window, silent. It was as if she’d never asked the question at all. Maybe he’d had children and they were gone, but she could not ask him that. She knew how that would burn.
    ‘I’m ready to learn from you,’ she said. ‘Everything you know. All of it. And I’ll pay you, somehow, one day.’
    Holt turned to her again and his face creased into a smile. He had a beautiful smile. ‘I have almost three million dollars in a bank account in the Seychelles.’
    She raised her eyebrows.
    Holt shrugged gently. ‘What’s a man like me to do with beaches and blue seas?’
    ‘How long will it take?’ Rose asked.
    ‘What?’
    ‘To train me?’
    He laughed as if the very idea was faintly ridiculous.