Rebekah woke with a start, uncertain for a moment where she was. But then it all pulled into focus: the shelves on either side of her, the debris scattered at her hands and feet. The first-aid kit. The bait needle.
The general store.
Getting to her feet, she looked at the smashed window: a rectangle of butter-coloured light was leaking in and across the room. Next to it was a clock on the wall. The last time she’d checked, it was 5 a.m. Now it was nearly ten.
She’d slept less than five hours.
The pain in her face had got worse during the night, throbbing in the space next to her eye, flaring in her ear, her cheek, her nose. The fishing line, as thin as it was, had been agony going in, the bait needle even worse. She had antiseptic but nothing to numb the pain of stitching herself back together.
Nothing to numb the pain of being in this place.
Alone.
She moved to the broken window. Using the edge of the counter, she hauled herself up and through, trying to avoid the glass still rooted to the frame. She heard something tear, felt the glass snag her pants, but she managed to wriggle through without puncturing her skin. The previous night, she’d used a dumpster to climb up to the window; this morning, it had rolled away from the wall, propelled by the ferocity of the wind, and her feet flailed as she tried to find a solid platform.
She dropped onto the dumpster’s lid, then down into a bed of mulched leaves. When she looked around her, it was like the aftermath of an explosion: branches had been torn from the trees, debris from the harbour was scattered everywhere – roof tiles, clapboards, huge lakes of seawater.
For a moment, as she stood gazing out at the Atlantic, she felt so small, so swamped by the enormity of her situation.
She was still alive. She was still breathing.
She’d survived.
But she was trapped a hundred and one miles of ocean from anywhere.
The thought dragged at her, made her stumble slightly. And then, as that hit home, something else took hold – more urgent and even more desperate.
Johnny.
That was when her eyes landed on the bicycle. It lay on its side outside the store, pretty much exactly where she’d left it the night before. If she was going to find Johnny, she had to go back to the forest: that was where she’d last seen him.
It was where her Jeep was too.
She picked up the bike and started pedalling, her stitched wound hurting as she gritted her teeth, pain streaking all the way down the right side of her head. Pretty soon, it became so bad that her vision blurred. She tried to ignore it, cycling hard out of the town, up onto the road that would take her along the southern flank of the island. The further she rode, the colder she got: it dulled the pain in her face, but it turned her fingers to ice, then any patch of exposed skin. A mile, then a second. By the third, with the cold cutting through her like a knife, she realized she was going to need more clothes, quickly.
Up ahead, a gas station appeared on the left.
She knew she must be close to the forest because she remembered the gas station being nearby the day before, and the houses opposite, boarded up, swamped by weeds and long grass. Her eyes switched back to the gas station: there was a huge pile of old tyres at its rear, hemmed in by a chain-link fence. She hadn’t seen it the day before but in that pile there might be one that fitted the Jeep.
She’d come back later.
For now, all that mattered was Johnny.
She had to find her brother.