Before

Rebekah threw her cell towards the man and closed her eyes.

Her fingers were laced through her brother’s.

She was waiting for the shot, for the sound to rip across the forest, for the force of the bullet to tear her away from Johnny’s grip.

But it never did.

She heard Roxie before she saw her: a brief patter on her left, the crunch of frozen grass, then a pained wail from the man who’d come to kill them.

Rebekah’s eyes snapped open.

The man hit the ground. She heard the rustle of his body rolling down the slope, the dog following him, teeth bared, one of her paws embedded in the side of his face. As soon as the man hit the trail, the dog came again, scratching at him, ferocious, unrelenting. Rebekah glanced at Johnny, he at her, and could see they were thinking the same thing. This was it.

This was their chance.

Run.

Rebekah grabbed her cellphone off the ground and they sprinted in the direction from which they’d entered the gully. Behind them, the dog growled, the grass crunched, the man said something – a shout, almost a yell, unintelligible – and then, suddenly, there was a gunshot.

He just killed Roxie.

Rebekah couldn’t look back. Instead, she accelerated, heading up the side of the gully, back towards the main path that would take them to the dig site. As they did, another shot rang out, hitting a tree to their left. The trunk detonated, spitting bark into her eyes, and as Johnny broke through to the main path at the top, Rebekah stumbled and hit the ground four feet behind him. She started crawling on her hands and knees, her eyes shut, sore from the dust, her palm piercing on broken branches.

She felt Johnny grab her under the arm and drag her the rest of the way onto the main path, then another shot rang out. Johnny grabbed her a second time, and as she cleared her eyes, she saw him, just ahead of her, in a crouch. A third shot, a fourth. One hit another tree, the other disappeared into the forest. Rebekah looked back again, over her shoulder. One eye was still closed, the other blurred, watering, but she could see enough.

The man was coming.

She scrambled to her feet and started running hard, following Johnny back along the trail. Her eye was still watering, but it had cleared, and she remembered all the running she’d done as a kid. Her performances for her county had got her the scholarship to the private school. Another shot rang out. But she wasn’t running for the finish line any more.

She was running for her life.

Another gunshot. Another.

Was that six now? Seven?

She tried to think how many bullets were in a gun, how many would be in the type of gun that the man had, and how many he would have left. But it was taking all her focus and energy just to run, to put one foot in front of the other, to watch where her feet were landing. In front of her, Johnny batted away a succession of branches, but his eyes were constantly flicking back to check that Rebekah was still with him.

Another shot.

And then a second almost instantly.

This time, Rebekah was knocked off balance.

It took her a split second to react, to process and understand what had happened. Then she looked down and saw a hole in the outer edge of her coat. A bullet had passed right through it, millimetres from her left hip. White insulation spilled out of the hole, black marks scorched the circumference – and, in the moment it took her to look, she’d taken her eyes off the contours of the path. Her foot caught on a stray tree root. She tumbled forward, smashing into a tree.

Black.

It lasted a couple of seconds.

As Rebekah pinged back into focus, confused, she saw the man – fifty feet away – looking in her direction. She glanced, to see if Johnny was nearby, but he was gone. He didn’t know she’d fallen.

Where Johnny had gone, the trees formed a kind of mouth, the trail darkening, the canopy drawn together. She looked again at the man, even closer now, his gun up in front of him, then to the path. When Johnny came back for her – because he would, she knew he would – he’d be a sitting duck. The way the path wound and closed, he would never even see the man until it was too late.

Don’t come back for me, Johnny.

Please don’t come back.

But then she heard him calling for her.

‘Bek?’

His voice, short and desperate.

‘Bek!’

She sprang to her feet.

The instant she did, the man caught sight of her. He fired into the trees, the bullet fizzing past her and hitting a pale, scrawny oak to her right. She headed away from the path, away from Johnny, deeper into the forest, looking over her shoulder to make sure the man was following her. He broke from the path into the undergrowth, kicking and chopping his way through a maze of vines and scrub. Rebekah heard Johnny calling her name again, further off now – his voice like a cry from another room – and then, finally, the sound changed: it was just the noise of Rebekah, stumbling, and her pursuer, breathless, behind her.

He shot at her again.

It came close, a low hiss in the air to her right, but then she veered left, making use of a break in the scrub and tried to alter her direction. Somewhere – so far off she wasn’t even sure if she was hearing things – Johnny called her name again, and then the ground became uneven. As trees clotted around her, the forest floor pocked, and her ankle jammed into a hole, five inches deeper than the rest of the terrain. It jarred the whole side of her body, ankle to hip. She’d barely even lifted it out when she hit another, less deep but much wider, and this time her ankle rolled into the empty space.

She fell.

Her hands cushioned her, but the impact still hurt. Every part of her hurt. She was so scared her bones ached. She pushed herself up, stumbling forward, hitting a tree, bouncing away from it, then hitting another.

She fell a second time.

Beneath her, the ground had altered again: it was starting to slope away from her, and she could hear something. She could smell it too: salt.

She was nearing the coast.

Maybe I can find help there, she thought, clambering to her feet. There might be people or fishing boats. She looked behind her, to see where the man was, to see how much distance he’d gained on her, and faltered.

Where was he?

A shot rang out.

The bullet came so close it was like she could feel the air move in the spaces beside her head. Her immediate reaction was to shield herself with her arm, protect her eyes, her skull, even though it was too late, even though the flesh and bone in her arm would be as effective as paper if he got the next one on target. As she did, she wobbled, the lunge of her arm shifting her weight – and she took a jolting step into another hollow. Her cellphone fell out of her pocket. Loose change went with it.

And then she started to tumble.

This time, there was nothing to stop her.

The ground dropped away beneath her: she’d been on the edge of another gully, but this one was smaller, much deeper, and disguised by a swathe of scrub. She went straight through the scrub, taking some of it with her as she tried to stop herself falling, and hit the sides of the gully hard. One roll, another, another, each one faster, each turn of her body pounding so hard against the frozen ground it was like a series of grenade blasts going off inside her. Halfway down, she pierced her head on something sharp – a branch, a root, the pain an immense flare along her face and neck – and then she landed so hard in a bed of dead, dried leaves it sucked all the breath from her. Leaves puffed up around her. Her body became cocooned by them. And then she became still.

She stared up at the sky.

It was grey, like dead skin.

Is this it?

Is this the end?

She tried to reach a hand to her face, to the injury she could feel next to her right ear, but it felt like everything had disconnected. Her arms weren’t doing what she was asking them to do. Her chest was on fire. Her breath was catching, and when she tried to clear her throat, she wheezed. Seconds later, everything smeared. There was blood in her eyes.

Briefly, her vision went red.

And then, once again, everything turned to black.