The flash drive contained a single video file.
Seven days had passed since Travis had handed it to her, and Rebekah had watched it hundreds of times. She knew every single inch of it, every word, every blur, every accidental tilt and stumble. After a while, viewing it was like watching a flower die and grow simultaneously. Much of it she could barely even look at, yet she did, because the rest, much more of it, she cherished.
That night, after meeting the missing persons’ investigator and trading cellphone numbers, she collapsed into the couch – the sun bleeding out in the sky, the girls in bed – and opened her laptop. A video window was already up.
As night slowly began to creep into the room, for a long time all she did was stare at the freeze-framed image on the screen, thinking of something her father had said to her in the days and weeks before he died.
Even the dead can talk.
In the end, he’d been right.
She pressed Play.
An image of Johnny started to move. He was mostly out of shot to start with but Rebekah knew exactly where he was: on the track leading up from the parking area at Simmons Gully towards the Loop. He was halfway, breath in front of his face. This was minutes after Rebekah had fallen into the gully.
Minutes after Lima thought he’d killed her.
Johnny was frightened. He didn’t know if he was doing the right thing in leaving Rebekah. He’d gone back, hadn’t been able to find her, thought the next best thing was to try to get help. But now she could see he’d lost confidence.
Now he felt as if he’d abandoned his sister.
Even so, he kept going, running, the video jarring and disorienting. Then he slowed again, seemed to remember he was holding the dashcam, and stopped. Briefly, he started turning it, trying to find something on it. The image was upside down, on the side, facing one way and then another: Travis had told Rebekah that no one had been quite sure what Johnny was trying to do. But she knew. On the drive to Montauk, Johnny had asked about the dashcam, and she’d told him Gareth had installed it, and that he’d said the dashcam had an emergency response feature that sent out an SOS if you were in a car accident. That was what Johnny was looking for in these moments. That was why he’d smashed the window of the Cherokee to get at the dashcam. He’d thought there was a button on it he could press. He’d thought, in lieu of him having his cellphone, it might get them found.
But, very quickly, he stopped looking.
Because that wasn’t how the SOS function worked.
There was no button to press.
He broke into a sprint again, the dashcam still recording the spaces behind him, the ground, a skewed angle on the trees. He was running with it in his left hand. At one point, his legs turned and he was looking behind him, and as his body swivelled, he slowed, and the noise died for a moment.
There was the sound of a car engine in the background.
Lima.
He was coming.
Johnny started running again, faster, the picture a blur of movement. It became almost impossible to see anything clearly – until, out of nowhere, the dashcam came up to Johnny’s face, as if he’d suddenly thought of something. The angle wasn’t perfect: the camera was on the back of the dashcam, so the screen was facing away from him. He had no real idea if he was in shot or not.
‘I don’t know if anyone will ever see this,’ he said, and although Rebekah had heard him say the same words countless times, something twisted inside her as he spoke. ‘Someone’s trying to kill us.’ His voice frayed. He was terrified – of leaving Rebekah, of what might have happened to her, of what was going to happen to him. ‘My sister … I don’t know where my sister is. She might be …’
Dead already.
He faded out, glanced behind him.
For a second, when his face came back to the camera, he was white, the fear so utterly paralysing it seemed to have collapsed him, altered his features somehow. But then he looked behind him again, down the track, the forest on all sides of him – bleak, rigid, wind crackling in the dashcam’s speaker – and it was like he understood that this might be his last chance to say something.
‘Bek,’ he said simply, his eyes watering from the cold, from her name and what it meant to him. Wind ripped through the trees. Johnny looked away again, behind him, and now there was a clear speck at the bottom of the track.
It was Stelzik’s Chevy.
When Johnny turned back, there was terror in his face again – terrible, consuming – and it cleaved Rebekah in two.
He knew he couldn’t outrun a car or a gun.
‘If anyone ever finds this, if my sister’s still alive, tell her that I love her.’ He looked behind him. He was crying properly now. The cold had nothing to do with it: as the Chevy closed on him, tears were running into the corners of his mouth. ‘I never said it enough. Maybe I never said it at all …’
He blinked more tears away.
‘I love you so much, Bek.’
‘I love you too, Johnny,’ Rebekah said quietly.
And, finally, the screen went black.
To start with, Rebekah could find no good in what she’d been through. Nothing positive. Nothing she could use. Mostly, she tried not to think about all that had happened to her, reducing it to a scar in her past.
Yet as time went on, as her memories became greyer, as her pain began to subside just a little, in the cord of that scar, she discovered one profound and undeniable truth.
I know who I am now.
I know what I do.
So, whenever the doubts came back in the months and years that followed, whenever her courage threatened to take flight, she would return to that truth. She would tell herself who she was and what she’d become.
And she would promise herself never to forget.
My name is Rebekah.
And I survive.