Before

Blackness gradually gave way to a vague grey light.

When the muscles of her face moved, they felt starched, and Rebekah realized it was because her blood had congealed and dried. The wound was above her jawline, close to her ear; every time it throbbed, it sent a spear of pain across her nose and forehead, and into her neck and shoulders.

She tried to blink.

That didn’t work either.

She could smell the blood, taste it, but mostly it was in her eyes. When she tried to open them, she couldn’t: the blood had acted as an adhesive, binding her lashes together.

Finally, she wrenched them open, and as she saw where she was, she remembered falling, the ground giving way beneath her, her last desperate attempt to cling to something as she tumbled. The whole thing was over in seconds, but that had only disguised the distance she’d come. This gully was deeper than the one in which they’d found Stelzik, the sides much steeper, almost vertical. If she’d been descending on foot, she would have had to do it leaning back, with a hand pressed behind her, or on her ass.

And then she thought of something else.

Why was she still alive?

Where was the man who’d tried to kill her?

Rebekah froze as she pictured him, his green eyes, as she remembered what he’d done to Stelzik, to Roxie, how he’d tried to march her and Johnny up to the spot in the tree roots to kill them. And then, as her head filled with an image of her brother, she panicked. Where was he? Had the man gone after him?

Was Johnny dead?

The idea sent a tremor through her throat.

Slowly, she raised a hand, her muscles stiff, then tried to shift the rest of her body. Pain on her left side, in her skull, her neck, right the way down the centre of her chest. After a couple of failed attempts, she managed to sit up and tried to move her legs back and forth. She was looking for sprains, fractures, breaks. Miraculously, the only injury was on her face. She touched a couple of fingers to the wound.

It felt bad.

Skin was flapping like paper, and as she moved again, trying to get onto her knees, she felt a trail of fresh blood break free from the cut and trace the outline of her cheekbone. Out here, in the middle of a forest, and especially because of how she’d fallen, there was a good chance the cut was dirty, filled with debris. She needed to get it cleaned and dressed.

Using a nearby tree as an anchor, she hauled herself up. Bones creaked. She paused, checking her pants for her phone. Shit. No phone – but she still had the keys to the Cherokee in her pocket.

As she started to look around, at the floor of the gully, at the scrub and vines and swathes of thick brush, she remembered why she didn’t have her cell: it had spilled out of her pants as she fell; all her loose change had gone too. The phone was still at the crown of the slope somewhere.

Slowly, she headed up there on her hands and knees.

She felt a hundred years old and heavy as concrete. Her hands became filthy, coated in mud, and leaves, and chips of ice. She wiped more blood away with her sleeve as she got to the top, still breathless after the climb, and started scanning the area for her cell. Eventually, she found the place at which she’d gone down the slope into the gully, the ground disturbed, her footprint visible. Close by, loose change was dotted like jewels.

But there was no cellphone.

He must have taken it.

She looked around the forest, suddenly worried that this was all part of the game, that the man might still be somewhere close by, watching, but she couldn’t see him. So why had he left her alive?

Picking up her change, she scanned her surroundings again. The trail she’d broken away from, the trail she and Johnny had been following back to the dig site, was just about visible through the trees. It looked quiet. The whole place looked quiet: in the time she’d been out, the wind had died right down and the weather had changed. There was no blue sky now, just an infinite grey ceiling of cloud. And it was even colder than before, the air raw. In desperation, she began searching for her phone again, not just so she might be able to make a call, but to find out the time.

She had no idea how long she’d been out.

A minute? Five? Longer?

I need to find Johnny.

She got back onto the trail and tried to pick up her pace. She wanted to run, but what if the man heard or saw her? Under the canopy of trees, inside the section she’d last seen Johnny pass into, she realized how cold she was. Her coat and hoodie were both wet from the ground, muddied from the leaves. She could still feel blood and dried saliva on her face. She wiped at her cheek with her sleeve, smearing blood across her lips, and – briefly – thought of calling out for Johnny. But she stopped herself, thinking of the man once again. If he was close by, he’d instantly know that she’d made it out of the gully.

She headed back in the direction of the car.

It took her twenty minutes to get to the Cherokee, with no sign of the man or Johnny on the way. Where are you, John? Please don’t be dead.

I can’t handle this on my own.

Then she noticed that Stelzik’s Chevy was gone.

Had the man taken it?

Or Johnny?

She looked around her, and as she did, she caught sight of herself in the windshield. She took a step closer to the glass. Blood covered one side of her face, an eruption of it from a hole-like injury next to her ear. The cut looked worse than it had felt when she’d been poking around with her fingers – blacker, deeper – and when she tried to wipe blood away from her cheek, most of it had dried solid. When she used a little saliva, all it did was spread. The whole area was like an explosion of red dye.

Leaning further in towards the glass, she turned her head to get a better view of the injury and something occurred to her.

Her mind spun back to the moments before she’d tumbled into the gully: one of the bullets had passed so close to her face, it was like she’d felt the air move. It was what had knocked her off balance and triggered the fall.

As she’d descended into the gully, she’d injured herself.

She’d smashed her head on something.

And then she’d hit the ground and she’d bled across her face, and she’d lain there – with that side of her head showing – absolutely and perfectly still.

She’d been that way because she was unconscious.

But if the man had come to the edge of the gully, if he’d looked down and seen her lying there – and especially when he’d seen all the blood, and the shape and appearance of the wound next to Rebekah’s ear – it would have looked like something else: a kill. Instantly, he would have switched his attention to going after Johnny because he’d have believed that the reason Rebekah fell, the reason she ended up in the gully, was him.

That was why the man wasn’t here.

That was why Rebekah was still breathing.

He thought he’d shot her in the head.