Lenore leaned over to look at my phone. “I thought only the surrogates survived the reaping.”
“There were a few kids lucky enough not to be home that night. Willem Vandekamp was one of those.” No doubt the murder of his siblings had helped fuel the Spectacle owner’s hatred for cryptids. “Rebecca Essig, Elizabeth’s mom, was another. This coworker of Elizabeth’s thinks it’s ‘beyond coincidental’ that the daughter of a survivor of the reaping has now been arrested as a cryptid. First Rebecca’s sister—I think he’s talking about one of the surrogates—and now her daughter.”
“He thinks the two are related?” Gallagher asked.
“He’s jumping to conclusions,” Lenore insisted.
“I agree. Still...” I couldn’t afford to leave any theory unexplored.
So while Lenore and Gallagher sipped from their Styrofoam cups and stared out at the world to make sure we weren’t being noticed, I went back to Elizabeth Essig’s social media and scrolled through her pictures until I found one where a woman named Rebecca Essig was tagged.
The photo was of a woman about my age, though the clothing said the picture was at least fifteen years old.
I saw only a passing resemblance between mother and daughter. Between her mother and me. No more than I might see in any stranger of similar hair and skin tone passing by on the street.
We could be related. Yet we could just as easily be genetic strangers.
However, Rebecca Essigdidlook familiar. But even after staring at her picture for two straight minutes, I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen her before. Maybe on some “remember the reaping” video they’d made us watch in school. Or in college...
I ran a search for “Rebecca Essig survivor of the reaping.” The results were fewer than I’d expected, until I remembered that there’d been no internet in 1986. Still, after a few clicks, I found what I was looking for in an article written years before by someone studying the long-term psychological effects of the reaping on its few survivors.
Though a certain newly minted PhD named Willem Vandekamp was listed as a prominent contributor, a woman named Rebecca Essig had declined to participate in the study.
“Delilah.”
“Huh?” I didn’t look up from my phone until Lenore began loudly slurping what little remained of her cherry limeade.
“We’ve been sitting here for an hour. The carhop is starting to give us dirty looks on her way to and from the building.”
“You’re saying we should leave?”
“No. I’m saying we should splurge on a couple more hot dogs so we can legitimately sit here a little longer. They’re two-for-one for the next couple of hours, and I’msosick of rabbit stew.”
“Yes. Order them. Do whatever you have to do.”
I searched for “Rebecca Essig family reaping” and scrolled through a bunch of only tangentially related links before it finally occurred to me to click on the image results. The very first image was an ’80s vintage department-store-style family photograph.
A tap on the picture brought up a post from one of Elizabeth Essig’s social media sites from much farther back than I’d scrolled on my earlier visit. She’d captioned the photo, which she’d evidently found when she was helping pack up a storage unit.
“Grandma Nat, Grandpa Will, Mom (RIP) and my uncle John and aunt Laura, who were killed in the reaping by the six-year-old monster masquerading as my aunt Erica. #RememberTheReaping.”
Erica Essig. The surrogate had a name.
I zoomed in on the picture, but it was a photo of a photo, and the resolution was not good. Still, it was unnerving to realize I was looking at the pixilated image of a six-year-old murderer.
“Here you go!”
I glanced up to see that the carhop was back, and this time she had two hot dogs and what appeared—based on the whipped cream smooshed into the top of the dome-shaped lid—to be a milk shake.
“Thanks.” Lenore handed her a ten-dollar bill and told her to keep the change.
“We really can’t afford this,” I lamented as the siren handed Gallagher one of the hot dogs.
Lenore shrugged. “It’s cheaper than buying another data plan. Or anything at all from Starbucks.”
She was not wrong. “Thanks. I think I’m on to something.” I hadn’t expected to find many pictures from the 1980s on the internet, but where the reaping was concerned, I was dead wrong. Sociologists, crypto-biologists, crypto-anthropologists, historians and conspiracy theorists had practically filled the internet with everything related to the nation’s greatest tragedy. My only challenge was figuring out which search words would trigger the results I needed.
On my third try, I typed in “Erica Essig surrogate,” and stumbled onto a public, user-driven database of photographs of the three hundred thousand-plus surrogates who’d been taken into custody by the FBI, at the age of six.
