Page 29 of Not Quite Dead Yet

Jet watched it again.

The third time.

Motion Detected 10:39 p.m. 10/31/2025.

Herself, walking up the drive toward the front door, dressed all in black, hair a little mussed from the walk, from the wind, from the zombie mask.

Jet slid her knees up and her MacBook closer, resting against the lump of her thighs, padded by the comforter. Lights off, dark except for the screen, except for the video ofthatJet, looking into the bucket of Halloween candy, realizing it was empty.

The world was dark behind her, but she glowed from the lights mounted by the front door. Then Jet turned, looking right into the camera, through the screen, staring at this Jet, the one tucked up in bed now. She stuck out her tongue and Jet stuck hers back.

‘Don’t go in,’ Jet muttered darkly, warning her past self as she pulled out her keys and slotted them in the door. The Jet who was still alive, the one who had everything: all the time and all thelaters she could ever want. Jet envied her, hated her a little. ‘Don’t go in.’

She didn’t listen.

The door opened and swallowed Jet whole, and it took less than a minute to do it.

The frame froze and the video ended.

Was the killer already inside when Jet had opened the door? Or did they come in later, when Jet was distracted byher phone and a fucking cookie? The footage had no answers for her, not the first time she’d watched it, or the second or the third. The killer never crossed the frame, never set off the motion detector.

Jet turned to the notebook spread open on the pillow beside her. The writing on the left-hand page was crossed out:Ideas for dog walking app in Boston/other cities.Many ideas crossed out before that one, half a notebook of them. On the top of the fresh right-hand page she’d written:Who murdered me?Underlined. She’d transferred the times and data they’d found on her Apple Watch, and below that she’d asked:Ring doorbell camera – was the killer already inside when I got home?Now she answered:I don’t know.Dropped the pen.

Outside her door, she heard her parents creeping past on the way to their bedroom. Saw them too, the gloom from their passing feet. One set faltered, two shadows that lingered, blocking the glow under the door. A boundary, between here and there, the living and the dead.

‘Keep going, Mom,’ Jet whispered, not loud enough to be heard. ‘I’m asleep.’

‘She’s asleep, Dianne,’ her dad hissed. ‘Let her sleep.’

The shadows moved on.

Mom had asked herone last timethree times since they got back in the house. So Jet told them she was tired, going to bed. Because she didn’t want to sit at the dining table and eat lasagna with her parents in the bleach-cleaned air; she wanted a bar of chocolate and she wanted to be alone: to do this. Log in to her parents’ Ring.com account – got the password from Dad – and see it for herself. The moment she goes in alive and comes out dead.

Jet skipped ahead to the next video, the next time the motion detector, well, detected motion: 11:05 p.m.

Third time watching this one too.

Billy, hurrying toward the door, pulling his hands out of his pockets, an awful screeching sound that buzzed against Jet’s speakers. Reggie. Screaming.

Reggie from now stirred at the sound, sleeping by Jet’s feet, or trying to.

‘Sorry bud,’ Jet said, turning the volume down, dimming his distress.

The dog wasn’t allowed upstairs, and definitely not on the beds, but this wasn’t the first time Jet had ignored those rules.

‘Hello?’ Billy called on-screen, before he even got close. ‘Mr and Mrs Mason? Jet?’

He reached the front door, knocked his fist against it, the camera fish-bowling his face, distorting his panicked eyes. ‘Hello? Are you OK in there? I – I can hear the dog. Is everything …’ He stopped, cupped his hands to his eyes, peered through the crinkled stained glass of the front door. He drew back, bent down to the mail slot. ‘Reggie,’ he called through it. ‘Reggie, boy, what’s wrong? Come here. Reggie!’

The howling didn’t stop.

Billy ran his hands through his hair, fingers trapped in the curls.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he muttered to himself, looking around. He spotted the doorbell camera, looked right into the lens, into Jet’s eyes, forty-eight hours in the future. He pressed the button, that annoying chime –doo-di-dooo,you know the one. ‘Is anyone in?’ he asked the camera. ‘Hello, can you hear this? I think something’s wrong. I …’

Billy’s face moved right up to the camera, then beyond it, out of frame. The rustle of the bush as he clambered over it to look through the window, into the living room.

You could hear it. The very moment he spotted Jet, lying there, head bleeding and undone. There was a click in his throat, too mechanical to really sound human, somethingbreaking that might not be so easy to fix. Metal screws and wire mesh wouldn’t do.

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