Page 62 of Not Quite Dead Yet

‘Hi, Creepy Eyes. Me again. Thanks for the sledgehammer. Can I just –’

Jet took the sandwich bag out of his hand. She upturned it, the other sandwich falling to the mud-churned ground, flapping open.

‘PB and J, dude? You twelve?’

‘It’s my dessert sandwich,’ he said weakly, recoiling back.

Jet walked away, sliding her hand inside the clear bag, avoiding a large smear of peanut butter. The plastic formed a glove around her fingers, awkward and misshapen and sticky on the inside.

Back into the trench, Billy taking her arm, helping her down.

Jet dropped to her knees beside the dish towel, not too close.

Her breath loud, but there was a new sound too, echoing through the late-afternoon sky, growing, a high-pitched wail, blaring up and down.

‘That’s the cops,’ Billy said, ‘coming down the street.’

Jet reached over, fingers outstretched in their clear bag.

She pinched the corner of the dish towel, just the very corner, and flicked it open.

Clumps of mud and soil rained over her, scattering around her knees.

Jet blinked.

There it was, lying against the white inside of the towel, almost clean.

Her iPhone.

The screen shattered, glass split into delicate little fronds.

The frame buckled, under the weight of all that concrete.

And next to the phone, tucked up against it, was a hammer.

Black handle.

Metal head.

Flecks of brown on the blunt end that might have been dirt or –

‘That’s –’ Billy began.

‘– The murder weapon,’ Jet finished.

This little thing, right here. No more than sixteen inches long. Head like a metal bird, a few strands of blond hair caught in its mouth.

This was it. This was what killed her. The thing that had broken open her head, shattered her skull, left a sliver of bone where it shouldn’t be.

This, right here.

The thing that took Jet’s life before she’d even lived it, stole her future, all of herlaters and all of hertomorrows, leaving her with just a handful. Leftovers. Scraps.

It wasn’t even very big.

The siren was almost on top of them now, splitting the sky, the clouds roiling above to mend the cracks.

Billy was on his knees too, right here in the dirt with her. He placed his hand on her back.

---