As Good as Dead

by Holly Jackson

  Panic riled up in her, warm and frothing, and she tried to let it out, tried to scream. But wait, she couldn’t. Only the muffled edges escaped, not enough to even call it a scream. There was something covering her mouth.

  She reached up to see what it was…but wait, she couldn’t do that either. Her hands were clasped behind her. Stuck there. Stuck together.

  She twisted one hand as much as she could, folded down her index finger to feel what was bound around her wrists.

  Duct tape.

  She should have known that. There was a strip of it across her mouth. She couldn’t move her legs apart; her ankles must be wrapped too, though she couldn’t see that far down, even when she lifted her head.

  Something new, unraveling from the pit of her stomach. A primal feeling, ancient. A terror beyond any words that could contain it. It was everywhere: behind her eyes, beneath her skin. Too strong. Like all the million, million pieces of her disappearing and reappearing at once, flickering in and out of existence.

  She was going to die.

  Shewasgoingtodieshewasgoingtodieshewasdeadshewasdeadshewasgoingtodie.

  She might just die from this feeling alone. Her heart so fast it no longer sounded like a gun, but it couldn’t keep going like this. It would give out. It would surely give out.

  Pip tried to scream again, pushing the word “help” against the duct tape, but it pushed it right back. A hopeless cry in the dark.

  But there was still a spark of herself inside of all that terror, and she was the only one here who could help. Breathe, just breathe, she tried to tell herself. How could she breathe when she was going to die? But she took a deep breath, in and out of her nose, and she felt herself rallying inside, gathering in numbers, pushing that too-strong feeling into the dark place at the back of her mind.

  She needed a plan. Pip always had a plan, even if she was going to die.

  The situation was this: it was a Saturday, around four o’clock in the afternoon, and Pip was in the trunk of his car—the DT Killer. Daniel da Silva. He was driving her to the place where he planned to kill her. Her hands were bound, her feet were bound. Those were the facts. And she had more; Pip always had more facts.

  The next one was particularly heavy, particularly hard to hear even if it came from her own mind. Something she’d learned from one of those many true crime podcasts, something she never thought she’d need to know. The voice in her head repeated it to her plainly, no pauses, no panic: If you are ever abducted, you must do everything you can to avoid them taking you to a secondary location. Once you are in a second location, your chances of survival go down to less than one percent.

  Pip was being taken to a second location right now. She’d missed her chance, that small window of survival in the first few seconds.

  Less than one percent.

  But for some reason, that number didn’t bring back the terror. Pip felt calmer, somehow. A strange quieting, as though putting a number to it made it easier for her to accept.

  It wasn’t that she was going to die, but that she was very, very likely to die. An almost certainty, not enough left over for hope.

  OK, she breathed. So, what could she do about it?

  She wasn’t at the second location yet.

  Did she have her phone on her? No. She’d dropped it when he grabbed her, heard it crack on the road. Pip raised her head and surveyed the trunk, juddering as they swung down a rougher road. There was nothing in here except her. He must have taken her backpack. OK, what next?

  She should have been trying to visualize the route they were taking, make mental notes of the turns the car made. She’d been taken at the far end of Cross Lane, where the trees grew thick. She’d heard him start the engine, and she hadn’t felt the car turn, so he must have carried on down that road. But that terror, it had blinded everything else while she’d flickered in and out, and she hadn’t been paying attention to the journey. She would guess they’d been driving for five minutes already. They might not even be in Fairview anymore. But Pip didn’t see how any of that could help her.

  OK, so what could help her? Come on, think. Keep her mind busy, so it didn’t go looking for that dark place at the back, where the terror lived. But a different question occurred to her instead. That question.

  Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?

  Now she’d never know the answer, because she’d be dead. But, no, that wasn’t right, she told herself, shuffling onto her side to release the pressure on her arms. She did know the answer, a knowledge that was bone-deep, a knowledge that would outlive her. Ravi would look for her. Her mom. Her dad. Her baby brother. Cara, more a sister than a friend. Naomi Ward. Connor Reynolds. Jamie Reynolds, just as she’d looked for him. Nat da Silva. Becca Bell, even.

  Pip was lucky. So lucky. Why hadn’t she ever stopped to think about how lucky she was? All those people who cared about her, whether she deserved them or not.

  A new feeling now. Not panic. It was less bright than that, heavier, sadder, slow-moving, but it hurt so much more. She was never going to see them again. Any of them. Not Ravi’s lopsided smile or his ridiculous laugh, or any of the hundred ways he had of telling her he loved her. Never hear him call her Sarge again. Never see her family, not her friends. All those last moments with all of them, and Pip hadn’t known those were her final goodbyes.

  Her eyes welled up and spilled over, running down her face to the rough carpet. Why couldn’t she sink through the ground now, disappear, but disappear to somewhere DT couldn’t get to her?

  At least she’d told her mom she loved her before she walked out the door. At least her mom had that small moment to hold on to. But what about her dad? When had she last said it to him, or to Josh? Would Josh even remember what she looked like when he was all grown-up? And what about Ravi: when was the last time she told Ravi she loved him? Not enough, never enough. What if he didn’t truly know? This was going to destroy him. Pip cried harder, tears gathering around the tape across her mouth. Please don’t let him blame himself. He was her best thing, and now she would always be the worst thing that had happened to him. A pain in his chest he’d never forget.

  But he would look for her. And he wouldn’t find her, but he would find her killer, Pip was sure of it. Ravi would do that for her. Justice: that slippery word, but they would need it, so they could all eventually learn to move on without her, lay flowers at her grave once a year. Wait, what was the date today? She didn’t even know the date of the day she was going to die.

  She cried and cried harder, until those more rational parts of herself took over, pulled her back from despair. Yes, Ravi would find her killer, would know who he was. But there was a difference between knowing and being able to prove it. A world of difference between those two things; Pip had learned the hard way.

  That was something she could do, though. A plan, to keep her mind busy. Pip could help them to find her killer, to lock him away in a cage. She just needed to leave enough of herself behind, in this trunk. Hair. Skin. Anything with her DNA. Cover his car with the last remaining traces of her, her final mark upon the world, an arrow straight to him.

  Yes, she could do that. That was something she could do. She stretched back and rubbed her head against the carpet. Harder. Harder, until it hurt and she could feel the hairs pulling from her scalp. She shuffled lower and did it again.

  Next: skin. There wasn’t much exposed that she could use. But she had her face and she had her hands. She twisted her neck, pushed her cheek into the carpet, and she grated it back and forth. It hurt and she cried, but she kept going, the bone in her cheek raw and grazed. If it bled, that was even better. Leave blood behind, see him try to get away with that. Then her hands, moving awkwardly against the duct tape. She scraped her knuckles into the carpet and against the backs of the passenger seats.

  What else could she do? She cast her mind back th
rough all the cases she’d ever studied. Three syllables came to her, a word so obvious she didn’t know how she hadn’t thought of it first. Fingerprints. The police already had her fingerprints on file, to eliminate her after Stanley died. Yes, that was it. The swirling spiderweb prints of her fingers would be the net she left behind, to tighten and tighten around DT until he was caught. But she needed a hard surface; carpet wouldn’t work.

  Pip glanced around. There was the back window, but she couldn’t get to it because of the dark cover slanting down over the trunk. Wait. The sides of the car by her head and her feet were encased in plastic. That would work. Pip drew her legs in close and pushed her sneakers against the carpet, sliding herself up and round, and again, until she was curled up small against the side, the plastic within reach of her bound hands.

  She did one hand at a time. Placing and pressing each finger into the plastic, several times. Up and down, wherever she could reach. The thumbs were the hardest, because of the tape, but she managed to make contact with the very tops of them. That was a partial print, at least.

  OK, what next? The car itself seemed to answer, jumping as the wheels drove over something. Another sharp turn. How long had they been driving now? And what would Ravi’s face look like when he was told she was dead? No, stop that. She didn’t want that image in her head. She wanted to remember him smiling, in her last hours.

  He’d told her she was the bravest person he knew. Pip didn’t feel brave now. Not at all. But at least the version that lived in Ravi’s head was, the one he turned to to ask What would Pip do now? Pip tried it herself, with the Ravi who lived inside her head. She turned to him and she asked: What would you tell me to do, if you were here with me?

  Ravi answered.

  He would tell her not to give up, even if that’s what the statistics and logic told her to do. “Fuck that less than one percent. You’re Pippa Fricking Fitz-Amobi. My little Sarge. Pippus Maximus. And there’s nothing you can’t do.”

  “It’s too late,” she said back to him.

  He told her it wasn’t too late. She wasn’t at the second location yet. There was still time, and there was still fight left in her.

  “Get up, Pip. Get up. You can do this.”

  Get up. She could do this.

  She could. Ravi was right. She wasn’t at the second location yet; she was still in the car. And she could use this car to her advantage. Her chances of surviving a car crash were far higher than her chances of surviving a second location. The car seemed to agree with her, the wheels growing louder against a gravel road, urging her on.

  Make him crash the car. Survive. That was the new plan.

  Her eyes darted to the bottom of the trunk door. There wasn’t a latch she could use here to open the door and roll out. The only way was through the back passenger seats, and from there, throw herself at him, make him lose control of the wheel.

  OK: two options. Kick at the backseat, hard enough to break it, fold it down. Or she could climb over the top, in the gap above the headrests. And to do that, all she had to do was remove this cargo cover above her.

  Pip went with option two. The cover was rigid—she felt it with her knees—but it could only be attached on two sides by a hook or a mechanism. She just needed to readjust her position, slide down, and then kick up at that corner until it came loose.

  The car slowed to a stop.

  A stop too long to be just a turn. Fuck.

  Pip’s eyes widened. She held her breath so she could hear. There was a sound—a car door opening.

  What was he doing? Was he leaving her somewhere? She waited for the slam of the door, but the follow-up sound didn’t come, at least not for several seconds. And when it did, the car peeled off again, slowly. Not nearly fast enough for a crash.

  But it was only seven seconds before it drew to a gentle stop again. And this time, Pip heard the parking brake pull up.

  They were here.

  The second location.

  It was too late. “I’m so sorry,” Pip told the Ravi in her head. And: “I love you,” just in case there was any way he could pass it on to the real one.

  Car door opened. Car door closed.

  Footsteps on gravel.

  The terror was back, leaking out of the place at the back of her mind where she thought she’d locked it away.

  Pip rounded into a ball, drew her knees up to her chest.

  She waited.

  The back door opened.

  He was standing right there. But all Pip could see were his dark clothes, up to his chest.

  A hand reached forward, pulled at the cover above her head, and it retracted, rolling itself up against the backseat.

  Pip stared up at him.

  A silhouette against the late-afternoon sun.

  A monster in the daylight.

  Pip blinked, her eyes readjusting to the glare.

  Not a monster, just a man. A familiarity in the way he held his shoulders.

  The DT Killer showed her his face. Showed her the glint in his smile.

  It wasn’t the face she thought she’d see.

  It was Jason Bell.

  Jason Bell was the DT Killer.

  The thought was so loud in Pip’s head, louder than the terror. But she didn’t have time to think it again.

  Jason bent down and grabbed her elbow. Pip recoiled, smelling the metallic tang of his sweat, staining the front of his shirt. She tried to swing her legs out to kick him away, but Jason must have read the thought in her eyes. He leaned down hard on her knees, pinning her legs there. With his other hand, he pulled her up to sitting.

  Pip screamed, the sound of it stifled against the tape. Someone must hear her. Someone must be able to hear her.

  “No one can hear you,” Jason said then, as though he were right there too, implanted in her head alongside Ravi, who was now telling her to run. Run. Make a break for it.

  Pip flicked her legs out and pushed off against her knuckles. She landed on her feet on the gravel and tried to take a step, but her ankles were bound too tight. She tipped forward.

  Jason caught her. Righted her, gravel scuffing around them. He hooked his arm through one of hers, clenching it tight.

  “There’s a good girl,” he said quietly, absently, as though he wasn’t really seeing her at all. “Walk, or I’ll have to carry you.” He didn’t say it loud, he didn’t say it hard; he didn’t have to. He was in control and he knew it. That’s what all this was about.

  He started walking and so did she, minuscule steps against the duct tape. It was slow-moving, and Pip used the time to look around her, study her surroundings.

  There were trees. Off to the right and behind her. Encircling them was a tall metal fence painted a dark green. A gate right behind them that Jason must have opened when he’d first left the car. It was still open now, wide open. Taunting her.

  Jason was leading her toward an industrial-looking building—iron-sheeting sides—but there was a separate brick building off to the left. Wait. Pip knew this place. She was sure of it. She took it all in again: the tall green metal fence, the trees, the buildings. And if that wasn’t clear enough, there were five vans parked over there, the logo emblazoned on their sides. Pip had been here before. No, she hadn’t. Not really. Only as a ghost, skulking up and down the road through a computer screen.

  They were at Green Scene Ltd.

  The complex off a tiny country road in the middle of nowhere in Weston. Jason was right; no one would hear her scream.

  That didn’t stop her from trying again, as they reached a metal door at the side of the building.

  Jason smiled, flashed his teeth at her again.

  “None of that,” he said, fiddling with his front pocket. He pulled something out, sharp and shiny. It was an overloaded ring of keys, different shapes and sizes. He flicked through them, selecte
d a long thin one with jagged teeth.

  He muttered to himself, guiding the key toward the bulky silver lock in the middle of the door. His other arm loosened a little, the arm holding her there.

  Pip took her chance.

  She slammed her arm down against his and broke the hold.

  Freedom. She was free.

  But it didn’t get her far.

  She couldn’t even take one step before the force of his hand pulled her back, holding her bound arms behind her like a leash.

  “It’s pointless,” Jason said, turning his attention back to the lock. He didn’t look angry; the expression in the curve of his mouth was closer to amusement. “You know as well as I do that that’s pointless.”

  Pip did. Less than one percent.

  The door unlocked with the sound of clanging metal and Jason pushed it inward. It screamed on its hinges.

  “Come on.”

  He dragged Pip over the threshold. It was dark in here, full of tall, wiry shadows, just one small window high up on the right, barring most of the sunlight. Jason seemed to read her mind again, flicking a switch on the wall. The industrial lights blinked to life with a lazy buzz. The room was long and thin and cold. It looked like some kind of storeroom: tall metal shelving units down both walls, huge plastic vats stacked up and along the shelves with small faucets near the bottoms. Pip’s eyes scanned across them: different types of weed killer and fertilizer. There were two sunken channels in the concrete floor under the shelves, running the length of the room.

  Jason pulled her along by her arms, the heels of her sneakers dragging against the ground.

  He dropped her.

  Pip landed hard on the concrete, just in front of the right-hand shelves. She struggled up into a sitting position, watching as he stood over her. The breath in and out of her nose too loud and too fast, the sound reshaping in her mind into DT, DT, DT.

  And here he was. Strange, really, that he looked just like a man. He’d been so much bigger in her nightmares.

  Jason smiled to himself then, shaking his head at something funny.