Page 90 of Angels Fall

“Clear!” whoever shouts again.

Doesn’t matter.

I know death when I see it.

I’ve observed enough of it.

They can keep trying to shock him back to life all they want.

Jeff’s gone.

He’s gone.

Goddamn it, kid.

Part of me wants to just go make them stop, but they’re already loading him in the EMT truck to, I suppose, keep giving it their best.

I’ve said it before… People fighting the inevitable always gives me the hardest time. But if it makes them feel better to try, who the fuck am I to stop them? They need to believe, so let ’em believe, I guess.

And there’s absolutely no fucking time to even begin thinking about all the shit I’m starting to think about. Maddie’s coming undone and I need to be there for her.

I pat Brandon on the shoulder and he nods at me like, Go. And so I do. I go to Maddie, who’s still crumpled on the ground in the parking lot.

“Hey—” I start, but she waves me off. That’s fine. I get it. I mean, damn, I really just wanna try to fix it. But I can’t. So I’ll stand here and see if I can not get in the way.

And then…

Like out of fucking nowhere—and this is probably the last thing in the world I’m expecting—her phone dings.

This is not something I should be able to hear. There’s so much going on that the dinging of a cell phone shouldn’t even register. But it does. I dunno why. But it does.

She has an odd look on her face. I can’t describe it. Not in words. But if I had to try I’d say it looks pained, defeated… knowing, I guess.

She pulls her phone out of her jacket pocket and, sure enough, the screen is lit.

She looks down at it, slowly.

And then…

She throws it to the ground, balls her hands into fists at her sides, looks up at the dawn-breaking sky being kissed by tendrils of hot orange and sooty black…

And she lets loose a guttural, primal scream that begins in the center of the earth, rips its way through her body, past her breaking heart, out of her mouth, and up into whatever bullshit heaven sits in the sky, where a bullshit God looks down laughing, having broken his promise to me that I was being given the chance to repair the damage I created.

That was never the deal.

I get it now.

I am back here to be forced to watch Maddie suffer.

Because I missed it all the first time.

Fuck you, God, you lying cunt.

I pick her phone up off the ground to see what it was that affected her so.

It’s a text.

It says…