by Jackson Ford
Nic’s voice brings me back. “If I was in your situation, I’d be angry. At everyone. Your mom and dad, the government, your brother. None of what happened was your fault, and you’ve got every right to be furious. But you’re not angry.”
“How do you know?”
“Maybe I don’t. But Teags… you’re the most straight-up person I’ve ever met. You’re kind and smart, and funny as hell. Your forward-planning skills are all over the place, but… you’re you. I mean… Fuck, I don’t…” He closes his eyes. Takes a very deep breath. “I know I’m not saying this right, and I know it’s probably simplifying the situation like a billion times over. So I’m just going to say it. What you went through would have broken most people. It would have broken me. How did it not break you?”
We’re under the interchange now. Concrete above and below us.
“You’re right,” I say after a minute. “I should be angry. I was for a long time. Years, even. But…”
This memory is something I’ve kept close, returning to it often, polishing it like a precious jewel. I am so, so scared of losing it. Forgetting it, or changing the details in my mind, or letting it slip away. Even telling it to someone feels like I’m putting it in danger.
“But then I came to LA,” I say, still looking out the window at the passing lights. “Tanner set me up here. I didn’t know anybody, and the whole thing with the… with Reggie and everyone was still being worked out, and I just… didn’t know what to do. She just told me to wait, you know? Shacked me up in a crappy hotel and said she’d be in touch.
“I was on Hollywood Boulevard. Where the Walk of Fame is. It was like five o’clock, and I was hungry, so I bought a taco from this little food stand—I’d never eaten one before.”
“You didn’t know what a taco was?”
“I did, just hadn’t had one. Not exactly a Wyoming specialty.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“So I’m standing on the corner with this taco, which is leaking out its cardboard holder all over my hands, and there’s all these tourists around, just huge crowds, gawking at the stupid stars on the sidewalk, and the sun is going down, and the palm trees are like, silhouetted against the sky, and…”
I trail off. When I speak again, my voice is very steady. “And suddenly it was real. I could do whatever I wanted. Be whoever I wanted. I was a million miles from Wyoming and Waco, and I was never going back.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“You say you could do whatever you wanted, but you couldn’t. You had to work for Tanner. She wouldn’t have let you open a restaurant, or even be with someone, and—”
“I know all that. Tanner’s deal was—is—deeply fucked up. But it got me here. I think she knew that—knew that after Waco being made to live somewhere like LA would be enough to keep me sweet. I’d been in the worst situation you can imagine, and it ended. Things got better. If it could happen once, it could happen again.”
He reaches over, takes my hand. It’s the one I wiped my face with, but he doesn’t care, squeezing hard despite my wet skin.
“So I’m standing there with this stupid taco,” I say, “and I just decided… I decided that I didn’t want to be angry. The people who hurt me were gone. I wasn’t gonna let them fuck with me any more. I was somewhere I thought I’d never even see, and I had to make the most of it. What happened to me? It wasn’t gonna define me. I wasn’t gonna let it. My parents took so much from me, and I was not gonna let them take this too.
“Yeah, it’s been hard sometimes. Working under Moira Tanner sucks. And yeah, I’ll probably never own a restaurant. But I am never gonna stop trying because things can always get better. People are stupid, things go wrong, plans fall apart. Shit doesn’t work like you want it to. But there’s always a way out.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. The traffic slowly crawls along around us, heading for the glowing sky.
“How was it?” he says eventually.
“What?”
“Your first taco.”
I pull a face. “Tasted terrible. I threw it in the trash.”
He snorts. Then I snort. Then we’re both laughing, then we’re both howling until my stomach feels like it’s going to explode. The pressure of the entire day just rolls out of us, filling the car with absurd, hysterical laughter.
“Oh shit,” he says, wiping his face when we stop laughing a thousand years later.
“Yeah.” My stomach aches, but it’s a good ache. “Nic, listen. I—”
“Oh, shit.” He leans forward, peering out the windshield.
Flashing red and blue lights. Just out of sight around the curve of the freeway.
FORTY-TWO
Jake
Jake is no longer in the house on East Orange Grove. He’s back in the junkyard with Chuy, lost in the memory.
The man in the trunk had stared up at them with lidded, rheumy eyes, breathing through his mouth. Drugged with something. His straggly days-old beard was crusted with what looked like dried blood, a rivulet of spit leaking from the corner of his trembling mouth. He was in his late fifties, body hunched and bent, wearing a hoodie with carolina basketball across the front. The hoodie had gone grey with age, and was threadbare, holed in a dozen spots. Ancient cargo pants and torn trainers with flapping tongues completed the picture.
The man’s hands and feet were bound. Chuy reached inside and with a grunt rolled the man up and out of the trunk. He’d thumped to the ground, giving off a pitiful mewling sound. Under the junkyard’s floodlights, he’d looked shrunken like a mummy, the greying hoodie shrouding him.
“You got a decision to make,” Chuy had murmured.
He’d squatted down, head tilted to one side, considering the wheezing man.
“What are you talking about?” Jake had said. But he’d known. Of course he’d known. He’d known the second Chuy had lifted the trunk lid.
“You can spend the rest of your life pretending you ain’t different, like you’re just another one of us poor motherfuckers wandering around with our thumbs up our asses. You can keep hiding.”
He’d turned his head towards Jake.
“Or you can man up. Use your power, your ability, whatever the fuck it is. Use it like it was meant to be used.”
“You want me to k—” He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t quite get the word out. His palms were cold and damp, and he wiped them unconsciously on his shirt.
Chuy had glanced at him as if he hadn’t realised Jake was standing there, then all at once had rocketed to his feet, delivering a kick to the bound man’s stomach. The air had left him in a great, lurching heave, and he’d curled into a ball, trembling.
“See, what I did,” Chuy had said, wiping his mouth, “is I went digging for the scummiest dude I could find. Took me longer than I thought, considering the amount of scumbags in this town. But I found him. This asshole…” He’d nodded down at the man. “This asshole used to touch little kids back in the day. Wasn’t too clever about it either—got himself ten years in Pelican Bay.
“Hangs out on Figueroa most days, but lately he’s been going past this school. Just posting up on the corner, watching. Staying there longer and longer, every day.”
“I can’t.”
The response was automatic. But even as he’d said it, Jake could hear the uncertainty. He felt terror, yes, and a surprising, startling anger at Chuy, but… yes, wasn’t there something else behind the fear? Something that might or might not have been curiosity? It had been building ever since he’d first shown Chuy what he could do, when he’d thrown that hubcap into the darkness. I got a nine mil can do that, and I don’t have to carry round hubcaps to use it, neither.
“Of course you can,” Chuy had said. “You just don’t want to.”
He could walk away. Right now. Just head right into that gap in the maze of cars and go home, hitch a ride, fuck it.
Except, then Chuy would vanish. And so would the picture.
“It’
s blackmail,” he’d said.
“Blackmail.” Chuy had actually laughed. “You know what happens if you don’t do it? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. You get to go on living your life. Hell, I’ll even drive you home. That ain’t blackmail. No one’s forcing you to do anything. I’m asking.”
The man on the ground had tried to roll away then. Chuy had glanced down, delivered another rib kick, doing it almost absently. The noises coming out of the man’s throat had started to take on a raspy, reedy quality, like a sleeper about to start snoring.
“Blackmailers lie,” he’d said. “They lie and they cheat and steal. Have I lied to you? Cheated you? I’m your fuckin’ friend, man. Friends don’t lie to each other. I’d never do that. Never, d’you hear me?”
Jake had turned then, walked around the side of the car, stood with his hands by his sides. His palms felt like they’d been dipped in warm, runny oil.
Chuy’s voice from behind him. “What I found on you? It’s the real deal. It doesn’t paint the full picture—my guess is there’s a ton of stuff that didn’t leave a paper trail, which isn’t surprising, not with what you do—but it gives you one hell of a starting point.”
Chuy had stepped closer, his voice dropping to a conspirational rumble. “This guy? He’s nothing, J. Nobody. Not a single person would even notice he’s gone. I got a bigger target in mind. Bunch of guys much worse than the dude back there. The shit they into… you can’t even believe. I thought about doing it myself, thought about it a bunch of times, but I always stopped. You know why?”
He’d held a finger to his temple. “Fucking cops. The things they can do with bullet matching and ballistics and residue, I can’t even tell you. Maybe one guy, OK, I get away, but more than one? And you gotta do it quick, or they’ll scatter. But you…” A smile had crept onto his face. “With what you can do? You could take care of all of ’em, leave zero trace. Can you imagine the cops trying to figure out how you did it? With no fingerprints, no contact between you and any of these dudes? No gun, no ammo? No bullet residue? Hell, you don’t even have to be in the same room; you could be watching them through the window of the next building over. And who says you have to use an actual weapon? Fuck it. Knock a bookcase over. Rip the brakes out of their car. And even if you did somehow get caught, how the fuck are the cops going to prove it? Let’s see ’em argue that one in court.”
“Jesus Christ, Chuy. I can’t just…” He had to force the words out, almost yell them. “I can’t just kill someone.”
Chuy had given him a baleful look. “I’m not saying turn into a serial killer. You’re smarter than that. I’m saying, what if you could use your Gift to do some real good? Take out the trash? But before that happens, I gotta know you can do it. I gotta know you got the stones.”
“I… I can’t…”
“Why not? Who the fuck is he to you?”
“He’s a human being!”
Chuy had given Jake a sad, almost pitying look. He’d glanced back towards the shaking, moaning thing on the ground staring at them with uncomprehending, terrified eyes. Vaguely, Jake had wondered what Chuy had drugged the man with, where he’d got it.
The photo was still in Jake’s hand. Chuy had taken it, held it up as if seeing it for the first time. Then he’d handed it back with a shrug and started walking away, heading for the edge of the circle of cars.
“Ch—wait. Chuy. Chuy!”
“Your decision, man,” Chuy had said over his shoulder. He’d almost vanished into the darkness between the cars. “No blackmail. No forcing.”
“Hey!”
But Chuy was gone. The junkyard had swallowed him.
Jake doesn’t remember much of the next few minutes. He remembers standing by the car, clutching the photo to his chest. Then he was standing over the man, looking down at him. The drugs must have been starting to wear off, because the man’s eyes were a little more focused now, his mouth trying to form words. His lips had come together, separated with a faint pop, as if trying to form the letter P. For please, perhaps.
Jake had been getting stronger. Much stronger. Strong enough that he could easily force a piece of metal through someone, or move an engine block over their head and…
There was no way. He couldn’t just kill someone. Nothing was worth that.
He’d paced the circle of cars, prowling like a tiger, scrunching the photo in his fist. He told himself a dozen times to stop, not wanting to damage the photo, telling himself it was all there was… Only that wasn’t true, was it? Chuy said he had more. And that was the question here, wasn’t it? Did he trust Chuy?
The fear and confusion were almost too great, almost overwhelming him, sweeping him from the circle like a rising tide. Chuy was… complicated. He was the kind of person who could switch from warm good humour to cold hard fury in half a second.
But was he a liar?
When you got down to it, at the very core of it all, he’d always been straight with Jake. He’d kept his secret. He said he was going to dig up info on Jake’s past and he had. Chuy wouldn’t lie, Jake was sure of it.
His gaze landed on something at the edge of the circle of cars: a pile of steel rebars. Each one four feet long, rusted and warped, undisturbed perhaps for years. Without fully understanding what he was doing, he’d reached out for one, pulled it out, the others clattering off it as it shook loose a pall of dust. Dimly he was aware of the moaning from the bound man getting more and more frantic.
He looked down at the photo in his hand. It was crumpled, a crease bisecting his mom’s face. He felt like he was at the very centre of the world at that moment: like every other person on the planet was watching him, billions of people, no one daring to breathe.
His past stretched before him, a landscape shrouded in fog. Who he was. How he got his abilities. Why his mother had given him up. Who she was, who her parents were. How could he move forward if he didn’t know any of it? If he didn’t lift that fog? He had a chance to blow it away, clear the air in a single breath—was he really going to pass that up?
He’s a human being.
He’d watched expressionless as he moved the rebar over to the space above the man’s body. Ignoring his gasps, the half-formed, pleading words. The man tried to wriggle away, rolling across the packed dirt, and Jake had made the rebar follow him almost without thinking about it.
He didn’t have to do it. He could walk away. If there was more out there, he could find it too. He didn’t need Chuy, he just had to work harder at it…
Then the rebar was buried in the man’s chest.
Jake wasn’t even aware of having driven it down. He could feel that it hadn’t gone all the way through to the ground—it had penetrated a couple of inches into the flesh, no more. A curious squirming sensation registered in his mind—feedback from his grip on the rebar as the man coughed and gurgled and twisted.
Blood gouted. Jake pulled the rebar out, then forced it down again, harder this time. More blood, the man’s howls rising to a wild warbling shriek. Again and again, eyes huge and heart slamming, Jake drove the rebar into the man’s chest.
And when the man failed to die, when he kept right on screaming even after the ground around him was almost black with blood, Jake ripped the rebar out and, with a thought, bent it around the man’s throat.
Bent it, and tightened.
Which is when Chuy had come sprinting out of the darkness and grabbed him, enveloping him in a bear hug. “Easy. Easy!”
Jake was screaming too. The screams devolved into sobs, and he collapsed in Chuy’s arms. He let go of the rebar, which stayed in place, wrapped around the man’s neck like a garrotte, one end sticking straight up in the air.
“You’re OK, man. Just breathe.” Chuy put a hand on the back of Jake’s head, bent it so their foreheads were touching. His next words were a low, almost satisfied growl. “Proud of you, brother. You fucking did it. That’s why I believe in you. It’s like I said, man, we gonna change the fucking world with this shit.”
; In the nights to come Jake would think back to the junkyard. It was the first thing on his mind when he woke up and the last thing he thought of before he went to sleep. But strangely, it wasn’t the feeling of murdering the man that he remembered; it was the sensation of touching foreheads with Chuy, that burning intensity, the connection. And those words. I believe in you.
Later, when Chuy had laid out why Steven Chase, Bryan Hayden and Javier Salinas deserved to die, he’d felt that same intensity. That same sense of rightness. He was no serial killer. He took no pleasure in doing it. But it had to be done, and nobody was better placed than him.
There’s no way in hell he’s letting Chuy down. He can finally make that call, the one when he tells Chuy it’s handled. That all three of the people responsible for El Agujero are out of the picture. He can imagine the look on Chuy’s face: the relief, the huge grin. The fierce gratitude.
His attention is jerked from his thoughts. A sound has washed into the ruined living room of the house on East Orange Grove, a sound that separates itself from the rest.
A car. Close. Underscored by the crunch of gravel as it pulls into the driveway.
Jake pads into the hall, Sandy’s cellphone still clutched in his hand. A rebar follows him, jangling as it flips its way out of his backpack.
A car door slams. It’s followed by the click of footsteps coming up the walk.
Jake positions himself directly opposite the front door. The hallway is dark, and he slides into the shadows at the far end, being sure to keep the rebar below the mirror.
Not that it matters. The second Javier Salinas steps inside, the second the door closes behind him, Jake will jam the rebar through his skull.
FORTY-THREE
Teagan
“Here.” Nic pulls off his hoodie, fighting with the belt. “Put this on.”
I pull the hood over my head, crossing my arms and leaning against the window as Nic crawls around the curve. They can’t be looking for me. Us. Why would they roadblock all the way up here? Has the fire spread that far?