Eye of the Sh*t Storm

by Jackson Ford

  But there’s no way I’m turning Leo over. That would be the worst thing I could do. I’d never forgive myself.

  “Can’t do that,” I say. I straighten up to my full height – five three, but you work with what you’ve got. “Africa, listen to me. We are talking about the life of a child. If you do this, that’s over. He won’t be dead, but he may as well be.”

  I don’t even care if Leo hears this – I have to make Africa understand. “There are things bigger than China Shop, and this is one of them. Please, dude. Think.”

  Just for a second, Africa hesitates. The tiniest flicker of doubt crosses his face, his eyes narrowing very slightly. He runs his tongue across his upper lip – I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it. Yes. Come on. Make the right decision, big guy.

  Which is when Nic decides to save the day.

  Maybe he thinks I’m not going to convince Africa, or just decides enough is enough. He steps forward, raises his chin slightly. “OK, I’ve heard enough. You need to know that I am the legal representative for this woman, Teagan Frost, also known as Emily Jameson. I am also the legal representative for this child, Leo Nguyen. They are my clients.”

  I gape at him. “Nic, what are you doing?”

  He ignores me, puffing his chest out. “My clients are American citizens, and enjoy the rights and privileges afforded by our constitution, and by the rule of law. You wish to detain Mr Nguyen. He is with Ms Frost and myself of his own free will – we are acting in loco parentis until his biological father is found, a fact the child will be more than happy to confirm. He can be detained by an authorised law enforcement officer with the proper identification, but since you don’t have any, I’d ask you to politely fuck off.”

  A shutter comes down on Africa’s face. Closed for business. Expression as hard and unyielding as a steel door.

  Doesn’t Nic get it? Africa used to be homeless. He spent years living in the cracks. His enemies were people who spoke exactly like Nic is speaking now. Lawyers and judges and case officers and cops.

  “You talk to me,” Africa says slowly. It’s the complete opposite of how he was before. There’s no yelling now. No gesturing. His voice is quiet, as still as a calm sea, with dark shapes swimming just below the surface. “You talk to me about the law.”

  “I want this to be clear,” Nic continues. “You’ve presented no ID, and no arrest warrant. If you act against my clients, or if you try to detain them in any way, you should know that I will be contacting the Los Angeles Police Department and informing them of a kidnapping.”

  “Nic,” I say. “Shut the fuck up right—”

  Africa shoves Nic aside, reaches out, and grabs hold of Leo Nguyen.

  It’s one of those situations which you know is going to end badly even before you fully understand what’s happening – but you can’t do a single thing to stop it. You just stand there with a stupid look on your face, unable to move, unable to even speak.

  “Leave me alone!” Leo yells.

  And on the last word, he discharges a huge burst of electricity into Africa.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Teagan

  There’s a giant bang, and Africa goes flying.

  He shoots backwards, his feet leaving the ground, his huge arms flailing. There’s a split-second where I get a look at his face, and what’s there is total, sincere confusion. Like he genuinely cannot believe this is happening to him.

  He flies ten feet, slamming into the door of the nearby Humvee, right by the soldier with the wraparound shades. The man dives for cover as Africa slides to the ground, the stunned expression still on his face.

  Nic grabs for Leo, way too fucking late. I have to use my PK to grab hold of his watch, stop him from touching the kid and getting his own dose of zap. Nic’s wrist jerks, and he winces in pain, eyes flicking over to me.

  “Leave me alone!” Leo yells again, little fists balled.

  “Drop your weapon!” The soldier with the shades rips his rifle up. His aim lingers on Leo, before swinging over to me, as if he can’t comprehend what he just saw. He’s young – my age, maybe even less. The rifle barrel trembles as he draws a bead on us. I put my hands automatically, even as I lock the gun down, jamming the safety catch in place.

  The crowd at the stadium entrance scatters, tripping over each other to get away. Africa is still sprawled, blinking in stunned disbelief. His clothes are smoking – it’s probably only his size that’s kept him conscious after a hit like that.

  “Christmas elves!” I yell. I read once that if you want to defuse a fight, you should start yelling nonsense – something about how it short-circuits the aggression response in peoples’ brains. “Monocles! LeBron James! Panna cotta! Um…”

  “What are you doing?” Nic shouts. He’s frozen in place, one foot slightly lifted, as if getting ready to break into a run. His voice is a lot higher than it normally is.

  “Shut up, I’m thinking! Netflix! Netflix and Chill!”

  “I said, drop it!” the soldier yells. There’s the thunder of boot-clad feet. More guardsmen appear, coming in with rifles up, yelling at the onlookers to get back. They’re approaching us in a loose semicircle, yelling at us to get on the ground.

  Well. That didn’t work.

  “Listen to me,” Nic shouts, Leo quaking behind his legs. “These are my clients, and—”

  “Nic, enough.” For some reason, my voice stops the guardsmen yelling, just for a second. As if they want a little more time to assess why, exactly, I’m not getting on the ground.

  I lift my hands, fingers spread, making eye contact with the young guardsman – or as much as I can with his mirrored sunglasses, anyway. Showing him I’m not a threat. If we play this right, we can just walk out of here. Africa’s down for the count, probably trying to figure out what planet he’s on. The guardsmen haven’t got the means to stop us. We’re not getting any food here, that much is certain… but we can probably get back to the river.

  “Leo,” I say, holding out my hand behind me. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “I—”

  “It’s OK.” I flash him a smile. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”

  “Down. On the fucking. Ground.”

  “Yeah, nah,” I mutter. “Leo?”

  I hear him take a breath behind me, like he’s about to start sobbing again. But it’s just like before, when we were leaving the storage unit. If he trusts you – or at least, if he thinks you aren’t going to hurt him – he’ll do as he’s told. There are soft footsteps, and then a small hand slips into mine. Oh, thank fuck.

  “Nic, you too,” I say. Then, to the guardsmen: “We’re gonna leave now. OK? There’s no weapon, no harm, no foul. We’re just gonna go.”

  The guardsman with the mirrored shades glances at the soldier on his right, a woman with a long ponytail. For the first time, they seem unsure. I can use that. All I have to do is start walking.

  Africa is on his feet now, unsteady, using the Humvee for support. Gaze burning a hole in the back of Leo’s head. I take a step forward – and from behind me, there’s a sharp click.

  One of the guardsmen – a woman barely out of her teens, it looks like – tried to fire, the gun pointed right at my head. In her panic, she pulls the trigger again, then a third time. Her thumb frantically works the safety, the confusion on her face growing.

  So much for trigger discipline.

  I meet the woman’s eyes. “Let’s all just—”

  With a yell, she drops her rifle, claws at her waist for her sidearm. I’ve locked it down before she’s even drawn it, holding the trigger in place for good measure. “Nobody wants any trouble,” I say, raising my voice. “We—”

  One of the guardsmen rushes us.

  It might be the wraparound shades guy, but I can’t be sure. Whoever it is throws their rifle to one side, sprints straight for Leo, as if intending to scoop him up and get him away from danger.

  He doesn’t get there. Before I can react, before anybody can do anything, Leo screams—r />
  —and a bomb goes off.

  That’s what it feels like. A huge, ear-splitting bang, a flash of intense white light.

  I stagger, clapping my hands to my ears, blinking against tears that double and triple my vision.

  The guardsman who rushed us has been thrown backwards – and unlike Africa, he’s not moving. He lies in a tangled heap, one arm thrown over his chest, like he got drunk and passed out.

  For a long second, not a single person moves. Nobody says a thing. All except for Leo, who is huddled in a ball on the rough concrete. He’s still screaming.

  The woman who pulled her trigger takes a step forward, blinking in shock, when it happens again.

  In the split-second available to me before the flash and the ferocious bang wipes my brain clean, I get a good look at exactly what he’s doing.

  I thought Leo was just delivering electric charge through the ground. He wasn’t. Not even close.

  Lightning.

  The kid is literally calling down the lightning.

  He’s ripping the charge from the heavy clouds above, pulling down an enormous bolt of raw electricity. For a moment, the woman he’s targeted is a dark, agonised silhouette against a backdrop of burning, horrible white light. Then it’s gone, and she’s down, and I have no time to process what the fuck I just saw before two more bolts of lightning come cracking down.

  Now I am blind. Blind and deaf. I drop, not knowing what else to do, terror squeezing my stomach in a clawed fist. I curl into a ball as more lightning comes hammering down. In the gaps between the bolts, there are screams. Horrified, disbelieving. Cut short.

  There’s nothing I can do. There is no part of my ability that can stop this. Whatever power Leo is tapping into, it’s bigger than him, bigger than me.

  Move. But I can’t. My legs won’t listen to me. I curl tighter and try to calm my hammering heart and hope and pray that Nic is OK.

  In the storage unit, Leo had this… safety radius, I guess you’d call it. He made sure the electricity he was putting out didn’t affect the area around him. I have to hope it’s the same thing here – that the lightning won’t fry us. But if there really is a safety radius, and the guardsmen are outside it…

  Bang.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  And after what seems like years – decades – it finally stops.

  An insane ringing fills my ears. But behind the sound, there are others. Crackling fire. A woman sobbing. Running footsteps.

  There’s no more screaming. I don’t think there’s anyone left to do it.

  Slowly, I sit up. It’s like my mind takes a second or two to catch up to my eyes, and I have to blink a few times before the afterimages in my vision fade.

  Bodies.

  At least five. guardsmen, mainly, lying in sprawled, broken heaps. There are objects dotted between them, and it takes me a second to recognise them – they’re clothes, military fatigues, torn and shredded, ripped right off them. Shoes, too, scattered everywhere. Behind us, the crowd at the stadium entrance has scattered. There are small fires everywhere, and a big one on the Humvee, which is fully ablaze. The air stinks of ozone and gasoline. A rifle lies abandoned on the concrete.

  Shit – Africa!

  I’m so certain I’m going to see him among the bodies that a cry actually forces its way out of my throat. But he’s not among them. He’s nowhere to be seen.

  Leo. He’s still crouched down, still shaking. Nic is up on his knees, staring at him.

  I get to my knees too. Doing so brings on another dose of double vision, and I have to stop for a second to let it pass.

  I’ve been in danger before. You can’t live the life I lead without landing in multiple fucked-up situations. But I think this is the first time there was genuinely nothing I could do.

  I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t run. I was completely helpless. All I had was blind hope that I wouldn’t die – and it was only through blind luck that I didn’t.

  Leo looks over at me – and his eyes roll back in his skull. His left hand twitches, then his whole arm. He tilts sideways, slumping onto the parking lot surface, his body jackhammering.

  This isn’t like before, when he almost laughed at his leg and his wrist twitching. This is way, way worse.

  “Nic,” I say.

  He doesn’t appear to hear me.

  “Nic, help him.” I’m not sure I’ve got the strength right now to carry Leo myself.

  Nic looks up at me, then over at Leo. Moving as if in a dream, he makes his way to the boy. It’s impossible to miss how he hesitates before scooping him off the ground. Like he’s scared to touch him.

  But then he has the boy in his arms, straightening up and walking in long, jerky strides away from the stadium. Somehow, I manage to follow.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Teagan

  Over the past few years, I’ve become very familiar with the giant spurt of adrenaline you get after surviving something that should have killed you.

  It always arrives around five minutes after I nearly die, beginning with a prickle on my arms, a delightful tremor in my fingers. Then a feeling of well-being, flooding through me, quickly growing to a kind of hysterical euphoria. It’s like an old friend by now. One I’ve been hanging out with for so long that I know everything they’re going to do before they do it.

  It also makes me wildly uncoordinated. As we stumble back down the slope towards the river in the growing dusk, I have to watch my feet, make sure I don’t faceplant. My ears are still ringing, and my balance is shot to shit. God knows how Nic is doing – he’s carrying a twitching Leo behind me, his feet heavy on the hard earth of the hillside. Behind us, the sirens have started.

  We are so fucked.

  We went to the stadium to get food and water, to keep us going for the long night ahead. We were supposed to slip in and out, just three more poor souls looking for shelter, souls nobody would miss when they made their exit and resumed their stealthy trek down the LA River. Instead, we not only completely failed to get any food and water, but we also sent up a giant signal flare for anybody looking for us. It’s not just Tanner and Reggie. If the Zigzag Man didn’t know where we were, he does now.

  Fucking Africa.

  I hope he’s OK.

  And I hope catches a horrific case of genital itch because, seriously, what the hell?

  Lost in my thoughts, I almost run headlong into a tree. I just catch myself, sagging against it, resting my cheek on the rough bark.

  Nic doesn’t stop to check if I’m all right. Leo has stopped shaking now, but he’s unconscious, a dead weight in Nic’s arms.

  We’re not being chased – mostly because there’s nobody really left up there to chase us – but it’s not a good idea to hang around. With a groan, I push myself off the tree, start moving.

  It’s a lot faster going down the hill than going up. Also, a lot harder on the quads. It takes me a few minutes to realise we’re not heading back down to the river – or if we are, we’re not going down the way we came up.

  When I mention this to Nic, he doesn’t respond. I have to ask again before he looks at me, blinking slowly, like he just woke up.

  “There’s a quicker way to the Main Street Bridge,” he mutters.

  “How—?”

  “’Cross Broadway, then through the LA State Park.”

  “… ’K.”

  I kind of grey out for a little while. I just follow Nic, my mind trailing ten feet behind me. We cross an empty four-lane street at the bottom of the slope, then a set of train tracks. There are no trains in sight, the tracks silent and still. I have to work really hard not to trip over them.

  How can it be so damn quiet? After the insanity we just went through, the whole city should be on high alert. But there’s nothing. Like none of it happened.

  We hit the park, which is barely worthy of the name. It’s a barren stretch of dirt, pockmarked with distantly-spaced bushes. As we enter, I come to a wobbling halt, hands on my knees, a stitch
burning in my side and the muscles in my legs twitching. Like I’ve got my own case of the wiggles to deal with.

  “Teagan, let’s go.” Nic says.

  “Just a second.”

  “We don’t have a second.”

  “Yeah, don’t care.” I sit down hard, giggling. Actually giggling. What can I say? Adrenaline makes you do weird shit.

  He grunts, looks away.

  “By the way, just what the hell was that?” I ask. “Back there?”

  “What the hell was what?” He’s distracted, glancing in the direction of the tracks, as if he’s expecting pursuers to come rumbling across them at any moment. Leo gives a particularly bad twitch, just then, which makes Nic look down at the boy in his arms. For half a second, a flicker of terror dances across his face. Like he’s been carrying a bomb.

  “Objection, your honour, my client pleads the fifth,” I say. “All that.”

  Here’s another side-effect of adrenaline: it makes it impossible to lock down your emotions. They whipsaw wildly, joy turning to fury in a nanosecond. It’s why I giggled as I slid down the tree, and it’s why I can’t control the sudden, irrational anger.

  “You can’t just take a kid without a warrant,” he says.

  “What fucking world are you living in?” I was on the verge of convincing Africa. I’d opened up a tiny crack in his armour, and if I’d just had a few more seconds, everything that happened back there could have been avoided. Africa is a dipshit, true, and we wouldn’t even have gotten into that situation if it wasn’t for him… but he was starting to see reason. He’d realised what was at stake. If Nic had just shut the fuck up, Leo wouldn’t have gone apeshit, and those National guardsmen might still be alive. We’d have food, water, maybe a new ally. “You have a law degree. I thought they only gave those out to smart people. So explain to me why you thought talking about the constitution and in loco fucking parentis was going to help back there.”