Eye of the Sh*t Storm

by Jackson Ford

  “I, uh…” Nic can barely keep a straight face. “I hit a deer. On Slauson.”

  And together, grinning stupidly at each other: “A South Central deer?”

  “I’ve never seen that movie,” Leo says. He does it in such a prim, offended manner that I can’t help but break out laughing again. So does Nic.

  We look at each other – and it’s like the argument we had before, after Dodger Stadium, suddenly leaps to the front of our minds at exactly the same time. It’s a look that says, No amount of movie references or dumb superhero jokes is going to bridge this gap. Maybe nothing will.

  All at once, I desperately want to tell him that that’s bullshit. I’m still trying to untangle what we said to each other, but I’m not going to let what we said define our relationship. Not a chance.

  I don’t get a chance to process it. Right then, my PK gives a ping.

  I’m very far from being at full capacity. But my ability to sense stuff has come back, a little. And right now, I’m sensing a bunch of wallets and cellphones and coins and glasses heading towards us from deeper inside the station. A second later, there are voices.

  My eye’s meet Annie’s. She’s halfway out of her seat when four bobbing lights come into view. Cellphone flashlights, or actual torches. It’s impossible to see who’s behind them.

  “Who’s that?” says a male voice.

  “Thought you said this place was empty,” comes another voice. A woman this time.

  “You have gotta be kidding me,” I mutter.

  “Teagan, we good?” Annie says, not taking her eyes off the lights. Nic steps protectively in front of Leo. I can just make out the dark shapes behind the floating lights now – it looks like there are five figures there. My first thought is that they’re city officials, come to clean any squatters out of the station. But there’s something in the way they’re standing that tells me otherwise. They’re not the Legends, or the National Guard – I can’t feel any weapons. And I’m pretty sure they weren’t conjured by the Zigzag Man.

  “How y’all doing?” one of them says. His voice is deeper than the others.

  “We’re having a great night,” I tell him. “A legendary one, actually.”

  “Is that right?” The man’s torchlight jerks. “Time for y’all to move on. We got here first.”

  Were they here already? Deep in the station where we couldn’t see them? They must have been… but then, why are they the only ones here? There is no possible way we got here at exactly the same time as a bunch of dudes who suddenly remembered the existence of Union Station, and decided that it was a primo camping spot. Not even we can be that unlucky.

  And how the hell did they get in here, anyway?

  “We were just going,” Nic says.

  I flick an annoyed glance at him. “Uh, no we’re not. We’ll go when we’re damn good and ready.”

  “We’re claiming this spot for the camp,” says someone else. “And we don’t know you. Get outta here.”

  Annie tugs at my arm. “Let’s go,” she hisses.

  I swing my arms wide. “Who the hell are you? Ow.” There’s a sudden burst of pain at the base of my skull, my shoulders protesting at the movement. I recover quickly. “You do realise this is a public building right? You can’t just—”

  “You know what?” rumbles the man with the deep voice. “Y’all being disrespectful. Empty your pockets. Then you can go.”

  Are these jackasses trying to mug us? Of all the shit that’s happened today…

  Fine. They’re about to find out that I’m not that easy to roll on. Except… I don’t know if my PK is going to help this time. There’s not enough of it. And even as the thought occurs, I’m weighing the odds, not liking what I see. Five of them. Three of us – four if you count Leo, who is as much out of gas as I am. We’re already bruised, bloodied, exhausted.

  If they want to mug us, who the hell is going to stop them?

  “I said,” the man repeats. “Cough it up. Go on. Or—”

  “Woah, hold on!”

  It comes from my right, a spot I haven’t even looked at yet. There’s a sharp, delighted bark, and Bradley Cooper bursts out of the darkness.

  The dog jumps up on Leo, yapping and licking at him, almost knocking him over. His owner steps into view, a huge smile on his face.

  We all stare at him, open-mouthed. It’s Nic who speaks first.

  “Grant?”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Teagan

  I’d heard a lot about the homeless camp on the storm drain, even before this whole crazy night kicked off. It’s one of those things you see in the news or on social media, and kind of just skim by. Or at least, I do.

  I pictured a few tents, maybe a FEMA outpost or two. On the scale of one to shit-I-had-to-think-about-tonight, a homeless camp somewhere to the south didn’t even bump the needle.

  And I certainly was not expecting it to take up an entire freeway interchange.

  The first things we see are the winking lights of cook fires. A hundred of them, it looks like, glimmering in the darkness like stars. The sound comes next: an almost subsonic hum, the noise of a thousand voices laughing, shouting, grumbling. The hum is mixed with the hammering of metal on metal, the thin crackle of cooking fires. It swells into the night, amplified by the concrete corridor of the river.

  And then the camp coalesces out of the dark, and all I can do is gape.

  LA is known for its traffic, and almost all of that traffic happens on our gigantic freeways. Those freeways have even larger interchanges: giant spaghetti junctions, where freeways loop over and around one another, multiple levels of them, creaking under the staggering weight of cars and trucks. Or that was the case, before the quake. There are plenty of interchanges that got damaged, declared very-much-not-safe to drive over, and the 710-105 is one of them.

  It’s a gigantic, concrete Celtic cross where the two freeways intersect. The whole interchange is almost half a mile wide, most of it positioned just to the west of the storm drain. The section that crosses the drain has to be seven hundred feet wide, easily, multiple layers of freeway piled on top of one another.

  But it’s not the size of the interchange that gets me. It’s the size of what’s underneath it.

  Most of the interchange supports are propped up with heavy-duty steel scaffolding – a huge nest of it, bars and platforms and catwalks holding the entire edifice up. There are tents everywhere – and I do mean everywhere. Not just on the concrete channel, but on the scaffolding platforms too, and on the actual freeways themselves. Some genius has actually hung rope ladders, turning the whole camp into something a little kid would dream up. The river itself cuts right through the middle of the camp, the channel vanishing into the maze of scaffolding.

  The whole thing looks like a catastrophe waiting to happen. Here and there, the scaffolding has been bolstered by lengths of bamboo, the stalks lashed to the existing steel, strengthening the structure. There’s a crew of men levering another set into place, they themselves standing on a makeshift platform positioned under the lowermost freeway loop.

  Both sides of the storm drain are lined with flood barriers, right up to the freeway. A lot of them look like fresh repairs, or replacements. I can’t tell if the city did it, or the people in the camp.

  “We’re getting dozens of new people every day,” Grant says. Turns out, he was the reason these people were in Union Station. When his new buddies mentioned how full the camp was getting, he had an epiphany: why not occupy the station? It was, after all, just sitting there, sealed off but empty. When he was told it was impossible to get inside, he happened to mention that he was a former electrical engineer for the railways, and he happened to know a few ways in that were probably a little less secure…

  They actually arrived some time before we did, and were just leaving as we got there.

  “How many people here now?” Nic asks him.

  He whistles. “Must be over two thousand, easy.”

  Honestly, it lo
oks like more. They crowd between the tents, shuffle in a long queue around makeshift kitchens, crouch in small groups playing dice or dominoes, sit alone with their phones. Some of them give us curious glances, and a few shout hello to our little honour guard, but most just ignore us.

  There are business suits, tattered nurses’ scrubs, overalls, crisp white Ts with red and blue bandanas – the Crips and the Bloods, for once not appearing to give a shit about their beef. Men, women, kids, dogs, cats. Birds in cages. The air smells of weed and charcoal, sweat and rotting garbage – which is everywhere, piled up in stinking, tottering heaps.

  “Did you know about this?” I ask Annie.

  She shrugs. “Sure. It’s gotten a lot worse since I last saw it, though.”

  “Worse?” The man with the deep voice – Grant introduced him as Alvin – kisses his teeth. I’m still not sure I’ve forgiven him for trying to rob us. “Please. We doin’ just fine.”

  “Clearly,” I say, eyeing a piece of makeshift scaffolding that looks like it’s going to fall down if I raise an eyebrow.

  “Oh, y’all think just because we out of work, we don’t know what we’re doing?” Alvin points, indicating an older man with a neat beard, fussing over a bamboo support. “See that dude? He worked construction for thirty years – built Tom Cruise’s spot. He’s been helping build this place up. We got a bunch of other dudes too.”

  “He put up the scaffolding? The metal stuff?”

  “Nah. Government did that shit, then they left. Y’all know how it is. Don’t matter though, we got all kinds. We got doctors, construction guys, Uber drivers, chefs, all of it.”

  Alvin sees the incredulous look on my face, and gives me a weary smile. “Twelve million people in the Greater LA area, y’all think a couple thousand didn’t get screwed by insurance after the quake? Probably a lot more than that. Blue collar, white collar, all of it.”

  “I can help rig up some lights, by the way,” Grant says. “I’m an electrical engineer. We could tap into the power grid, and—”

  “Dude, I told you, we got it under control,” Alvin says. “All that shit was done before you got here.”

  “Right,” Grant says, a little crestfallen.

  “Your house gone, maybe your car,” says the woman next to Alvin. “Insurance company won’t pay cos you didn’t take out special coverage or your property taxes were overdue or whatever. Government supposed to help, but they can’t agree on what to do, or whether they should accept aid from other countries or what not. Where you gonna go?”

  “Lucille’s right,” says Alvin. “I mean, to be fair, some of us still got jobs to go to, you know? We got cars, but we gotta park them way away from here.” He waves at the dark, interlocking freeway above us.

  “I don’t get it,” I say. “If you’re still getting a salary then why not rent, or…?”

  “Like there’s so many properties out there to rent,” says Lucille. “Most of us ended up with bad credit too. You know what I used to be? A prop designer. Eleven years. You think they’re making movies here any more? All the big studios moved their shit. Someone told me the other day to go live in Vancouver, find work there. Fucking Vancouver! You know how many people from California tried to move to Canada? Take me years to get up there.” She sniffs. “I’m LA born and raised. I’m never leaving.”

  She glances at Leo. “Oh, sorry, little man. I didn’t mean to swear in front of—”

  “It’s fucking OK,” Leo says, with a shrug.

  I swear everybody takes a step back from him, wincing and hissing and telling him to mind his language. He blinks at us. “You guys say it all the time.”

  “Is that right?” Alvin fixes us with a pointed look.

  I quickly change the subject. “Isn’t it dangerous here? This is literally a storm drain. Aren’t you guys worried about…?”

  I trail off, thinking about the blockage upriver, at the broken Main Street Bridge. All that water, building and building.

  We used to get flash floods in Wyoming sometimes – I never got caught in one, but I know a little bit about how they work. We’d get them on dry creek beds and up in the canyons. They’re nasty all right, big swells of water carrying a shit-ton of debris: broken trees, snapped branches, even boulders. They don’t just appear from nowhere. You have some warning – you can hear them coming – and if you have a clear enough viewpoint, you can actually see them too.

  I squint up the sides of the concrete storm drain, wondering if we’d be able to get out in time if a flash flood did chase us down. There are more flood barriers on either side of the camp, many of them looking brand-new, without graffiti. That confuses me, but only for a second. Some of the barriers were probably knocked down in the quake, and what I’m seeing are the ones the city replaced. The barriers are wall-to-wall on either side of the channel, with only a few gaps here and there for bridges, or maintenance worker access.

  Not good if you happen to be living here.

  “Sure.” Lucille nods. “It’s crazy dangerous.”

  Alvin sighs, like this isn’t the first time he’s had to explain this. “You think this is the only homeless camp in LA? Ever since those skyscrapers came down in Skid Row, bunch of people been looking for places to live. You got all these camps springing up everywhere, and one by one, the government comes in and shuts them down.”

  “Why?”

  “Who the hell knows? Different reason every time. Safety, security, bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood, whatever. But then some people started camping here, and nobody was hassling them. Word got around, more and more people moved in…” He grimaces. “Even this place is getting to full. S’why we were scouting other spots, ones where folks wouldn’t really get hassled.”

  Annie raises an eyebrow. “Like Union Station?”

  “Why not? Trains aren’t running. Place looks boarded up from the outside. Nobody’s checking it. Why the hell not?

  “What do you guys do if there’s a flash flood here?” I ask Grant, trying to sound casual.

  He looks bewildered. “A flash flood?”

  “It’s when water—”

  “We’d get out of here,” Alvin drawls. “No problem. If there’s water coming, we’d see it way before it hit.”

  Lucille points up the channel. “Probably hear about it too. Data’s a little sketchy here, but we still got some.”

  Alvin grimaces. “I mean, you think about it, we get swept away in a flood or whatever, it’s probably a good thing for the government. Less people to take care of. Maybe that’s why they’ve left us alone.”

  Ugh. And I work for the government. I’d love to say that Alvin’s crazy conspiracy theory is just that, but I can totally see it happening.

  I have to remind myself that it was the Legends who smashed us into the bridge supports in the first place. Without them, the bridge would never have collapsed. I can’t take on responsibility for everything. All the same, the thought doesn’t sit easy.

  “Over here.” Grant ushers us through the maze of scaffolding, to a spot close to the sloped edge of the channel. There’s a cookfire, a big one, blazing in a sawed-up metal half-barrel. Two dozen people are clustered around it, some with blankets over their shoulders, talking quietly in small groups. A few kids, even a couple of newborns. Sleeping bags and camping cots and blow-up mattresses everywhere.

  “Yo,” Alvin barks. He claps Nic on the shoulder. “They’re good. I checked ’em out.”

  Grant winks at me. I really want to ask him how on earth he hooked up with a group of half-assed stick-up artists. But I am way too fucking tired right now.

  “Sit down,” Alvin rumbles. “Yo yo, clear a spot for ’em! Make yourselves comfortable. We got heat, we got some water. ¿Juan, vato, queda algo de comida? Maybe some of that steak?”

  “I’m sorry.” I raise a finger. “Did you say steak?”

  “Don’t expect the Four Seasons.” He snickers. “But yeah, Juan –” he indicates a short, stooped man near the fire “– he found
a butcher shop that was going out of business. We pooled cash, bought a bunch of stuff. Y’all are welcome. Won’t even charge you – you know, to apologise for trying to jack you before.”

  “I love you,” I say. I mean it, too. Juan has already slapped the meat on the grill over the fire, the sizzle as sweet as angel trumpets.

  “Can I have some?” Leo says.

  Nic shakes his head. “Look, thanks for the offer, but we gotta keep moving.”

  “I dunno.” Annie frowns. “We could use some food.”

  “What about the Legends?” Nic asks. “Or – you know. Mr Zigzag Guy?”

  “We gotta eat,” I tell him. To be honest, I don’t care how much he protests. I probably wouldn’t care if Pop herself came bursting into the circle waving a bazooka. I am eating that steak.

  All the same, I get a little jolt of worry. It’s not just the Legends, or the Zigzag Man, or the National Guard. It’s Africa, too. His network of contacts isn’t as deep as Annie’s Army, but it’s still extensive… and it’s a sure bet that he knows at least a few people here. I’m almost certain he’s still in play – Leo hit him pretty hard, but then again, Africa’s pretty hard himself. He’s out there, right now, maybe hustling connects in Skid Row for info. Maybe he already knows where we are, is on his way down here…

  At that very second, my gaze happens to land on a dude off to the side, talking on his cellphone. He’s long-term homeless, it looks like, shirtless despite the rain, his body a mess of bruises and track marks, his face pinched and sour. His eyes meet mine, and he looks away quickly.

  I shake my head, irritated. Not every person on the phone will be calling Africa, or even know that the big guy is looking for us. All the same… we shouldn’t stick around any longer than we have to.

  Food first, though. We all get a piece of steak, the silent Juan doling them out. They arrive on paper plates, still sizzling, with two slices of white bread on the side already soaking up the juice.

  It’s only steak in the sense that it’s a cut of meat from a cow – we are not, as Alvin said, talking dry-aged rib-eye here. But… dear God and all her drunken angels. I’ve eaten some amazing things in my life, but I think this piece of mystery meat between two slices of Wonder Bread may be the very best. It’s gone in four enormous bites.