Eye of the Sh*t Storm

by Jackson Ford

  “Easy, baby.” She can’t rock him back and forth, it’s beyond her – her torso and hips just don’t have the ability. His eyes have rolled back, the whites showing under fluttering lids. Reggie doesn’t even know if he can hear her, but she keeps talking anyway. “I know you’re scared, but you have to stop, please, baby, just ease up. It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all—”

  A bolt of lightning strikes so close to her that Reggie is certain she’s been hit. It leaves a burning trail in her vision, and it’s followed by a dozen other strikes, the boy’s rage climbing.

  Everything in her wants to push the boy away, make herself smaller, protect herself from the onslaught. The terror of being struck is as raw as an exposed nerve ending.

  “And it’s nowhere as bad as her fear that her captor might be hit. Her, and her bomb trigger. The backpack under Reggie’s body feels like it’s made of a super-dense material, a metal from a distant star with a giant gravitational pull, sucking everything towards it.

  And still, Reggie keeps talking, because there is absolutely nothing else she can do. “Shhh, baby. Shhh. I know you’re scared, but you have to listen to me. We’re going to finish this together, we’re not done yet, we have to keep going…” Tears are pouring down her cheeks, but Reggie barely notices. “You and me. All you have to is breathe, and we’re not done yet. It’s OK.”

  The boy’s screams have turned to sobs. His legs are still kicking out, but the kicks are different now – more like heavy muscle spasms.

  The ground is smouldering in a dozen places, actual flames in others. The sky above them is nothing but black clouds. But there are longer gaps between the lightning strikes now. Slowly, ever so slowly, they start to ebb.

  Reggie keeps talking. “That’s it. Let it go.”

  Annie lies sprawled on the ground a few feet away – Reggie has to force back a soft moan of horror when she spots her. She can’t be dead – it’s simply not an option. Reggie won’t let it happen.

  Nic curls in a tight ball nearby – did he get hit too? But as Reggie watches, he gets unsteadily to his feet, flinching as a lone bolt strikes a short distance away.

  “Nic,” Reggie says. “Just—”

  She doesn’t get the rest out, because at that moment, Nic sprints past her. Heading right for the woman.

  Reggie tries to yell at him no, the woman still has a grip on the bomb trigger. She can’t get the word out – her throat has locked up, horror freezing her in place.

  The woman is up on one knee. Nic’s attempt to take her by surprise does not go well, because the Zigzag Man gets there first.

  Reggie is expecting him to use his ability. He doesn’t bother. He uses Nic’s own momentum against him, grabbing the back of his shirt and hurling him forwards. Nic’s feet tangle up and he goes sprawling, grunting in pain.

  Reggie keeps whispering, not daring to stop, until she realises that the boy is no longer listening. He’s gone completely limp.

  Nic hauls himself upright, throws a wild haymaker. The Zigzag Man blocks it easily, then whips a cupped palm around and onto Nic’s ear.

  Reggie’s seen the move before, in combat training. The pressure can pop the eardrum. Nic stumbles backwards, streaming eyes squeezed shut.

  The Zigzag Man steps into his space, and lands a flat hand on Nic’s nose, which breaks with a sound that reminds Reggie of crunching ice cubes. Nic goes down hard, arms wheeling.

  There are no more lightning bolts. No sound but the howling wind.

  The woman straightens up, takes a shaky breath, and turns towards Reggie. The look in her eyes is pure fury. Rain plasters her hair to her forehead.

  “It’s OK, baby.” The boy is beyond listening now, but Reggie doesn’t care – if she stops talking, she’ll crumble. “We’re going to fix this, don’t worry about it, you just stay with me.”

  Somehow, Nic is still conscious. He reaches out for the Zigzag Man, trying to grab his ankle. The man sidesteps, barely glancing at Nic.

  “Let me have them,” he says. There’s a wheedling, pleading note in the Zigzag Man’s voice that Reggie finds more horrifying than anything. Above his beard, his eyes are wild. Vicious. “Let me take them into my house. Let me hide them in the walls.”

  “Program,” the woman spits. “Captain. Tournament. Disorder.”

  “Please.” It’s a growl: an insane animal noise.

  The woman steps between Reggie and the Zigzag Man, her voice suddenly urgent. “Photograph. Skeleton. Zigzag. Zigzag. Zigzag.”

  He subsides, his face slipping into a perfect blank. A slave once more.

  Reggie meets the woman’s eyes. “You can’t have him.”

  In response, the woman simply bends down, hooks a hand under the boy’s armpit.

  And with every ounce of strength she has, every inch of mobility her arm will give her, Reggie swings her modified knife at the woman’s throat.

  She’d taken it out her pocket the moment she realised what Leo was about to unleash, hidden it under her body. Her fingers slotted in the rings built into the handle. The blade slashes through the air, and Reggie knows, knows, that it will find its target. The woman underestimated her, and Reggie’s going to make her pay.

  The woman snaps her left hand up faster than Reggie would have thought possible. She catches Reggie’s wrist, stopping the blade an inch from her throat.

  “Really?” she says, contemptuous. “You thought that was going to work?”

  Reggie would give anything to snap back at her: No. But this will. And then attempt something else, surprise her, knock her off balance…

  But there’s nothing else. She has nothing left to try.

  The woman plucks the knife from Reggie’s hand, almost tenderly slipping it off her fingers. Then she hurls it away.

  Reggie tries to pull her arm back over Leo, but the woman stops her. She lifts the boy out, then stands, hefting his unconscious body. Leo’s legs are twitching badly now.

  “We’ll find you,” Reggie says to the woman, knowing it’s not a good idea to provoke her, and not caring. Raindrops fall into her mouth, cold and somehow slimy. She spits them out, snarling. “Do you understand that? You are about to bring the wrath of God down on you and yours.”

  The woman turns, and walks away. The Zigzag Man follows, like an obedient dog.

  Reggie sucks in a deep breath. “You don’t get it. It’s like Annie said: there’s nowhere you can go.” She raises her voice, as loud as it will go. “It’s not just her contacts who’ll come after you. Every special forces squad, every investigator, every single intelligence operator employed by the US government: they are all going to be looking for you. There’ll be nowhere left to run.”

  “We don’t have to run,” the woman says over her shoulder. “We won’t even have to hide for much longer.”

  She lifts the bomb trigger, glances at it. Then casually, almost as an afterthought, tosses it away.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Teagan

  “Teggan!”

  The voice reaches me from what feels like a very long way away. Another galaxy, maybe. Or from the afterlife.

  “Teggan! Under you!”

  I don’t know how I do it, but I get my eyes open. Turn my head. Still not convinced what I’m hearing is real.

  The flood is still being held at bay, although that’s going to change in maybe five seconds. The concrete slab I’m on is now twelve or fifteen feet off the deck. And on the deck, wheels almost submerged in the rushing water…

  The China Shop van.

  With Africa sticking his head out the window. Yelling my name.

  What in the name of fuck is he doing here? Does he not see the enormous flood?

  Reality slaps me around the face. The stupid son of a bitch came back for me. He actually thinks he’s going to drive me out of here.

  I open my mouth to tell him to get the hell away, and then I see the most wondrous thing.

  No people. The homeless camp is finally, finally empty.

&nbs
p; There’s no way to know for sure… but somehow, I do. Everybody is finally safe. Africa and the Legends got the last of the people out.

  As if hearing my thoughts, the pressure of the flood gets even worse, almost punching through my PK completely.

  I lean back on the slab, willing it to move down towards the van. It doesn’t listen to me at first – but then it starts to move. Slow, sluggish, but moving. To my right, a section of scaffolding collapses with a clatter, forced off its foundations by the rising torrent.

  “Come come come!” Africa slaps the door with a massive palm. “On the roof. Get on the roof!”

  I’m right at the end of my tether, so what he’s saying doesn’t register at first. What the fuck is he talking about, the roof? Does he not—?

  Which is when the last of my PK drains away completely. And the flood, freed from its shackles, comes roaring down towards us.

  I topple off the concrete slab onto the roof of the van, landing on my back, hard enough to knock what little wind is left out of me.

  Africa punches the gas. There’s a horrible second where the wheels do nothing but spin in the water. Then the tires catch, and the van leaps forward.

  The water hits the concrete, right behind us. The impact is so powerful that it actually jolts the van, bouncing me up off the roof. I shriek, coming back down with a thump, numb hands scrambling for purchase on the slick metal, as the roaring waters explode upwards again. There’s the insane clanging of a hundred scaffolding poles giving way at once, wrenched away by the force of the water. The concrete slab I was on vanishes under the raging torrent.

  We pop out from under the freeway, wheels sending up great gouts of spray, being chased by an enormous, frothing wall of water and debris. Africa swerves to avoid – well, actually, I don’t know what the fuck he swerves to avoid, but it sends me sliding sideways. I throw my hands out, grabbing the edge of the roof closest to my head, fingers scrabbling at it.

  There’s a metallic whang as a piece of scaffolding bounces off the van, hitting right where I was a second ago. Christ, that was close.

  We’re not moving fast enough. Not even close. The flood has ripped through the homeless camp and is right on our heels. If it hits us, it’ll lift the van right off the concrete, send it tumbling.

  And there’s not a damn thing I can do except hang on, and hope.

  He can’t keep this up for ever. We have to get out of the storm drain. Only, how the hell are we going to do that, when there are flood barriers for ever? Come to think of it, where are the people Africa drove out of the camp? Surely he didn’t drop them off in the middle of the—

  There’s a gap. One of the flood barriers on the left is down – a different barrier to the one I knocked over. I have no idea how they did it, but someone managed to rip the brackets out of the ground and send it sliding down into the storm drain.

  I let out a scream of triumph as Africa swerves towards the gap. If we can just keep our speed up…

  A second later, we hit the slope, and that’s when everything goes really wrong.

  The slope is at an angle. Obviously. That means the wet, slippery roof of the van is suddenly no longer flat.

  If I’d been in a better state of mind, I might have foreseen this. But I’m so out of gas, and so desperate to get the fuck out of the LA River and never, ever come back, that I just don’t think about it until it’s actually happening.

  This time, my palms can’t get enough friction. I have enough time to let out a single strangled, panicked yell, and then I’m off the roof.

  Time goes very, very slow, and everything in front of me gets crystal clear. The van. Africa’s panicked, desperate face in the side mirror. The slick concrete of the storm drain. The drops of water in the air.

  My shadow on the ground, growing bigger by the nanosecond.

  I throw out my PK in one last, desperate burst, trying to find anything that will help—

  I snag the van’s side door. Without even realising what I’m doing, I rip it open, nearly tearing it off its slide mechanism. At the very last instant, with my arms stretched as far as they will go, I grab the handle.

  If this were a movie, I’d just hang there, disaster miraculously averted. I do not hang. I bounce.

  The van takes my weight so suddenly that it almost pulls my arms out of their sockets. My feet smack the concrete, skidding wildly, the laws of physics doing their best to rip me off and flay every inch of skin from my body. Oh, and you know how it feels when you catch your fingers in a door? Imagine that, only the door wants to kill you. My howl of pain turns into words: “Fuck fuck fuck fuck—”

  There’s the blat of another engine, so close it nearly splits my head in two. Then the most miraculous thing happens. Someone grabs hold of me. A huge, meaty arm covered in tattoos wraps itself around my midsection, and pulls me close.

  I don’t know what the hell is happening, or who’s got hold of me. All I can do is let go of the door handle and hold on. As my feet judder against the wet concrete, as freezing water peppers my face and the flood makes one last, desperate lunge for us: I hold on.

  We crest the edge of the storm drain. The van goes airborne, all four wheels leaving the ground as it roars into the open air. Whoever has me, and whatever goddamn vehicle they’re driving, does the same. For a split-second, I’m weightless. Completely free.

  Then we come down with the biggest bang I’ve ever felt.

  Whoever is holding me is strong, but the impact is enough to wrench me from their grip. There’s a tangled, panicked second where I’m still weightless, and then I hit the ground. Hard.

  I roll, tumbling sideways, the sky and the van and the dirt spinning around me. I don’t get knocked unconscious. Exactly the opposite. There’s so much adrenaline and methamphetamine and terror burning in my body that I come out of the roll and stumble to my feet, hyperventilating, spinning in wild, jerky circles.

  The skin on my hands has been ripped away, the raw flesh stinging. My left knee is sending up very urgent signals of pain, and every breath feels like it’s going to burn through the walls of my lungs.

  It’s not just my knee, or my lungs. My whole body is a distant forest fire of pain, glimmering on the horizon but growing closer by the second. I don’t know if it’s the meth keeping me upright, or the adrenaline, or both. The world goes wavy for a long moment, tilting so badly that I almost fall over anyway.

  I’m in a vacant plot of land bordered by the storm drain on one side, and warehouses on the other. It’s so similar to the place I first entered the storm drain with Leo that for a second, my poor, addled brain makes me think I’m actually back there.

  The difference is that this time, there are people here. A lot of people. A hundred, maybe more. Dirty faces with soaked skin. And all of them staring at me. They’re not silent – there’s a hum of voices, rolling like waves across the crowd. Almost drowned out by the flood waters rushing past below us.

  Almost, but not quite.

  There’s a squeal of brakes, followed by a grinding blast of tyres on dirt. The China Shop van comes to a rocking, shuddering halt, Africa stumbling out, head snapping side to side, looking for me.

  And just beyond him, screeching to a halt: a motorcycle. A big, red Harley-Davidson, and on top of it… Robert. He was the one who grabbed me when I came off the van.

  He saved me.

  Just beyond him are the other bikers. Pop is there too, soaking wet, her hair a mess, clambering off her gigantic ATV.

  Someone in the crowd cheers.

  It’s an exhausted, almost desperate sound. But it kickstarts something, and then the whole crowd is going nuts. Cheering, clapping, punching the air. Men and women, kids, dogs barking. The crowd surges forward, and for a moment, I have this absurd idea that they’re going to pick me up and drop me back in the river.

  They don’t. They surround me, Africa, the bikers. They clap us on our backs, shoulders, grab our hands and pump furiously. Every touch sends bolts of furious pain through my
insulted body. Through the chaos, I spot Alvin, of all people, hooting and hollering even louder than everyone else.

  I just stare, my mouth hanging open. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.

  They know what you can do. They saw.

  I don’t know what that means yet, but the crowd gives me a little bit of a preview. Because not everyone is cheering. Most people are… but there are others who are just gaping at me. The emotions on their faces are not just relief, happiness, excitement. There’s awe there. Fear. Disbelief.

  And yet somehow, in this moment, in this hurricane of handshakes and back pats that make my body jangle with pain, it doesn’t matter.

  “Thank you,” I murmur, as my hammering heart starts to slow, just a little. “Thanks. I… thank you.”

  I’m still not completely sure I’m not dead. It feels like I’ve stepped into another universe. One of those places where everything is almost, but not quite, exactly the same.

  In that instant, I lock eyes with Pop.

  She is in the middle of a crush of people, but somehow, I have a clear line of sight right to her. And despite the fact that she just about everyone is congratulating her, she ignores them. In that moment, I am the only one she’s paying attention to.

  You know the phrase balanced on a knife edge? I’ve never liked it. I know knives, and let me tell you, most of the ones in your kitchen right now are so blunt you could do a handstand on the edge and not draw blood. But I do think there are moments when everything hangs in the balance. When a situation could turn out fine, or go completely to shit, and the difference between the two scenarios is barely the thickness of an atom.

  And as Pop looks at me, I can’t help but think of all the times we’ve clashed today. The meth I’ve stolen, the people who died, the gunfights and car chases.

  But I also think of what we just did. The dozens – no, hundreds – of people we saved. She may have gotten there at the very last minute…

  But she still came.

  Pop looks at me. I look back. And for a few seconds, it’s just her, and me.