by Jackson Ford
The books he stole were the only thing that kept him going. He buried himself in history: American, European, Chinese. Obscure stories about the gold rush in Australia and the Boxer Rebellion. Things that had happened, that had been witnessed and recorded and written about. He mined wisdom from them, tucked each quote away like a precious jewel.
He’d experienced a flicker of excitement when he first hit the LA traffic, felt the cars cosy in all sides of him. Wasn’t LA supposed to be a city of second chances? He’d read that somewhere, he was sure of it. What LA was, as a matter of fact, was a big anonymous American city. Just like all the others.
He’d made it work. He always did. He’d slept under an overpass in Pomona for a while, leaning up against his bike, lying half-awake, sure someone would try and take it from him. He still had a little money left over from Vegas, but not much, and he began to worry that he wouldn’t have enough for gas. That would be bad news. He’d have to leave the bike, and if someone took it while he was gone…
He was down to his last ten dollars when he got a job, washing dishes at a crappy restaurant in Monterey. The owner advanced him his pay cheque in exchange for Jake working a bunch of unpaid overtime. It was enough—just—to fill the bike with gas. None left for food or a place to sleep, but that was OK. He’d been through plenty of shelters and soup kitchens, and he knew the score.
The LA Mission was the closest. He’d head up there for the 12:30 p.m. service: soup, rolls, the occasional plate of greens swimming in fryer oil. He thought he might be hassled, his blond hair and sharp features marking him out—it had happened before—but nobody bothered him save the usual hey-man-got-a-smoke-want-some-crack-good-good-smoke. He let it all wash over him, utterly indifferent. Homeless people, after all, were only human.
It had been a long time since he’d used his power. He’d been very, very careful to keep it under wraps, knowing that it would get him on the radar of the authorities faster than any boosted purse or unpaid diner bill or siphoned gas. There were times he almost forgot about it, going days without even noticing his grip on the objects around him. But of course it was a part of him, this strange power that he knew so little about, that came from nowhere and nothing and which would likely remain that way for ever and ever, amen.
The food tables at the Mission were set up in a big cafeteria room, noisy and hot and tight with bodies. He’d got his soup, his roll, his little pat of butter. He’d been walking towards an empty plastic stool at the far end of the table, his mind a million miles away. Someone had left a battered paperback—Fifty Shades of Grey, he’ll never forget—on one of the stools. As he’d passed by, he’d brushed the book, knocking it off the stool.
He’d been holding his tray in both hands, and he didn’t even think about it. Just reached out with his mind, grabbed the book. It hovered in mid-air for a full second before he realised what he was doing and let it go like it had burned him.
Panic surged inside him, feeling like it was going to burn him alive. A room packed with people, and he’d just used his power. He was fucked. It was over.
He hardly dared raise his eyes to look. When he did, tearing them away from the sprawled paperback with its artfully knotted tie on the cover, he realised that no one had seen. No one. Not a single person had looked in his direction. The hundreds of other homeless in the room were intent on their meals, their conversations, their petty arguments. He’d escaped.
He breathed out a long shaky sigh, so relieved that he thought he was going to pass out. And when he looked up, a woman was staring right at him.
He didn’t know her name. She was just a volunteer, sweeping up some broken glass at the far end of the room, a figure in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, dirty jeans with a rip in one knee. But she’d seen. Jake knew from the moment he looked at her. She’d seen. And in her eyes… she was about to start yelling, screaming, Holy shit, did anyone else see that?
Except she didn’t. She’d blinked, shaken her head and gone back to sweeping. She hadn’t seen anything. He could almost see her mind working overtime to justify it. I’m tired, done too much overtime, need a drink. Seeing things.
Jake had moved on, trying hard not to shake. By the time he sat down, he was feeling a little more calm. It had been stupid to lose control like that, but ultimately it wouldn’t matter. If she was going to start shouting or approach him, she’d have done it already. He was reasonably sure she wouldn’t tell anyone.
Except of course she did.
She told Chuy.
By the time Jake reaches his bike, his earlier panic has dissipated. He actually finds himself whistling as he straddles it, dislodging the kickstand. Tuneless notes are obliterated by the blat-blat-blat as he kicks the engine into life.
He has only one more stop to make. One stop before he gets everything he ever wanted. And he is OK. Shaken, sure, but OK.
Know thyself and you will know the Universe and the Gods.
As he heads west, the sky behind him is just starting to lighten.
FIFTEEN
Teagan
How do I even start to describe Skid Row?
Maybe one word’ll be enough. And that word is bullshit.
It’s bullshit that there’s a seven-square-mile homeless camp in the middle of downtown LA less than two minutes from the Edmonds Building. It’s bullshit that two thousand people have to share nine dirty, stinking public toilets. It’s bullshit that they’re forced to take down their tents every day because some Los Angeles County official decided that it looks bad to have them up. It is total bullshit that the city’s attempts to fix things have nothing to do with actually rehousing these people or taking care of them, but just taking advantage of the low rents to move in people they deem more respectable. Start-ups and hipsters and hacker spaces.
Do I sound preachy? Am I making you uncomfortable? Deal with it.
I love this town, but I will never understand how everyone here is OK with Skid Row. Then again, I don’t have the first clue what to do about it myself.
It’s nearly 6 a.m. when I park the Batmobile on San Pedro Street at the edge of Skid Row. It’s actually a miracle I managed to drive the whole way over here. I felt like I was going to fall asleep at the wheel, and when some idiot in a Prius with a USC bumper sticker nearly drove into me on the 10, it actually took me a couple of seconds to react.
I am officially a danger to myself and others.
It’s probably a good thing that I plan to go on foot from here. Skid Row’s streets are full of people moving in weird, unpredictable directions, and the last thing I want to do is knock someone over. I kill the engine, then sit for a few moments staring out the windshield at nothing. Thinking.
About Steven Chase. And whoever killed him.
Whoever did it is another me—however the hell that’s possible—only they’re different. There is no way I could bend a piece of thick steel like that. I just don’t have the strength.
It wasn’t just my parents who tested my ability. If anything they held back. The government, though? They didn’t give a fuck. They put me through endless tests at a facility in Waco, Texas. A crappy series of prefab buildings in the middle of a windy-ass desert. They wanted to see how far I could push my PK—range, power, precision, all of it.
They made me use my ability in extreme heat and cold and noise, which was a barrel of laughs, as you can imagine. They also subjected me to a fake kidnapping, bursting into my cell at three in the morning dressed in black ski masks and yelling in Russian, waving flashlights and automatic weapons in my face.
I broke three noses and two arms with a flying chair, shattered a kneecap with a desk and knocked someone unconscious with the butt of their own gun. I also didn’t lift more than my maximum weight while doing it, which they somehow managed to monitor. Probably a good thing—if I had, those idiots might be dead instead of sitting in the infirmary with a cool story. And no, I’m not sorry. You put a gun to my head? I don’t care if it’s loaded with blanks. I will ruin
your day. It’s possible they could have repeated the exercise, but it’s kind of hard to recreate a stressful situation when the subject will probably just roll her eyes and go, “What? Again?”
Point is: I have limits. Tested, confirmed limits.
After four years in that shithole, four years of stress tests and range tests and blood tests and stress tests and range tests and blood tests, they’d finally had enough. I wasn’t going to be a soldier for them, nor was I actually giving them anything useful. They’d exhausted all their testing options, and at that point they were fairly evenly split about whether to cut me open and dig around inside me, or just put me in a very deep hole and forget about me.
Which is when Tanner stepped in. She had what she described as an alternative scenario. Perfect situation for her: if I ever step out of line, she steps out of the way of the people who want to cut me open and/or bury me.
Whoever killed Steven Chase did something that shouldn’t have been possible. Who are they? How the hell did they get so strong? More importantly, why have they only appeared now?
I have to track them down. If I don’t, then Tanner comes for me, and I’ll spend the rest of my short life locked in a government black site. But if I actually do it, then the same thing will happen to whoever this person is. I’ll never see them again. Tanner will make sure of that.
The only person out there who knows what it’s like to be me will be gone.
You might not have realised it from my sunny demeanour, but being the only one of your kind sucks. And not the everyone-is-special-in-their-own-way kind of thing. I mean literally the only one of your kind. I want to find out how this person got their abilities. How they came to exist when everything my parents ever did was destroyed. But more than that, I just want to talk to them. If I could get them alone… just for a minute…
I make sure the Batmobile is locked and head north up San Pedro.
Skid Row isn’t a camp with fences and gates. It’s just an area of the city where the homeless congregate. Across 7th Street, the tents start appearing: grey and green and blue, torn in places, the early-morning sunlight bouncing off the fabric. They’re pushed up against walls and chain-link fences next to vacant lots, buttressed against the outside world with barricades of shopping carts and black plastic bags. The shopping carts are all the same kind: bright red. A charity must have handed them out. And there’s trash everywhere: torn flyers, used condoms, discarded cigarette packs. The sharp smell of urine winds its way up my nostrils, squats there.
There are surprisingly few people on the street. An old woman, leaning against a tree, lined face turned up to the sun. A man on the corner, rocking back and forth as he hugs himself, squatting on a piece of cardboard. As I approach, there’s a figure coming in the opposite direction—a young Asian guy in clean jeans and a red button-up, sleeves rolled. I’m surprised to see him. He looks out of place on the grimy street. Then I remember how the start-ups and hacker spaces are moving in, taking advantage of the low rents. He’s probably a tech-bro coder, working on an app that he thinks is going to make him millions.
The dude on the cardboard says something to him, and the guy just ignores it, even though he has to step sideways to avoid him, passing me without a glance. He’s wearing a chain, thin metal links under his shirt. I can feel it. It would be so, so satisfying to give it a good yoink right now…
I don’t carry a purse, just a little stash pocket in my phone’s flip case for my cards and cash. I hold out a few coins, and the homeless man flashes me a toothless smile as he takes them, bobbing his head. He’s not someone I know. The very faint burned-plastic smell of crack wafts up from him.
“You doing OK?” I say.
He shrugs, already starting to rock back and forth again.
I jerk my chin at the intersection. “Africa still over by the Mission?”
“Africa?” His voice is deep, sonorous, like that of an opera singer. “Africa over in Africa! You on the wrong continent!” Opera voice or not, it comes out as connent. He flicks his hands at me, as if gesturing me to get lost, then resumes his rocking.
No point arguing. I keep walking, leaving him behind, heading deeper into Skid Row.
There’s more activity as I turn left onto East 5th, with several clusters of people huddled on the sidewalks, smoking, eyeing the block. A cop car rolls by, a meaty arm hanging out the window. It’s impossible to miss how the people on the sidewalk turn away, duck their heads.
The sky is a pale blue, made hazy by the smoke. It’s already baking hot, but a shiver snakes up my spine anyway. I’ve never liked cops. And the cops have never liked Skid Row. Everybody I’ve ever talked to in this place has been rolled up on, had their shit stolen. Everybody knows someone who’s been shot.
The Los Angeles Mission is a big concrete complex ringed with tall, spiked railings. It looks like a prison, but it’s where a lot of the people on Skid Row go to get help. It might be early, but the gates are wide open, and there are large groups of people milling around the entrance. The street smells of sweat, weed smoke, fried food. The sidewalk is slicked with spilled beer, although there are no smashed bottles anywhere—no litter of any kind, in fact. Even the pee smell isn’t as bad here. A couple of kids dash back and forth, laughing, weaving through adult legs and red shopping carts.
On the other side of the street two people dressed for office work march past. Just like the guy before, they don’t even look at the people outside the Mission.
I don’t know as many people in LA as Annie does. I could live here twenty years and never build a contact list half as deep. But in the two years I’ve been here, I’ve got friendly with a few people. And getting some info from them is better than sitting around the office, waiting for something to happen.
Africa is one of those people.
It doesn’t take me long to find him. It’s kind of surprising I didn’t hear him from down the block. He has a big, booming voice, bouncing from one slang word to the next in his thick accent, occasionally breaking into roaring gales of laughter.
He stands head and shoulders and chest above almost everyone in the crowd: a stick-thin seven-footer, wearing a faded dashiki under a ratty purple-and-gold Lakers jacket. He’s telling a group of (much shorter) buddies something, and as I pull up he throws back his head to let loose another howl of laughter. Almost immediately, his head bobs forward again like one of those little drinking birds. It’s a head that is way too small for his body.
I slide through the crowd, reaching up to tap him on the shoulder. I almost have to jump to do it. “Hey, big guy.”
His face creases in a frown, before erupting in a massive smile. “Teggan!” he roars, slapping me on the back, nearly sending me sprawling to the sidewalk. “You toubab! What you do here, huh? You bored in Hollywood?”
“How you doing, man?”
The rest of the group makes way for me good-naturedly, although I catch of couple of suspicious glances.
“’M good, huh,” he says. “And you? Yangi noos, yaaw?”
“Living the dream. Can I talk to you for a sec?”
“’Bout what?”
“Need some help with something.”
I don’t want to reveal too much in front of the group, most of whom I don’t know, but then again what does it matter? All I’m trying to find out is if anyone’s spotted anything weird around the Edmonds Building.
Someone calls Africa’s name. He lifts his chin, looking towards the Mission gates, yells something in French. “Wait here,” he tells me, loping off in the direction of the entrance.
I hang out, leaning against the fence, trying to look casual. Letting my mind drift.
“Spare a cigarette?”
I look up. One of Africa’s buddies—a pudgy guy with a single wisp of grey hair hanging off his balding scalp—is standing in front of me, looking pissy.
“Nah, sorry. I don’t smoke.”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “Change, then. Help a brother out.”
�
��I… I can’t. I gave it to someone already.”
“Come on, man. I gotta eat.” He steps closer, getting into my space. “I know you got—”
“Hey.” Africa pushes him away, hip-checking him. Africa being Africa, his hip is about level with the guy’s shoulder. “Derek! Leave her, sai sai!”
The balding guy grumbles but moves away.
“Here.” Africa shoves something into my hands—something hot and greasy, wrapped in parchment paper. Then he takes off, striding away from the Mission, beckoning me to follow. He’s chowing down on half a sandwich, one he must have got from the Mission kitchen. What I’m holding is the other half.
“Hey, dude, I can’t take this,” I say, jogging to keep up with his massive strides. Even as I say it, I get the smell of the sandwich, and my stomach wakes up with a jolt.
“You look tired,” he says over his shoulder. “Breakfast get you going, huh?”
There’s got to be someone I can give the sandwich to. But we’re away from the crowd now, and in any case not eating food given to you by a homeless guy would be shitty in the extreme. The bread is fried, filled with eggs and mayonnaise and something sharp and spicy. It tastes fantastic, even if it comes with a side order of guilt.
Africa heads over onto Wall Street, which might have the most ironic name in history. It’s a sea of tents pushed up against each other like balls in a ballpit, surging out over the edge of the sidewalk. Africa moves between them like they aren’t even there, alternately taking bits of his sandwich and reaching out to grip hands, fist-bump. I jog to keep up, only just managing to stop dots of mayo dribbling onto my chest.
Africa’s tent is dark grey, one side with a square of rough neon-green fabric duct-taped across it. There’s a mountain of bags next to the tent: backpacks, black garbage bags, duffels. A couple of cardboard boxes. All of them overflowing with clothes and knick-knacks. There’s a nodding cat figure, a pile of old basketball jerseys, a framed portrait of Obama.
