Eye of the Sh*t Storm

by Jackson Ford

It takes an almost physical effort for Reggie to lock down her thoughts. She’s more amazed at herself than angry – she can’t recall the last time she lied to Moira Tanner. There was no point, has never been any point. Moira might be tough to work with, but she has always wanted China Shop to succeed – Teagan might have trouble seeing that, but Reggie sure doesn’t.

  So what in the blue hell was that?

  Reggie almost laughs. A first-year psychology student could figure this out. Part of her wants Moira to call her out. To fire her. Because then she’d be free from China Shop, free to do whatever the hell she wanted, audition for Darcy Lorenzo, kick off a new career and—

  Reggie makes a noise that is part snarl, part groan. Regina McCormick, CIA analyst and operative, does not lie. Warrant Officer Regina McCormick of the 162nd Aviation, 1st Battalion (Assault Helicopter) does not lie. She’ll be damned if Regina McCormick of China Shop does.

  Of course, that ship has sailed. The lie has been told. Still. It wasn’t big. Nothing she can’t explain away. If they do find Teagan, it will pass by unnoticed.

  “Reggie?” Annie says.

  “I want you both to split up,” Reggie hears herself say. Her heart feels as if it’s skipping every third beat, and there’s a very strange taste in her mouth. “Search the storage unit again.”

  “But—”

  “Again, Annie. Top to bottom. Then I want you to start looking in the surrounding area. Anywhere you think she might have gone.”

  “Why would she run without telling us?” Africa asks.

  “I don’t know, honey. But she’s gotta be somewhere, so get to searching. Have the LAPD assist if you can, you can cover more ground that way.”

  “They will not follow us. They are already—”

  “I don’t care, Africa. Find Teagan, you hear me? Find her.”

  FOURTEEN

  Teagan

  The cop is middle-aged, with an untidy beard and the weary eyes of a man who never quite got that detective’s badge.

  I can’t use my ability here. That would make a bad situation exponentially worse. I can’t run, because this is Los Angeles, and he’ll shoot me. And I can’t do nothing, because Leo – a boy who can electrify things that you thought could never be electrified – will send a zillion volts through the dirt and cook the cop where he stands.

  “What are you doing here?” the cop says.

  The question blindsides me. I was expecting something along the lines of Get on the ground and don’t fucking move.

  “Um…”

  It’s not a good answer. The cop takes a step closer. I get in front of Leo instinctively, shielding him. My pulse thunders in my ears.

  The cop jerks his chin. “Move along.”

  “I… what?”

  “You can’t be here. This is a crime scene. If you need a place to stay, there’s a big camp down the river a ways. Under the 105.”

  The cop isn’t seeing two people with extranormal abilities, one of whom just electrified an entire building. He’s seeing a scared, haggard-looking woman – who looks, funnily enough, like she’s coming down off a meth binge – and a small child.

  There might be an FBI windbreaker on my back, but it’s one that’s been torn and shredded by our run through the fence, scuffed with dirt, looking like it came from a gift shop. More importantly, he’s seeing us on this side of the fence.

  He can’t have seen us come through, or seen me make the hole. If that were the case, he’d be a lot more aggressive. We’ve moved far enough away from the fence that he thinks we’re just passing through. The poor son of a bitch is on patrol duty, and to him, we’re nothing more than a couple of drifters – just two of the thousands moving in and around LA in the aftermath of the quake.

  Fuck it. I’ll take it.

  “What happened in there?” I say. “Seems like a lotta your buddies are out.”

  “Nothing important, ma’am. Move along now.”

  I can’t resist sketching a salute as I hustle Leo past the cop. He eyeballs us before turning back to the fence.

  “This way,” I mutter to Leo, trying to keep my voice steady. Mercifully, the kid’s in duckling mode again, sticking close behind me.

  We head directly away from the storage unit, moving towards the drop-off I spotted earlier. The land rises a little as we get close, the soil rougher, with more rocks pushing up through it. I’m expecting the same on the other side of the drop, but instead, it’s concrete. A long slope of it, running down to a wide channel.

  The LA River.

  See, Annie? I know what it is now.

  Unlike the section we tangled with the Legends on, this part of the river isn’t concreted over. The sloping sides are, sure, but the flat part is a wide expanse of packed dirt and scrubby vegetation. A few bamboo groves sprout here and there, spreading jagged shadows. The actual channel of water is right at the bottom of the slope, on our side. No telling how deep it is, but it’s not flowing all that fast. There’s no one around.

  Why did they concrete one part of the river, and not up here? Annie would know. If—

  I close my eyes. Annie can’t help me now.

  We need to get as far away as we can. It’s going to be a lot trickier here than it is on the river. There might be more places to hide up top, but there will also be more people. On the river, we should be in the clear.

  “We’re gonna head down there,” I tell Leo, pointing. I’m worried he’s going to protest, but he just nods.

  Now that we’re out in the sun, the meth comedown has ebbed a little. I’m still headachey and nauseous, but at least I’m not seeing things. I don’t imagine anyone creeping up behind me.

  The slope is too steep for us to walk, so we scoot down on our backsides. Weirdly, it’s kind of fun, and I smile at Leo, hoping he feels the same way. But he’s turned away from me, looking north, towards the building clouds.

  The water runs in a shallow channel, around ten feet wide. I’m worried that it’s going to be too deep to cross, but close-up, it looks like it barely comes up to my ankles. The other side is flat, hard-packed dirt, like the scrubland above, maybe two hundred feet to the opposite concrete slope.

  We reach the bottom, still scooching on our backsides. I’m just wondering how to cross the water when I slip, dropping towards the channel. I throw a hand out to stabilise myself, which works for about half a second. Then I skid, arms flailing, right into the water. It’s only ankle-deep here, but it’s enough to completely soak my legs and my butt.

  I sit in the shallow flow, breathing very hard through my nose, trying to think of nothing at all.

  Leo manages to avoid ass-planting like me, but he can’t stop his feet hitting the water. His jeans are soaked all the way to the rip in his knee.

  I don’t have the faintest idea where we’re actually going to go. Even trying to picture Glendale on my mental map of LA is like trying to see through thick mist. But if we can get further down the river, and up the far slope, there might be somewhere we can go. A café, maybe, or – what the hell – a homeless shelter. Get something to eat and drink. Figure out our next move.

  “OK,” I tell Leo, forcing a smile onto my face. “It’s not deep. Come on.”

  He shakes his head. Wraps his arms around his knees.

  “Come on,” I say, the smile faltering. What is with this kid? He’s already wet, isn’t he?

  “It’s cold,” he says.

  “Yeah, well—”

  “Where’s my dad?”

  “He’s… I promised you I’d get you back with him, and that’s exactly what I’m gonna do, OK?”

  “You said he was outside.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Am I seriously having this debate while sitting in a pool of water? I get unsteadily to my feet, the current eddying around my ankles. “I said I’d get you to him.”

  “No, but, you said, he couldn’t get back in.” He hugs his knees tighter.

  “I did, but—”

  “No.” Long and drawn out. He shakes his
head vigorously, then points. “If he’s up there, then, we need to go up there too. I dunno why we’re down here.”

  Oh. I get what’s happening here.

  “Leo.” I wade across to him. “We can’t go back up there. We don’t even know if your dad is—”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why can’t we go there?”

  “Because…” I falter. “Because the cops will arrest us.”

  He won’t look at me.

  “Your dad couldn’t get back in to find you, and I know I said I’d get you back to him, but we have to go.”

  In response, he hunkers down into himself.

  “You’re not the Zigzag Man,” he says. I’m pretty sure he meant to say with the Zigzag Man, but that’s not what came out. “But I don’t like you. You’re a liar.”

  It is very, very hard not to start screaming.

  An adult would understand this. An adult would get that trying to find someone here is a bad idea. An adult would agree that we need to get somewhere safe. Leo is not an adult. Obviously. And in his mind, his dad is waiting for him somewhere around here.

  I don’t want to lie to him. That’ll just backfire later. And lest we forget, Leo can instantly kill anything he doesn’t like.

  Getting angry or frustrated here will solve nothing. So despite my exhaustion, despite the horrible, leaden feeling in my body, despite the unbearable urge to crawl into a cave and sleep for a thousand years, I stop. Force myself to think.

  I take a deep breath, and plop down next to him, relieved to be off my feet. Even if the concrete is freezing under my wet backside.

  “Leo,” I say quietly. “I didn’t lie.”

  “My dad says that if you lie to someone, it means you don’t love them.”

  “That’s… true, I guess. But, Leo, I swear, I wasn’t lying. I just… forgot to explain myself.”

  He blinks up at me, not understanding.

  “Your dad might be up there. If he is, they won’t let him in the building.”

  “But he’s gonna come find me!”

  “Yes, he will. But he might not be able to. You understand what I’m saying? I know you only zapped the building because you were scared, but…”

  Another deep breath, trying not to picture the body I came across. “But it made other people scared too. That’s why I came, because my friends and I were scared and wanted to find out what was happening.”

  He says nothing.

  “If your dad is up there, they won’t let him in. And if we go up there now, they’ll take you away from him.”

  “They will?”

  “Yeah. So we need to get somewhere safe. OK?”

  He chews his lip. “My dad always says you need a plan.”

  “He’s smart.” I don’t know what else to say.

  “Super-smart. Like that time we went to the BioPark but it was closed, so we went for ice cream instead.”

  “The… BioPark?”

  His eyes light up, maybe for the first time. “It’s like a zoo? They have a giraffe and a Kododo dragon and a turtle with red feet.” His gaze drops, as if he remembers where we are.

  I’m about to speak when he says “We gotta go to… to 860 East Glencoe. The place in Compton.” He stumbles a little over the words. “We gotta go there.”

  He picks at the concrete surface, prying up a loose chunk. It makes me think of what Annie said, about how the Army Corps of Engineers built it – just like they built the levees that collapsed during Hurricane Katrina.

  “Maybe my dad went there,” Leo is saying.

  Maybe he did.

  And maybe, if I get Leo there, his dad will be so grateful that he’ll tell me what the hell the School is, and who’s running it.

  Getting there is going to take some doing. We’re in the Glendale Narrows right now, and Compton is almost twenty miles directly south of us. I need a ride… but that comes with its own problems. It’s not just the fact that the roads are a mess right now. It’s Reggie. She’ll be checking out every damn security camera in a fifty-block radius… and I only have to get unlucky once.

  We could walk it – just go right down the river, straight shot, all the way past Downtown Los Angeles – DTLA, as we call it – then through Commerce, Bell Gardens, Downey. Hop out when we get to Compton. That keeps us off the roads, and away from any cameras – or at least, away from most of them. But it has its own problems. If we’re going to walk, we need food, and water.

  I can’t just go into a random restaurant. For one, it’s not exactly what you’d call safe – by now, Reggie and the crew must know I’ve gone AWOL, which means they’ll be in full search mode. For two, I have almost no money. Oh, I have a couple of cards in my pocket, but using them would be like putting up a neon sign. And the five bucks in cash and change I have won’t get us far. The quake, sadly, didn’t make things in LA much cheaper.

  And it’s only the start – even if Leo and his dad are reunited in Compton, even if Mr Nguyen gives me the low down, we still need to find something more permanent. Something that keeps Leo safe from Tanner… and from the Zigzag Man. Whoever the hell he is.

  I need some help.

  Annie and Africa are out, obviously. Same for Reggie. And whoever helps me will have to be someone who won’t call the cops when I show up with a strange little boy. Somehow, I don’t think claiming Leo is a mysterious family member who just showed up one day is going to cut it.

  It has to be someone who knows what I can do. Who knows about the world of shit I immerse myself in on a regular basis. The last thing I need is to have to explain why I can move shit with my mind and why Leo can zap anything he touches.

  Which, really, leaves exactly one person.

  I close my eyes, making myself run through other names in my head. Literally anybody else. I cycle through a bunch of foodies I hang out with, a woman I got friendly with at a yoga class last year, even Manuel, who runs the mini-market at the corner of my block – or used to, before it was wrecked by the quake. No go. None of them know about my ability.

  You can’t call him. For one thing, you broke your phone. You don’t know his number by heart, and—

  Aaaaand Google backs up all my contacts online. I can use Leo’s phone and just call it right up.

  God. Fucking. Argh.

  “Hey,” I say to Leo. “Would you mind if I used your phone real quick?”

  FIFTEEN

  Teagan

  “Hello?” Nic Delacourt says.

  Actually it’s more of a grunt than a word. Like he’s just woken up from a really deep sleep. He must have crashed out after he got home from Howlin’ Ray’s – makes sense, if he’s been moving rubble and working with his hands on the early shift.

  I take a deep breath. “Um. Hey.”

  Silence.

  I’m about to speak again when he says, “Who is this?”

  “It’s… it’s me.”

  “Who the fuck is me?”

  Is he still half asleep? I know I’m on a different number, but he has to recognise my voice, right?

  “It’s Teagan,” I say. Leo gives me a weird look. Behind us, a police siren goes off, piercing the night air as a cruiser speeds away.

  “How’re you doing?” I say, when he doesn’t respond.

  “Tired. Look… sorry, it’s been a really long day. I kind of got home and just passed out. Can we do this tomorrow?”

  “Can we do… what tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s too late,” Leo whispers.

  “Yeah, I know, Leo, stop it.” I wave him away.

  “Who’s that?” Nic asks.

  “Doesn’t matter. Nic, I’m in trouble. I need help.”

  I’m not sure what I was expecting. A sudden alertness. A clipped “Where are you?” I was not expecting more silence.

  “You still there?” I ask. “I’ve got a real problem, man. I could definitely use—”

  “What kind of problem?”

  The same dull, resigned tone.
<
br />   “One I can’t really talk about over the phone.” I shift on the concrete – God, my ass is freezing now.

  He laughs. Tries to, anyway. “Sure. Of course. Why’d you even call me, Teags?”

  “What do you mean, why did I call you? Did you not hear me when I mentioned my massive problem?”

  “Oh yeah, I heard. But what I want to know is, why am I the person who has to come rescue you?”

  “I don’t—”

  “You got Annie. The big dude, what’s his name… Africa. Your girl Reggie. Shit, you could probably get whatever fucking secret agency you work for to bring in the marines, if you need an assist. Why me, man?”

  “Because you’re my friend!”

  “Oh, is that what we are? Cool. Thanks for the clarification. Been wondering about that for a while now.”

  “Nic…”

  “You know what, actually, Teags, sorry, but I’ve been working since ass-o-clock this morning, and I gotta do the same thing tomorrow. I need sleep. I’ll talk to you when I wake up.”

  “We gotta cross the river,” Leo says. “It’s cold here.”

  Nic barely manages to stifle a yawn. “Yo, who the fuck is that with you?”

  I bite down very hard on my frustration. “Nic. I know you probably don’t like me very much right now. But I really need your help. I’ve got a kid with me. His name’s Leo…”

  “What do you mean a kid?”

  “A boy. He’s like three—”

  “I’m four!”

  “Four, sorry. He’s four years old, and we can’t find his dad.”

  “Hold on, hold on. You want me to come get you because of some lost kid? Jesus fuck, Teagan, go to the cops or child services or something, man. I don’t even work as a lawyer any more. Let me sleep.”

  “He’s like me,” I say, through gritted teeth. “He can do what I do. Well, not exactly, he’s got a different ability, but…”

  Another beat of silence. Then: “Well, what about China Shop? Isn’t this what y’all are about?”

  “I can’t go to the team for this one.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’ll take way too much time to explain over the phone.” I talk quickly, before he can object. “It actually doesn’t matter right now. Please, please help us. We just need some food and water, and maybe a ride somewhere.”