by Jackson Ford
The moment the other woman vanishes into the ground – and Amber knew it was going to happen before anybody else did – she moves.
The soldier, the one who tried to stop her getting to her son, still has a hold of her. Arm around her stomach, locking her in place. He’s yelling into his earpiece. “All teams, Frost is down. Open fire. Repeat, fire at will!”
As the metal barricades tumble, she rips away from him, twisting out of his grip. There’s a moment where she thinks he’s going to hold onto her. But a tentacle of moving dirt rips his legs out from under him.
Matthew howls, sends another wave of earth and rocks outwards. As the soldiers find their rifles again, as deafening gunfire splits the trees, Amber runs. Head tucked, bent at the waist, nearly falling as the earth bucks underneath her.
Behind her, the sound is like the end of the world.
She can’t see the gun. She had it a second ago, she knows she did. But the air is full of dust, stinging her eyes, clumps of dirt raining down as Matthew attacks the soldiers. Her feet tangle up in something – roots, a rock, it doesn’t matter, it sends her sprawling. She skins her palms, the wind knocked out of her by the impact. She lies gasping, chest hitching. Her fingers scrabble at the dirt—
And come down on cold metal.
She doesn’t know what kind of gun it is, whether it’s a Glock or a Smith & Wesson or a fucking Colt 45. She’s not good with guns. She’s handled them once or twice, even fired them at a range before, but she’s never really cared for them. Not that it matters. Right now, the gun is the only chance she has.
She grabs it, pulls it close to her like a baby, cradling it in both hands.
This is insane. Every bit of it. The soldiers could have shot her, Matthew could have seen her running, thought she was trying to get away. She sobs, trembling as behind her, Matthew and the soldiers tear each other to pieces.
Then again, she knows exactly why she went for the gun.
It opens up another angle. One she didn’t have before. Amber has spent so long running cons that the basic principles are in her bones: something she can depend on when the entire world goes to shit. Her choices here were not good. She could run… but that would mean leaving Matthew alone, which she would never do, never ever. He’d kill the soldiers, one by one.
A wave of frustrated, burning anger, forcing another sob out of her. Don’t these people understand? You can’t contain Matthew. He’s too powerful. Not even the woman with powers, the other one, could stop him.
But Amber can. She knows she can. She’ll get him away, get him into the forest, and then everything will be… fine.
Stay here. Just do nothing…
But she can’t.
Shaking, sobbing, Amber gets to her knees. The gun held in both hands. She remembers what she has to do: check if the gun is loaded, keep her fingers away from the trigger. The noise is… She’s never heard anything like it. Roaring, spitting gunfire. Shouts from the soldiers. And underneath it all: the crunching, thundering roar of tons of earth moving at her son’s command.
Both hands, finger away from the trigger guard, dammit, pull back the—
A rock impacts a tree trunk above her head, gouging a huge chunk out of the wood. She ducks, flinching against the rain of sharp fragments. But her hands are moving on their own now: pulling back the slide, looking into the chamber. There’s no bullet there, so she pulls back the slide the whole way, lets it go.
It takes every ounce of courage and strength she has to get to her feet. To turn around, and plunge back into that hell. Gun down, finger in the trigger guard. Get Matthew away from here. Get him where he needs to be.
FIFTY-FIVE
Teagan
Breathe.
Just breathe.
There is nothing to breathe.
No air, not a single molecule of it. Nothing but darkness. Heavy, stinking darkness.
I can’t move – not so much as a fingertip. I’m encased in concrete. My burning chest screams at me to dig, to get myself back into open air, but I can’t.
Dirt presses in on all sides. It’s warm here. Not hot. Warm. Like infected flesh, like room-temperature soup. It’s on my ankles, arms, face, neck. My eyelids, the inside of my nostrils.
I have to scream, or I’m going to go crazy. My mouth opens, just a little. For a second, there’s hope – movement. Then grimy, grainy soil floods over my teeth and tongue, choking me, forcing its way into my mouth. There’s no scream. Just a thin, hissing whimper. I squeeze my lips shut, knowing it’ll make it worse, unable to stop it happening.
My PK. I couldn’t get Paul out in time, but there’s a car directly above me, isn’t there? I can just reach up, rip the goddamn doors off, dig myself out. The thought is so intoxicating that it’s a good few seconds before I actually do something about it, sending my PK up through the dirt like questing roots…
And I can feel something. The car, I think – or parts of it, anyway. But I can’t do anything. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get a grip on the car. I swing my PK around in desperation, feeling out other objects in the world above… but I can’t even figure out what they are, much less manipulate them. The darkness and the warmth and the suffocation have turned my thoughts to mush.
My heart is going to explode. It’s pounding so hard that it’ll just pop like a balloon. I want it to. I’m desperate for it to happen. I can’t be here, I shouldn’t be here, just let me go let me go let me go—
Buried alive. The thought gets louder and louder and louder, until it’s like someone screaming in my ear. Buried alive! Buried alive, Teagan! Just like Paul! Not burned or shot but buried! Buried alive!
I throw out my PK again. This time, I get even less back. My chest is on fire now, glowing red hot. For some reason, that makes me think of Sandra-May Cruz, the bottle of wine Paul brought her. A random memory, my brain scrambling for something familiar to hold onto.
Watts. The towers. The kids playing basketball. Rocko, Sandra-May’s dog. The trees next to the towers, blowing in the wind.
There are tears on my face. Nowhere for them to go, so they mix with the soil. No sound now. Dead, leaden silence.
… Breathe…
The earth, crowding my nose and mouth, whispering at me to let it in…
Reggie, on the way to Dodger Stadium: Sometimes, I forget how young you are. We were on the ATV… No, we weren’t on the ATV, we were in the truck. The ATV was after. We pulled into the parking lot. My ears were ringing, for some reason – no, that’s wrong too. My mind was ringing. I don’t know what means.
Nic. All I have to do is picture Nic, and everything will be OK. But his face becomes Jonas Schmidt, smiling, telling me he’d like to know my story. But he’s not coming, nobody is coming. I’m going to die, just like Paul did, buried alive Teagan, not burned or shot but buried! Nobody can get to me in time.
Nic becomes Carlos, impaled on that steel bar. My chest, burning, burning, on fire, white hot…
I don’t want to think about Carlos. I don’t have a choice. The thoughts are coming faster now, rushing on top of one another. I try to make myself think of my favourite things to cook – pho, steak, grilled cheese sandwiches – trying to picture the ingredients, the knife I use, my little kitchen. But I can’t hold onto them. The thoughts turn to ash, just like Carlos did. No matter how hard I try, all I can see are the trees in Watts, blowing in the wind.
It’s almost over.
FIFTY-SIX
Teagan
Calm now.
There’s nothing I can do. Even the burning in my chest is starting to fade. I’m disappearing, melting into the darkness…
There’s a very small version of me still screaming and raging. Pissed off at all the things she never got to do. All the sex she’ll never have, the food she’ll never eat, the air she’ll never breathe. But she’s buried buried buried, deep inside. Soon she’ll be gone completely.
More images. Blurring together now. My dad’s chilli. My sister’s freckles. Tanner’s sco
wl. Running through the forest in Wyoming. Driving through LA on a summer afternoon. Annie’s mom in Watts. The trees moving in the wind. The strange tinnitus in my head. The parking lot of Dodger Stadium.
There’s something off about those last thoughts. Not that it matters. It’s quiet down here. Quiet, and warm.
The trees, moving in the wind…
I try to let go of the thought, but it stays. Like a splinter that won’t budge, no matter how much you pick at it.
The wind…
Except: there was no wind.
The air in Watts was still and quiet. I remember… I remember how hot it was. How calm. Why would the trees be moving, if there was no wind? And in the Dodger Stadium parking lot, when I got that same tinnitus in my head, wasn’t I close to the trees there too? At the edge of the lot?
I know I’m seeing something important. But it’s like trying to catch smoke.
Let it go. It doesn’t matter.
Trees. Moving. No wind. Moving. No wind. Mov—
Fuck that. It isn’t possible.
It’s just the last active part of my brain, spitting up random thoughts and connections, not willing to check out yet. It’s lying to me. I wasn’t the one moving the trees – even thinking it feels stupid. I can’t. They’re organic molecules. They don’t listen to me – they never have.
But they were. You’ve been getting stronger. And maybe, just maybe…
The tinnitus. The ringing sensation in my mind. I felt it in Watts, and again in the Dodger Stadium parking lot. It was gone so quick I couldn’t get a fix on it. What if… what if I just didn’t know what I was looking for?
It takes all the strength I have not to close my eyes and drift away, which is what every cell in my body wants to do.
Soil is organic matter, says the tiny part of me that refuses to die. The stuff you’re buried in? You can move it, dipshit.
But how?
OK. Stay awake. Just fucking stay awake. Ignore the panic and the lack of air and the darkness and the heat and – No! Fucking stay on course, you heinous bitch.
Forget everything on the ground above. It can’t help you. Just focus on what’s in front of your face. It doesn’t have to be big. You don’t need to move the whole planet. You just need to move one tiny little piece of it…
I bring my PK back. I make it do what it’s told. I make it sit in front of my face, like a dog. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. There’s nothing to grab onto, no point of reference. Nothing to hold nothing to think about just Nic and Carlos and Annie and—
FUCK YOU. Focus.
Imagine a tangle of fine hair. A huge, loose, puffy mess. That’s what it feels like. Imagine squashing it in your hand. Hardly anything there: almost no resistance.
Almost.
Because as I make my PK energy occupy the space in front of my mouth, I feel something. The barest glimmer of feedback. So brief and fleeting that I’m not even sure it’s really there. It might just be my mind playing tricks.
Snatches of old songs keep floating to the top of my mind. Kendrick Lamar and NWA. Nas. De La Soul. Vince Staples and MC Eiht and Yugen Blakrok. Earth Wind & Fire tracks that my dad used to play while he cooked, the classical music my mom liked, Bach and Brahms and Beethoven. Blending into each other. Seconds left, every bit of oxygen almost gone…
And then, there it is. Like I had it the whole time. I can feel the soil. The individual granules, packed tight.
I wrap myself around them.
And push.
A headache blooms above my eyes, spreading to my temples. Burning, throbbing. But suddenly, there’s no dirt against my mouth. There’s a space. A little hole in the darkness.
Holy shit. I did it!
I suck in a choking, hasty breath, desperate for oxygen. But of course, I’m underground – the little hole I’ve created isn’t a vacuum, but there’s barely any air there.
Barely, however, doesn’t mean none. The breath I take fills my mouth with granules of dirt, but it also clears my head – just the tiniest bit.
I need to go further. I need more.
I push my PK upwards. One inch at a time. Creating a tiny passage to the surface, moving soil and roots and rocks out of the way, tunnelling through the dirt like an earthworm. I can’t move myself through it – I don’t have nearly enough power to do that. But I can get through to some more air.
And all the while I’m thinking: I shouldn’t be able to do this. This shouldn’t be possible.
But it is. It’s happening. It’s really fucking happening.
I try another breath, but there’s even less air than the last time. The higher I go, the more energy it takes, and the more worried I get about collapsing the tunnel. If even one chunk of soil decides to slip back, I may not have enough energy left to push it away. I’m down to seconds now, the confused jumble of memories and images getting harder and harder to turn away from.
My chest is going to explode – just rupture, ribs popping outwards. Nobody’ll hear it. Nobody but me.
And then—
Then, there’s no more soil.
And the tiniest crack of light slips into my prison.
I’m imagining it. I have to be. It’s the last little spark from my synapses before they fizzle out for good.
But then I hear them. Voices. Shouting. Distant, muffled… but there.
I suck in a breath.
And oxygen floods my lungs. Incredible, amazing, wonderful oxygen.
Fuck paella. Fuck ice cream. Fuck pho and pizza and coffee and Korean BBQ and every good thing humans have invented to put in their mouths. I’ve never known anything to taste as sweet as air does, right now.
The burning in my chest starts to fade. The flood of thoughts slows to a trickle. The noises up top have started to resolve themselves now. It sounds like some major shit is going down, and I am done being stuck in here.
So I go to work.
I still can’t move. The earth locks me in place. But I can breathe now, which means I can think. Thinking means PK. Marathon runners talk about a second wind, and it looks like psychokinetics have something similar. I’ve still got a tenuous grip on the soil, but I’ve got a much stronger grip on the inorganic objects over my head. Like, for example, the doors of the wrecked car that Matthew and his mom arrived in.
I rip them off. It doesn’t take much – the hinges are fucked anyway. This trick didn’t work with Paul, but it’s going to work now. It has to.
Just like on Schmidt’s plane, I don’t have to see the doors to know their position in space. They are twisted and bent from Matthew’s little temper tantrum, a good shape for digging.
I plunge them into the earth over my head, making sure to keep the little air passage open as I do so. I can’t see what I’m doing, not from where I am, which means I have to go by feel. It’s like trying to navigate an unfamiliar room in the dark. I grit my teeth, focusing hard, scooping the earth away above my head. Faster now. Faster. More light floods into my prison, light and noise.
I’m still alive, assholes. Get ready.
Closer now. Closer. I start laughing – insane, hysterical laughter, still gulping down the air.
And then it all goes to shit.
One of my scooping motions dislodges a thick knot of earth and roots. It collapses into my air hole, shutting off the light, choking off the air. I’m still hyperventilating, and I get another mouthful of dirt.
The sudden lack of oxygen startles me, knocks me off my game. I lose track of where the door scoops are, my PK fuzzing. In a sudden panic, I put my energy into shifting the collapsed dirt. But it’s like I’ve been knocked back to square one, and the fear that comes is worse than before. Another fire lights in my chest, glowing, threatening to spread.
And no matter what I do, the earth won’t budge. I’ve fallen right back into the panic. Just feet from open air, feet from safety, I’ve been dragged into hell.
I dig deep into my own mind. Reach to the very bottom of myself, and ask for one
last push of energy.
Nothing.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Teagan
Hands.
Reaching down through the dirt, fingers brushing my face.
There’s a moment where I’m dead certain I’m imagining it. But I’m not. Someone is up there, and they’re digging. They’re scrabbling at the dirt, letting in more bursts of light, nails scratching at my skin.
The light is followed by a trickle of air. This time, when I ask my mind for a little more, it gives it to me.
I find the wrecked doors, grab hold of them again, start to dig. More light floods in, the trees, the grey sky.
Annie.
Teeth bared, sweat pouring off her face, wrenching the dirt away.
In what seems like five seconds, my arms are free. I lever myself out of the hole, gasping, retching. Annie helps, getting her hands under my arms, grunting as she pulls.
We’re in a crater, maybe four feet deep. The world is too bright, too intense. I’m sucking in great gulps of air between hacking coughs, collapsing into Annie’s arms. Something bumps up against my leg – one of the car doors, I think. Out of sight, beyond the hole, Matthew is still losing his shit – huge whumps of shifting earth, cut through with bursts of gunfire. I can’t have been under that long – a few minutes, maybe, no more, although it felt like ten years.
And I still can’t breathe, because Annie is hugging me too tightly.
“I thought—” she starts. Then a sob wrenches its way out of her, a horrible, guttural groan. She’s shaking too, both of us on our knees in the dirt.
She pulls away, gripping me by the shoulders, as if she wants to check if I’m still in one piece. She starts speaking, hardly stopping to breathe, the words flooding out of her. “I wanted to take out the kid but then I saw what he did to you, and I managed to get out and I couldn’t let you get hurt, not like Paul, not again, not someone else, and I didn’t know if I was gonna get here in time, but… And he’s still out there fighting Burr and the rest of them… I wanted to help but you were down there and I couldn’t… I couldn’t…”
