Jackson Ford - Eye of the Sh*t Storm

“Here,” I say, offering her my second sandwich. “You should try this. It’s really fucking good.”

“I’m fine,” she mutters, not looking at me, her voice almost swallowed by the noise of the crowd.

“I don’t know what they do to it. I think it’s the marinade, but it might also be the oil? I get the feeling they fry the stuff in chilli oil. I saw a trick like that once on—”

“I’m fine .”

It’s a snarl, backed up by a flash of anger on her face, a look so harsh and sudden that I actually lean back a little.

I take a bite of my second sandwich, to stop myself saying anything else. It doesn’t taste nearly as good as the first one. The headache at the base of my skull is more insistent now, as is the yawning emptiness in the pit of my stomach. My fucking shoulders are starting to ache – I can’t relax them, no matter how much I roll my neck. I’m clenching my teeth, too, and my legs are starting to tremble. I don’t feel good any more. And I have a horrible feeling it’s about to get a lot worse.

Africa has noticed. “You are lucky. It was powder, not rocks. That means the chemicals were weak. You must keep drinking water, OK? Because you are going to crash, and much worse than Annie and I are now. And after we are done here—”

“Dude, I’m fine.”

“Maybe now. Maybe for a few more hours. But then…” He shakes his head, no doubt thinking of his girlfriend. “You think you know, but you don’t. You will want more, and Teggan, you cannot let yourself take any.”

His voice is making my headache worse. “I won’t. Can we drop this? Please?”

He looks like he wants to keep going. Instead, he goes back to his food, shaking his head. Like he doesn’t understand.

We sit in silence for a few minutes. I will myself to eat that second sandwich… and can’t do it.

Africa finishes another tender. “OK, so. Now that the job is finished, we must talk about what to do next. Mrs Tanner will want a full report. Especially about the thing with the bridge. We must make sure to tell her that the Legends, they won’t be a problem any more, huh?”

I finally swallow. “Got that right.” I prod the air with a hunk of sandwich. “Cook meth in my city, get a bridge shoved up your ass.”

“Eh, take this serious.” He puts down his next tender, locks eyes with me. “We cannot just say, hey, we took care of the problem . There are still the guns. And it is important for us to be honest – and she has to know what happened when your power go crazy from the meth, huh?” He holds up a hand. “I know you say there are no videos and what what, but you cannot be sure. And I know lots of people see it anyway. Even in here, people are talking about it.”

“Who cares?” I grin, an expression that feels like I have to wedge it onto my face with a crowbar. The headache is starting to get gnarly now, a furnace at the back of my head. “Let them talk. You hear some of the stories coming out of LA these days? You know there are a bunch of people who swear blind they saw an actual devil – like a horned devil – crawling out a quake crack in Pomona? You think anybody’s gonna believe—?”

“Not sure that’s the same thing as you throwing a bunch of shit around the LA River,” Annie mutters.

I blink at her. “The what?”

“The LA River, man.”

“What river? That was a storm drain.”

“Eh, come now,” Africa says. “No distraction. We must talk about—”

“You cannot be this dense,” says Annie.

“Rude. I’m not dense, I’m just confused. That was a river?”

Annie glances at Africa. “Back me up here.”

“Yes yes, the LA River, I know. Now, when we talk to Mrs Tanner—”

I blink. “What fucking river are you guys talking about?”

“Jesus Christ.” Annie pulls out her phone, dials up Google Maps. She un-pinches her fingers to zoom out on a map of LA, tapping on a winding path that bisects the city, north to south. “Here. Runs from the Santa Susana Mountains all the way to Long Beach.”

“That’s a river ?” I say.

“Yes!”

“But it was… that’s a storm drain!”

“Culvert, technically, but whatever. Army Corps of Engineers buried the river in concrete in the late thirties, after this massive flood. Now all that’s left is that channel of water running down the middle – easier to control, I guess. And to be fair, they didn’t concrete the whole thing. There are spots up in Glendale, where it’s still an actual river, with banks and plants and shit.”

I don’t ask how Annie knows all this stuff. She’s big into the history of LA, always has been. And while I’m not happy that she’s giving me shit – again – at least she’s participating. She’s not shutting us out. And the conversation distracts me from my head and my stomach and my iron-hard, vibrating muscles.

“It’s basically falling apart, anyway,” Annie is saying. “Concrete’s all fucked up, mostly because the Engineer Corps can’t build for shit. They’re the ones who did the levees in New Orleans – remember Katrina?”

“But how can they even do that?” Africa says, pointing at Annie’s phone. “It must be a big river, yaaw .”

“ Of course it was big. Took ’em twenty years. But they got it done. Just up and wiped a whole river out of existence under a shit-ton of concrete. Anyway, Teagan, you can’t seriously tell me you don’t know about it.”

“I—”

“You’re telling me…” Annie closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. “You’re telling me you’ve been in LA for over two years, doing a job where we drive back and forth across the river—?”

“Storm drain,” I mutter. Fuck, are my eyes vibrating? It feels like it. I’m twitchy and hot, nervous, irritable.

“ River , three or four times a week… and you just never register that it’s there? What about LA River Drive? What you think they named that after?”

“…River Phoenix?”

She sighs, dropping her head and rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Fuck me, you just live in your own world, don’t you?”

Africa clears his throat pointedly. “When we meet with Reggie, we must explain everything so she can make a full report to Mrs. Tanner.”

“Yeah, OK.” I should eat the last bite of my sandwich, still oozing delicious sauce. But I’m not hungry any more. Not even a little bit. “Why you got such a hard-on for Tanner anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been doing this for months now. Mrs Tanner says , and what would Mrs Tanner think , and we must tell Mrs Tanner . What gives, dude?”

The words coming out of my mouth are nasty, childish even. I don’t like them even as I say them, and I’m starting to feel pretty nasty and childish myself. Is it the meth talking? Or me?

Then again, Tanner isn’t exactly my favourite person right now. We know she’s been investigating where the earthquake kid, Matthew Schenke, came from – a place in New Mexico that he called the School. And yet, I have no idea what Tanner has found, if she’s found anything. She’s shared diddly-squat. She’s no slouch, which means she must have something… but her keeping us in the dark, pissing around with losers like the Legends when there’s a bigger threat out there, is starting to grate. Africa being intent on pleasing her makes it worse.

I expect him to get angry, like Annie, but he just sits quietly for a moment, nodding to himself, as if genuinely considering it.

“It is difficult, what she does,” he says eventually. I swear his voice has gotten deeper, his Senegalese accent more pronounced. “She is trying to do good things in a world that is not good. It is not right that we lie to her. That is not fair.”