Jackson Ford - Eye of the Sh*t Storm

The basement might be a dump, but it’s a signposted dump – there’s a metal plate bolted to the wall, block lettering pointing us to JANITORIAL, LAUNDRY, KITCHEN, UTILITY ROOM. “Employee parking lot should be close,” Annie mutters.

“We gonna drive?” Africa moves alongside her. “We left the van back at—”

“I know. We can jack something if we have to.”

The tight corridor muffles our footsteps. The adrenaline rush from our little couch stunt is running out, leaving me cold and shivery. Hungry. That’s how my PK works – using it requires fuel. Good thing for me that the fuel is usually food and sleep, both things I’m quite fond of.

Shit, maybe there’s a kitchen down here. I could snag something. Then again, the hotel’s abandoned, so it’s not like they’re offering room service.

I’m pretty sure Annie and Africa want us to get the hell out right now, but it doesn’t look like we’re being followed. If the bikers are anywhere, they’re one floor above us, confused about why there are no splatted bodies on the sidewalk. Would it really be so bad if I just grabbed a snack?

I send my PK out in a wide arc, searching through the walls, checking for the familiar shape of ovens and utensils and fridges.

And that’s when I pick up something… kind of odd.

I push between Annie and Africa, sending out my PK in invisible waves of energy. “And now?” Africa says.

“The parking lot’s this way,” Annie snaps, pointing to a faded sign on the wall.

“Yeah, just a second.” I look left and right, make sure that I’m feeling what I think I’m feeling. That the hunger and adrenaline aren’t giving me false positives.

My PK leads me back the way we came, down another passage, this one crowded with old, slightly rusty silver food carts. I weave between them, ignoring Africa’s hissed questions and Annie’s exasperated sighs.

I feel the bikers before I see them. Or rather, I feel their guns. Two big semi-automatic rifles, although not of the modified-psychotic-oversized Army-gun type.

I take a quick peek around the corner. The two men holding them are standing in front of a big double door, which I’m pretty sure is the back entrance to the kitchen. I only get the briefest glimpse of the two, but there’s at least one beard, one pair of dumb mirror shades, and a whole lot of very bad tattoos. We must have arrived right at a lull in their conversation. No sooner do I pull back behind the corner, then one of them starts talking about his girlfriend. It’s in the bored tone of someone who would very much like to get home to her. That’s OK, homie. Let me send you on your way .

I slip their gun safeties on, doing it slowly so they don’t hear it. Africa and Annie have sidled in behind me.

“OK,” I whisper. “Go get ’em.”

“What do you mean, Go get ’em ?”

“Take ’em out. I’ve taken care of their guns.”

“Teagan, what the fuck? What are we doing here?”

“We need to go, now.” Africa glances over his shoulder. “We have to—”

“ Hey! ”

That last one comes from the bearded dude. He heard us talking, and has now stuck his head around the corner.

I wave. “Hi there.”

He steps around the corner, gun coming up. “On the fucking ground,” he barks, just as his partner appears. “ Now! ”

“Fuck no. It’s been months since they cleaned this floor.”

“The hell with this,” the other guy says – the guy with the terrible mirror shades. He jerks his gun up, aims at my chest, pulls the trigger. Or tries to. When it doesn’t work, his finger flies to the safety. Which I currently have locked. Which makes him stare down at his gun with a stupid look on his face.

“Yeesh.” I wince. “Don’t worry. Happens to the best of us, champ.”

Bearded guy roars, charges Africa – who decks him right in the mouth, knocks him out cold. Hey, just because the guy isn’t good in a fight does not mean you want one of his punches connecting.

Beardy crumples like a two dollar card table. His buddy is a little smarter – he ignores his gun, goes for the walkie clipped to his belt. Which goes nowhere, obviously, because I’m holding it in place.

I’ll say this for Annie: whatever she’s going through, she can move hella fast when it counts. She steps in, twisting from the hip and punching the guy in the solar plexus – once, twice, three times. He falls, gasping like a goldfish, fingers scrabbling at the wet concrete.

“’Scuse us.” I step over him, nudging through the door to the kitchen.

“OK, now, Teggan.” Africa is breathing hard. “Why you make us come – oh.”

I smile, pleased my PK didn’t lead me astray. “Yeah.”

The doors open up into a big food prep area: long tables, low fluorescent lighting, big plastic bins. There’s a faint odour of old food – spinach, oysters, something tangy like sriracha – but it’s drowned out by a sharp, urine-like stench. And it’s not hard to see why. They don’t prep food here any more.

I count at least forty Ziploc bags of meth, stacked neatly on one of the tables. At the far end of the room, a blinking figure in a hazmat suit is poking his head out the door of the main kitchen, wondering who we are and what the hell is going. Behind him are the things that led me here: the beakers and rubber tubing and big ventilation units.

Apparently, it’s not just guns the Legends are selling.

I spread my arms, sketch a bow to Annie and Africa. “I’d like to thank the Academy.”

The lab itself is in the main kitchen, through another set of double doors at the other end of the prep area: a mess of equipment and chemicals scattered across disused stove tops.

A meth lab in the kitchen of a busy hotel would never work in regular circumstances, but these are not regular times. Nobody’s checking in upstairs any more, or ordering room service – and if there’s a nasty smell coming from the vents at street level, who’s going to complain? There’s so much toxic shit in the air from the quake, it makes the usual LA smog seem like Chanel No. 5.

I didn’t sense any of this when we arrived at the hotel. Wasn’t really paying attention to my PK.

Someone – one of the meth cooks maybe – has hung a fluffy toy of the RV from Breaking Bad on one of the pot hooks. An attempt to make the workplace a little brighter, which is one of the most nauseating things I’ve ever seen. It makes me irrationally angry. How dare these shitbags turn a kitchen – a proud place, a place for art and honest work and good food – into a drug lab? And then make a joke out of it?

I vent some of the rage by snapping all the Bunsen burners, choking off the plastic tubing with my PK, then fucking up the valves on the chemical tanks. Kitchen’s closed, motherfuckers .

There are two meth cooks, and no other guards. Not exactly surprising – when your lab is in a hotel already bristling with your people, putting more than a couple to guard the lab seems like overkill. The main doors in the big kitchen are barred and padlocked, so there’s only one entrance – the door we came through.

I keep my PK on the alert for any guns approaching the lab, but there’s nobody around. It’s a little worrying at first, but then again, why would anybody come check on the lab? If you throw three people off a balcony, and their bodies vanish between you and the ground, you don’t go hunting in the basement.

My gaze lingers on one of the stoves. It’s a Jade Titan, a commercial model with super-powerful gas burners. Man, what must it be like to be in charge of that thing, standing over it with all six burners on full? Steaks sizzling, pasta in the back, sauce reducing. Pastry chef would be melting chocolate in another pot over the boiling water, of course, and there’s no way I’d be able to resist—