Jackson Ford - Eye of the Sh*t Storm

The air tastes of damp wood, burning trash, the sour tang of urine. Bad smells all – but strangely, they don’t bother me. I note them, acknowledge them, let them be.

I can move anything with my PK. Anything. Organic, inorganic, it doesn’t matter. Right now, in this moment, I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.

I take a few hundred years to appreciate the sensation. Letting it wash over me. There’s no pain any more. No hollow stomach. How could I have wanted to take this back? I can’t even remember what I was scared of. It’s miraculous.

Slowly, oh so slowly, I turn my eyes to the flood.

Three hundred feet away now. Maybe thirty seconds from impact. Carrying so much debris that the water itself is boiling up the sides of the channel, tendrils of raging white froth reaching out for me.

I smile. It’s lazy, easy-going, like I’m strolling through the park and have come across a piece of litter on the ground, one that I can pick up and dispose of without a second thought.

Park. Wasn’t Reggie in a park? Wasn’t that where Annie and Nic went? Wasn’t Reggie in some kind of trouble?

It doesn’t matter. When I’m done here, I can go save her.

I roll my shoulders, take another gentle breath. Stare at the giant torrent coming to sweep me away. It’s two hundred feet away, closing fast.

A sound reaches my ears from behind me. That’s what it feels like – a noise that swims through the air, languid and easy, alighting on my ears with the softest touch. Engines. More specifically: motorcycle engines.

I look over my shoulder, and smile.

The Legends are here.

There are four of them, winding their bikes through the maze of scaffolding. There’s Robert, on one of the biggest bikes I’ve ever seen, a monster Harley Davidson with handlebars you could do pull-ups on. He’s with two goons I don’t know… and Pop.

She’s not riding a bike. She’s riding a gigantic, four-wheeled ATV that looks like a runty monster truck, painted bright green. She is staring in absolute horror at the approaching flood, her mouth open.

A second later, she locks eyes with me.

I have a sudden urge to yell that I’m high on meth – and not just any meth. Her meth. Instead, I give her a little wave. I’m glad she’s here. I don’t need her, because I’m going to stop the flash flood all by myself, but she might come in handy later on. I don’t think she’s going to shoot me – not now, not when she actually sees what’s happening here. And if she does, so what? I’ll stop the bullet in mid-air.

I turn away, and Pop and the Legends fall from my thoughts.

Wait. What if there are people on the other side of the flood barriers? That’s where the water is going to go, after all. But a quick check with my PK shows nobody in range. There’s a section of freeway on the west side of the storm drain, which is wrecked enough that there no cars at all driving on it – none that I can sense. To the east is a section of vacant lots, plus a few destroyed homes. Nobody around. No one to get hurt.

It’s perfect.

I’m humming now. The opening bars of “The Next Episode”. Dre and Snoop, backing me up. And as I hum, I bring my PK inwards. Marshal the invisible energy in front of me. My ability – the weird, fucked-up thing that makes me different from everybody else, that I’m still nowhere close to understanding.

A hundred feet away. Ninety. It’s possible that I could stop the water now, even at this distance – the meth hit has made me that powerful. But I want strength, not range. I want to grab the entire flood – water, debris, all of it – and send it up and outwards. I want to look it right in the face before I send it on its way.

Fifty feet. Forty. Driving rain soaks my clothes, drenches the skin on my face. Thunder cracks the clouds above. I smile through it all.

A tiny grain of doubt. My PK may not work on water. I’ve never tried it before. But the water is thirty feet away now, and there is no time left to doubt myself.

I grab my PK, wrap it around the flood. Every tree branch, every bamboo stalk, every car, every piece of rubble, trash, concrete, wood, dirt.

And water. Every individual molecule of water, each atom of hydrogen and oxygen. A billion of them. No, a trillion. Uncountable. I wrap my PK around all of them—

And push .

It’s like a wave breaking against a sea wall.

The flood explodes upwards, a torrent of water bursting into the air, tossing concrete rubble and destroyed cars into the sky like they’re made of packing foam. The water balloons upwards and outwards, cascading over the flood barriers. The noise is incredible: Krakatoa getting hit with a meteorite.

And I am not ready.

Even with the meth boosting my PK, I am just not prepared to grab a million tons of rushing water carrying half a million tons of debris, and stopping it in its tracks.

It’s like getting punched in the stomach by God. I grunt, ferocious tears squeezing out from my closed eyes. I actually slide backwards, my shoes scraping across the concrete, nearly toppling over. The water isn’t like other objects. It doesn’t have boundaries, or a shape. It’s everywhere, and keeping hold of it… I have to force each individual molecule to listen to me.

And of course, it’s not just the water. It’s everything in the water. A thousand objects, some big enough to give my PK trouble on a good day.

I lean in, like I’m walking into a strong wind. I’ve never concentrated this hard in my entire life. The focus is total. I channel everything I have towards the raging torrent. I’m not even sure I’m breathing. The world’s worst headache is back, growing at the base of my skull.

The rain actually bends around me. The drops flying away. I didn’t even realise I was controlling them.

The water and the debris crash down on the flood barriers. They crumple, collapsing under the onslaught. A chunk of concrete the size of a small car rips one of them in half. The sound of the flood buries the noise of tortured metal.

And I can’t get the water out of the storm drain fast enough. It just keeps coming, piling up. It gets higher and higher in front of me. Twenty feet. Twenty five. I grit my teeth and roll my shoulders and make it do what I want, putting everything I have into it.

You shall not pass , I think, the thought wild and uncontrolled.

Except: it’s too much. The sheer force of the flood is too much to contain. My PK was a wall before, grabbing the water at a specific point and not letting it past. But the water and debris at the edges are starting to find their way through, the flood creeping in on either side of me, rolling down the sloped side of the storm drain. Before I can blink, it soaks my ankles, climbing towards my knees.

“Not today, fucker .”

I dig deep, pulling in even more PK energy, refusing to acknowledge the screaming, horrifying headache rolling up from the back of my skull. I plug the gaps, forcing the water back. Holy shit, how big is this damn flood?

A car nearly crushes me. It must have gotten high enough to escape my PK. It comes rolling over the top: a mangled wreck that used to be a Prius. I yelp as it crunches into the concrete, jumping backwards, and for a half a second, I lose focus on my PK.

The flood explodes towards me. I snap my PK back on it, once again refusing to let it pass. It’s now ten feet from me, barely under control. Cold, dirty, spitting water hits my face, my eyes.

I don’t know if the camp behind me has cleared. I don’t dare look. I don’t know if anybody can see what I’m doing, or if anyone is filming on a cellphone I missed. There’s nothing I can do about it now. I don’t even know if my exit plan – grab the metal-and-wood pallet, and get the hell out – is going to work any more, or if I’ll have time to do it. All I can do is push the flood back.