Jackson Ford - Eye of the Sh*t Storm

People will see what’s about to happen. They’ll swear it’s true. And maybe that might have consequences for me, somewhere down the line. But there’ll be no photos or videos, none, no evidence at all.

Africa claws at me, and I reach out and take his hand, letting him know it’s going to be OK.

Then I go to work.

I tear away the bridge slabs. Just lift them right off. Every single one, like they’re made of foam. Daylight floods the van’s interior as I move the pieces of the broken bridge to one side, out of the way. I don’t throw them, or put them in a place where someone might think, how the hell did they land up over there ? I just give us a bit of space to breathe.

The slabs give out a crunching bang as they impact the surface of the storm drain. The bikers have stopped in their tracks, except for one or two who take a step back.

With a small smile, I rip the doors off our van.

All of them.

I blink – a movement that feels like it takes aeons. When I open my eyes, after a million years, Annie and Africa have exited the van, staggering away from it on the opposite side to the bikers.

I take my time. Clamber out of the van, not worried about being shot – I’ve shut down the bikers’ guns, almost as an afterthought. I stretch extravagantly, and the crick in my back feels delightful. I’m bursting with energy, raw and pure. It’s like I’ve had the best sleep ever, deep, dark, dreamless, and now I’m awake and I’m under blue sky and there’s nothing I can’t do. God, why did I think meth was bad? It’s fucking awesome .

A thought intrudes. Jeannette – Africa’s girlfriend. An image of her when we first crossed paths. A skeletal crust of a person, hunched, body stripped clean. Screeching and snarling like an animal.

But the distance between her and what I’m feeling now is immense. It’s easy to push the thought away.

I stare at the stunned, trembling biker gang, some of whom are desperately trying to shoot me. I’m barely aware. My mind is a thousand miles away.

My parents made me. And not just in the Biblical sense. They were gifted geneticists, light years ahead of anybody else, and they wanted to create a soldier who could end wars before they started. Turns out, not even they could put multiple abilities in one person, so they split them between me, and my big brother and sister. Adam didn’t need to sleep. Chloe could see in infrared, picking up heat signatures.

What would their abilities have been like on meth? I don’t know about Adam, but Chloe… her vision would be an explosion of colour. A billion shades of heat and light, dazzling, hypnotic.

Chloe and Adam are gone. Adam went insane, his mind shredded from never having slept. My parents had to lock him away, and his twin Chloe – poor, deluded Chloe – let him out. He killed them all, almost killed me too.

I miss them so much. All of them. Especially Chloe.

The thought of her brings hot, bittersweet tears to my eyes. I would have loved to share this with her. I can picture us on the ranch in Wyoming, both of us high off our fucking tits, riding horses through the forest and laughing, her seeing every colour of the universe while I move objects half a mile away. She should be here. With me. We should be doing this together.

There’s a box at the back of my mind where I put all the bad shit. Don’t get it twisted: it’s not like I have a box of bubbling, evil darkness threatening to take over. That’s just not me. A lot of horrible things have happened in my life, but I’ve dealt with them. I spent a long time dealing with them, thank you very much, and although I can’t get rid of them, I have found a place to put them.

When I picture it, I actually see a dusty, slightly tattered box on a high shelf in the closet. The kind you don’t really think about until you need to get something from it.

What can I say? Therapy works. Even when you’re imprisoned in a government facility.

I don’t like to pull the box down too often – it’s not a fun experience. But now, it’s as if the contents have no power over me. Like I can hold them in my hands, turning them this way and that.

My real name isn’t Teagan Frost. Back when I was still hanging with Chloe and Adam, I was plain old Emily Jameson. Em. It’s been a long time since I even thought of myself as Em, and the memory is so bittersweet that it almost makes me cry.

Almost.

One of the bikers throws his gun, hurls it away like it’s poisonous. I smile slowly at him. He makes the sign of the cross, does it again.

I’m still levitating some of the bridge slabs. I let them drop, and the bikers break. Two of them sprint right at me, eyes wide and fearful, wielding their guns like clubs.

I tilt my head, and the bikers go flying. Thrown right into the air, my PK manipulating their bodies like it was nothing. Moving organic matter used to be almost impossible, but not any more. They yell and flail their limbs, crashing into the narrow channel of water running down the centre of the storm drain.

Another biker, coming at me from the side, trying to flank me. He’s got a big-ass combat knife, seven inches of serrated steel. I stop both the knife and his arm so suddenly that his ulna breaks, and his scream of pain is sweet.

There’s music. No: humming. I’m humming, and it takes me a very long second to recognise the tune: the opening bars of “The Next Episode”, by Dre and Snoop.

More phones are in the area, the people on the surrounding streets coming to investigate the ruckus. I brick them all, reaching out and crushing them with a single thought. It’s scary how good it feels to be this powerful, scary because I keep thinking of Jeannette. I ignore the thoughts, grabbing hold of two of the black SUVs, sending them flying like a grenade went off underneath them, boom , just end over end, metal and glass crunching.

Holy shit. I’m actually horny.

Sex is usually off the table for me. I lose control of my PK when I come, throwing everything around me into the air. As you can imagine, that severely limits who I can sleep with. Why yes: it sucks exactly as much as you think it does. I’ve mostly dealt with it by not thinking about it, not making sexual pleasure into something I chase, and I’ve been pretty successful thus far.

I’m not a virgin. I popped my cherry with a bartender here in LA, getting him drunk and taking him into the woods to fuck, where my PK wouldn’t have any inorganic objects to grab onto. It sucked. I hated it. I stopped trying.

Now? Jesus Christ with a butt-plug, I am ready to fuck anything that moves. It’s like all the sex I could have been having these past few years has built and built and built, and now it’s all clamouring for release.

Every one of our pursuers is on the run, booking it up the sides of the channel. I raise my arms, eyes closed, grinning at the sky, and trip the bikers up. What the South Africans call an ankle tap. I don’t really want to keep them here. I just want to remind them who they’re fucking with. It distracts me from the hot, flushed feeling of need.

All at once, my legs turn to jelly. I don’t feel woozy or anything – I’ve never felt so clear. But the lower half of my body isn’t paying attention. I sit down clumsily, amid the fire and rubble and smoke, the blue sky above me, and the storm building to the north, at my back.

The van we were driving is still burning behind us, nothing more than a gutted shell now. At least we took care of the meth. I lie down, head resting on the concrete. After what I just did, I should feel drained, wiped out. But I’m still so freakin’ wired . If my legs were actually listening to me, I’d start running. Probably in the direction of the nearest human being, so we could find a hotel room somewhere and fuck each other’s brains out. I giggle, my fingers twitching.