Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

“What?”

“Annie!” I gesture at her to move. She’s quicker on the uptake, skipping off the roof and skidding to a stop on the muddy ground. I send out my PK, not giving the tiniest fuck who’s watching, wrapping it around the chunks of roof and drywall. They’re crazy heavy, but I’ve got to get them off. It’s 4 p.m. now, which means it’s been, what, four hours since the quake? Four and a half? All that time under the rubble…

I close my eyes, let out a deep breath. Get past the cold and the wet and the exhaustion, and start moving things.

First, the top of the pile. I shove the rubble to the side, focusing on the bigger pieces. I don’t bother to place them – just rip them away from the house, sending them crashing over into the yard behind, against the remains of the property wall. I’m more tired than I thought I was – each piece costs me, draining energy. A headache starts to bloom at the base of my skull, nausea gnawing at the stomach.

Annie puts a hand on my shoulder, resting it there. I get the sense she’s doing it more for herself than for me.

“Faster, come,” Africa says.

“Working on it.”

“Is she down there?” Annie asks. “Her chair, maybe?”

My eyes fly open. What a fucking numbnuts I am. I’m trying to dig out the whole house, and I don’t even know where Reggie is inside it. I’m wasting all this energy shifting big pieces, when there’s a better way.

I inhale through my nostrils, exhale. Africa says something, but Annie cuts him off. “Let her work.”

I send my PK through the house concentrating on shapes. A door handle. A fridge, I think. The office whiteboard, ripped in two. Another door, part of a wall. They’ve all been jumbled together, making it hard to figure out what’s what. A sudden, sick fear: I might pass over Reggie’s chair, mistake it for something else. She may have been knocked clear, or dragged herself under a desk, or part of her Rig. If that happens, I could burn the energy on nothing.

Right then, I get real woozy.

Under normal circumstances, I’ve got quite a bit in the tank before my PK gives out on me. These are not normal circumstances. The world starts to turn sideways – Annie has to grab me, hold me up. My tongue feels weird in my mouth; like there’s too much space in there, like it’s suddenly shrunken and can’t reach the sides. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever felt, but it’s definitely top five.

“Got it,” I murmur.

“Like hell you do. You can barely stand up.”

“No, I mean, I got it. Reggie’s chair.”

And I do. I recognise the shape now, my PK building a picture in my mind. With Annie’s help, I sit down on the ground, cross-legged – my pants are already soaked, so it’s not like I’m going to get any wetter. Then I start directing her and Africa, getting them to help clear the smaller bits of rubble while I concentrate on the bigger chunks. Turns out, a lot of the house is still there; it’s retained its shape, as if unwilling to let the quake break it apart completely.

I move the final bits of roof and plaster, shoving them to one side. Annie and Africa look almost like they’ve been swallowed by the Boutique, the top of Africa’s head just visible as they dig. They’ve got the chair now, I can feel it, and right then, I don’t want them to pull it out. What if we find Reggie under there, and she’s—

“She’s here,” Annie shouts back. “We found her!”

I let my head drop to my chest, pushing back against the headache. When I look up, Annie and Africa are halfway down the pile of rubble – and Reggie is in Africa’s arms, looking as small and fragile as a newborn bird.

Her eyes are open. Unfocused, glazed… but open.

I collapse backwards, not giving a shit about the mud, letting out a groan of relief. Part of the garage wall is still upright. Annie props Reggie against it, and immediately goes to work. She massages the dead tissue in Reggie’s legs, kneading it hard.

“Water,” Reggie whispers.

Africa fumbles in his pack, holds out a bottle, forgetting for a second that Reggie can’t pick it up. I don’t bother correcting him – I take the water with my mind, tilting the plastic bottle to Reggie’s lips. Behind us, a distant siren cuts through the hiss of the rain, coming from the north end of 7th Avenue.

Reggie sips, then starts to cough. I pull the water back too fast, spilling some down her shirt.

Her eyes flutter open. “That’s the second chair I’ve… managed to lose… in under a year. Moira’s going to kill me.”

Africa makes a noise that might be a laugh. Even I can’t help smiling, a little. We wrecked her previous chair in a police chase a few months ago, smashing it all over El Segundo Boulevard. At least this time, it wasn’t our fault.

“She had it on top of her,” Annie tells me.

“Quake knocked me over. Managed to pull it on top of me… before the walls collapsed. Used… arms.”

She has to stop between words to take ragged, hitching breaths. Imagining her flat on her back, using what little strength was left in her arms to pull the chair onto her, knowing that the roof could collapse at any second…

“Paul say the office was quake-proof,” Africa says.

Reggie expression hardens. “It… was. But this one… bad.”

“Yeah.” I wipe water off my forehead. “We’ve noticed.”

There’s a laptop clutched in her one good arm. She has it braced in the crook of her elbow, like a baby.

Before I can ask why she saved it, her eyes widen. “Where’s… Paul?”

We fill her in, telling her about the job, Schmidt’s plane, the quake. “If he got any brains inside him,” Annie says, “he’ll go find the nearest shelter, get that broken arm seen to.” Her voice is a hard wall.

“And you three?” Reggie’s gotten a little bit of strength back. “You’re OK?”

“Fine.” I point. “What’s with the laptop?”

Reggie looks down, as if seeing it for the first time. “I’ve got it set—” She coughs, a very weak sound. Annie moves onto the other leg, fingers digging deep into Reggie’s flesh. “I’ve got it set to back up to my drive every fifteen minutes. I have it in… in case I want to show you all something in the main room. It was… right next to me, on my Rig. When the shaking first started, I grabbed hold of it. Pulled it with me.”

“What did you find?” I ask.

The silence goes on a little too long.

All things considered, I’d rather just abandon this whole clusterfuck and go somewhere with a hot beach and cold beers. But of course, we all know what Reggie found – or the broad strokes, anyway. That means no beer until we save the world.

Reggie gathers herself. “The earthquake – both earthquakes – were caused by a person.”

And there it is .

Another long silence. I decide to say what everyone is thinking. “How sure are you? Like sort-of sure, or like really really—”

“I’ve got it on tape,” Reggie says quietly.

“Ah. Shit.”

She raises an eyebrow, and I backtrack. “Well, I mean, that’s good that we know, but just, you know… shit. It sucks that the earthquake isn’t just Mother Nature, cos…”

“You should stop while you’re ahead,” Annie mutters to me.

“Copy that.”

“How did you even know where to look?” Annie asks Reggie. “Or that you needed to look in the first place?”

Reggie gathers herself. She’s got a little of her breath back now. “Remember the state trooper?”

“What state trooper?”

“The one that went missing, on our side of the Arizona border. It didn’t sit right. Career officer with a family and a healthy psych record, just ditching his cruiser in the middle of nowhere? Something was off.”