Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

“Yeah, but—”

“It took me a while to go digging, what with all the mission prep. How did that go, by the way? With Schmidt?”

“Teggan was on the plane when it flew off,” Africa tells her.

“I’m sorry, what?”

I have to restrain myself from punching Africa on the shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. State trooper. Video.”

“I just kept an eye on it. Figured I’d do a little detective work. His cruiser didn’t have a dash cam, but one of the last things he did before he went missing was run a plate on his computer. Vehicle registered to an Amber-Leigh Schenke, out of New Mexico.”

“Who is she?”

“No idea. I couldn’t dig up anything on her – my guess is, it’s a fake name. Or fake registration anyway.”

“I don’t get it though. What made you so interested in this in the first place? It’s genuinely not what we normally—”

Her gaze is level, surprisingly clear. “Sometimes, you get a hunch. You follow it.”

Well, that’s some grade-A bullshit right there. Still, I’ll figure that out later. “But the local cops would know what you knew, right?” I ask her. “They’d have run the plate?”

“Correct. They’d already put out an APB. But I’m a lot faster than them, and, if I do say so myself, able to get into places they can’t. I found the car at a gas station near Cabazon.”

“That was the site of the first quake,” Annie says, more to herself than to us.

“Bingo. And we got lucky.” She winces. “Well, lucky as can get, anyway. The station wasn’t a mom-and-pop deal. That’d been the case, the footage would probably be on a videotape buried under ten tons of rubble.”

I frown. “So how did you—?”

“Big national chains stream their security footage to the cloud. Wouldn’t want rank and file employees having access to it, now, would we? Not when they might be stealing potato chips or whatnot.”

I feel like the rank and file employees would probably be banging customers in the back room rather than stealing chips, but it’s not the not the time to get hung up on details.

“Hold on.” Annie shakes her head, like she’s trying to dislodge a fly. “So they’ve seen the footage too?”

“Nope. Hadn’t got around to reviewing it – at least, if the metadata tells me true.”

“Why not?”

“Who knows? Chain of command, probably – corporate stakeholders gotta weigh in before they formally review the tape, or some such. I’ve taken the footage off their hands for now.”

I shake my head, trying to get my thoughts back on track. “So… so you’re saying we’ve got another Jake. One of my parents’ rejects who grew up to be a bad guy.”

“…Not exactly.”

And she taps the laptop, still clutched tight in her arms.

I pull a piece of roof overhead to shield us from the rain, aware that someone might be watching, and not giving a shit. With Annie’s help, Reggie gets the laptop working, pulling up a video file. It’s the gas station security camera, looking right across the concrete apron, out towards the pumps and the entrance from the highway. Dark clouds mass in the distance, the footage grainy and glitchy.

“Sorry about the job, by the way,” Reggie mumbles.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“When I didn’t realise Schmidt had left his hotel. I’d just broken through the gas company’s encryption, and I wasn’t really paying attention, so—”

“For real?” Annie says.

I find my voice. “That’s… not like you.”

“Yeah. I don’t get it. You always tell us that we need be completely focused on the jobs – you and Paul both.” Annie bites her bottom lip, stops massaging Reggie’s leg. “What gives?”

“Doesn’t matter now.” Reggie taps the laptop. “Fast forward. About halfway through this file.”

Annie works the trackpad, Reggie directing her. “More. More. No, stop – back a little. There.”

A beat-up truck cruises into view by the pumps. Before it’s even come to a stop, the door pops open, and a little kid scrambles out.

“Freeze it,” Reggie says.

Annie does so, just as the kid glances at the camera. The footage is a little blurry, but I get a good look at his face. No more than four or five, with an untidy mop of brown hair. Reggie taps the screen, her fingernail brushing the kid’s chest.

“ Him? ” Annie says.

I start rubbing my hands together, because it feels like the blood has just stopped flowing to my fingers. “No fucking way.”

“Watch,” Reggie says.

The tape plays again, the kid crouching on the edge of the lot. He’s joined by a blonde woman – his mom, I guess. Amber-Leigh Schenke.

The camera starts to shake. Slowly at first, then very quickly. There’s no sound, but it’s all too easy to imagine what it must be like.

I clear my throat. “What are we looking f—?”

The earth around the kid and his mom explodes upwards, cocooning them in a huge sphere of soil.

“What the fuck ?” says Annie.

The camera goes dead.

“Rewind it,” I say. It’s a miracle I can speak at all. There’s no saliva left in my mouth. None.

We watch it again. Then a third time. And as much as I’d love to believe it was a trick of a light, or a special effect, it wasn’t. There’s no mistake.

“Where the kid’s standing?” Reggie says. “That’s—”

“The epicentre,” Annie mutters.

I stand, walk away. It’s either that, or I’ll break the laptop. Just put my fist through the screen.

Holy fucksticks, this is bad.

This is really, really bad.

It’s not surprising that there’s someone else like me. I exist, and Jake did, so it makes sense there’d be more. But I never, in a million years, thought it would be a kid. It couldn’t be.

When my parents were first figuring out how to give people abilities, they used women with unwanted pregnancies as test subjects. Foul, on every level. It was where Jake originated – he was a reject from their programme, a foetus that they thought they’d been unsuccessful with. His mom brought him to term, and years later, he popped up on my radar. He was bad news. He’d lost his mind somewhere along the line, and stopping him almost got me killed.

But my parents quit working with unwanted pregnancies when my mom had me, and my brother and sister. There was no reason for them to continue – not with three super-powered kids running around. But this kid has abilities, and if he’s only four or five, then—

Who gave them to him ?

It’s not just that. At my best, I can lift a car off someone – and that’s when I’m pushing it. This kid can manipulate the earth, and he just flattened most of LA.

Behind me, somewhere very far away, Annie is saying my name.

What if I have to kill him? I thought I could reason with Jake, find out who he was and why he’d had me framed for murder, but it didn’t work. It was him or me. That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and Jake was my age, a grown man. A kid? A four-year-old boy? I can’t. I won’t. They can’t make me.

Africa is making his way towards me. I stick a hand out, warning him back.

Oh my God. The tinnitus. That weird mental static I felt, when we went out to Sandra-May’s place in Watts. The sensation that someone had filled my head with water. What if it’s somehow connected to the kid? To his ability?

I turn back to Reggie. “Is there any way you could be wrong?”

“Come on now,” says Annie, her face pale. “You saw what’s on the tape.”

“Reggie. Is there any way?”

She shakes her head. “That’s where the quake started. It isn’t far from where the state trooper went missing. Even if we didn’t have that, you saw how he protected himself. He’s like you, Teagan.”