Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

I have a sudden urge to sit down, just sit and never get up again. Instead, I take a deep breath. “If we aren’t going after this kid, then what the hell are we gonna do?”

“I didn’t say we weren’t going after him.” Reggie lets her head fall back against the thin pillow. “I just want us to process everything first.”

“What? Like Paul?”

She closes her eyes, and it strikes me then just how much effort this is taking out of her. It’s using every ounce of strength she has.

“We’ll mourn Paul later,” she says. “I’m talking about the boy. We need to develop a way to contain him. From where I am, it appears he’s like you, Teagan.”

“He’s nothing like me.”

Annoyance slides into Reggie’s voice. “You know what I mean, and don’t try to pretend otherwise. Your psychokinesis affects inorganic objects only, whereas he clearly has the ability to move organic molecules. Carbon, hydrogen. Do you think he can affect all organic objects? Trees and leaves and such?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t stick around long enough to fill out the questionnaire.”

“All right,” she snaps. “No point focusing on the unknowns. We know for sure he can manipulate the earth – use it as a weapon. My guess is that for the most part, he’s got limits, just as you do.”

I gesture to the chaotic medical tent, with its doctors and soldiers and patients swirling around us – every one of them wet from the steady rain, muddy and exhausted. “You sure about that?”

“Yeah, OK… but I think he can only cause an earthquake in certain circumstances, like when he’s above a fault line. That’s what happened with the first quake, on the gas station camera.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m not. But the epicentre on the last quake was right above the San Andreas fault. Why go to all that trouble, if you can cause a quake anywhere?” She stares into the middle distance for a moment, thinking hard. “And he’s only a child. Do you think there’s a chance he doesn’t know what he’s doing? Maybe he reacts this way when he’s scared – he might not even have meant to cause the earthquake.”

I get a picture of the kid’s face again. Right before he… Right before Paul. The weird, almost smug little smile. Like he’d won a prize.

“He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“How can you be sure?”

“…I just am.”

Now that I’ve pictured the kid’s face – the evil, twisted little boy grin – I can’t get it out of my head. The thoughts tumble, cascade, pile on top of one another. I didn’t get a chance to think much about where the kid came from before – I knew he had to have been created after everything went to shit in Wyoming, but I never gave a thought as to who might have done it. With my whole family gone, nobody was able to recreate my ability in another person. And God knows, the government tried.

Except… what if they succeeded? What if, at some point during my captivity, they actually ended up creating another person with abilities? It’s not like they had any incentive to keep me in the loop – I was an asset to them, a piece of government property. Still am, kind of.

Problem with that is they kept getting more and more frustrated, urging me to push myself harder, go past my limits. Why do that, if they’d succeeded? Why keep up the act? For my benefit? Fuck no. They didn’t care what I thought. Whatever happened during my captivity in that windblown little facility in Waco, it didn’t result in a superpowered kid.

Which doesn’t change the fact that there’s one of them out there, wandering around, with the ability to bury people alive.

A cold chill, shivering across my scalp. Did Tanner do this, somehow? Did she know? And if she did, if the kid really is one of hers, then what in the hell is she doing unleashing him on Los Angeles?

When I voice these thoughts to Reggie, her expression hardens. “Moira would never do that.”

“Are you sure , though?”

“Something like this… it’s too big. The child would be in a facility, same as you were.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know. Someone else in the government might be—”

“Oh, she’d know.”

“She didn’t know about Jake.” I think back to when I first understood that Tanner had completely missed the fact of Jake’s existence, after the whole mess had blown over. The idea that there were things she didn’t know was intoxicating. Who’s to say that she knew about this?

Reggie, apparently. “If this boy was made by our own government, Moira would be in the loop. She may have missed Jake… but it looks like everybody missed Jake. A government-made person with abilities would light up her radar screen like fireworks on the fourth of July. Wherever this boy came from, it wasn’t us.”

“Then where—?”

“We can worry about that later. Right now? We need to focus on how he can be contained.”

Interesting choice of words. She’s right, though. I’ve killed exactly one person before today, and he was trying to kill me, and he was also a grown-up, potty-trained adult with his own fully formed dreams and desires. I don’t care if this kid is the Antichrist: I am not killing him.

“I know you want to charge out there,” Reggie is saying.

“Reggie, I swear, if you’re about to tell me that I have to slow down and think—”

“But I am going to tell you that. It’s been, what, forty-five minutes since Paul? The kid is long gone by now. We don’t know where he’s going, what he wants, if he even wants anything. Let’s at least have some kind of plan for next time.”

“What about the airport?” Africa says. “We put him on the runway, huh? No dirt. No ground for him to use.” He says ground like the word tastes foul in his mouth.

“Yeah, we gotta get him there first,” I mutter.

“It’s an idea,” Reggie says. “But I don’t think it’ll work. We don’t know his range, or how strong he is. He might be able to just pull earth right through the tarmac.”

“Hey Teggan – what happen when you go to the forest?” Africa waves his hand above his head. “When there’s no other stuff.”

The forest. What he’s asking is, what happens when I’m surrounded by organic objects and nothing else. What happens is that I feel all squirmy and weird, like I’m uncomfortable in my own skin.

“I can’t move anything,” I tell him. “But it doesn’t get rid of my ability. And you’d have to keep me in the forest to stop me whacking you round the head.”

“Could we get him on a plane, then?” Africa asks. “Keep him off the ground?”

“Maybe,” says Reggie. “But there must be an easier way. I feel like we don’t know enough.” She thinks for a moment. “Tell me about the woman. The one who was with him – we saw on her the tape too, I think. His mother?”

It’s crazy that we’re having this conversation – this rational, considered, mostly calm conversation, when Paul’s body is in a shallow grave not half a mile away. I exhale, trying to control my frustration. “She was kind of ahead of where he was. Most of the time, she had her back to me.”

“What was she like?”

“You saw on the video. She’s young.”

“I know that. What else? You saw her in person.”

“Kind of hard to say. I didn’t get a good look. And Annie was with me. Paul would have—”

I stop, the words cutting off cold. That same feeling again: a hangover, building and building.

“The boy then.” Reggie’s voice is stiff. “Tell me about him.”

“He was… Well, he was a kid. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“How old?”