Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

But that’s exactly what I do. I don’t move. I stare at the car, my breath coming way too fast. The more I tell myself not to be ridiculous, that I can help out without revealing my ability, the harder it becomes to do it.

“What’s wrong with you?” Nic says, desperation edging his voice.

At that moment, the teenager groans – a horrifying, agonised sound. Nic shakes his head, staring at me in disbelief, then turns to help. There are more people now, at least six. They surround the car, Nic directing operations, telling them where to grab hold. He doesn’t look at me. The smoke is gushing now, swamping the body of the car, flames licking at the paintwork. Nic and the others have to step away, coughing, yanking clothing over their mouths before plunging back in. The boy is hammering on the windows.

And while all this is going on, I stand frozen, terrified, unable to move a goddamn muscle.

Finally, after what seems like hours, I kick myself into gear. Exposure be damned. There are people in that car, and if I don’t start helping, they’re dead.

But as I refocus my PK, getting ready to lift, they manage to move the door. It comes loose with a grinding squeal of metal, so suddenly that Nic actually stumbles backwards. Hands reach into the gap, dragging the man and the boy out. The kid’s left leg is a bloody ruin, the man unconscious.

“I can help,” I say. Nobody hears me.

Then we’re being hustled away from the burning car, stumbling across the wrecked street. I lose track of the injured man and his kid, spinning in place, hunting for something I can lift, burning with shame and wanting to fix it.

But all the other buildings are wood, and they’ve managed to stay upright. There are downed power lines, but nobody’s trapped underneath them. I don’t see any more burning cars.

I sit down heavily on the curb, my head swimming. The oddest thought: You didn’t put enough liquid in your rice. That’s why the paella burned .

I don’t know how long I sit there for. When I look up, Nic is huddled with another group of people, clustered around a phone. The man who owns it flicks his finger rapidly, scrolling. The woman on his right is the one in the business suit, the one from before who was helping Nic out with the car. She’s wearing a lone red stiletto, and is staring in horror at the phone screen, hand over her mouth.

Nic stands with his arms folded, a grim expression on his face. When I make my way over to him, he gives me an utterly blank look. Like he doesn’t know who I am.

“Nic?”

“What?”

“What is it? Is everything…?”

The rain has picked up even more – I hadn’t realised it, but I’m soaked through, my hands patterned with grime.

“San Bernardino,” Nic says. It’s a spot to the east of LA, near Riverside. Around here they call that area the Inland Empire, although I don’t know why.

“I don’t understand…”

“It’s gone.” His voice is as dull as his gaze. “Wiped out.”

Nobody can make any calls. The lines are jammed. Amazingly, some of the networks still have data – slow-as-shit data, but it’s working. It’s how we found out about San Bernardino.

A man I don’t know – a dude wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a ponytail who looks about a thousand years old – explains to anyone who will listen that every time a quake increases by a single point, it releases thirty-two times as much energy as before. It’s from him that we find out the quake was actually a 7.1.

“Seismic events this big are actually quite rare,” he says. He sounds like the preachers you sometimes get outside malls. “You might only get twenty a year worldwide. We had one in Ridgecrest last year, but that wasn’t nearly as bad as Northridge in ’94. Hoo-ee! That was a bad one. Although there was a 3.3 in 2014 where one person died…”

His eyes shine as he talks about orders of magnitude and Richter scales and seismic events. After a while, he goes off to talk to someone else.

There’s surprisingly little to do. If the quake had happened during fire season in October, with the Santa Ana winds kicking up, we would be well and truly fucked. But it’s the middle of winter now – or what passes for winter in LA, anyway. The rain keeps the few fires on my street under control, and after an ambulance finally arrives to treat the two people from the car, we all end up just standing around. The streetlights don’t come on – power is down across the city, apparently – but people turn their headlights on, bathing the street in a yellow, rain-flecked glow.

Harry is pushing his cart of bags and bottles down the sidewalk like nothing has happened. Chunks of broken concrete are everywhere, cracks zigzagging, but he just moves his cart around them. When I ask him if he’s OK, I get a vague smile, and he waves me away. He’s never said a word to me, not one, although I don’t know if it’s because he prefers not to talk, or if he’s actually mute.

I lose Nic for a while. It’s full dark before I find him, sitting on the hood of a car, scrolling through his phone. He has an old Clippers hoodie on over his T-shirt – I have no idea who gave it to him.

I slide in next to him. “Hey.”

He looks up. Back down.

“I’m really sorry about before,” I say quietly. “I didn’t how to help, and then you had the door off, and… I was just scared, that’s all.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I don’t know what to say to that. There’s nothing I can say.

“You check in with your Mom and Dad?” I try, after a few moments.

“What? Oh. Yeah, they’re fine. Pico Rivera’s about the same as here. No power, but the buildings’re all up to code, so…”

It’s not hard to fill in the gaps. The neighbourhood around us has taken a hit – plenty of cracks in the street, the odd fire, downed power lines. But as scary as it seemed at first, it’s not a killing blow. It’s damage that can be repaired, that can be worked around. From the few conversations I’ve had with neighbours, it seems like most of LA is the same. Hit… but not all that hard.

Can’t say the same for San Bernardino. Something went wrong there. Buildings that weren’t up to code. Misplaced funds. Apparently it’s been a problem for years. I guess it finally caught up with them.

“A few of us were talking,” Nic says, as if sensing my thoughts. “We’re going out to San Bern, see if we can help. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but we could use you there.”

I pull out my own phone. I found it when I went back into my house earlier – through some weird miracle, it was still on the kitchen counter, about the only thing that didn’t get thrown around my living room. There are a bunch of messages on the China Shop group chat. Reggie, asking whether everyone is OK. Paul, wanting to know the power status of everyone’s neighbourhoods, warning us about aftershocks, demanding we check in hourly. Annie, sending picture after picture of Watts, her neighbourhood, including a shot of a weird scaffolding-sculpture-artwork thing. She sends three thumbs-ups afterwards, so I assume it’s important.

Those aren’t the messages I’m after though. The one I show Nic is from a contact labelled HAIL SATAN. It simply says, Do not go near San Bernardino. Stay within the city limits .

“Tanner?”

“Uh-huh.”

He lets out a low breath. “The people in SB were right near the epicentre, and it just… They’re saying there’s over two hundred dead.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. You in or not?”

He tries to make it sound casual, but his voice is tight.

“I can’t,” I say softly.

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Nic…”