Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

“No wedding ring this time,” I yell into the wind. “Smart.”

If anything, his grin gets wider. Annie looks murderous, and I don’t blame her. Before he and his team found me, Burr smacked her and Paul around, trying to get information on my whereabouts.

Burr steps in close, looming over me. He’s near enough now that I can hear him just fine, without him having to raise his voice too much. “I’m in command of this operation, freak show.”

“Really? After what happened last time?” I widen my eyes. “Oh, I see! You’re sleeping with Tanner. Does your wife know?”

But of course, I get why he’s in command. Even after the injuries he sustained, he was the one who chased us down – who kept going despite the fact that Carlos smashed his nose to pieces in the escape. He’s a tenacious fucker, and that’s the kind of thing Tanner appreciates.

He carries on as if I hadn’t spoken. “You do what I say, when I say it, we get along just fine.”

He gives Annie a cheerful wave, like she’s an old friend. That does it. I step in close, snarling in his ear. “You say one word to her I will snap your fucking neck, you hear me?”

Burr doesn’t flinch. “You do anything other than what I tell you to, I will shoot you in the leg and tell your boss you tried to run. You hear me ?”

Abruptly he claps me on the back, snaps a crisp salute to my escort. “Let’s go,” he shouts into the wind, gesturing to the chopper.

The door is open, the interior filled with soldiers. I spot the familiar shape of assault rifles, bulbous helmets, just like Burr’s. Annie and I look at each other. After a long moment, she gives a very tiny shrug.

We’re almost at the chopper, doing a bent-over roadie run, when the ground starts to vibrate underneath us.

At first, I’m convinced it’s the vibration from the chopper’s engines. But it’s too strong, too irregular. I stumble, crashing into Annie, both of us grabbing onto each other. The chopper’s skids are rocking slightly, the vibration rumbling through them. On my right, a jeep screeches to a halt.

The horror in Annie’s face is echoed on mine, the vibration thrumming up through our soaked shoes. This is it. Cascadia.

We’re too late.

Burr grabs us, hurls us into the chopper. The second we’re inside, it lurches off the ground, shooting up like someone kicked it in the ass. I grab hold of the first thing I can find, a chair support, not even bothering to get to a sitting position.

The realisation of what’s happening is like a dagger through my chest. Either we didn’t get to the Olympic National Park in time, or the kid found somewhere else to trigger the fault.

The inside of the chopper is hot, the air humid and sticky. It makes me feel like I’m under a thick blanket at the height of summer. The stench of fuel is stronger than ever. Every soldier in the chopper is yelling, their words inaudible under the din of the engines. There are hands on my shoulders, pulling me up onto my knees, then helping me into my seat. Annie sits opposite me, craning her neck to see out the window. What was it Mia said? Full-margin rupture.

The chopper banks, giving me a good look at the ground. There’s still power down there, floodlights bathing the base and its vehicles in a yellow glow. I scan the runway, waiting for what I saw out of Schmidt’s plane window, when the first quake hit. Waiting for the firework sparks as power lines let go. For buildings to start tearing themselves apart.

I don’t see any of it. The chopper must be banking too fast – I can’t get a fix on the ground.

Someone tries to put something on my head. I jerk away, almost cracking my chin on the window. It’s one of the soldiers, a man with a neatly trimmed black goatee, holding a thick headset.

Hands shaking, I snatch it away, jamming the cups over my ears and adjusting the stalk mic. It must have some kind of noise-cancelling tech inside it, because the chopper’s engines go from a roaring din to a low hum. Immediately, I hear bursts of chatter, distorted by static.

“Four-niner, four-niner, confirm position.”

“Not detecting any—”

“—lack of activity on the ground here, confirm your—”

“Somebody tell me what the fuck is going on.”

That last one is me. Either nobody hears it, or there’s a button I need to push to transmit. I fumble at the cups, fingers hunting for a button or switch that may or may not exist.

“Everybody be cool.” Burr’s voice is loud and harsh in my ears.

“How bad is it?” Annie appears to have forgotten her hatred of him for the time being, her voice urgent.

Burr holds up a hand. There are more voices on the line, clipped and frantic, and so staticky that I can’t make any of them out.

“Shaking’s stopped,” Burr says.

“They sure, boss?” the soldier next to me says.

“Yeah, copy,” Burr replies to another voice on the line. To us, he says, “They’re not sure what it was, but it wasn’t the big one.”

The soldier next to me, the one with the goatee, slumps back into his seat. He reaches across, and grips the hand of another soldier, a hard-looking woman with a wicked scar down her jawline. They grin at each other, wild grins, like we dodged a bullet.

“It might not have hit yet,” Annie says.

“Nah,” Burr replies. “They’re not getting any quake activity from the actual fault. They say they’d be seeing some by now.”

For a second there, I thought we were fucked. Truly and completely fucked. This is what someone must feel like after a delay stopped them getting onto a plane that crashed forty minutes after takeoff. Or someone who just, just missed being creamed by a speeding car at an intersection. Wide-eyed, blood rushing in my ears, the world around me curiously sharp. A nice little cocktail of adrenaline and dopamine and pure, unfiltered terror.

I finally find what I think is the transmit button, on the underside of the left ear cup. “So what was it? An aftershock from the San Andreas?”

Burr ignores my question. The familiar grin is back on his face. “Everybody, this is the freak show. Freak show, this is everybody. If I’m not available when you make a break for it, they’ll be the ones shooting you in the leg. And for the record, they’ve been briefed on that little thing you do.”

The woman with the scar catches my eyes, then rolls her own, which makes me feel a little better.

“We’ll be there in a half-hour,” Burr says. “Hey, freak show, you wanna do some tricks to keep us entertained? Maybe juggle something?”

“Sure. Toss me your wedding ring. Wait, that’s right, you left it home. Why is that, exactly?”

The man next to me snorts, and Burr’s smile falters. He looks away, the chopper banking, heading for the horizon.

“ Why isn’t it working? ”

Matthew sends huge, furious columns of dirt exploding into the air, showering him and Amber and the body of Jocelyn with hailstorms of dust and pebbles. He uproots a tree, a big Douglas Fir. Amber screams as it crashes down, the thump somehow more terrifying than what her son is doing. Matthew kicks the fallen tree upwards on a wave of rolling dirt, sends it crunching into the trunk of another, half-ripping the second one from the earth. Roots dangle, dust clouds drifting on the wind.

Amber huddles in a ball by the truck, arms over her head. And as she watches her son, something inside her…

Snaps .

She believed she could control him. The belief was like an old, toughened tree branch, bending against a hurricane wind. But it’s been bending for too long, and it’s finally broken.