Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

He looks at me like I’ve told him the sky is purple. “Of course I know what I’m doing.”

The last hope I had that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t understand what he’d done fades away.

“Why?” I say. “Why would you…?”

He shrugs.

It’s the shrug you’d normally see in a kid who just pinched his sister, or drew on the wall with a magic marker, or stole a cookie from a plate.

I’ve seen some shit, OK? I have seen my family burn to death. My former best friend impaled, choking on smoke. I know the world can be an ugly, fucked-up place, and I thought I had a good idea of just how fucked up.

But that little shrug? That little who-me innocent rise and fall of a shoulder?

It’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen.

“Hey,” he says suddenly. “Can you move buildings and stuff?”

“…What?”

“Like how strong is your power? What can you not move? I’m pretty sure you can’t move people, and you can’t make the earth fly, like I can.”

Let Burr shoot him. Let Garcia. Give them their guns back. Give Alpha a clear shot .

And still, I don’t move.

“Matthew,” I say, making my voice stern. “If you trigger Cascadia, a lot of people are gonna die. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Do you understand that?”

He smiles. The same evil, joyous grin he made when he put Paul under the ground.

“You didn’t answer me,” he says. “About how much power you have.”

“Just…” I get to my feet. “Just turn around. Go back. I don’t want to hurt you.”

He looks at me as if pondering a very difficult question. “You can’t hurt me,” he says. “I can hurt you though.” Stated as a simple matter of fact.

“Frost!” Burr is trying to force his way through one of the gaps now, Amber sobbing behind him.

“That’s your mom, right?” I say, ignoring Burr. “You think she wants you to hurt people? Cause all those quakes?”

“I don’t care what she wants. She’s my mother, she’s supposed to help me. And you still haven’t answered my question about your powers.”

I hold out a hand. “Matthew… just—”

He looks right at me. Nods, as if coming to a conclusion. “I don’t think I want to talk to you any more.”

There’s no chance for me to answer.

One second, the ground under my feet is stable. Firm. Then it’s just… gone. It flies outwards, like a pond that someone has thrown a rock into, rippling away from me. I fall, too stunned to even scream.

My brain still expects me to land on my back. When it doesn’t happen – when I keep falling – it goes into overdrive. My PK supercharges, grabbing onto everything in a hundred yard radius. Every single inorganic object, inside of an instant.

None of it helps me.

Matthew creates a ten-foot-deep hole within a second, right where I was standing. I hit bottom, teeth clacking together, biting my lip. Blood fills my mouth, and stars fill my head.

There’s a frozen moment where I get a glimpse of the kid, the sky above him. And the rising, circular wave of dirt, leaning over the pit.

My PK. If I can just—

The dirt crashes in.

And there’s nothing but darkness.

Get the gun .

It’s the only thing Amber can think to do. It’s a lizard-brain thought, instinctual. She doesn’t even try to process what happened the other woman, the one with powers like Matthew’s. She doesn’t think about who she is, or where she came from. It doesn’t matter now.

Get the gun. Not one of the big assault rifles – she wouldn’t even know how to use one of those. No, the gun she wants is the soldier’s sidearm, the one that the woman with powers threw into the forest. Amber saw where it landed, saw it skid to a halt in the ferns.

It won’t help, of course. What’s a single pistol going to do against a platoon of soldiers? But it’s better than nothing. And maybe, just maybe, she can get Matthew away…

The moment the other woman vanishes into the ground – and Amber knew it was going to happen before anybody else did – she moves.

The soldier, the one who tried to stop her getting to her son, still has a hold of her. Arm around her stomach, locking her in place. He’s yelling into his earpiece. “All teams, Frost is down. Open fire. Repeat, fire at will!”

As the metal barricades tumble, she rips away from him, twisting out of his grip. There’s a moment where she thinks he’s going to hold onto her. But a tentacle of moving dirt rips his legs out from under him.

Matthew howls, sends another wave of earth and rocks outwards. As the soldiers find their rifles again, as deafening gunfire splits the trees, Amber runs. Head tucked, bent at the waist, nearly falling as the earth bucks underneath her.

Behind her, the sound is like the end of the world.

She can’t see the gun. She had it a second ago, she knows she did. But the air is full of dust, stinging her eyes, clumps of dirt raining down as Matthew attacks the soldiers. Her feet tangle up in something – roots, a rock, it doesn’t matter, it sends her sprawling. She skins her palms, the wind knocked out of her by the impact. She lies gasping, chest hitching. Her fingers scrabble at the dirt—

And come down on cold metal.

She doesn’t know what kind of gun it is, whether it’s a Glock or a Smith & Wesson or a fucking Colt 45. She’s not good with guns. She’s handled them once or twice, even fired them at a range before, but she’s never really cared for them. Not that it matters. Right now, the gun is the only chance she has.

She grabs it, pulls it close to her like a baby, cradling it in both hands.

This is insane. Every bit of it. The soldiers could have shot her, Matthew could have seen her running, thought she was trying to get away. She sobs, trembling as behind her, Matthew and the soldiers tear each other to pieces.

Then again, she knows exactly why she went for the gun.

It opens up another angle. One she didn’t have before. Amber has spent so long running cons that the basic principles are in her bones: something she can depend on when the entire world goes to shit. Her choices here were not good. She could run… but that would mean leaving Matthew alone, which she would never do, never ever. He’d kill the soldiers, one by one.

A wave of frustrated, burning anger, forcing another sob out of her. Don’t these people understand? You can’t contain Matthew. He’s too powerful. Not even the woman with powers, the other one, could stop him.

But Amber can. She knows she can. She’ll get him away, get him into the forest, and then everything will be… fine.

Stay here. Just do nothing…

But she can’t.

Shaking, sobbing, Amber gets to her knees. The gun held in both hands. She remembers what she has to do: check if the gun is loaded, keep her fingers away from the trigger. The noise is… She’s never heard anything like it. Roaring, spitting gunfire. Shouts from the soldiers. And underneath it all: the crunching, thundering roar of tons of earth moving at her son’s command.

Both hands, finger away from the trigger guard, dammit, pull back the—

A rock impacts a tree trunk above her head, gouging a huge chunk out of the wood. She ducks, flinching against the rain of sharp fragments. But her hands are moving on their own now: pulling back the slide, looking into the chamber. There’s no bullet there, so she pulls back the slide the whole way, lets it go.

It takes every ounce of courage and strength she has to get to her feet. To turn around, and plunge back into that hell. Gun down, finger in the trigger guard. Get Matthew away from here. Get him where he needs to be .