Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

We still can’t find people who are lost at sea, or stumbling around on the ice at the north and south poles. And they aren’t covered by a thick tree canopy. There’s a reason why people who get lost in the woods stay lost – even hikers who wander off the path, and who are desperately trying to get back to civilisation. And if that’s not convincing enough, let me share a little nugget I dug up a few days ago.

In 2009, a three-year-old named Joshua Childers wandered away from his family into the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri. He wasn’t even wearing pants – just shirt, shoes and a diaper. Now: think about this for a second. The kid’s three. Tiny legs. Can’t get far. Probably bawling his eyes out. Desperately wants to be found. And there was a huge manhunt to pull that off. Layup, right? Well, guess how long it took to find little Josh? Who was still alive and kicking when they got him, by the way.

Fifty-two hours.

Over two freaking days .

Now up the stakes. A target who doesn’t want to be found. Who is way, way more intelligent than most kids his age. And who has abilities that would make disguising his trail very easy.

UAVs – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, the big Predator drones – have thermal imaging, sure. But they struggle seeing through dense tree canopy, and telling the difference between a human and, say, a coyote. You could fly some smaller drones through the trees of course, but the problem is that most drones rely on GPS, and signals get real weak in the woods. I hear the guys at MIT lent Burr and company a couple of special drones which don’t use GPS… but they only had a couple. Not nearly enough.

So it’s about manpower. Boots on the ground. And in this case, manpower came up short.

So yeah: it’s been a pretty terrifying few days. But the longer we went without a catastrophe, the easier it got. Here’s what I think: I think the woods just swallowed that boy, like he made the earth swallow me, and Paul. If he is still out there, he hasn’t gotten close to the ETS zone.

Good fucking riddance.

We’re still trying to untangle just who his mom was. We don’t know where she came from, how she landed up with a superpowered kid. More importantly, we don’t know why she helped Matthew. That’s the thing that gets me the most. Matthew was psychotic. It was all a game to him. But what I can’t figure out is why his mom – his parent – would not only let that happen, but actually help him.

It’s not as simple as genetics – as if I would ever consider genetics to be simple. Psychos like Matthew don’t come along often. A mother-son pairing? That’s lottery odds. So what was her deal?

It doesn’t exactly simplify things that she was found dead in the forest. Crushed by rocks. It means that Matthew turned against her, right when he probably needed her most.

Too much for today. Too much for any day.

I wind my way into the kitchen, which is nice and bright and airy thanks to the collapsed back wall. Probably isn’t a very safe room, especially if we get any lingering aftershocks, but it’s still packed with people. Annie is at the kitchen table, beer in hand, hunched over it protectively, speaking to a large guy with dreads who I don’t recognise.

We haven’t talked about what happened at the Vance Campground.

It should be easy. She saved my life, coming to help me when she had a real chance to get revenge on Matthew. I’ve tried to thank her a billion times, check in on her, let her know I’m around if she wants to talk. She doesn’t. It’s like she’s trying to pretend the whole thing – including helping me out – didn’t happen.

Annie and I have never been all that close. But over the past few months, ever since Carlos died, we’ve become… not friendly, exactly, but at least nicer to each other. We don’t get on each other’s nerves like we used to. Then she saved me, and I thought…

Well, I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t expect us to be bosom buddies suddenly, but I didn’t expect to get frozen out, either. It feels like we’ve taken a massive step back, and I have to keep reminding myself to give her space.

Looking at Annie now, seeing the tightness in her shoulders, the way she grips her beer bottle like she’s trying to crush it to powder, makes me think: fuck it . I’m booze-brave, more than ready to have it out. If I can’t get her to talk about it, at least I can let her know that we’re still cool. I wipe my mouth, taking a step towards her.

And stop. Because, even drunk, what am I going to say to her that I haven’t said a billion times already?

No, seriously: what? What combination of words is going to get her to open up, and even if that actually does happen, what then? She collapses in floods of tears, and we hug it out, and she’s suddenly miraculously OK? That’s not how this shit works.

As if sensing my thoughts, Annie looks up. I thought she was drunk, way more than me, but in that instant, her eyes are completely clear. Patchy, red, set in a face that looks ten years older than it did two weeks ago, but clear.

She gives a little shake of the head. Almost invisible – the guy she’s talking to doesn’t even notice the movement, just keeps blabbering on. I stand, swaying in place, the urge to say something growing and fading with every in-out breath. Does she think I’m going to be pushed away by a little head-shake? But if I do say something… and she still doesn’t listen…?

Then she raises her bottle, tilts it in my direction. Gives me the smallest ghost of a smile.

I make myself smile back, returning the toast.

Then I get the fuck out of there and into the backyard before I do something stupid.

The rear of Sandra-May’s house is much smaller than the front yard. An uneven rectangle of slightly scruffy grass, running onto a low wall which lets me see right into the property opposite. That house is in even worse shape, one whole side collapsed, the windows dark and dead.

LA is getting itself together a little faster than I would have thought. Dodger Stadium was a clusterfuck – and came very, very close to being a full-on New Orleans Superdome situation. Fortunately, it didn’t. If the soldiers had been police, motherfuckers would have ended up getting shot. But the National Guard are soldiers, and soldiers are trained not to fire at things unless they really do pose a threat. That much, at least, I learned from Burr and Okoro. So Dodger was on the edge for a while, but it never truly got to disaster territory.

As for the rest of the city, it turns out FEMA actually learned some lessons from Hurricane Katrina. Congress threw a shit-ton of money at the problem – both during, and after. Especially when the California reps reminded them just how much money the state itself makes for the country. A few billion dollars in emergency funding gets a lot of things done. As does a shit-ton of private funding from Facebook, Apple, Google and just about every other tech company in the state. Give them this: they know a good PR opportunity when they see one.

Of course, the authorities still would have fucked it up in some way – they’re the government, after all, and I have very close and personal knowledge of them fucking things up. Fortunately, a day or two after the quake, Japan arrived.

Here’s the thing about the Japanese government. They are really good at fixing earthquake damage. Remember Fukushima? Quake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown? That was a 9.0. There were plenty of big freeways near the plant – freeways that got wrecked by the quake – and the Japanese authorities fixed most of them as good as new in under a week . I looked up the before and after photos – the roads are better than they were before the quake hit. Japan does not screw around.