Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

We’ve got plenty of momentum left. It sends me rolling, tarmac scraping my exposed hands. A shattered bit of glass slices through my jacket, scratching the arm beneath, right before I slam into the side of a dumpster.

Things go blurry. There’s a ringing alarm going off right next to me. I stick my finger in my ear to block it out, only to discover that it’s inside my head.

I sit there, head bowed, waiting it out. When it drops to a low ringing, it’s replaced by a tidal wave of pain—one that starts at the base of my skull and goes all the way down to my toes.

“Fucking… ow .” I squeeze my eyes shut. Somewhere ahead of me, Annie is groaning.

Very slowly I get to my feet. I’m banged up, the world fuzzy at the edges, the lights above us way too bright, but at least I can stand. Nothing broken, as far as I can tell. I touch the graze on my arm, finger pushing through my torn jacket. It’s not as bad as it feels. I think I’m good.

The alley we’re in is typical downtown LA: dumpsters, bags of reeking garbage, puddles of unidentifiable brown liquid, walls so graffitied that the original surface isn’t even visible any more. The chair, its seat shredded to hell, lies nudged up against one of the dumpsters. Above us, light paints a fire escape’s shadow onto the wall. It’s hot—in the nineties, easy—and there’s the definite stench of smoke in the air, a scent that’s been hanging over the city for days as the fire chews at its northern edge.

A series of fire doors lines the Edmonds Building—new, but already starting to rust. There’s nobody around. Although there is a siren, a real one this time, getting closer by the second. Who knows what the security guards would have told the cops when they called them? Police? Someone impersonated one of us, then dived out a window on the 82nd floor. No, we don’t see a body. No, we don’t know why they did it. Please don’t hang up .

“Annie? You all right?”

Another groan answers me. She’s up on all fours, head hanging, a puddle of puke underneath her.

Amazingly, I still have my earpiece. “Paul. We’re in the alley. North side. Come get us.”

I don’t register his reply, because right then I get real woozy. I bend over, hands on my knees until it passes. The base of my skull throbs, like it has its own heartbeat.

I stay there for a minute until it subsides, then stumble over to Annie. “Any survivors?”

She lurches away from me, moving like she’s drunk, almost slipping in a patch of puke and ending up collapsed against the wall. Her clip-on tie is gone, torn away, and there’s a nasty scrape on her cheek.

“What,” she says. “The fuck.”

“Oh come—”

“ What the fuck? ” Suddenly she’s just yelling, angrier than I’ve ever seen her. “ What? What?! ”

“You’re welcome!” What is she freaking out about. We made it, didn’t we?

Annie buries her face in her hands, then slides her arms up until they’re cradling her head. “I’m done,” she says after a long moment, letting her arms drop. “No more. No more jobs with you. I don’t care what Tanner says. Fuck you, and fuck her. We just… That was… No. Never. I’m done.”

“I didn’t see you coming up with anything.”

“I didn’t get the chance!” she roars at me. She’s shaking. Like, really shaking. Her dark skin has gone grey, and her eyes won’t stay still. “We wouldn’t even have been up there if it wasn’t for you.”

Maybe it’s the look on her face, or just the adrenaline catching up with me, because it’s then that I start to shake too.

A car horn. Loud and insistent. Carlos and Paul, parked across the alley entrance, the van sideways to us. Annie and I stumble over, still shaking, somehow managing to make it to the van without falling over. Carlos is behind the wheel, cap pulled down low over his eyes. A few yards down, on our side of the street, the garish open sign of an all-night convenience store blinks at us.

We reach the van as the side door slides open. Paul peers out, blinking behind wire-framed glasses. He’s wearing his usual striped button-down, his bald head gleaming under the street lights.

“How on earth did you get down so fast?” he says.

Annie roars in his face, then hurls herself into the van.

“Annie? Jesus, are you all right?” Paul tries to follow her and gets another incoherent yell for his trouble.

“I’m fine too, by the way,” I say.

He ignores me, crouching down in front of Annie, who ignores him. She’s sitting on the low bench that runs along one side of the van’s interior; the other is packed solid with radio equipment, tool racks, stacked duffel bags. A wire-covered bulb in the ceiling fills the inside with harsh white light.

“Think I’ll sit up front,” I mutter.

I swing round to the passenger side, and Carlos pops the door for me. Behind us, through the partition, Annie growls at Paul to leave her the fuck alone.

On the jobs we do Paul handles comms and logistics while Carlos does the driving. He’s a big guy, with a blocky, angular face and stubble that never seems to vanish no matter how often he shaves. He’s wearing a flannel shirt despite the heat, the sleeves rolled up to expose the intricate tattoos lining both arms. The tattoos mix a hodge-podge of images, classic American muscle cars nudging up against snarling tigers and leaping dolphins. The biggest piece is a grinning, colourful día de los muertos skull with flowers for eyes, wrapped around the inside of his forearm.

Carlos flashes me an evil grin as he puts the van in gear. “Yo, I got what you need.” His Mexican accent gets stronger when he talks like this. “Get you real fucked up. First taste is free.”

“Shut up and give me the goods.”

He laughs. “Glove box.”

I pop it, and the sight of the bag of beef jerky nearly makes me faint with joy.

“You’re my hero,” I say between mouthfuls of delicious salty meat.

“I’m everyone’s hero.” He’s pulling slowly out of the alley, looking left and right for cops. “What’s up with Annie?”

I tell him what happened, bracing myself for the freak-out.

It doesn’t come. Instead, he just says, “Huh.”

“That’s it?” I say.

“What?”

“I pull off an amazing last-second save, and all you can say is ‘Huh’?”

“You know Annie’s scared of heights, right?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, it was pretty scary and all, but I had it totally under—”

“No, like really scared of heights. Like one of her worst fears.”

I open my mouth to reply, then close it again. Thinking back to the cargo elevator, how Annie stood with her eyes closed, not moving. And in the office where we placed the coupler, how she stayed away from the windows. Didn’t even look at them.

“Huh,” I say.

A siren splits the night behind us. Carlos guns the van, and we’re gone.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their history .

In all the books Jake had read—and he’d read many, stolen from libraries or shoplifted from second-hand stores or borrowed and never returned from shelter break rooms—that was the one phrase he’d never quite got out of his head. It would come to him in odd moments, drift across his mind as he tried to fall asleep, shivering under cold bridges or freeway overpasses, as he stepped out of gas stations and corner stores in towns that he and his mother might have lived in when he was a kid.

It always bothered him that no one knew who actually said it. Most people attributed it to George Orwell, to 1984 , but Jake thought most people had shit for brains. He’d read 1984 three times, and he’d never come across it. Everybody was going around parroting this bit of wisdom without knowing or caring that its own history had been obliterated.