Eye of the Sh*t Storm by Jackson Ford (most romantic novels .txt) 📕

Reality slaps me around the face. The stupid son of a bitch came back for me. He actually thinks he’s going to drive me out of here.

I open my mouth to tell him to get the hell away, and then I see the most wondrous thing.

No people. The homeless camp is finally, finally empty.

There’s no way to know for sure… but somehow, I do. Everybody is finally safe. Africa and the Legends got the last of the people out.

As if hearing my thoughts, the pressure of the flood gets even worse, almost punching through my PK completely.

I lean back on the slab, willing it to move down towards the van. It doesn’t listen to me at first – but then it starts to move. Slow, sluggish, but moving. To my right, a section of scaffolding collapses with a clatter, forced off its foundations by the rising torrent.

“Come come come!” Africa slaps the door with a massive palm. “On the roof. Get on the roof!”

I’m right at the end of my tether, so what he’s saying doesn’t register at first. What the fuck is he talking about, the roof? Does he not—?

Which is when the last of my PK drains away completely. And the flood, freed from its shackles, comes roaring down towards us.

I topple off the concrete slab onto the roof of the van, landing on my back, hard enough to knock what little wind is left out of me.

Africa punches the gas. There’s a horrible second where the wheels do nothing but spin in the water. Then the tires catch, and the van leaps forward.

The water hits the concrete, right behind us. The impact is so powerful that it actually jolts the van, bouncing me up off the roof. I shriek, coming back down with a thump, numb hands scrambling for purchase on the slick metal, as the roaring waters explode upwards again. There’s the insane clanging of a hundred scaffolding poles giving way at once, wrenched away by the force of the water. The concrete slab I was on vanishes under the raging torrent.

We pop out from under the freeway, wheels sending up great gouts of spray, being chased by an enormous, frothing wall of water and debris. Africa swerves to avoid – well, actually, I don’t know what the fuck he swerves to avoid, but it sends me sliding sideways. I throw my hands out, grabbing the edge of the roof closest to my head, fingers scrabbling at it.

There’s a metallic whang as a piece of scaffolding bounces off the van, hitting right where I was a second ago. Christ, that was close.

We’re not moving fast enough. Not even close. The flood has ripped through the homeless camp and is right on our heels. If it hits us, it’ll lift the van right off the concrete, send it tumbling.

And there’s not a damn thing I can do except hang on, and hope.

He can’t keep this up for ever. We have to get out of the storm drain. Only, how the hell are we going to do that, when there are flood barriers for ever? Come to think of it, where are the people Africa drove out of the camp? Surely he didn’t drop them off in the middle of the—

There’s a gap. One of the flood barriers on the left is down – a different barrier to the one I knocked over. I have no idea how they did it, but someone managed to rip the brackets out of the ground and send it sliding down into the storm drain.

I let out a scream of triumph as Africa swerves towards the gap. If we can just keep our speed up…

A second later, we hit the slope, and that’s when everything goes really wrong.

The slope is at an angle. Obviously. That means the wet, slippery roof of the van is suddenly no longer flat.

If I’d been in a better state of mind, I might have foreseen this. But I’m so out of gas, and so desperate to get the fuck out of the LA River and never, ever come back, that I just don’t think about it until it’s actually happening.

This time, my palms can’t get enough friction. I have enough time to let out a single strangled, panicked yell, and then I’m off the roof.

Time goes very, very slow, and everything in front of me gets crystal clear. The van. Africa’s panicked, desperate face in the side mirror. The slick concrete of the storm drain. The drops of water in the air.

My shadow on the ground, growing bigger by the nanosecond.

I throw out my PK in one last, desperate burst, trying to find anything that will help—

I snag the van’s side door. Without even realising what I’m doing, I rip it open, nearly tearing it off its slide mechanism. At the very last instant, with my arms stretched as far as they will go, I grab the handle.

If this were a movie, I’d just hang there, disaster miraculously averted. I do not hang. I bounce.

The van takes my weight so suddenly that it almost pulls my arms out of their sockets. My feet smack the concrete, skidding wildly, the laws of physics doing their best to rip me off and flay every inch of skin from my body. Oh, and you know how it feels when you catch your fingers in a door? Imagine that, only the door wants to kill you. My howl of pain turns into words: “Fuck fuck fuck fuck—”

There’s the blat of another engine, so close it nearly splits my head in two. Then the most miraculous thing happens. Someone grabs hold of me. A huge, meaty arm covered in tattoos wraps itself around my midsection, and pulls me close.

I don’t know what the hell is happening, or who’s got hold of me. All I can do is let go of the door handle and hold on. As my feet judder against the wet