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

I lift my hands, fingers spread, making eye contact with the young guardsman – or as much as I can with his mirrored sunglasses, anyway. Showing him I’m not a threat. If we play this right, we can just walk out of here. Africa’s down for the count, probably trying to figure out what planet he’s on. The guardsmen haven’t got the means to stop us. We’re not getting any food here, that much is certain… but we can probably get back to the river.

“Leo,” I say, holding out my hand behind me. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“I—”

“It’s OK.” I flash him a smile. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”

“Down. On the fucking. Ground.”

“Yeah, nah,” I mutter. “Leo?”

I hear him take a breath behind me, like he’s about to start sobbing again. But it’s just like before, when we were leaving the storage unit. If he trusts you – or at least, if he thinks you aren’t going to hurt him – he’ll do as he’s told. There are soft footsteps, and then a small hand slips into mine. Oh, thank fuck.

“Nic, you too,” I say. Then, to the guardsmen: “We’re gonna leave now. OK? There’s no weapon, no harm, no foul. We’re just gonna go.”

The guardsman with the mirrored shades glances at the soldier on his right, a woman with a long ponytail. For the first time, they seem unsure. I can use that. All I have to do is start walking.

Africa is on his feet now, unsteady, using the Humvee for support. Gaze burning a hole in the back of Leo’s head. I take a step forward – and from behind me, there’s a sharp click.

One of the guardsmen – a woman barely out of her teens, it looks like – tried to fire, the gun pointed right at my head. In her panic, she pulls the trigger again, then a third time. Her thumb frantically works the safety, the confusion on her face growing.

So much for trigger discipline.

I meet the woman’s eyes. “Let’s all just—”

With a yell, she drops her rifle, claws at her waist for her sidearm. I’ve locked it down before she’s even drawn it, holding the trigger in place for good measure. “Nobody wants any trouble,” I say, raising my voice. “We—”

One of the guardsmen rushes us.

It might be the wraparound shades guy, but I can’t be sure. Whoever it is throws their rifle to one side, sprints straight for Leo, as if intending to scoop him up and get him away from danger.

He doesn’t get there. Before I can react, before anybody can do anything, Leo screams—

—and a bomb goes off.

That’s what it feels like. A huge, ear-splitting bang, a flash of intense white light.

I stagger, clapping my hands to my ears, blinking against tears that double and triple my vision.

The guardsman who rushed us has been thrown backwards – and unlike Africa, he’s not moving. He lies in a tangled heap, one arm thrown over his chest, like he got drunk and passed out.

For a long second, not a single person moves. Nobody says a thing. All except for Leo, who is huddled in a ball on the rough concrete. He’s still screaming.

The woman who pulled her trigger takes a step forward, blinking in shock, when it happens again.

In the split-second available to me before the flash and the ferocious bang wipes my brain clean, I get a good look at exactly what he’s doing.

I thought Leo was just delivering electric charge through the ground. He wasn’t. Not even close.

Lightning.

The kid is literally calling down the lightning.

He’s ripping the charge from the heavy clouds above, pulling down an enormous bolt of raw electricity. For a moment, the woman he’s targeted is a dark, agonised silhouette against a backdrop of burning, horrible white light. Then it’s gone, and she’s down, and I have no time to process what the fuck I just saw before two more bolts of lightning come cracking down.

Now I am blind. Blind and deaf. I drop, not knowing what else to do, terror squeezing my stomach in a clawed fist. I curl into a ball as more lightning comes hammering down. In the gaps between the bolts, there are screams. Horrified, disbelieving. Cut short.

There’s nothing I can do. There is no part of my ability that can stop this. Whatever power Leo is tapping into, it’s bigger than him, bigger than me.

Move. But I can’t. My legs won’t listen to me. I curl tighter and try to calm my hammering heart and hope and pray that Nic is OK.

In the storage unit, Leo had this… safety radius, I guess you’d call it. He made sure the electricity he was putting out didn’t affect the area around him. I have to hope it’s the same thing here – that the lightning won’t fry us. But if there really is a safety radius, and the guardsmen are outside it…

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

And after what seems like years – decades – it finally stops.

An insane ringing fills my ears. But behind the sound, there are others. Crackling fire. A woman sobbing. Running footsteps.

There’s no more screaming. I don’t think there’s anyone left to do it.

Slowly, I sit up. It’s like my mind takes a second or two to catch up to my eyes, and I have to blink a few times before the afterimages in my vision fade.

Bodies.

At least five. guardsmen, mainly, lying in sprawled, broken heaps. There are objects dotted between them, and it takes me a second to recognise them – they’re clothes, military fatigues, torn and shredded, ripped right off them. Shoes, too, scattered everywhere. Behind us, the crowd at the stadium entrance has scattered. There are small fires everywhere, and a big one on the Humvee, which is fully ablaze. The air stinks of ozone and gasoline. A rifle lies abandoned on the concrete.

Shit – Africa!

I’m so certain I’m going to see him among the bodies that a cry actually forces its way out of