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

them? They must have been… but then, why are they the only ones here? There is no possible way we got here at exactly the same time as a bunch of dudes who suddenly remembered the existence of Union Station, and decided that it was a primo camping spot. Not even we can be that unlucky.

And how the hell did they get in here, anyway?

“We were just going,” Nic says.

I flick an annoyed glance at him. “Uh, no we’re not. We’ll go when we’re damn good and ready.”

“We’re claiming this spot for the camp,” says someone else. “And we don’t know you. Get outta here.”

Annie tugs at my arm. “Let’s go,” she hisses.

I swing my arms wide. “Who the hell are you? Ow.” There’s a sudden burst of pain at the base of my skull, my shoulders protesting at the movement. I recover quickly. “You do realise this is a public building right? You can’t just—”

“You know what?” rumbles the man with the deep voice. “Y’all being disrespectful. Empty your pockets. Then you can go.”

Are these jackasses trying to mug us? Of all the shit that’s happened today…

Fine. They’re about to find out that I’m not that easy to roll on. Except… I don’t know if my PK is going to help this time. There’s not enough of it. And even as the thought occurs, I’m weighing the odds, not liking what I see. Five of them. Three of us – four if you count Leo, who is as much out of gas as I am. We’re already bruised, bloodied, exhausted.

If they want to mug us, who the hell is going to stop them?

“I said,” the man repeats. “Cough it up. Go on. Or—”

“Woah, hold on!”

It comes from my right, a spot I haven’t even looked at yet. There’s a sharp, delighted bark, and Bradley Cooper bursts out of the darkness.

The dog jumps up on Leo, yapping and licking at him, almost knocking him over. His owner steps into view, a huge smile on his face.

We all stare at him, open-mouthed. It’s Nic who speaks first.

“Grant?”

THIRTY-NINETeagan

I’d heard a lot about the homeless camp on the storm drain, even before this whole crazy night kicked off. It’s one of those things you see in the news or on social media, and kind of just skim by. Or at least, I do.

I pictured a few tents, maybe a FEMA outpost or two. On the scale of one to shit-I-had-to-think-about-tonight, a homeless camp somewhere to the south didn’t even bump the needle.

And I certainly was not expecting it to take up an entire freeway interchange.

The first things we see are the winking lights of cook fires. A hundred of them, it looks like, glimmering in the darkness like stars. The sound comes next: an almost subsonic hum, the noise of a thousand voices laughing, shouting, grumbling. The hum is mixed with the hammering of metal on metal, the thin crackle of cooking fires. It swells into the night, amplified by the concrete corridor of the river.

And then the camp coalesces out of the dark, and all I can do is gape.

LA is known for its traffic, and almost all of that traffic happens on our gigantic freeways. Those freeways have even larger interchanges: giant spaghetti junctions, where freeways loop over and around one another, multiple levels of them, creaking under the staggering weight of cars and trucks. Or that was the case, before the quake. There are plenty of interchanges that got damaged, declared very-much-not-safe to drive over, and the 710-105 is one of them.

It’s a gigantic, concrete Celtic cross where the two freeways intersect. The whole interchange is almost half a mile wide, most of it positioned just to the west of the storm drain. The section that crosses the drain has to be seven hundred feet wide, easily, multiple layers of freeway piled on top of one another.

But it’s not the size of the interchange that gets me. It’s the size of what’s underneath it.

Most of the interchange supports are propped up with heavy-duty steel scaffolding – a huge nest of it, bars and platforms and catwalks holding the entire edifice up. There are tents everywhere – and I do mean everywhere. Not just on the concrete channel, but on the scaffolding platforms too, and on the actual freeways themselves. Some genius has actually hung rope ladders, turning the whole camp into something a little kid would dream up. The river itself cuts right through the middle of the camp, the channel vanishing into the maze of scaffolding.

The whole thing looks like a catastrophe waiting to happen. Here and there, the scaffolding has been bolstered by lengths of bamboo, the stalks lashed to the existing steel, strengthening the structure. There’s a crew of men levering another set into place, they themselves standing on a makeshift platform positioned under the lowermost freeway loop.

Both sides of the storm drain are lined with flood barriers, right up to the freeway. A lot of them look like fresh repairs, or replacements. I can’t tell if the city did it, or the people in the camp.

“We’re getting dozens of new people every day,” Grant says. Turns out, he was the reason these people were in Union Station. When his new buddies mentioned how full the camp was getting, he had an epiphany: why not occupy the station? It was, after all, just sitting there, sealed off but empty. When he was told it was impossible to get inside, he happened to mention that he was a former electrical engineer for the railways, and he happened to know a few ways in that were probably a little less secure…

They actually arrived some time before we did, and were just leaving as we got there.

“How many people here now?” Nic asks him.

He whistles. “Must be over two thousand, easy.”

Honestly, it looks like more. They crowd between the tents, shuffle in a long queue around makeshift kitchens, crouch in small groups playing dice or dominoes,