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

sit alone with their phones. Some of them give us curious glances, and a few shout hello to our little honour guard, but most just ignore us.

There are business suits, tattered nurses’ scrubs, overalls, crisp white Ts with red and blue bandanas – the Crips and the Bloods, for once not appearing to give a shit about their beef. Men, women, kids, dogs, cats. Birds in cages. The air smells of weed and charcoal, sweat and rotting garbage – which is everywhere, piled up in stinking, tottering heaps.

“Did you know about this?” I ask Annie.

She shrugs. “Sure. It’s gotten a lot worse since I last saw it, though.”

“Worse?” The man with the deep voice – Grant introduced him as Alvin – kisses his teeth. I’m still not sure I’ve forgiven him for trying to rob us. “Please. We doin’ just fine.”

“Clearly,” I say, eyeing a piece of makeshift scaffolding that looks like it’s going to fall down if I raise an eyebrow.

“Oh, y’all think just because we out of work, we don’t know what we’re doing?” Alvin points, indicating an older man with a neat beard, fussing over a bamboo support. “See that dude? He worked construction for thirty years – built Tom Cruise’s spot. He’s been helping build this place up. We got a bunch of other dudes too.”

“He put up the scaffolding? The metal stuff?”

“Nah. Government did that shit, then they left. Y’all know how it is. Don’t matter though, we got all kinds. We got doctors, construction guys, Uber drivers, chefs, all of it.”

Alvin sees the incredulous look on my face, and gives me a weary smile. “Twelve million people in the Greater LA area, y’all think a couple thousand didn’t get screwed by insurance after the quake? Probably a lot more than that. Blue collar, white collar, all of it.”

“I can help rig up some lights, by the way,” Grant says. “I’m an electrical engineer. We could tap into the power grid, and—”

“Dude, I told you, we got it under control,” Alvin says. “All that shit was done before you got here.”

“Right,” Grant says, a little crestfallen.

“Your house gone, maybe your car,” says the woman next to Alvin. “Insurance company won’t pay cos you didn’t take out special coverage or your property taxes were overdue or whatever. Government supposed to help, but they can’t agree on what to do, or whether they should accept aid from other countries or what not. Where you gonna go?”

“Lucille’s right,” says Alvin. “I mean, to be fair, some of us still got jobs to go to, you know? We got cars, but we gotta park them way away from here.” He waves at the dark, interlocking freeway above us.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “If you’re still getting a salary then why not rent, or…?”

“Like there’s so many properties out there to rent,” says Lucille. “Most of us ended up with bad credit too. You know what I used to be? A prop designer. Eleven years. You think they’re making movies here any more? All the big studios moved their shit. Someone told me the other day to go live in Vancouver, find work there. Fucking Vancouver! You know how many people from California tried to move to Canada? Take me years to get up there.” She sniffs. “I’m LA born and raised. I’m never leaving.”

She glances at Leo. “Oh, sorry, little man. I didn’t mean to swear in front of—”

“It’s fucking OK,” Leo says, with a shrug.

I swear everybody takes a step back from him, wincing and hissing and telling him to mind his language. He blinks at us. “You guys say it all the time.”

“Is that right?” Alvin fixes us with a pointed look.

I quickly change the subject. “Isn’t it dangerous here? This is literally a storm drain. Aren’t you guys worried about…?”

I trail off, thinking about the blockage upriver, at the broken Main Street Bridge. All that water, building and building.

We used to get flash floods in Wyoming sometimes – I never got caught in one, but I know a little bit about how they work. We’d get them on dry creek beds and up in the canyons. They’re nasty all right, big swells of water carrying a shit-ton of debris: broken trees, snapped branches, even boulders. They don’t just appear from nowhere. You have some warning – you can hear them coming – and if you have a clear enough viewpoint, you can actually see them too.

I squint up the sides of the concrete storm drain, wondering if we’d be able to get out in time if a flash flood did chase us down. There are more flood barriers on either side of the camp, many of them looking brand-new, without graffiti. That confuses me, but only for a second. Some of the barriers were probably knocked down in the quake, and what I’m seeing are the ones the city replaced. The barriers are wall-to-wall on either side of the channel, with only a few gaps here and there for bridges, or maintenance worker access.

Not good if you happen to be living here.

“Sure.” Lucille nods. “It’s crazy dangerous.”

Alvin sighs, like this isn’t the first time he’s had to explain this. “You think this is the only homeless camp in LA? Ever since those skyscrapers came down in Skid Row, bunch of people been looking for places to live. You got all these camps springing up everywhere, and one by one, the government comes in and shuts them down.”

“Why?”

“Who the hell knows? Different reason every time. Safety, security, bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood, whatever. But then some people started camping here, and nobody was hassling them. Word got around, more and more people moved in…” He grimaces. “Even this place is getting to full. S’why we were scouting other spots, ones where folks wouldn’t really get hassled.”

Annie raises an eyebrow. “Like Union Station?”

“Why not? Trains aren’t running. Place looks boarded up from the outside. Nobody’s checking it. Why the hell not?

“What do you guys do