Rivals

by David Wellington

  It had been nearly a week since she’d smashed her way out of Mandy’s house, so angry and hurt she couldn’t think at all, could only punch and kick and scream. Once she was outside she’d just gone jumping from roof to roof until she wound up somewhere downtown, just wandering the street with her head full of fog. When she went back to get the car it was gone, along with her purse and her sidekick—most likely Brent drove it home. Brent, who was in all the newspapers now. Everybody loved him. He had saved Mandy, after all. Maggie hadn’t given a single thought to whether her friend was in danger when she left. She’d just wanted to get away and had thought of nothing but herself.

  She was glad Mandy was okay. Apparently she was still in the hospital but would make a full recovery. Maggie told herself over and over she was glad for that. Even though there had been a moment there, after Mandy told her she wouldn’t keep her promise, when Maggie could have—she might have—

  It wasn’t worth thinking about what she might have done. The things she had done were bad enough.

  There’d been nothing in the papers about Maggie so far, which she figured was something Special Agent Weathers must have arranged. She was kind of grateful to him for that. She did know the police were looking for her. Twice so far a cop had seen her on the street and shouted for her to freeze, but both times she’d just jumped up onto the rooftops and gotten away without any problems.

  She dried her clothes with the old battered hot air hand dryer in the gas station restroom. No matter how long she held her skirt under the wheezing vent, though, or how vigorously she rubbed at it, she knew it would still be soggy when she put it back on. It was also a dead giveaway whenever the cops spotted her. How many homeless girls could there be wandering around downtown wearing field hockey uniforms?

  Maggie needed a change of clothes. She needed money. And she needed to get out of town.

  None of that should be too hard, she thought, for a notorious supervillain.

  Chapter 21.

  Brent poured Grandma’s tea and cut a sandwich in half—egg salad, just like she liked. She was propped up on the couch on a mound of pillows, watching television and she grunted acknowledgement when he put her plate and her tea cup down in front of her.

  Her right arm was in a cast that covered all but her thumb and ran almost up to her elbow. No one had signed this cast. Lucy had asked if she could, and got a nasty look in exchange. The doctors said it would be at least a month before the cast could come off and Grandma could use her hand again.

  Brent had volunteered to play nurse until she was back up to full speed. Every day when he got back from school he made her dinner. At night he helped her into bed and then tucked her in, as if she were the kid and he the guardian. It still felt pretty weird, especially when she yelled at him for not doing things right. He was pretty sure that it didn’t matter if he made her bed with hospital corners every morning, or if her tea had a drop too much honey in it. He got the sense she just needed to yell at somebody.

  She was angry. She had a right to be angry. Most of the time he left her alone.

  “The phone was ringing again all day,” Grandma muttered. “More reporters.”

  “You shouldn’t pick it up unless you know who’s calling,” Brent told her. “That’s why we have Caller ID.”

  “I can’t figure out how to use that thing. Anyway, I gave them the same old song and dance. That you’re too busy being a hero to talk to anyone.”

  Brent had changed the voicemail message so it said much of the same thing, though it didn’t use the H word. It asked that the reporters respect his privacy and not call back. So instead they emailed—he dreaded turning his computer on in the morning before school because he knew he would have to sort through dozens of requests for interviews and photo shoots and product endorsements before he could find any messages from Lucy or Special Agent Weathers.

  He deleted all the emails, even the ones offering money for his life’s story. He deleted all the voicemail they got—people he actually wanted to talk to knew not to call his house unless it was an emergency. But he couldn’t do much about the photographers who followed him around all day. Some of them were parked down the block, with telephoto lenses sticking out of the back of a van and following his every move, constantly trying to get a look through the curtains over his bedroom window. More of them were camped out outside the high school. A judge had said they couldn’t come within five hundred feet of him, but they were always trying for four hundred and ninety-nine.

  Maggie had worried about being followed around by the FBI all the time. It turned out the government was the least of Brent’s problems.

  Speaking of which—the doorbell rang, and Brent went to answer it. He was expecting Special Agent Weathers but he had to be careful, so he twitched aside the curtains and peered out at the porch. No smiling, shouting reporters appeared so he let the FBI man inside and closed the door behind him.

  “Have you found her yet?” Brent asked.

  “Hello to you, too,” Weathers said, and hung his coat on a hook by the door. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Reynolds,” he said to Grandma. She waved her good hand at him without bothering to turn around.

  Brent apologized and lead Weathers into the kitchen, where he poured him a Diet Coke—it was all he had other than Grandma’s herbal tea and water. “I’m sorry if I was abrupt. But I’m really worried about her.”

  Weathers frowned. “We’ve had reports. She’s been seen around, but—”

  “But you can’t catch her. She runs away too fast.” Brent nodded and drummed his fingers on the table. “I understand. I’ve been looking for her, too. Patrolling, I guess you could say. I haven’t spotted her yet, though. You’ll call me on my cell the next time someone sees her, right?”

  “Sure.” Weathers reached into his jacket pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. He carefully smoothed it out on the table and looked into Brent’s eyes. “There’s actual news on another front, if you want to hear it. We have not managed to recover your father’s body.”

  Brent gulped. It had been a long time. There hadn’t even been a funeral yet. He’d hoped that if he had a body, he’d have something to bury. Maybe if he put a memorial service together, Maggie would feel compelled to come, and then he could talk to her there. If he could just talk to her, figure out what was going on with her—

  But no. If she thought the FBI was watching, she wouldn’t come anywhere near.

  He rubbed his face. His father was dead (you killed him, a nagging little part of his brain reminded him) and he needed to be buried. That was the only important thing. “Do you at least know how he died?”

  Weathers took a sip of his drink. “You don’t want to know that.”

  “Okay,” Brent said.

  “I’ve got a whole team out there in the desert studying that thing you and he found. I’ve got people watching it round the clock. A lot of what they’re finding out, you don’t want to know. I’ll tell you one thing anyway. I asked them to send in two guys in hazardous materials suits to get your father’s body. They couldn’t do it. They made it back out themselves, but just barely. They both died within an hour. They were good men, Brent.”

  “I’m… so sorry.”

  Weathers shrugged. “You didn’t ask them to do it. I did. I thought the hazmat suits would be enough to protect them, but I was wrong. Whatever that green fire stuff is, it kills anyone it comes into contact with. Except you and your sister. You want to hear some more interesting facts?”

  Brent stared at Weathers through his fingers. He wasn’t sure how to answer that question. “Okay,” he tried.

  “We’re pretty sure the thing, the cylinder you found, was buried for at least sixty thousand years. They did radiocarbon dating on it and that’s the farthest back that particular test can go. Which means human beings didn’t build it. Sixty thousand years ago human beings were still figuring out how to make bows and arrows.”

  “So it’s a crashed alien spacecraft?”

&nbs
p; “Sure,” Weathers said. “Maybe. Those are the facts. You want some more, well, all I have are theories. Which means I can’t prove any of it. Now as for what that green fire is, I don’t have the foggiest notion. All I know is that it heals you if you’re exposed to it—you said it healed Maggie’s blisters and your razorburn—so maybe it was an automatic medical station or something.”

  “But it’s killed three people!”

  “Three people, yes, all of them over age eighteen. I have a bunch of scientists trying to figure out why teenagers come out of there stronger than when they went in. The best thing they can think of is that it must have something to do with your pineal gland. That’s a little pinecone-shaped thing in the middle of your brain. It produces melatonin, or at least, it does until you finish puberty.”

  “Then what does it do?”

  Weathers scratched his left eyebrow. “Then it turns into a lump of bone that does absolutely nothing. By the time you’re twenty-one it’s completely calcified. Nobody’s exactly sure why it does that. Nor do we have any idea how an active pineal gland protected you and your sister from certain death. Again, I don’t have answers. In this case I don’t even have a theory.”

  Brent nodded. He squirmed in his chair. He didn’t want to know any of this. He really didn’t want to know about the two men who died trying to recover his dad’s body.

  “You won’t send anyone else in there, will you?” he asked.

  “Oh, no!” Weathers let go of a bitter laugh. “Hell, no. I’ve got a call in for every available ton of quick-setting concrete in the state. I’m going to cover that thing over until it looks like a big parking lot. A parking lot no one will ever again be allowed to set foot on.”

  Brent squinted at him. “No way. I thought you would want to study it. Take it to pieces and figure out how it works. Isn’t that what you do with UFOs?”

  Weathers looked at him for a while before replying. Just looked at him. “You may be under the impression that the government is one big conspiracy. That we’re always scheming and plotting away behind the scenes. But that’s not who we are. We’re just people. People who work very hard, for not much pay, to try to protect American citizens. We’ll make sure nobody else dies, Brent. That’s my job.”

  Chapter 22.

  School was becoming a hassle. Brent couldn’t ride the bus anymore—reporters kept trying to sneak onboard, for one thing. For another he had to keep an eye on Matt Perkins. He had to walk over to Perkins’ house every morning before Matt even left for school, and at the end of the day he had to follow the bully all the way home. Occasionally the kid’s abusive dad came out onto the porch and yelled at Brent to leave his son alone, but really, there was no option. The very next day after Brent’s original confrontation with the bully, Perkins had tried to shake down Ryan Digby again. The only way to stop that was to always be there whenever the two of them met.

  “I don’t think I can do this forever,” he told Lucy. She had started patrolling with him, usually while riding on his back. It was nice at least not to be alone when he rambled all over town like this. They were walking home from school along a busy side street, just off the highway. A news van with a satellite dish on top was crawling along behind them, holding up a lane of traffic, and he had to raise his voice over all the honking horns. “And anyway, he’s just one bully. There are others out there and I’m not doing anything about them. A lot of freshman have been leaving notes in my locker asking me for help—but I can’t be in two places at once. If only Maggie was still around she could help me.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Lucy asked, leaning her head over his shoulder. “She would probably organize the bullies and hold the whole school up for protection money.”

  “Hey!” he said. “She’s still my sister.”

  But he was getting used to it, unfortunately. Nobody believed in Maggie anymore. Nobody wanted to give her a second chance. The newspapers had been merciless after she destroyed the Hunt house. They claimed that she had been trying to kill Mandy. It didn’t help that Mandy seemed to think so too, and had told every reporter she could find just how awful her ordeal had been.

  The police were pretty clear on the fact that they were going to arrest her as soon as they found her. Weathers had said there was nothing he could do. But Brent knew there was still some good in her. Before Mom had died she had been a pretty cool sister. Even afterwards she had always looked after him. She had saved him from the green fire—didn’t that count for anything?

  “If I could just talk to her,” he started, but even to himself he felt like a scratched CD skipping over the same line over and over again. “Maybe, then—”

  He stopped because he saw two girls standing at the street corner ahead. It was Jill Hennessey and Dana Kravitz, and it looked like they were having an argument. Or at least—Jill was having an argument, and Dana was just agreeing with everything she said, her head bowed as if she deserved whatever nasty things Jill had to say. Jill was holding on tight to Dana’s arm and Brent wondered if he should intervene.

  But no—that wasn’t right. That wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing. Dad wouldn’t have wanted him to intrude on everyone’s personal lives, he was pretty sure. “When I saved Mandy Hunt I didn’t have to think about it,” he told Lucy. “I didn’t have to wonder whether I was doing the right thing. I didn’t have to calculate what would happen every time I broke through a wall or kicked a pile of bricks out of the way. I just did it. If every problem was so clear-cut this would be so much easier!”

  “But they can’t be, Brent. The world is complicated, and that’s why heroes are so rare. Superheroes have to make the right decision every time, and—”

  “Hold on,” he said. Something looked wrong. Out of place. There was a line of cars coming toward them. Dana and Jill had a DON’T WALK light. But they were stepping out into the street, Jill’s hand on Dana’s back, right between her shoulder blades.

  “Jump down,” he told Lucy, and felt her weight fall off his back. Then he was off like a shot, sprinting toward the two girls. They weren’t looking where they were going, and the cars were getting awfully close—

  He could see them perfectly as he ran. It was as if time had slowed down. Jill still had one foot on the curb. She had turned slightly to face the oncoming traffic and it looked like she was about to jump back. Dana, on the other hand, was all the way out in the street and was falling forward, her hands out to catch her. She was going to land on all fours right in front of the cars.

  The car in front had already slammed on its brakes—the driver saw Dana. But Brent just didn’t know if it would stop in time or not.

  He dashed up between them, one foot forward sliding across the asphalt. He started turning sideways before he’d even reached them and momentum took him the rest of the way. He saw the news van coming up behind him, swerving hard to pass a car that had stopped short in the middle of the crosswalk. Brent reached out one hand and pushed Jill, as gently as he could, backward, back onto the sidewalk. Dana was just about to fall.

  He wasted a fraction of a second thinking about the best way to grab her, the way that wouldn’t involve touching her anywhere inappropriate. Then, one hand scooping low under her stomach, the other wrapping around her shoulders, he picked her up and then kicked hard to launch them both across the street, toward a patch of green grass that looked like it would soften the impact.

  The news van hit him in the shoulder, hard enough to make him see stars. He twisted around to take the impact across his back, protecting Dana as the van’s grille buckled under his weight. The blow knocked him sideways, but only a little, and then he was falling, rolling, and time sped up again, became a blur—

  Then he was sliding on his back across the grass, Dana on top of him as if she were riding a sled. They came to a stop just like that, with her lying full length on top of him, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck.

  He was a fifteen year old boy so he noticed at once how soft her body was, how per
fectly she fit into his arms. He was also Brent Gill so the thought embarrassed him enough to make him blush.

  “How’s my hair?” Dana whispered. It was the first thing she’d ever said to him.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, honestly. Then he looked over her shoulder and saw a portable video camera staring back at him. He tried to smile. Then he tried to sit up, thinking he would gently roll out from under Dana and get back on his feet.

  Instead she clutched him hard. He could feel her shaking and he realized she must be terrified—she could have been killed back there.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re safe now.” There were reporters everywhere, and people with cell phone cameras, and a man carrying a garden hose—Brent thought it must be his lawn they’d landed on. It was all happening so fast. He saw Jill come running up, and Lucy pushing her way through the crowd, her eyes wide.

  Slowly, carefully, he lifted Dana off of him and set her down in the grass. She was breathing very hard, almost hyperventilating.

  The reporters all started talking at once. “Brent! Brent! Do you have some kind of super senses, that let you know when danger is near? Brent! How does it feel to save a pretty girl? Is she your girlfriend? Does Brent have a girlfriend? Is she going to kiss him anyway? Mr. Gill—could you just look this way and give us a thumb’s up?”

  “Get back!” Lucy shouted. “Let him breathe!” Then she grabbed the garden hose and put her thumb over the end so she could spray any reporters who got too close. Soon she’d cleared a circle maybe twelve feet wide around Brent and Dana. “Get back, all of you! Give him some room!”

  Brent got to his feet and brushed off his clothes. He was covered in blades of freshly mown grass. He looked down and saw Dana still sitting there, hugging herself. He reached down and gave her a hand up.

  “I don’t have a date for homecoming yet,” she blurted out.