Rivals

by David Wellington

  “We’ve got her,” he said. “We found your sister.”

  Chapter 26.

  Maggie knew how to swear. She supposed every kid did, but back when she and Mandy Hunt were in middle school together, they’d had a game where they challenged each other to come up with the worst thing you could possibly say. They started with “you are a pus-dripping donkey anus,” and worked their way up from there. You got extra points if you could say it like you actually meant it.

  Maggie had usually won that game. She was a champion at being frustrated, if nothing else. But maybe not good enough to express exactly how she felt about the bank vault door. It was proving to her something she’d suspected but never experienced before: there were limits to her new super-strength.

  “Festering eye socket of a month-dead syphilitic warthog!” she screamed.

  It was ten feet high and just as wide. There was no good way to get her fingers around its edge because it sat flush with the wall. The hinges were on the inside, so she couldn’t just tear those off, either. She tried pounding her way through it with her fists. It made her knuckles bleed but at least she was making progress of some kind, in that she had seriously dented the metal door.

  “Lice-encrusted scalp of a bastard pornographer!”

  After about five minutes of that she stood back and examined her progress. She had put a three-inch deep dimple in the surface of the door. It would take hours and hours to get through the door like that. By the time she did, every cop in town would be down there with her, probably shooting her repeatedly in the back.

  “This isn’t fair!” she shouted, and her words echoed in the marble basement that housed the vault. When the echoes died away, silence returned—silence, except for the sound of police sirens wailing away upstairs.

  She cursed a few more times, then she just gave up. There had to be easier ways to get money.

  She headed upstairs carefully, keeping an eye out for anyone waiting for her with a shotgun. The bank lobby was empty, though. Red and blue light was flashing off the walls, throwing weird shadows across the marble, but there was not a single person to be found. Even the teller with the mole on her nose was gone—she probably ran away the second Maggie headed down the stairs.

  Maggie took a deep breath. Then she turned around and looked outside. Through the revolving doors she could see the street. A line of police cars stood out there, their lights whirling angrily. Men in uniform were crouched behind the cars, and they all had guns. All the guns were pointing at her.

  “Crap,” she said, which wasn’t very inventive but it expressed her emotions perfectly. She started to run back toward the stairs—maybe she could get out by way of the roof—when the glass doors shattered and something much bigger than a bullet came sailing into the room. It hit one of the ATM machines hard and then dropped to the floor.

  Maggie picked it up. It looked like a spray can of whipped cream—except it was painted a flat black. There were holes all down its sides. As she studied it, bright yellow smoke started oozing out of the holes.

  Tear gas, she thought—even as her throat started to close up. She wasn’t invulnerable to tear gas, apparently. She turned and threw the grenade back out through the shattered glass doors and smiled as the cops there all scattered.

  Something was popping and crackling behind her. She turned and saw the ATM that the grenade had hit. The screen was shattered, exposing the machine’s guts—wiring and circuit boards and a security camera dangling by one wire. Little flames were popping into life inside the machine as sparks jumped back and forth.

  Maggie felt like palming her face. Duh, she thought. Everyone uses the ATMs these days for cash withdrawals. The teller had told her as much.

  She swung around and kicked the ATM hard. It fell to pieces and money started spilling out all over the floor. Some of it was on fire. She left those bills and grabbed as many undamaged twenties as she could, stuffing them inside her backpack. There were a lot more of them than she’d expected and she didn’t have time to stack them properly so they got crumpled up in the pack but it didn’t matter. It was money—she had her money, the money she needed to—

  “Margaret Gill,” someone said, their voice amplified by a bullhorn. It was the cops. “We want to end this peacefully with no one getting hurt. Your brother is on the way—he says he wants to talk to you before we take you into custody.”

  Maggie stopped what she was doing and looked up, as if Brent would be right there in front of her. “Crap,” she said again. She had taken too long.

  Chapter 27.

  Weathers parked his car as close to the bank as he could get. The police had already closed down the road that lead past the bank building, stringing up yellow tape and parking cars lengthwise across the street to keep anyone from trying to get in. There were plenty of reporters already who were trying to cross the barricades anyway. They’d been waiting for this, Brent knew. Waiting for Maggie to do something bad.

  “If I can talk her down, if I can get her to surrender,” Brent said, “will you let her come home?”

  He knew the answer, of course. But he waited for Weathers to sigh and say, “It’s gone too far for that. I’ll need to arrest her—it’s better if I do it than the local cops, probably. I can take her some place safe.”

  “Like a—” Brent swallowed painfully, “—a psychiatric hospital? So she can get some help, work out her problems?”

  “Maybe, eventually,” Weathers said. “I was actually thinking that the local jail wouldn’t be able to hold her. She could just punch her way through the walls. I have an idea about a place we can put her she can’t escape from.” He sighed again and turned to look Brent in the eye. “She’s broken a lot of laws, and she’s hurt people. You have to understand, Brent, that society has a responsibility to people who—”

  “I understand that she’s my sister, that’s all,” Brent said, and he got out of the car before Weathers could say anything more.

  There was a policeman standing at the roadblock pushing back the reporters but when he saw Brent he lifted up the yellow tape and let Brent duck underneath it. Beyond the tape cars were parked in a semi-circle around the bank’s front door. A few tendrils of yellow smoke were rolling along the gutters—Brent had no idea what that was about. The flashing lights and the squawking of so many police radios disoriented him. Cops with handguns and rifles were crouched behind the cars. They didn’t look at Brent as he walked out into the middle of the street. Behind him a police captain with a bullhorn called Maggie’s name. The amplified voice made Brent wince.

  “Margaret—your brother’s here. Do you want to talk to him?”

  Brent stared at the police captain, then back at the revolving doors of the bank. This wasn’t going to work, he thought. There was too much chaos, too many people strained to the pitch of desperation. He needed to talk to Maggie alone. He looked back at the police captain and said, “I want to go inside.”

  “No way, kid,” the captain told him, holding one hand over the mouthpiece of his bullhorn so what he said wouldn’t be broadcast to the whole neighborhood. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “I wasn’t asking,” Brent told him, and walked over to the revolving door. It was shattered, its glass broken, but the metal frame was intact and when he pushed it, it turned and let him inside.

  Maggie was waiting for him there. She grabbed him and then jumped back, away from the door and the windows. She pulled him over a counter and down into a narrow space behind the teller windows.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” she said.

  “Jeez! That hurt! My head bounced off a cash register,” he told her, rubbing the back of his skull. The pain faded almost instantly, but still he was annoyed. “Why did you do that?”

  “They’ve got snipers out there. If I show myself in the windows they’re going to shoot first and ask questions later.”

  Brent took a long look at her. The light wasn’t great but he could see how tired she looked. Her eyes were narrowed and h
er hair was a mess. She looked even more desperate than the cops outside.

  “Mags, what’s been going on with you?”

  “I’ve just been trying to keep out of trouble.” She glanced up at the white painted wall behind them. It turned blue, then red, then blue again as the police flashers outside cycled. “Didn’t work. Listen, I’m going to run away. Leave town. You’ll probably never see me again. I’m sure that’s what everyone wants.”

  “Not me,” he told her. He stared into her eyes. She looked away but he kept watching her face. “Did you see the message I sent you? It was on TV all day. And in the papers.”

  “I’ve mostly been avoiding the news. It’s all about how awful I am and how everybody’s scared of me.” She shrugged. “But yeah. I saw it. It was… really nice of you, Brent, to say those things. It’s nice to think there’s one person out there who might believe I had excuses for everything I did. I wish I could say it mattered, though.”

  “Of course it matters! That’s why I did it. I want you to come home. We’ll straighten everything out with grandma. I’ll even talk to her about not hitting you anymore. Mandy Hunt probably won’t press charges, if you just explain—”

  Maggie laughed at him.

  Brent felt his cheeks getting warm. He didn’t like that laugh. It said he was just a little kid, still, and he couldn’t possibly know how serious things had become.

  “I admit it won’t be easy to come back,” he said.

  “Easy,” she said. She wasn’t avoiding his gaze anymore. Now she was just blowing him off. “Easy. Everything’s easy for you now, isn’t it? Everybody loves you. The big hero. Brent, if I go out there right now with you and turn myself in, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think they’ll give me a chance to explain? Or do you think they will just take me off to jail and let me rot there for the rest of my life?”

  “You… may have to go to jail for a while,” he admitted.

  “A while. I’m seventeen years old. By the time I got out I would be as old as Grandma. Bank robbery, Brent. Attempted murder—that’s what the papers are saying about what I did at Mandy’s house. Assault and battery, on Grandma. Who knows what else they can think up?”

  Brent shook his head. “So you won’t come with me. You won’t come out of here peacefully.”

  “Actually, I will,” she said.

  He blinked. “You will?” She didn’t sound as if she meant it.

  “I’m going to walk out that door with you, arm in arm. That way, they won’t shoot at me. They’ll wonder if maybe, just maybe, I’ve decided you’re right and that I should just give up. Take what’s coming to me. Reform and become a model citizen. They won’t believe it. But maybe they’ll think it for just a second. Which is all the time I need to get away.”

  “Please, Maggie. Just consider coming home, for real. For me.”

  “Let’s go,” she said, and stood up. She hauled him up to his feet. Together they jumped over the teller counter and headed to the door. “I’ll know if it’s working in a second.”

  “How?” he asked.

  “If they start shooting the second I appear in the window, then they aren’t buying it. Come on. This way.”

  “And what if I refuse to help you?”

  “Then,” she said, “you can watch the police gun down your sister in cold blood, and you can spend the rest of your life knowing you could have stopped it, and you didn’t.”

  Brent squeezed his eyes shut. That was exactly how he’d killed Dad, wasn’t it? By watching it happen and not doing anything. He had no choice.

  “We’re coming out together,” he shouted. The police had to be listening.

  Together they approached the revolving door. They couldn’t both fit through at once, so Maggie pulled the metal frame out of the way and they squeezed through where the door had been.

  “Maybe we should put our hands up,” Brent said, when he saw all the guns pointed at them.

  “Brent!” Special Agent Weathers said, then, “hold on to her! But get your head down!”

  Brent looked the other direction, to his right, and saw a policeman in riot armor standing with his back to the wall of the bank, just outside the doors. He had a shotgun and he was bringing it around to point at Maggie’s face.

  It was a setup. From start to finish.

  Brent started to scream “Maggie, jump!,” but before he could get her name out, the policeman fired.

  Chapter 28.

  Shotgun pellets whizzed through the air, smashing across Maggie’s face and shoulders. One of them went past her head and hit Brent in the ear. It stung worse than any pain he’d ever felt and he dropped her arm and went down on one knee. He reached up and grabbed at his ear, then looked at his fingers, expecting them to be covered in blood. But apparently whatever the green fire had done to him and to Maggie, it had made them tough enough that the pellets couldn’t break their skin.

  Maggie roared in pain but she didn’t go down. For a second her hands were on her face, scrubbing at it as if she could wash away the pain. Then she brought her hands down and looked back at Brent.

  No. She glared at Brent. She thought he must have been in on this. That he had betrayed her. She reached out to grab him and he saw her face was unmarked, that she had taken a shotgun blast right in the head and it hadn’t really harmed her at all.

  It had, however, pissed her off.

  She grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the ground. He tried to squirm out of her grasp as she pulled her arm back, but he felt weak and queasy, his body rebelling against him. Then she punched him right in the nose.

  Blood squirted down the front of his shirt. His ears rang and his skull felt like it was spinning around underneath his scalp. He fell backwards, unable to stop himself, and landed flat on his back. The pain of the shotgun pellet hitting his ear was nothing compared to this—he thought he might throw up. He thought he might pass out.

  “Turn around and put your hands against the wall,” the policeman said, pumping his shotgun. “I will shoot you again.”

  All around them cops were running out from behind their cars, weapons drawn and pointed at Maggie. One of them had a taser, a flat white plastic gun with two prongs sticking out of its front. He fired and the prongs turned into darts that punctured her shirt. A pair of very thin wires were attached to the darts. There was a crackling sound and Maggie’s head jerked back for a second, but still she didn’t go down.

  It seemed to Brent that she moved very slowly as she stepped toward the policeman, the one with the shotgun who had fired at her first. Brent saw him turning as if he was going to run away. Maggie didn’t give him a chance. She grabbed him by the straps of his bulletproof vest and swung him around as easily as if he was a toy. When she let go he flew through the air, his legs and arms flailing. He hit one of the police cars hard enough to crumple its hood. Brent could hear bones snapping inside his body and saw his face go slack as he slid down to the ground.

  He wasn’t moving.

  He looked back at his sister. Her eyes were very wide. She looked scared—terrified—by what she’d done. But she didn’t stick around to apologize. The other cops were starting to shoot at her, pistol bullets and rifle rounds zipping through the air, the smell of gunsmoke filling up Brent’s nose—

  And then she was gone. She had jumped over the line of police cars and was running away. After a moment Brent couldn’t see her anymore.

  He got up carefully, worried he might have broken some bones himself when she hit him. His nose felt like it was stuffed up and it was still bleeding, a trickle of wet blood running down his lip and into his mouth. He wanted to touch it, to feel if the cartilage in there was shattered, but he thought that might not be a good idea. What if he made it worse.

  “What are you doing?” Weathers demanded. He ran up and grabbed Brent’s arm and shouted in his ear as if he was trying to wake Brent up. “She’s getting away!”

  Brent stared at the FBI man. If he could have shot lasers out o
f his eyes he would have, then and there.

  “You have to go after her,” Weathers said. “Nobody else can keep up with her. What are you waiting for?”

  “You set us up,” Brent said. His voice sounded like a growl.

  “There’s no time for this,” Weathers told him.

  Brent shook his head. “We’ll make time, then. You told me I would have a chance to bring her in peacefully. But you just wanted to kill her!”

  “Oh, please, kid. With buckshot? We knew it would barely hurt her. What were we supposed to do, shoot her with BBs?”

  “You betrayed me. You tricked me into betraying my sister.”

  Weathers grunted in annoyance. “She is getting away. Right now. You need me to draw you a diagram? She’s hurting people, Brent. I told you my job is to make sure people don’t get hurt. Innocent, honest people. She’s already decided she’s not one of them, so I have no problem if she gets hurt, because that’ll protect a lot of people who do deserve my help.”

  “And what about me?”

  “Oh, did I hurt your feelings? Well, pardon me. I’ve got a girl who’s knocking down houses and breaking an old lady’s arm because she’s so full of hormones she doesn’t know right from wrong. If I need to lie to you, some teenage boy whose biggest contribution to society is that he refuses to beat up the school bully, so be it.”

  “I quit. I don’t work for you anymore. Do you understand?”

  “You never did. I don’t pay you. I’d actually be happier, and my life would be easier, if you did not exist, Brent. But right now you have to go chase your sister and hit her until she stops running. Because as of right now, she has nothing to lose. She just hurt a cop pretty bad. What’s next? Is she going to kill someone?”

  Brent tried to think of a reply. But he couldn’t. Weathers was right. Maggie’s behavior had been getting worse and worse. Who knew how low she would sink before she was through? She had to be stopped, one way or another. Either the cops could try shooting her with bigger and more deadly guns, or it could be him. Brent could chase her down and bring her in.