Rivals

by David Wellington

  The tears dried on Maggie’s face. “They’d better not try,” she said. She could feel the anger coming back, but it was almost welcome this time. Weathers—if he was in her hotel room right then she would have grabbed him by the throat. He’d tried to kill her!

  “I have every reason to believe we’ll take her into custody shortly,” Weathers went on. “Especially now that we have Brent working with us. He’ll do whatever it takes to bring his sister to justice.”

  The television set exploded, because Maggie shot across the room and kicked in the screen. Broken glass and sparks glittered and flashed on the carpet, all around her bare feet. It didn’t matter. Her feet were tougher than anything she could step on, now.

  Baby bro, she thought. Oh, Brent. You’ve sold me out. You want us to be okay, do you?

  Next time, I’m going to break more than your nose.

  There was more to the newscast, however, and it made her sit up on the bed and pay very close attention.

  Chapter 32.

  BRENT’S BIG BLUNDER!

  SISTER GETS AWAY

  Cops curious: did he let her run?

  Brent read the headline again. He was still too mad to read the full text of the front page story in the morning paper. The picture showed him standing next to the Volvo. It was taken from a high angle, maybe even from the helicopter he’d seen hovering over the scene, so you couldn’t see the mother or her baby inside the car. You could see the blood that splattered downward from Brent’s nose and stained his shirt, and the way his nose was kind of tilted over to one side.

  Lucy came over and touched his nose gently. “It doesn’t hurt any more, does it?” she asked.

  “No, it’s completely healed. It felt kind of weird for a while but then I figured out why. It was bent out of shape when she punched me. The cartilage had to shift back to the right position. The paramedic who checked me out nearly had a heart attack when he saw it crawling across my face like that.”

  “Yuck,” Lucy said.

  “He said normally noses don’t do that. He said that when somebody gets their nose flattened like that, normally the doctors have to break it again to put it back in the right shape.”

  “Okay, stop,” Lucy told him.

  He was angry enough, though, to enjoy grossing her out. “I could feel it moving inside my head all night. Rebuilding itself.”

  “Stop! I know I said I would always be there for you, and yes, I guess that’s true, but if you tell me one more nasty detail I will totally walk out the door, and I know for a fact that you don’t want that, so be quiet, okay, cease and desist, be still, for me?”

  He frowned and sat down next to her on his bed. “Sorry,” he told her. “I’m just fed up. I did everything I could and the newspaper acts like I dropped the ball. ‘Cops curious’. I mean, seriously? One of them did ask me if maybe I let her go, but then Weathers threatened to have him demoted on the spot and he backed down. Everyone who was there saw me go chasing after her at top speed. If I had caught her, if I hadn’t had to catch that car—”

  “Would you have beaten her up?” Lucy asked.

  “I—I don’t know,” he admitted. “I probably would have tried to talk to her again. And she would have run away again.” He thought back to the moment when Maggie had hit him. “Except, there was this one moment, when I was convinced that suddenly everything made sense. That my whole purpose, the point of my entire existence, was to get in a serious fistfight with Maggie. How messed up is that? My dad would have been ashamed. But if she had stuck around, I think I would have hit her back. She’s my sister, Luce. Why did I feel that way?”

  “Let me ask you something,” Lucy said, running one hand up and down his back. “Before you got your powers—you and she fought a lot, right?”

  “Well… we called each other a lot of names. And one time, when we were pretty young, I was building this tower out of Legos, like, this enormous thing that I spent days on, and she knocked it over like she was Godzilla.”

  Lucy laughed. “But you never, even once, wanted to hit her?”

  Brent stared down at his feet. He could see where this was going. “Yeah. I guess I did. Maybe about a hundred times a day, some days. But I would never have actually done it. Mom always said I should never, ever hit a girl.”

  “Which is good advice. Except maybe if the girl is throwing cars at you. Don’t punish yourself for being human, Brent. I know you think you’re supposed to be some paragon of virtue now because of what happened to your dad, but don’t be so hard on yourself! And don’t let total strangers tell you what you’re worth. You’re always going to be my hero. You always have been, even before all this.”

  He leaned over and gave her a big hug.

  For a while they just hung out, the way they had been doing for years. Lucy tried to help him with some of his algebra homework but mostly he just wanted to chill, listen to some music (not too loud) and surf the web. It was actually really nice, the kind of thing he hadn’t had the chance to do for ages, and when Lucy said she had to get home he was sad to see her go. At the front door he waved at her dad, who had come to pick her up in his Jeep. Lucy’s dad was a really nice guy who had the loudest laugh Brent had ever heard and who always wore a cowboy hat, indoors and out. Brent liked him a lot. When they’d gone, Brent turned around to head back to his room—and found Grandma standing right behind him, watching him intently.

  “We should talk,” she said. She lifted her cast and gestured for him to follow her to the kitchen. She sat down with a grunt and let her broken arm rest on the table.

  “Do you need anything before bedtime?” he asked.

  “I need,” she said, and stared at him through her huge glasses, “some peace of mind.”

  “I’m not sure I can help you there,” he told her.

  “Maybe,” she went on, “you think I was too hard on your sister. Look at me, boy. You answer me now, and be honest.”

  Brent nodded. He didn’t like to say it, but—“Yes. I think you really pushed her. I don’t blame you for her running away. That was her choice. But you made her life pretty miserable.”

  Grandma nodded agreeably, as if she could see his point and was giving it ample consideration. Then she said, totally surprising him, “I love that girl.”

  He could do nothing but sit there and wait for her to explain. What she’d said sounded frankly impossible.

  “Don’t be so surprised. She’s all I have left of my daughter. Oh, don’t pout like that. I know I have you as well, but you take after your father. Maggie has your mother’s eyes and her hair—that beautiful hair. I used to brush out your mother’s hair for her, when she was little. And then, until she was five years old, I brushed Maggie’s, as well. Did you know that? No. You didn’t.”

  “But you hit Maggie! A lot!”

  “I hit your mother, too, when she needed it. Because it was the only way to keep her on the straight and narrow.” Grandma waved her good hand in the air. “I suppose things are different now. But in my day, we had a saying: ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’. It was how you taught your children discipline and respect.”

  Brent thought there had to be better ways. He thought that society must have come pretty far since then. “They don’t say that anymore,” he told her.

  She looked unconvinced.

  Chapter 33.

  The security guards were checking IDs at the front door of the hospital, so Maggie went around to the back and jumped up to the second floor and crawled in through an open window. Then she had to wait near the nurse’s station until no one was around, which felt like it took hours. Once she had access to a computer it was easy enough to look up what room Fred Wallace was in. She’d gotten his name from the news broadcast she’d seen in her hotel room. He was the cop who had shot her in front of the bank while Brent distracted her. He was the cop she’d then picked up and thrown, hard enough to fracture half the bones in his body.

  He was a twelve-year veteran of the police force. He had a wif
e and two kids. She had swatted him away from her like a pesky fly. It was true, he had shot her. In the face. But she had shrugged off the pain of that in a second. His pain was going to last a whole lot longer.

  No one noticed when Maggie slipped past a nurse’s station on the fifth floor and worked her way down a semi-darkened hallway. It was late and the hospital felt all but deserted. Visiting hours were long over but in some of the rooms she passed people were still sitting next to quiet beds, holding pale, battered hands or reading magazines or just staring into space. Machines kept beeping softly to themselves and the soda machine at the end of the hallway rumbled and buzzed for no one.

  She found the room she wanted. The door was open and she could see Wallace lying in the bed. There were bandages wrapped around most of his head and on both of his hands. He was asleep. Maybe that was for the best. Maggie slipped into the room and stood at the foot of his bed.

  It was amazing how fragile human bodies could be. The ones without superpowers, anyway. She hadn’t thought about what she was doing. As usual, she had just reacted—to her anger, to the darkness inside of her. When he shot her, she’d figured that made it alright to strike back. No, even that was giving her too much credit. She hadn’t figured anything. Everything had looked red, and she had just lashed out like a wounded animal.

  She didn’t think she should wake him. He probably needed his rest, and, anyway, what was she going to say to him? I’m sorry I nearly killed you? The newscast had said he was in serious but stable condition. That meant he wasn’t going to die. But what if he had? It could have happened easily enough. If he’d hit his head instead of his back, if she’d thrown him slightly differently… there were so many ways.

  All she could do, she decided, was leave the money and go. She slipped off her backpack and looked for a place to set it down. She was giving him half the money she’d stolen from the bank. It might cover his medical expenses, though she doubted it. She’d started to count it earlier and realized that there just wasn’t that much of it. After paying for her ridiculously expensive hotel room and a cheap car, she might not even half enough left to pay for gas and food on her trip out of town. It didn’t matter, though. She would give Wallace and his family as much as she could spare.

  She was about to put the backpack on a chair by the bed when she heard a toilet flush. All the hair on her arms stood up and she slowly turned around to see someone coming out of the room’s private bathroom. A middle-aged woman with short, frizzy hair. Her face was red and worn as if she’d been crying for a long time. It must be Wallace’s wife, Maggie decided.

  “I don’t want you here,” she said, her voice firm. Not, what are you doing here? Not, did you come to finish the job? That was what Maggie had expected.

  “I only came to say I’m sorry. And to try to help,” Maggie told her.

  “Don’t. Don’t try. You can only make things worse. I know about you. I went back and read all the things they said in the newspaper. You hurt people, and then your brother comes in and saves the day. Except he doesn’t save anything. He just cleans up. He’s like your janitor.”

  Maggie looked down at her shoes. “I have some money, here, I thought it could help pay for the hospital room, and—”

  The woman grabbed the backpack out of Maggie’s hands. She rummaged around in the twenty dollar bills crammed inside. “Where’d you get this?” she asked, holding up a handful of twenties.

  “From the bank.”

  “It’s stolen? Do you even understand what you’re doing? He’s a cop. I’m a cop’s wife. I can’t take this. It would be my duty to turn it in.” She threw the bills at Maggie and they fluttered across the floor. “Here. I don’t want it,” she said, and handed the backpack to Maggie. “Stupid little twit. Bringing stolen money here.”

  “I was only trying to say I’m sorry!” Maggie protested.

  “Help? Do you even know what you did? It’ll be months before he walks again. Fred will probably never be able to go back to active duty—they’ll have to give him a desk job. He’s going to hate that.”

  Tears were crowding in the corners of Maggie’s eyes. “Please. Let me help, somehow. Just tell me what you want. Because I don’t know what else to do.”

  The woman grabbed Maggie’s face in her hand and stared into her eyes. “Just go away. Just go somewhere and die.”

  Maggie fled the room, then. At the nurse’s station someone shouted for her to stop, but she ignored them and kept running. Eventually she was outside again and still running and she didn’t stop for a long time.

  Chapter 34.

  Weathers was waiting for Brent the next morning when he was on his usual patrol, heading towards school and another day of failing algebra. When Brent first saw the FBI man he kept walking, but Weathers just followed after him.

  “Leave me alone,” Brent said. He knew it wouldn’t work, but what else was he going to do? Hit the guy?

  It was tempting.

  “I’m not here to ask you for anything today,” Weathers told him.

  “Are you here to apologize for using me?”

  Weathers chuckled. “No. That was just part of my job. It’s also part of my job to provide you with information you may find useful.”

  Brent scowled. “Did you find my sister again? You want me to go trick her into getting run over by a tank?”

  Weathers grabbed his shoulder. Brent spun around, as angry as he’d ever been in his life. The fingers of his right hand curled into a fist. Both of them looked at it. Eventually Brent managed to relax his hand, to let it fall loose at his side.

  Weathers seemed intent on pretending he hadn’t seen it. That he had no idea what Brent had been thinking. “Yesterday wasn’t a complete fiasco. We actually managed to gather a lot of useful data.”

  “What? You were—huh?”

  “I wanted to know how powerful the two of you were, so I had some of our techies rig up some video equipment in the helicopter you saw. We got excellent footage of the two of you fighting and my analysts spent all night going over it.”

  “So now you are watching us, just like Maggie said.”

  Weathers shrugged. “Studying you, you could say. As long as your sister is at large my job is to know everything I can about her. Especially about her limitations and weaknesses. It turns out the two of you have similar, but not identical powers. She’s about ten per cent stronger than you are—but you’re faster, by the same margin.”

  Brent frowned. “We’ve got different powers? Why?”

  “Who knows? I still don’t have a good answer as to why teenagers can survive the green fire in the alien spaceship but adults are killed instantly. Maybe it’s because you two have slightly different DNA, or maybe it was because she’s a little bit older than you. Honestly, I have no clue. My analysts were very surprised by the results. They assumed that it would be the other way round. Normally, men tend to have stronger muscles while women beat us at endurance and quickness. But your sister is the tough one in the family. This is the kind of thing you should know, Brent, for next time.”

  “If I ever go up against her again—”

  “When you do,” Weathers told him. “It’s inevitable you’ll clash again. The police gave it their best effort but she got away from them easily. You could have caught her—if you weren’t distracted. You’re the only real threat to her right now. Which means she’s going to want to neutralize you.”

  “And if I refuse to fight her?” Brent asked, fuming. “I’ve got better things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  Brent looked up the street. Matt Perkins should be coming along any second now. “There’s a bully, who picks on the little kids at school. I watch him. I make sure he doesn’t do anything to hurt anybody. Maybe that won’t save the world. But it makes life easier for somebody. It makes life better for somebody.”

  “Matthew Perkins was expelled from school yesterday afternoon,” Weathers told Brent. “After the local police had a chat with your principal. Bully
ing is a crime. Did you know that? Perkins’ parents agreed to remove their son from the school in exchange for a written promise from the school that no charges would be filed.”

  Brent stopped breathing for a second. “You did that?” he asked.

  “Like I said, it was the local police. Who perhaps were acting on information I provided them. That’s what I’ve been reduced to now—providing information.”

  Brent shook his head. “But that’s a terrible idea. Matt’s life will be ruined. And anyway, he was only a bully because his father abused him—”

  “When the Perkins family got home,” Weathers went on, “they found a case worker from Child Protective Services waiting for them. Most likely Matthew will be removed from his parents’ custody and go live with a foster family.”

  Brent rubbed at his face in frustration. “Oh my God. You broke up an entire family—”

  “A dysfunctional family. You really think Matthew was better off under his father’s care? You really think that was a good outcome?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not my right to judge people.”

  “Nor is it mine. It’s up to the courts what eventually happens. Because the courts only exist to judge people. There are institutions in place, Brent, to take care of the little things. You don’t need to fix all the bullies and bad parents in the world. Matthew Perkins was a distraction. I took that distraction away. You’ve got far more important things to do.”

  “Like betray my sister?”

  Weathers touched his forehead as if he were doffing a non-existent hat. “Have a good day at school. And, hey, kid? Don’t start rebelling just yet. The human race still needs you.”

  He turned around and walked away, then. Brent roared in frustration, then headed to the next block where he was meeting Lucy to walk the rest of the way to school together. “I can’t believe he said that,” he told her, after he’d recounted what the FBI man had said. “He knew exactly what it would do to me. That was one of the last things my dad ever said—‘When are you going to start rebelling’.”