Rivals

by David Wellington

The freshman girl squeaked in panic. She turned her head to one side as if she really expected Maggie to attack her, as if she couldn’t bear to watch the blow coming at her.

  “Oh, just beat it,” Maggie said, and the girl was running before she’d even finished her sentence. The girl would probably go and tell her teacher, and the teacher would call the principal’s office, and the principal would call the cops. Whatever. That would take time, and her locker was just up ahead. When she reached it she wasted a few seconds trying to remember the combination, then realized she didn’t need it. She grabbed the locker’s handle and pulled. The whole door came away with a nasty screeching noise that made Maggie’s teeth hurt, it was so loud. Up and down the hall classroom doors popped open and kids looked out, wanting to see what was going on. It didn’t matter. She would just grab the photo and walk out, and if anyone tried to stop her she would just—

  The picture wasn’t there.

  There was nothing on the inside of the door. The locker itself was completely empty. It didn’t even smell like her locker anymore. It smelled like someone had scrubbed it out with disinfectant, a nasty smell that managed to be sweet and acrid at the same time. Not willing to believe it, Maggie turned the bent locker door over in her hands and checked the number, but it was the same number she’d always had.

  “You bastards,” she growled. They had cleaned out her locker.

  Well, of course they had. The police had probably insisted on it. They would have wanted to know if there was anything in the locker that could lead them to her. She imagined one of the vice principals sorting through her stinky gym clothes and disassembling the ham sandwich lunch she’d left in there the day before she ran away. They probably went through all her textbooks and read all the notes in the margins. And they had definitely taken her picture of Mom away.

  “Oh no, you didn’t,” she said. She couldn’t manage to put as much ironic sneer into her voice as she would have liked, though.

  Maybe they still had her stuff in a box somewhere, if they hadn’t just thrown it out. Maybe it was in the principal’s office. The smart thing to do, of course, would be to just walk away. She’d already taken too long here—any second now, somebody might—

  “We all get PMS sometimes, Maggot. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Maggie turned slowly, a very nasty grin forming on her face. “Hello, Pill,” she said. “It’s been so long, and I’ve barely missed you at all.”

  Jill Hennessey stepped out of the student lounge just down the hall. “I’ve been keeping up with your press clippings. You know, the news reports, the articles in the paper. The wanted posters. I have to admit, I’m becoming a fan. I mean, I always believed in you. I knew from the start that you had the makings of a first rate sociopath. But you really sunk to new depths faster than any of us imagined. In just a few short weeks you went from beating up defenseless old ladies to robbing banks. Kudos to you!”

  Maggie frowned. This felt wrong. Jill was cruel, yes, and even sadistic. But she didn’t sound right. She was talking too fast, almost as if she were nervous about something. As if she was scared.

  If that were the case—at least there was going to be one bright spot in Maggie’s day. But still, she needed to know what was going on. She ran over to where Jill stood and grabbed her by the throat. “What do you think you’re doing? Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m stalling you, you stupid child. I sent Dana to get your brother and I don’t want you to run away before he gets here.”

  “Big mistake,” Maggie said.

  “I don’t know. It seems to be working.”

  Chapter 40.

  “Lucy! Please. Just stop a second. Stop and talk to me,” Brent said. He’d been looking for her all morning. He wanted to discuss what she’d said the night before, but every time he saw her in the hall she had hobbled away from him. He was starting to get really frustrated. “What you said—”

  “There are some places even superheroes aren’t allowed to go,” she told him.

  “What?”

  She glanced to her left. She was standing next to the door for the girls’ bathroom. “Give it a rest, Brent,” she told him, with a sigh. “I acted pretty stupid last night. I said some things I didn’t… mean.” She looked down at the braces on her legs. “Anyway. I know I can’t compete with Dana. Just—give me some time, okay? To get over what was really just a childish infatuation anyway.”

  “I need to tell you how good it made me feel when you said… that,” he told her. “How special it—”

  “Oh just shut up!” Lucy clenched her eyes shut as if to hold back tears. “Shut your stupid face and leave me—”

  “Brent!” someone called from down the hallway. “Brent! Thank God I found you!”

  It was Dana.

  “Hey,” Brent said, his stomach churning. “This isn’t a great time.”

  Dana shook her head and ran over to grab his arm. “It’s your sister. She’s here. Over by the Home Ec rooms.”

  “No way.” He felt his hands make fists by pure reflex. “No, she wouldn’t…” He shook his head. “But I guess she did. Lucy, please, just—” he began, but when he looked at his best friend he only saw the girls’ room door swinging shut behind her. “Damn it! Okay, okay. We need to be careful here.” He turned back to Dana. “Go get a teacher, any teacher, and tell them what’s going on. They need to start evacuating the school. Maybe she’ll just leave quietly, but we can’t take that chance.”

  Dana nodded. She was still holding his arm.

  “You should do that right now,” he told her, gently.

  She nodded again. Then she ran toward the nearest classroom.

  Brent went the opposite direction—toward the Home Ec rooms. The hallway turned a corner up ahead. He was running by the time he got there and he couldn’t slow himself down in time, so he didn’t even try. His momentum carried him into the far wall, hard enough to crack some of the bricks there. He bounced off and kept running. By the time he got to the Home Ec rooms he was running so fast that the classroom doors on either side flickered as they whooshed past him.

  “Mags!” he shouted, when he saw her. “Stop right where you are.”

  She was holding a locker door like a club. She had it lifted over her head, and somebody was down on the floor in front of her. It looked like she was going to play golf with their head. Jesus, Brent thought. That’s Jill.

  “Not right now, baby bro,” Maggie said. She was breathing hard and her eyes were bright. The prospect of hitting Jill Hennessey was clearly exciting her.

  How do you talk somebody out of killing the most popular girl in school? Half the kids in Brent’s class would probably cheer.

  “Brent,” Jill said, sounding far calmer than the situation indicated, “will you be an absolute doll and kick Maggot’s ass for me? I’ll make Dana let you have your way with her. Whatever you want.”

  “You never did know when to shut up, Pill.” Maggie looked up at Brent. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to turn around for a second and not look?”

  “Put that thing down,” Brent told her.

  “Do you remember the last time I let you tell me what to do?” Maggie asked. “No? Me neither. Because that never, ever happened, and it’s not going to start now. Hit me if you’re going to hit me—or stand back and watch.”

  So he hit her.

  Digging his heels in hard enough to leave small craters in the linoleum floor tile, Brent launched herself at Maggie with everything he had. He shot toward her with his arms wide, planning to grab her around the waist and knock her down with his momentum.

  The problem was—as always—that she knew exactly what he was going to do. He might be faster than she was, but she already had the locker door up high, held like a baseball bat. She swung around as he came toward her and hit him right in the chest with the door’s jagged edge. Brent went spinning away from her, totally out of control, and as he struggled to get his feet underneath him she grabbed him by his belt and his
collar and body slammed him against a row of lockers, face first. The lockers caved in, their doors popping open one after the other. A shin-high avalanche of gym shorts and three ring binders slithered to the floor.

  “Start fighting back now,” Jill commanded.

  “Get out of here,” Brent shouted. He would have said more but Maggie chose that moment to grab his hair and haul him backward, out of the ruined lockers, and throw him against the far wall.

  He felt the bones in his shoulder separate with a drawn-out cracking noise that made him feel instantly nauseous. He dropped to the floor and thought about how nice it would be to never get up again.

  He could just turn his head. He could feel his broken bones knitting themselves back together, felt the muscles in his neck and arm sliding across each other. It hurt like hell to look down the hall and see Maggie walking away from him.

  Without turning around, she gave him the finger.

  That’s it, he thought, anger filling him up, drowning out the pain. He pushed against the wall behind him with his good arm. Shoved himself upward until he was standing. There were no moral quandaries in his head just then. No worries that he was doing the wrong thing.

  He jumped through the air and came down with both feet on Maggie’s back, right where her spine met her pelvis. She cried out and bent away from him, dropping to her knees. He grabbed her under the armpits and hauled her back up to her feet, intending on spinning her around and knocking her out with one powerful right hook.

  Instead she brought her head back way too fast. The back of her skull connected with his nose, smashing it flat. Then she kicked out with her feet and launched both of them backwards with incredible force, straight toward the wall of the AV Department.

  Maybe she’d planned on crushing him against the wall. Instead, the two of them went right through it in a shower of bricks and pulverized mortar.

  Chapter 41.

  Brent’s head spun. He tried to stand up and just fell down to one knee. He rubbed at his eyes—they were full of brick dust—and tried again. This time he managed to stand up.

  Then Maggie came at him, swinging an overhead projector like a club. He swerved out of her way and tried to sweep her legs out from under her on the way down. Instead she hopped over him and broke through the room’s door with her shoulder.

  “No,” he said, and dashed after her.

  Out in the hallway there must have been a hundred kids standing there, gawking at her. Their mouths were open. Their eyes were wide. They weren’t moving. The biology teacher, Mr. Armitage, was trying to lead them away but all they could do was look.

  Maggie just laughed. “Go Panthers!” she said, and pumped a fist in the air. Then she turned around to face Brent and brought her hands up like she would grab him and throw him into the crowd.

  “Mags,” Brent said, picking his way through the ruins of the door, “just hold on a second, okay? Let them go.”

  “Why?” she asked. “What do I owe them? When I was in trouble, when I was hurting, they all turned on me. They wrote me off, Brent. They gave up on me.”

  “I didn’t.” He glanced at the crowd and saw that it was, slowly, moving down the hallway, toward a fire exit. “I tried, again and again, to help you. But you wouldn’t let me.”

  “You couldn’t do anything. You were too busy doing dirty work for Weathers. And then you betrayed me.”

  “I did not! He used me!”

  “What. Ev.”

  The hallway was almost clear. Only a few stragglers had stayed behind to watch, and teachers were pulling them away. He just had to stall a couple more seconds.

  “I wanted you to come home. I wanted to fix everything. But you kept hurting people. You kept making it worse!”

  The anger drained out of her face. Maggie’s shoulders slumped and she suddenly looked very, very tired. “You get to this point,” she said, “when it’s all broken. When you’ve gone too far. And after that, everything you can think of just makes it worse. But you keep doing it because you don’t have any choices left.”

  “That’s bullshit. You always have choices.”

  The hall was empty, except for the two of them. Okay, Brent thought. Okay, whatever happens now, it’s alright. Nobody gets hurt but us.

  “Stop making it sound so easy!” Maggie came stomping toward him. “Stop making it sound like I ever had a chance.” She swung at him, and he ducked under her fist. Then he kicked out with one leg and caught her in the stomach.

  She went flying, arcing through the air to smash into a trophy case outside the entrance to the gym. Plate glass smashed and glittered through the air and she screamed as the shards of broken glass cut through her hoodie and jabbed her in a hundred places at once. She slid out of the display case and sat down hard on the floor. Then she reached up and picked a three inch long sliver of glass out of her hair.

  “Give up,” he said.

  Knowing she wouldn’t.

  She reached up and grabbed a golden statue of a football player from the case, then flung it at him with all of her strength. He managed to dodge to one side, but the statue smashed a crater into the wall behind him.

  Next came a championship cup for baseball. It grazed his shoulder and went skittering down the hallway. He looked down and saw a deep gouge in his arm, welling with blood.

  She grabbed a smaller trophy next, a piece of granite and chrome that she started to chuck at him—then stopped. “This is for field hockey,” she said. “I helped earn this one. How about golf instead?”

  Brent threw himself to the left and then rolled back up to his knees and got to his feet. She had plenty more trophies to go through, and he knew he couldn’t dodge them all. He pushed through the doors to the gym and hoped she was mad enough to follow him. She most definitely was—the doors flew off their hinges as she burst inside.

  He’d had a second or two to prepare. As she spun around looking for him, he wound up his arm and then pegged her in the head with a softball.

  “Gah!” she screamed, probably more from surprise than pain. She grabbed her head and for a second she wasn’t watching him. He charged her and knocked her backwards into a rack of baseball bats that clattered around her feet. When she tried to get up again she tripped on the rolling bats and fell in a heap.

  Now, he thought—this was his big chance. He wrapped an arm around her throat and hauled her upwards, leaning back to get her feet off the ground. She was stronger than he was, he knew, but if she couldn’t get any leverage all that strength wouldn’t help her. He could choke her until she passed out.

  “Just stop,” he shouted in her ear. “Stop! That’s your choice. Stop what you’re doing and let somebody else help you for once!”

  Her face was turning blue. He eased up, a little, not wanting to choke her to death. Her eyes rolled toward him and he saw pure hatred there. She wouldn’t ease up if their roles were reversed.

  “I’m so sorry,” he told her, and tightened his grip. He could feel her trachea start to collapse.

  Then she reached up with one flailing hand and grabbed his left ear. And pulled.

  He felt the skin tearing, felt the cartilage in his ear crush under the pressure. She was going to pull his ear right off his head. He felt something give way and blood poured down the side of his neck. Horrified, he released some of the pressure on her throat and then—

  Then he blacked out for a second.

  He came to and saw a baseball bat swinging toward his face, right at his eyes. Pain exploded inside his head and all he could see was blood. He heard the bat whistle through the air again and the side of his head felt like it was caving in. She hit him again on the chest, again on the legs—it was like she was smashing him to a pulp.

  His vision cleared a little as his skull reshaped itself under his skin. He looked around wildly and saw a white painted wall coming toward him—and then he was through it, he could hear himself scream as she kept pushing him forward, driving them both forward as hard as she could, another wall—h
e saw the inside of the girls’ locker room for a second, then another wall—there was so much noise, so much confusion, dust everywhere in the air and bricks falling all around him, and then she threw him and he hit the floor face first, there was pain, there was a lot of pain, and then he collapsed, his shoulders hitting the tiles, his legs kicking out meaninglessly behind him.

  “Do you think,” she said, sounding like she was a long way away, “that I won’t kill you, just because you’re family?”

  “Weathers—said you would—neutralize me,” he tried to tell her. The words that came out of his mouth sounded like mush.

  “It’s not like it would be the first time,” she said. She grabbed a handful of his hair and lifted his head up so he could look at her face. Only one of his eyes seemed to work. “I killed dad, after all. And I liked dad.”

  She picked him up, shoving her shoulder into his armpit. She was going to carry him somewhere. What was she doing?

  And… wait—what had she just said?

  Ahead of him he saw the wall of the AV room. The first wall she’d pushed him through. “You—” he said, but there were teeth in his mouth and he almost swallowed them. He spat them out instead. “You—”

  Where the wall of the AV room had fallen away it had exposed broken concrete with a length of steel rebar poking out of it. The bar stuck out at an angle, pointing right at him. She was dragging him toward the bar. He knew exactly what she had in mind.

  “You didn’t—” he moaned.

  She was going to impale his head on the bar. He was pretty sure that would do it. That would kill him.

  “You didn’t kill Dad,” he managed to say.

  Chapter 42.

  “I did,” Brent told her.

  She paused.

  “I killed Dad,” he mumbled.

  She looked at the spike sticking out of the wreckage. Above her the ceiling was sagging and plaster dust spilled down like fine white rain. She’d really made a mess of the place. The darkness inside her, the dark wind of her anger, thrilled at the thought. It throbbed along with her heartbeat like thrash metal. Yeah, yeah, destroy the whole school! Kill your brother! Let’s see how low you can go—let’s see what you’re really capable of, villain.