Rivals

by David Wellington

  For a second, she froze. She could have sworn she heard something. A sort of metallic tapping sound. She looked up and around and saw nobody in the hallway. Except—yes—there. Over to her right, the hallway turned a sharp corner. Just at the edge of the corner she could see someone standing there, hiding. She couldn’t see much of them—just some hair, a ponytail that stuck out past the edge of the wall.

  It didn’t matter. Nobody could stop her now. Brent had been the only real threat, and Brent—yes. Brent.

  Kill Brent, the darkness whispered. Finish this. Make it all be over, now.

  She hoisted him up, planning on finishing him off before he could say anything more. But it was too late.

  “I opened that thing,” he whispered. “I let the green fire out. I could have put the lid back on, before he got there. But I didn’t. I was too scared.”

  She growled at him. She seethed inside. She couldn’t do it.

  “I killed Dad. I killed him. I killed Dad,” he said, over and over. Like he wanted to make sure she heard it even over the noise in her head.

  “Shut up!” she told him. She dropped him to the floor. He rolled over and curled into a ball. “That was a stupid accident. You had no idea what was happening. I did—I saw you both on fire. I could have grabbed him and pulled him clear, and maybe we could have saved him. I killed Dad! Don’t you get it, you damned idiot? That’s what this has all been about! I killed Dad!”

  “I killed him,” Brent muttered.

  She kicked him, hard, to try to make him stop. But he just kept saying the same thing, over and over. Like a scratched CD flickering back and forth over a half second of really stupid music.

  “Be quiet,” she commanded. She willed herself to pick him up again. To point his head at the spiky piece of rebar.

  Under her hands Brent’s body was putting itself back together. Shattered bones were shifting under his clothes, knitting themselves back into one piece. He was healing all the damage she’d done. “I didn’t do anything. I could have stopped it. I could have saved him but I didn’t. I thought if I saved other people, if I helped people, it would make it better. It would make up for killing him. But look at us now. This isn’t what he would have wanted. He didn’t like it when we fought, back when it was just calling each other names. He wouldn’t like this at all.”

  Maggie sighed. “He’s dead, Brent. He can’t see us now. He’s in a grave somewhere and—”

  “No,” he told her.

  “No what?”

  “He isn’t… buried. They—couldn’t,” he sighed. “They couldn’t retrieve his body.”

  “What?” she demanded. She shoved the picture in her pocket. “What the hell? You mean Weathers just left him there?”

  “I—I guess—”

  Maggie roared and grabbed him, hauled him up off the floor and shoved his head toward the spike again. But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t kill her own brother. A minute earlier things had been different. With the darkness surging inside of her, she could have done it without hesitation, without a second thought. But now…

  She threw him down on the floor. “Brent,” she said. “Brent!”

  “Whuh—?”

  “We’re done, Brent. This is over. Alright? We make a truce, right now. You leave me alone. You don’t try to get up. And I won’t kill you.”

  “I can’t—I can’t do that, Mags.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  He shook his head. “You’re out of control. You’re hurting people. I can’t—”

  He stopped talking. He lifted his head and she saw his nose was back in the right place and his ear was whole again. He pushed himself up on one arm.

  “Someone’s coming,” he said. “Hey! Whoever you are, get away!”

  Maggie spun around to see what he was looking at. Instead she heard a clacking sound, a rhythmic clicking on the floor. Lucy Benez came around the corner, hobbling on her leg braces. She was crying.

  “Please don’t kill him,” the crippled girl said.

  Maggie stared at her.

  “Lucy, get out of here,” Brent shouted. He was healing so fast. In a second he would be standing up again, and the fight would start. Again.

  “I have to do this!” Maggie said, even though she knew she couldn’t. “If I don’t kill him right now he’s going to keep coming after me. He’s going to send me to jail, and I’ll never get out. Doesn’t anyone understand? One of us has to die!”

  One of us has to die, Maggie thought. Funny—why did she put it that way? Obviously, Brent had to die. So she could be free. She couldn’t possibly have meant—anything else.

  “Please,” Lucy said. “I love him. Does that—does it mean anything?”

  “Something,” Maggie told her. There was an idea, a real thought growing in her head, struggling up through the clouds of darkness. A rational thought, for once. “Yeah. It means you’ll make a great hostage.”

  Everyone stopped moving when she said that.

  The darkness rose to a crescendo inside Maggie’s head. She raced forward and grabbed the girl’s arm. Lucy tried to fight her off but it was easy—effortless—to swat her other arm away. It wasn’t like she could do any harm to Maggie.

  Brent was the only one who could hurt her now. He was the only threat she had to deal with. She could just kill him, of course. She’d demonstrated that already. But there was another way to neutralize him, and it didn’t entail taking on any more guilt. Well, maybe just a little more.

  “I’m going to go now, Brent,” she said, over her shoulder. “I’m taking Lucy with me. If you don’t want her to get hurt, you’ll let me go. If you want her to live, you won’t follow me.”

  “Let me go,” Lucy said, wobbling back and forth on her leg braces. Maggie ignored her and started walking toward the parking lot, toward her car.

  Something resisted her. She looked back and saw Brent leaning up against the wall. He was holding Lucy’s other arm. He didn’t want her to take Lucy away.

  Well, there was a solution for that, too. “Brent,” she said, “I’m going to walk away now. I’m not going to stop. One of us really needs to let go of her. Otherwise this is going to be messy.”

  He had no choice. For once, she thought, he could know what that felt like, when you had no options left.

  He let go.

  She’d known he would. That was the problem with being the hero—everyone knew exactly what you would do in any given situation. When you were the villain, you were allowed to be surprising and spontaneous.

  So she kicked the wall next to him, hard enough to send the whole second floor of the school sliding, crumbling, bouncing and pouring down on top of his head. He looked appropriately shocked as he threw his arms up to protect his head—but only for a moment, before he was completely buried in the debris that kept thundering down.

  Lucy screamed as Maggie dragged her away.

  Chapter 43.

  “You—you can let me go now,” Lucy said, when they were out on the highway and well clear of town. Maggie hadn’t seen any police cars—maybe she’d gotten away in time. “You don’t need me anymore. Why don’t you just let me go?”

  Not yet. Maggie had her reasons.

  She turned up the music and let the darkness surge through her. She had to be careful not to drive too fast—the last thing she wanted now was to be pulled over for speeding. But this thing inside her, this evil thing she’d nurtured and grown kept calling out for more, more destruction, more freedom. She couldn’t fight it, she’d learned that much. She could try to calm down, try just to breathe but always something would happen, something would trigger her and the anger would roar.

  In the seat next to her Brent’s little friend was curled up and whimpering.

  “Stop looking at me,” Maggie growled. She checked the speedometer and saw she was going eighty miles an hour, so she forced herself to let off the gas a little. Outside the desert whirled by, red rock and sunshine. At this speed it looked empty and almost featureless.
A blasted landscape where her anger could stomp free, hurling itself against the rocks, leaping from crag to crag and tearing the stunted trees out of the ground by their roots. “I said stop looking at me!”

  Lucy turned her face into the stained fabric of her seat. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Maggie smacked the steering wheel, not quite hard enough to bend it out of shape. “It’s… alright,” she forced herself to say. If she hurt this girl she knew it would be a mistake. Brent would never forgive her.

  Though if she was honest with herself she knew she’d already crossed that bridge. He had betrayed her to the police. He had tried to choke her into submission—and he had stolen her guilt. He was going to bring her down, eventually, unless she finished him off first—

  No.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Then opened them again because she was driving and she needed to see the road. No. She would not kill her brother. She’d come close, definitely. She would have impaled him on that spike, if he hadn’t said what he did. If he hadn’t made the anger clear away for a second, made her think rationally for the first time in a while. She needed that clarity again.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she told Lucy. “So don’t be so scared, alright? Just… don’t be so scared of me.”

  “That’s kind of hard,” Lucy said.

  Maggie hit the steering wheel again. This time it bent. “None of this is what I would have chosen. Do you believe that?”

  Lucy shrugged. Her face was still buried in the seat.

  “I guess it looks bad, if you don’t know everything that happened to me. If you can’t see that I didn’t have any choices at all.”

  She turned the music down, a little. The darkness threatened to flood back into her soul but she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t fight her anger with the bass line throbbing like that, with the drums pounding out the rhythm of her accelerated heartbeat. “It’s almost over. I have one last thing to do and then I’m leaving. I’ll go somewhere no one will ever find me.”

  Lucy stirred. “Where’s that?” she asked.

  “I can’t tell you, obviously. I’m going to create a new identity. A secret identity. Nobody can know where I went.”

  “No—I just mean, where is it you think you can go, where they won’t try to follow? The police, I mean. That weird FBI guy. He’s never going to give up looking for you. How is this supposed to end?”

  Maggie bashed her head backwards against her headrest until it started to crumple under the blows. “I told you. I get out of here, and—”

  “Um, sorry, no,” Lucy said.

  Maggie froze up. The car’s speed sagged as her foot came off the gas pedal. After a second she recovered and went back to driving. Keep a consistent speed, she told herself. Don’t weave in and out of your lane. Someone might be watching.

  “I don’t think that’s what you want at all. Just to run away? You could have done that like, a long time ago.”

  “I had things I had to do. I needed money, and a car. I had to talk to the idiot who killed my mom. I had to get something out of my locker—”

  “That sounds like a lot of excuses,” Lucy said. “It sounds to me like you’ve been sticking around, even when it wasn’t safe, because you were afraid to leave. Why is that? You didn’t want to leave your family behind? Maybe some part of you thought that everything could be okay again. That it really could all be fixed.”

  “Hah!”

  “Okay. Then maybe you just needed an audience. You needed everybody to know how much you hurt. In a different town, where nobody knew you—nobody could feel sorry for you, either.”

  A storm of darkness crashed and thundered inside Maggie’s head. It came on so suddenly, with no warning at all this time, that she was defenseless against it. She slammed on the breaks and swerved off the road, pulling to a hard stop on the shoulder. Lucy flew forward, throwing out her arms to brace herself against the dashboard—she hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt.

  “Say that again,” Maggie snarled. “Try to psychoanalyze me one more time. Come on! Do it!”

  Lucy pushed up against her door. Trying to get as far away from Maggie as she possibly could in the cramped space of the little car.

  “You’re so damned smart, come on! Say one more thing, and then I’ll hit you. I’ll hit you so hard—you’re half-crippled now, you pathetic infant. You want to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair? You want to be dead? Say it. Come on. Say it!”

  But the girl was silent.

  Eventually Maggie pulled herself together, and got back on the road.

  Chapter 44.

  Brent couldn’t breathe.

  There was a ton of bricks and broken masonry and girders on his chest, compressing his lungs. His body, enhanced by the green fire, fought valiantly to rebuild his broken bones, to grow new muscle tissue to replace what had been torn or crushed. He could feel every cell in his body straining, urgently reaching for health, for strength. His arms twitched as his hands pushed and heaved at the weight on top of him. A few bricks toppled down from the pile. Then a few more. A broken girder clattered away and there was a puff of plaster dust as he exhaled a stifling breath from his battered lungs.

  His fingertips broke through, into open air. He shoved his hand out and reached for something, anything he could grip. He got hold of the twisted piece of rebar his sister had almost impaled him on, and pulled.

  Like a snake emerging from its old skin, he slithered out of the rubble. Exhausted, used up, he dragged himself on top of the pile and just lay there for a while, breathing, healing, not thinking at all.

  When his eyes finally opened again he saw nothing but destruction. Half the school had collapsed under its own weight. It was like Mandy Hunt’s house but on a far greater scale. He saw what his sister had done, and he knew what he had to do next.

  When he pushed his way through the buckled fire doors at the back of the school his clothes were in tatters and his face was filthy with his own clotted blood. He thought he must look monstrous, like some creature out of a mad scientist’s lab tortured into abominable life. He didn’t have time to worry about how he looked, however.

  His entire class of students was standing in the parking lot, watching him. Some of them gasped when they saw him come walking out of a cloud of dust and smoke. Some of them screamed. He saw the teachers and the vice principals trying to maintain order. He scanned the crowd and found Jill and Dana, standing near the back. They had been among the first to escape, he supposed.

  He walked over to them and the crowd parted around him. A few cheers went up but very few of the students joined in. They didn’t understand what had happened, or what any of it meant.

  “Brent,” Dana said, staring at him. “Oh, Brent. You’re alive.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and tried to smile at her. “And I need a favor. You’ve got a driver’s license, right?”

  She did. She even had a car in the parking lot. So much the better. When the three of them (Jill insisted on coming along) climbed in and she turned the key, he lay back in the seat and closed his eyes, desperately needing a few moments of rest.

  Then someone slapped the hood, and his eyes shot open. It was Weathers, who was coming around to his side of the car. The FBI man looked angry.

  Wearily, Brent lowered his window.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Weathers asked.

  “Home,” Brent told him. Which was true, as far as it went. He needed to stop there before they got back on the road. He figured he knew where Maggie was headed and he had to get there before she could hurt Lucy. He didn’t tell Weathers any of that, though. “I need to take a nap.” Which was also true, though he knew he wouldn’t have the chance. There was no time to waste.

  “Uh-huh. I bet you do. You and I need to talk,” Weathers insisted. “This has gone way too far.”

  “Later.”

  Weathers started to pull open the car door but Dana locked it before he could raise the handle. She stepped on the g
as and Weathers jumped back as she sped out of the parking lot and onto the highway.

  “Thanks,” Brent said.

  Dana glanced over her shoulder at him. “No problem. But shouldn’t you have told him what you’re going to do? I mean, the police could take care of this, couldn’t they?”

  “I’m not really crazy about the police right now,” Brent told her. “And as for Weathers, I don’t trust him as far as I can—um.” He reconsidered what he was about to say. “I mean, I don’t trust him as far as he can throw me. He wouldn’t try to capture Maggie. He would just try to kill her, at this point.”

  “Sounds like a happy ending to me,” Jill said.

  “Jill!” Dana scolded.

  “If there’s a way I can finish this without anyone dying, I’m going to find it,” Brent muttered. “Is that really what you want, Jill? For Maggie to get killed? You put yourself in danger back there just to buy me some time. I didn’t know you hated her so much. I mean, you two aren’t friends, but—”

  “We’re rivals,” Jill told him. “I’m in competition with every girl in school, including your sister. And when I compete, I always win, one way or another. Helping you send her to jail will be an acceptable conclusion. You can’t be popular when you’re in prison.”

  “They have to wear those ugly orange jumpsuits,” Dana said.

  “Exactly. You can’t be popular in an orange jumpsuit.”

  As they headed up the on ramp, Jill craned over the back of Brent’s seat and pointed through the windshield. “Look at it,” she said. Brent saw what remained of the high school, the entire gym and the assembly hall fallen in like impact craters, a few jagged walls sticking up from the foundations where classrooms had been. “She smashed up half the school.” She grinned wickedly. “Now who’s the hero?”