Rivals

by David Wellington

  Chapter 45.

  When they reached the right spot, Maggie just turned off the highway and drove into the desert. The car jumped and rattled and started shaking itself loose as she drove over rocks and plants and potholes and gullies but she didn’t care—if the car broke down out here it didn’t matter.

  Of course it matters, she thought. The part of her that wasn’t darkness thought it, anyway. I need the car for my big getaway. I’ll need it for when I start my new life.

  The darkness just laughed.

  She reached the ravine where she’d gotten her powers—the place where her father died and all this began—and brought the car to a stop in a plume of smoke that could probably be seen for miles. She was still a half mile from the cylinder. She turned to Lucy, who looked like she’d been shaken up pretty badly by the wild ride through the desert. “Stay here,” Maggie said. “I suppose you could try to run away. But it’s an hour’s hike back to the highway for somebody with normal legs. It would take you all day. You don’t have any water.” She shrugged. “I think you’re probably smart enough to understand what that means.”

  “So—what? You just leave me here? So I can die of thirst in the car instead of out in the desert?”

  “I’ll come back for you,” Maggie said. She sighed and turned on the air conditioning. Otherwise Lucy might fry inside the car as the sun beat down on it. Unfortunately that meant she had to leave the key in the ignition. To keep Lucy from driving away, she yanked off the steering wheel and threw it like a discus out into the depths of the desert.

  So much for the getaway, her rational brain thought.

  She left Lucy behind and headed down into the ravine on foot. She had a good reason to do so. She was pretty sure the ravine was going to be swarming with FBI, and she didn’t want her hostage to get killed when they inevitably started shooting at her.

  It wasn’t long before she could see the cylinder up ahead. Her eyes were stronger now, in the same way her arms and legs were, and she could see a lot farther and a lot more clearly than she used to. Except that with the cylinder, her super vision didn’t really help. Its weirdness hadn’t changed, she saw. She still couldn’t get a good sense of how big it was, or even what shape it was other than long and round.

  She could see other things very well. The FBI had surrounded the cylinder with a ring of chain link fencing maybe five hundred yards in diameter. Inside the fence they’d parked a bunch of construction trailers, generator trucks, bulldozers, backhoes and cement mixers. Men and women in body armor and carrying assault rifles patrolled the fence, while others operated a satellite dish or waved weird bits of scientific equipment at the cylinder.

  None of them, she saw, came within a hundred yards of it. They’d even planted little neon red flags in the ground around the entrance to the cylinder, probably to warn people not to come any closer.

  They were afraid of it. They were afraid of what the green fire could do.

  They should be, the darkness thought.

  Maggie came at the fence fast and hard, grabbing up handfuls of it and ripping it away. Barbed wire had been strung along its top but it didn’t even scratch her skin. Someone started shooting instantly but the bullets felt like hailstones on her skin—painful, but nothing she couldn’t just shrug off. There was shouting, and people running back and forth. She ignored it.

  She identified the trailer that looked like the command center—it was covered in antennae and small satellite dishes and even a cell phone tower—and headed toward it. On the way she picked up a forklift. She lifted it over her head and threw it overhand into the command center, which buckled under the impact, spewing broken glass and screaming people.

  An FBI agent in a bulletproof vest and a navy blue baseball cap came running at her, screaming, his rifle spitting out bullets and fire. She grabbed the barrel of his rifle—it was hot enough to scorch her hand, but she didn’t care—and before he could let go of the weapon she swung him around by it and then let go. He flew through the air and crashed down in the sand near the cylinder, with his head just inside the dangerous perimeter of the red flags. He looked around to see where he was and then got up and ran away screaming—not in outrage this time, but in blind panic.

  “All of you get out,” Maggie shouted. “This place is mine. Get out!”

  Some of them did as she said. Jeeps full of scientists and technicians started up and raced for the gap in the fence. Meanwhile the guards in their body armor and special agents in black suits started grouping up in formations, ducking behind cover, finding good firing positions. As if they could stop her with bullets.

  What came next took a while. She took their guns away, plucking them out of unwilling hands. Those who tried to hang on to their weapons or who were dumb enough to try to fight her hand-to-hand were thrown through the air, had their arms broken, were hurt badly enough that their friends had to carry them away. But eventually—one way or another—they all left.

  When she was sure she was completely alone in the site, she went back to the car and fetched Lucy. The disabled girl fought like a wet cat, but Maggie managed to bring her down to the cylinder by slinging her over one shoulder and squeezing her—hard—every time she tried to wriggle free.

  “Now,” Maggie said, “I need you to just be quiet for a while.”

  “How long?” Lucy asked. “I’m not really good at it, I mean, I talk a lot when I’m nervous and right now, well, this is beyond nervous, I think I might be verging on like a breakdown or something, I’ve never been able to control my mouth for very long and—”

  Maggie raised one finger to her lips. “Shh,” she said.

  Lucy shut up.

  Maggie found a shady spot behind the wreckage of the command center trailer and plunked Lucy down in it. Then she grabbed a bunch of chain link fence and wrapped it around the girl, tight enough that she couldn’t move.

  “Just chill a while,” Maggie said, and headed into the cylinder.

  Chapter 46.

  The interior of the cylinder was even colder than Maggie remembered. The air still sucked away every sound, until her footfalls sounded like whispers and then stopped making any sound whatsoever. The puddles on the floor still hadn’t dried up, and there were birds roosting inside in silent, watchful flocks. The place creeped her out, just as it had the first time she’d seen it.

  This time around she could observe more details, but very few of them made any sense to her. The cylinder seemed very large inside. In fact, it seemed bigger on the inside than it had looked from up in the ravine. Its interior was not smooth at all but lined with pipes and tubes, some thicker across than her waist. Many of them were broken open and she could see they were hollow inside. Others were still intact. Some had water condensed on them, and when she touched one of these she could feel a faint vibration travel up her arm. Whatever had happened to the cylinder, whether it had crashed on Earth thousands of years ago or if it had just rotted away over time, clearly parts of it were still in perfect working order.

  Like the well full of green fire, for instance.

  There was, she supposed, a certain amount of danger involved in going back inside. She had survived the green fire once, and in fact it had made her stronger. There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t kill her though if she remained too long inside the cylinder. It had killed her father without any trouble, after all.

  She’d come to find his body. As villainous as she may have become, regardless of how much the darkness inside her had eroded the good little girl she’d once been, she still owed Dad this much. He shouldn’t have to rot away inside some weird alien artifact. Yet when she actually found the body—or rather, his bones, which were all that remained of him—she found herself so repulsed she had to turn away rather than be sick.

  His remains were curled around the well that was the home of the green fire. His hands were still clenched around the manhole cover-sized lid as if he were still trying, from beyond his own death, to close the well and save his children.


  That meant something to Maggie. It meant something so horrible she couldn’t stand it, and this time she was sick, and had to pause to throw up on the floor. It meant he hadn’t died instantly.

  It meant there had been a chance, even if it was just a small one, to save him. To pull him out of there, just as she had dragged out Brent.

  He could have survived.

  She could have saved him.

  She dropped down beside him, unable to help herself. She pressed up against the bones as if curling up with him on a couch back in their house, and put her arm around his rib cage, just wanting to hold him. It was morbid of her, she supposed, but in her head it was just a way to say goodbye to him.

  While she lay there green flames came peeking over the edge of the well like snakes looking for something to bite. She didn’t run away. They came down and ran over her skin for a while. She thought they were probing her, or maybe checking to see if she’d already been changed. Eventually they withdrew once more into their well and their green light flickered out of the dim space.

  She didn’t have a lot of time, Maggie decided. She needed to get moving. She got up and brushed herself off, then set about picking up the bones, even the little finger bones she had to pry away from the lid. There was no way to carry them all in her arms, so she took off her hoodie and tied it into a kind of sack she could use to hold the various pieces. The bones were scorched and covered with a black residue that stained her hands, but the work didn’t make her feel ill. This was her father. A man she had truly loved, even if she never really showed it.

  When she had all of the bones she went back outside, stepping into desert heat that made sweat stand out instantly on her skin. Dad had loved the desert, more than anyplace else in the world. Maybe he would have wanted to be buried in the cemetery next to Mom, but Maggie thought that the desert would make a perfectly acceptable alternative resting place. She hiked out into the scrub trees and creosote bushes a ways and then set down the bag of his bones. With her fingernails she dug a hole in the ground deep enough that coyotes wouldn’t be able to dig him back up, and then she placed the bones inside with much love and care. She tried to arrange them in the right order, with the skull at the top and the leg bones at bottom, but some of the bones were shapes she didn’t recognize. She did the best she could.

  When she’d filled the hole back up, she looked around for a suitable large stone. She found a flat broad piece of shale three feet long and two feet wide. With another rock she carved his full name on the stone and underneath it she put the years he was born and died. Then she put the stone across his grave and knelt down beside it.

  And had no idea what to do next.

  She supposed she should say some words. Maybe make a vow to reform, or to not hurt Brent. The darkness wouldn’t allow that, though. In the end all she could think to say was goodbye.

  She headed back toward the cylinder then, feeling very calm and at peace. The darkness inside her had settled down for a moment but she knew it wouldn’t last. Something would happen. Some horrible thing would set her off again and the anger would take control. But for the moment she could simply walk in the desert and notice for once how sublimely beautiful it really was. How unspoiled, how alive.

  She realized with a shock then that for these few fragile seconds, she wasn’t actively unhappy. It was a weird feeling, and one she was unaccustomed to. She actually cracked a smile, and reached down to pick a pink flower and put it in her hair.

  Then she heard the sound of a car engine, very far away. Her ears had become as sensitive as her eyes and she knew the car had to be miles away still. She knew as well that Brent would be inside of it.

  She had expected him to follow when she kidnapped Lucy.

  She had looked forward to it. And now it had come to pass.

  She just had time to prepare for his arrival.

  Chapter 47.

  “Grandma,” Brent said, peering out through the car windows at the desert, remembering every landmark. “I’m calling to tell you that I’m about to go fight Maggie. Probably for the last time.”

  On Brent’s cheap cell phone Grandma’s voice was very faint and kept breaking up. Some of her words were lost to static. “You’re going to—hiss—finish off that little—crackle—now? That’s—beep—time.”

  Brent frowned. He could barely hear her. “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do. But she has Lucy and she might… well, she might do something actually evil. I can’t let that happen. I’m the only one in the world who can stop her, and—”

  “Boy,” Grandma interrupted, “if you need to—snap—her—sigh—up, then you do it. If anyone—rumble—her, she broke my—pop.”

  “I just wish Dad was here,” he told her. “He would know what the right thing to do was. All I know is what feels right to me, right now.” The phone beeped three times in his hand and he realized he’d lost the connection. Dana’s car must have passed beyond cell phone range. There would be no more parental advice.

  It meant they had almost arrived. “I really want to thank you for your help,” he told Dana, sitting back in his seat and closing his eyes. “I suppose I could have just run down here but I would have been exhausted when I arrived.”

  “I would do a lot of things for you, Brent,” Dana told him. “You rescued me. I owe you, big time.”

  He blushed and looked out the window. “Here,” he said. “This is where I get out.” He recognized a butte on the horizon and a stand of nopal cactus. This was where they had set up their camp. It was where they’d started hiking into the desert. The car couldn’t get him any closer. “I don’t know if I’m coming back or not,” he told the popular girls. “Can you wait an hour? If I don’t show up by then, just go home and—and tell the police. They won’t be able to stop Maggie. But maybe they’ll find somebody who can.”

  “Brent,” Dana said, “just be careful. For me?”

  He couldn’t promise that. He smiled at her anyway and started to get out of the car.

  “Wait,” Jill said. She leaned over his seat and grabbed his hand. “Just one thing before you go.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Something you need to consider.”

  “Alright,” Brent said, wondering what she had in mind.

  “If your sister kills you, Dana won’t have a date for homecoming. Okay? So come back to us in one piece. Otherwise it will be incredibly awkward if I have to find her a replacement at the last minute.”

  Brent closed the door softly behind him and started off into the desert, moving as fast as he could. Maggie had a considerable head start and he had no idea what she was up to. He ran on the flat desert floor, then reached the head of the ravine and started leaping from rock to rock, getting as much air as he could so he could survey the destruction ahead of him. He didn’t need super-eyesight to tell he’d come to the right place. The trailers and construction equipment near the cylinder were trashed, torn apart or picked up and cast aside like toys the day after Christmas. He didn’t see any sign of Lucy. Maggie, on the other hand, was in plain view. She wasn’t trying to hide. She stood near the cylinder, out in the sun. She was holding something big over her head. It looked like a portable generator, though Brent was too far away to make out much in the way of detail.

  Then Maggie threw it at him and he got a much closer look than he would have preferred.

  The generator came sailing through the air right at him. He jumped aside as it shattered on the rocks, showering him in fuel oil and machine parts. He looked up just in time to see a forklift following close behind. Then a half of a construction trailer. The noise was incredibly loud as he leapt from rock to rock, never more than half a second ahead of the incoming projectiles.

  A backhoe hit just behind him. Its digger arm snapped off on impact and went spinning through the air. He tried to duck but it struck him in the arm, sending fiery pain shooting up into his shoulder.

  “Damn,” he shouted, as he spun around and dropped into the ravine.
Maggie must have known he was coming. He moved as quickly as he could down the dried-up wash, keeping his head down as more pieces of equipment came raining of the sky. A satellite dish dug into the dirt in front of him, nearly tripping him. A Geiger counter went whizzing past his head like a bullet, trailing its wand behind it. A truck tire smacked him right in the chest. It was too soft to break any of his bones but it had enough momentum enough to knock him over on his back and drive the breath out of his lungs.

  As he lay on the dirt staring up at the sky, he saw a jeep come screaming out of the blue, on a ballistic trajectory right for his head. It took every ounce of energy he had to get his feet under him and throw himself to the left before it hit, sending up enormous plumes of dirt and small rocks. He covered his face with one arm as the ejecta came showering down all around him, stones the size of softballs bouncing painfully off the back of his head.

  When the dirt settled he moved. He pushed himself, dug his feet into the ground and threw himself forward, accelerating with every step until the wind was howling past his ears. Maggie kept throwing things at him—a spotlight on a tripod, surveying tools, the engine block of a jeep—but he was moving so fast he blazed right past them. He didn’t even feel the ground shake with the impacts.

  He came out of the ravine so fast the world around him blurred. He shot right toward Maggie as she picked up something else, a new weapon to use against him, but before she could throw it he grabbed it away from her. Unable to shed his momentum he ran right past her, skidding and plowing deep furrows in the ground as he tried to slow himself by digging his heels into the ground.

  It was only when he’d stopped completely, when his dust cloud caught up with him, that he looked down and saw what he’d grabbed out of Maggie’s hands.

  It was a hand grenade, and the pin had already been pulled.

  “Oh, sh—” he had time to say before it went off. His brain didn’t have time to react. His arms moved anyway, throwing the grenade away from him as hard as he could. It went off in mid-air, only a dozen yards from where he stood. Fragments of metal and burning gunpowder spattered his face and chest and his body screamed.