Rivals (10 page)

The wall above
her kept collapsing piece by piece. A huge chunk of plaster pinwheeled down
from the ceiling and struck her on the shoulder, striping her pale skin with
blood. Brent dove across her just as the entire wall gave way and came
crashing down.

He was
instantly buried in broken plaster and roof shingles. A length of metal
guttering whipped across his back and cut his shirt open but it only hurt for a
second before his body got its strength back.

Beneath him
Mandy wasn’t breathing.

Oh, no,
he thought.
No. I was so close.

But
maybe—if 911 had sent an ambulance as well—maybe she could be
revived. Brent scooped her up in his arms and staggered upright to his feet,
shedding hundreds of pounds of dusty plaster and broken boards. He had to
struggle to breathe himself. The air was so thick he couldn’t seem to get any
oxygen. He couldn’t see anything and his ears were ringing.

He could jump
straight up in the air, through the collapsed roof, but if he did he would have
to drag Mandy up through the rafters with him and she might get hurt. He
pushed through waist-deep debris instead, holding her up so her feet didn’t
drag in the jagged and broken mess, and shouldered his way back out into the
hallway.

The fire had
spread while he was in Mandy’s room. It was racing up the walls, following the
wires hidden behind the plaster, and was dripping from the ceiling. There was
plenty of fuel to feed it and he knew if he wasted another second he would be
engulfed in flames. The bathroom, he thought—he had seen blue sky
through the broken walls of the bathroom. He rushed forward, holding Mandy
well clear of the burning walls, and didn’t even stop to look when he got
through the bathroom door. He just ran and leapt and hoped he could find a
soft place to land once he was outside. Behind him the house shifted again,
walls falling in on themselves, the entire stairway collapsing and taking most
of the upstairs hall with it. By then, though, his feet were pedaling at empty
air and he was soaring, gliding across the street to land in a row of bushes
that felt a lot harder than they looked.

Just before
impact he lifted Mandy up in his arms to keep her from being crushed. When he
had his feet back underneath him he laid her down gently on a freshly mown lawn
and dropped to his knees beside her.

Her clothes
were torn. Her hair was a mess. She had streaks of white dust across her face
and her bare arms. Blood welled from dozens of cuts and abrasions all over her
exposed skin. And she still wasn’t breathing.

“Get back,”
Weathers said. He pushed Brent away and bent over the unconscious girl.
Putting his hands together on her chest he pushed down rhythmically as he blew
air into her mouth. Looking up for a second he said, “Pinch her nose shut.
Yeah, just like that.” He bent to blow air into her lungs again and then
repeated his chest compressions. “Come on,” he said, and scowled at her.

Mandy reached
up one hand and slapped weakly at Brent’s fingers. He let go of her nose and
she made a horrible wet gagging sound. She rolled over on her side and was
violently sick, but then she pulled her knees up tight to her chest and started
gasping for air. “Maggie,” she croaked. “Maggie Gill—she’s gone crazy.”

“Don’t try to
talk. You,” Weathers shouted, gesturing at a firefighter standing in the
street. “Over here!” He looked back down at the girl as the firefighter
brought over a silver survival blanket and wrapped her up in it. “Was there
anyone else in the house? Any brothers or sisters? Were your parents home?”

Mandy managed
to shake her head no before the firefighter put a mask over her face and
started pumping her full of oxygen. Two more firefighters came up with a
stretcher and lifted her up gently, then wheeled her at top speed toward a
waiting ambulance.

“Holy hell,”
Weathers said. His tie was shoved over to one side, and he fixed it with one
hand while he stared at Brent’s face.

“What?” Brent
asked. “Did I do something wrong?”

Lucy was
hobbling toward him. “Not at all, Brent. He’s just never seen anything like
you before.”

Brent shook
his head. He felt like he’d eaten an entire box of chalk and his eyes were
burning. His clothes were in tatters, barely hanging off of him. Otherwise he
thought he felt fine. “Huh.”

“It’s
official,” Lucy said, grabbing Brent around the chest and leaning her head on
his shoulder. “You’re a hero!”

It’s
official
, Maggie thought, staring at her
face in a gas station restroom mirror.

You’re a
villain.

“What a stupid
thing to think,” she told herself. But it was getting harder to deny. She’d
stolen food that morning. She’d been so hungry she hadn’t even thought about
it. Just walked into a bakery, asked for a half dozen croissants, and then
refused to pay once the clerk handed them over.

A kid about
Brent’s age had been standing by the door, sweeping dust out into the street.
He’d had freckles, she remembered, and he was wearing a really stupid paper
hat. He tried to stop her. Told her she was a thief.

She had flung
out one hand and knocked him into a row of tables hard enough to snap his
broom. She only used one hand because the other one was holding a half-eaten
croissant. If both hands had been free she probably would have crippled him.

With the door
clear, she just walked out and down the street an no one tried to stop her at
all. And the croissants tasted
so
good.

Of course,
anything will taste fantastic when you haven’t eaten in days.

Maggie washed
out her field hockey uniform in the sink with some of the nasty pink soap from
the dispenser. She used some more of it to scrub under her armpits and wash
her face. There wasn’t much she could do about her hair—the soap would
just make it more tangled and nasty, so she left it. God, what she wouldn’t
give for a shower. And her own bed. She’d been sleeping in the bus station
with all the other homeless people and it was getting very old.

It had been
nearly a week since she’d smashed her way out of Mandy’s house, so angry and
hurt she couldn’t think at all, could only punch and kick and scream. Once she
was outside she’d just gone jumping from roof to roof until she wound up
somewhere downtown, just wandering the street with her head full of fog. When
she went back to get the car it was gone, along with her purse and her
sidekick—most likely Brent drove it home. Brent, who was in all the
newspapers now. Everybody
loved
him.
He had saved Mandy, after all. Maggie hadn’t given a single thought to whether
her friend was in danger when she left. She’d just wanted to get away and had
thought of nothing but herself.

She was glad
Mandy was okay. Apparently she was still in the hospital but would make a full
recovery. Maggie told herself over and over she was glad for that. Even
though there had been a moment there, after Mandy told her she wouldn’t keep
her promise, when Maggie could have—she might have—

It wasn’t
worth thinking about what she
might
have
done. The things she
had
done
were bad enough.

There’d been
nothing in the papers about Maggie so far, which she figured was something
Special Agent Weathers must have arranged. She was kind of grateful to him for
that. She did know the police were looking for her. Twice so far a cop had
seen her on the street and shouted for her to freeze, but both times she’d just
jumped up onto the rooftops and gotten away without any problems.

She dried her
clothes with the old battered hot air hand dryer in the gas station restroom.
No matter how long she held her skirt under the wheezing vent, though, or how
vigorously she rubbed at it, she knew it would still be soggy when she put it
back on. It was also a dead giveaway whenever the cops spotted her. How many
homeless girls could there be wandering around downtown wearing field hockey
uniforms?

Maggie needed
a change of clothes. She needed money. And she needed to get out of town.

None of that
should be too hard, she thought, for a notorious supervillain.

Brent poured
Grandma’s tea and cut a sandwich in half—egg salad, just like she liked.
She was propped up on the couch on a mound of pillows, watching television and
she grunted acknowledgement when he put her plate and her tea cup down in front
of her.

Her right arm
was in a cast that covered all but her thumb and ran almost up to her elbow.
No one had signed this cast. Lucy had asked if she could, and got a nasty look
in exchange. The doctors said it would be at least a month before the cast
could come off and Grandma could use her hand again.

Brent had
volunteered to play nurse until she was back up to full speed. Every day when
he got back from school he made her dinner. At night he helped her into bed
and then tucked her in, as if she were the kid and he the guardian. It still
felt pretty weird, especially when she yelled at him for not doing things
right. He was pretty sure that it didn’t matter if he made her bed with
hospital corners every morning, or if her tea had a drop too much honey in it.
He got the sense she just needed to yell at somebody.

She was angry.
She had a right to be angry. Most of the time he left her alone.

“The phone was
ringing again all day,” Grandma muttered. “More reporters.”

“You shouldn’t
pick it up unless you know who’s calling,” Brent told her. “That’s why we have
Caller ID.”

“I can’t
figure out how to use that thing. Anyway, I gave them the same old song and
dance. That you’re too busy being a hero to talk to anyone.”

Brent had
changed the voicemail message so it said much of the same thing, though it
didn’t use the H word. It asked that the reporters respect his privacy and not
call back. So instead they emailed—he dreaded turning his computer on in
the morning before school because he knew he would have to sort through dozens
of requests for interviews and photo shoots and product endorsements before he
could find any messages from Lucy or Special Agent Weathers.

He deleted all
the emails, even the ones offering money for his life’s story. He deleted all
the voicemail they got—people he actually wanted to talk to knew not to
call his house unless it was an emergency. But he couldn’t do much about the
photographers who followed him around all day. Some of them were parked down
the block, with telephoto lenses sticking out of the back of a van and
following his every move, constantly trying to get a look through the curtains
over his bedroom window. More of them were camped out outside the high school.
A judge had said they couldn’t come within five hundred feet of him, but they
were always trying for four hundred and ninety-nine.

Maggie had
worried about being followed around by the FBI all the time. It turned out the
government was the least of Brent’s problems.

Speaking of
which—the doorbell rang, and Brent went to answer it. He was expecting
Special Agent Weathers but he had to be careful, so he twitched aside the
curtains and peered out at the porch. No smiling, shouting reporters appeared
so he let the FBI man inside and closed the door behind him.

“Have you
found her yet?” Brent asked.

“Hello to you,
too,” Weathers said, and hung his coat on a hook by the door. “Good afternoon,
Mrs. Reynolds,” he said to Grandma. She waved her good hand at him without
bothering to turn around.

Brent
apologized and lead Weathers into the kitchen, where he poured him a Diet
Coke—it was all he had other than Grandma’s herbal tea and water. “I’m
sorry if I was abrupt. But I’m really worried about her.”

Weathers
frowned. “We’ve had reports. She’s been seen around, but—”

“But you can’t
catch her. She runs away too fast.” Brent nodded and drummed his fingers on the
table. “I understand. I’ve been looking for her, too. Patrolling, I guess
you could say. I haven’t spotted her yet, though. You’ll call me on my cell
the next time someone sees her, right?”

“Sure.”
Weathers reached into his jacket pocket and took out a folded piece of paper.
He carefully smoothed it out on the table and looked into Brent’s eyes.
“There’s actual news on another front, if you want to hear it. We have not
managed to recover your father’s body.”

Brent gulped.
It had been a long time. There hadn’t even been a funeral yet. He’d hoped
that if he had a body, he’d have something to bury. Maybe if he put a memorial
service together, Maggie would feel compelled to come, and then he could talk
to her there. If he could just talk to her, figure out what was going on with
her—

But no. If
she thought the FBI was watching, she wouldn’t come anywhere near.

He rubbed his
face. His father was dead (
you killed him
,
a nagging little part of his brain reminded him) and he needed to be buried. That
was the only important thing. “Do you at least know how he died?”

Weathers took
a sip of his drink. “You don’t want to know that.”

“Okay,” Brent
said.

“I’ve got a
whole team out there in the desert studying that thing you and he found. I’ve
got people watching it round the clock. A lot of what they’re finding out, you
don’t want to know. I’ll tell you one thing anyway. I asked them to send in
two guys in hazardous materials suits to get your father’s body. They couldn’t
do it. They made it back out themselves, but just barely. They both died
within an hour. They were good men, Brent.”

“I’m… so
sorry.”