Rivals (14 page)

Together they
approached the revolving door. They couldn’t both fit through at once, so
Maggie pulled the metal frame out of the way and they squeezed through where
the door had been.

“Maybe we
should put our hands up,” Brent said, when he saw all the guns pointed at them.

“Brent!”
Special Agent Weathers said, then, “hold on to her! But get your head down!”

Brent looked
the other direction, to his right, and saw a policeman in riot armor standing
with his back to the wall of the bank, just outside the doors. He had a
shotgun and he was bringing it around to point at Maggie’s face.

It was a
setup. From start to finish.

Brent started
to scream “Maggie, jump!,” but before he could get her name out, the policeman
fired.

Shotgun
pellets whizzed through the air, smashing across Maggie’s face and shoulders.
One of them went past her head and hit Brent in the ear. It stung worse than
any pain he’d ever felt and he dropped her arm and went down on one knee. He
reached up and grabbed at his ear, then looked at his fingers, expecting them
to be covered in blood. But apparently whatever the green fire had done to him
and to Maggie, it had made them tough enough that the pellets couldn’t break
their skin.

Maggie roared
in pain but she didn’t go down. For a second her hands were on her face,
scrubbing at it as if she could wash away the pain. Then she brought her hands
down and looked back at Brent.

No. She
glared at Brent. She thought he must have been in on this. That he had
betrayed her. She reached out to grab him and he saw her face was unmarked,
that she had taken a shotgun blast right in the head and it hadn’t really
harmed her at all.

It had,
however, pissed her off.

She grabbed
him by the throat and lifted him off the ground. He tried to squirm out of her
grasp as she pulled her arm back, but he felt weak and queasy, his body
rebelling against him. Then she punched him right in the nose.

Blood squirted
down the front of his shirt. His ears rang and his skull felt like it was
spinning around underneath his scalp. He fell backwards, unable to stop
himself, and landed flat on his back. The pain of the shotgun pellet hitting
his ear was nothing compared to this—he thought he might throw up. He
thought he might pass out.

“Turn around
and put your hands against the wall,” the policeman said, pumping his shotgun.
“I will shoot you again.”

All around
them cops were running out from behind their cars, weapons drawn and pointed at
Maggie. One of them had a taser, a flat white plastic gun with two prongs
sticking out of its front. He fired and the prongs turned into darts that
punctured her shirt. A pair of very thin wires were attached to the darts.
There was a crackling sound and Maggie’s head jerked back for a second, but
still she didn’t go down.

It seemed to
Brent that she moved very slowly as she stepped toward the policeman, the one
with the shotgun who had fired at her first. Brent saw him turning as if he
was going to run away. Maggie didn’t give him a chance. She grabbed him by
the straps of his bulletproof vest and swung him around as easily as if he was
a toy. When she let go he flew through the air, his legs and arms flailing.
He hit one of the police cars hard enough to crumple its hood. Brent could
hear bones snapping inside his body and saw his face go slack as he slid down
to the ground.

He wasn’t
moving.

He looked back
at his sister. Her eyes were very wide. She looked
scared—terrified—by what she’d done. But she didn’t stick around
to apologize. The other cops were starting to shoot at her, pistol bullets and
rifle rounds zipping through the air, the smell of gunsmoke filling up Brent’s
nose—

And then she
was gone. She had jumped over the line of police cars and was running away.
After a moment Brent couldn’t see her anymore.

He got up
carefully, worried he might have broken some bones himself when she hit him.
His nose felt like it was stuffed up and it was still bleeding, a trickle of
wet blood running down his lip and into his mouth. He wanted to touch it, to
feel if the cartilage in there was shattered, but he thought that might not be
a good idea. What if he made it worse.

“What are you
doing?” Weathers demanded. He ran up and grabbed Brent’s arm and shouted in
his ear as if he was trying to wake Brent up. “She’s getting away!”

Brent stared
at the FBI man. If he could have shot lasers out of his eyes he would have,
then and there.

“You have to
go after her,” Weathers said. “Nobody else can keep up with her. What are you
waiting for?”

“You set us
up,” Brent said. His voice sounded like a growl.

“There’s no
time for this,” Weathers told him.

Brent shook
his head. “We’ll make time, then. You told me I would have a chance to bring
her in peacefully. But you just wanted to kill her!”

“Oh, please,
kid. With buckshot? We knew it would barely hurt her. What were we supposed
to do, shoot her with BBs?”

“You betrayed
me. You tricked me into betraying my sister.”

Weathers
grunted in annoyance. “She is
getting away
.
Right now
. You need me to draw
you a diagram? She’s hurting people, Brent. I told you my job is to make sure
people don’t get hurt. Innocent, honest people. She’s already decided she’s
not one of them, so I have no problem if she gets hurt, because that’ll protect
a lot of people who do deserve my help.”

“And what
about me?”

“Oh, did I
hurt your feelings? Well, pardon me. I’ve got a girl who’s knocking down
houses and breaking an old lady’s arm because she’s so full of hormones she
doesn’t know right from wrong. If I need to lie to you, some teenage boy whose
biggest contribution to society is that he
refuses
to beat up the school bully, so be it.”

“I quit. I
don’t work for you anymore. Do you understand?”

“You never
did. I don’t pay you. I’d actually be happier, and my life would be easier,
if you did not exist, Brent. But right now you have to go chase your sister
and hit her until she stops running. Because as of right now, she has nothing
to lose. She just hurt a cop pretty bad. What’s next? Is she going to kill
someone?”

Brent tried to
think of a reply. But he couldn’t. Weathers was right. Maggie’s behavior had
been getting worse and worse. Who knew how low she would sink before she was
through? She had to be stopped, one way or another. Either the cops could try
shooting her with bigger and more deadly guns, or it could be him. Brent could
chase her down and bring her in.

“Well, get to
it,” Weather said.

Brent wanted
to spit. He wanted to punch the FBI man in the face. Instead, he jumped over
the cars and hit the ground running, zooming like a rocket down a crowded city
street.

The sidewalks
were too crowded—people had gathered as close as they could to the bank,
anxious to see what was going on. If Brent tried to run on the sidewalk he was
going to collide with somebody, fast enough to knock them down and maybe really
hurt them. He couldn’t let that happen. So instead he ran up the middle of
the street, slipping between the two rows of cars. Motorists honked their
horns at him but there was nothing he could do—Maggie was way ahead of
him, and he needed to gain some ground if he wanted to catch her.

The road ran
ahead of him as straight as an arrow, pointing at some distant mountains to the
west. He could just see her up ahead, maybe a quarter of a mile away. He
could see her just fine—his eyesight had grown stronger, just like the
rest of him—but she wasn’t too hard to follow anyway. He just had to
follow the path of destruction.

She had
knocked down a newsstand, scattering the pavement with magazines and packs of
gum. She had crossed an intersection with Fulton Street, leaving cars stalled
and honking in frustration in her wake. From the dents in their hoods it
looked like she hadn’t even slowed down, instead just running over the cars as
if they were minor bumps in the asphalt. Further along, at Gallup Street, a
driver had swerved to avoid hitting her and had instead driven up on the curb
and smashed a fire hydrant. Water fountained high in the air: Brent felt a few
drops on his shoulders as he pumped his legs, trying to pour on more speed.

He was gaining
on her, definitely—only a few hundred yards separated them now—he
could see her straight ahead, see the cleats on the soles of her field hockey
shoes flashing left then right then left. She glanced over her shoulder to
look at him—

—there
was a squeal of brakes, an insistent blaring horn—a sickening
crash—

Maggie reeled
backwards, momentarily stunned. A car, a Volkswagen, had hit her head on. The
car looked like its front had had been folded in half. The driver released his
seat belt and stepped out of the car, one hand on his bald head. “Are you
alright?” he asked, sounding far louder than he probably meant to be. “Miss?”

Maggie growled
and then leaned forward, slamming her hands down on the hood of the car. The
driver hesitated for half a second, then ran off.

Brent hurried
to close the distance. To get to her. What he was going to do when he reached
her he wasn’t sure. They would probably fight.

There was
something organic about the thought. He was a superhero. She was a
supervillain. They were supposed to fight, weren’t they? According to every
comic book Brent had ever seen, the answer was yes.

Except—one
of the last things Dad had said to Brent was that he wished the two of them
wouldn’t fight so much. The memory of that, of his dad’s voice saying that,
nearly made him stop running.

The Volkswagen
came soaring through the air at him. Brent shook his head. He’d gotten
distracted. Maggie had picked the car up and threw it at him.

Brent jumped
out of the way in the nick of time. The Volkswagen hit the intersection and
burst open with an enormous, terrible noise, spitting out broken glass and
hubcaps and pieces of fender, bouncing up on its tires and then coming down
again hard enough to grind sparks off the pavement. Traffic from either side
swerved and skidded into the mess and somebody screamed in panic.

Hanging by his
hands from a traffic light, Brent looked down on all the chaos and breathed a
sigh of relief. If he’d been underneath the car when it hit… but that didn’t
bare thinking about.

Maggie was
moving again. She was turning down a side street, Houston Street, headed
toward the town’s rusted-out industrial district. Brent dropped down on top of
the demolished Volkswagen and dashed after her, cutting close around the corner
and jumping straight up in the air to avoid colliding with a baby carriage. The
woman pushing it shouted something he didn’t bother listening to. Maggie was
up ahead, at another intersection, taking a right turn. She was trying to
shake him, trying to get where he couldn’t see her, behind one building or
another. Maybe he could cut her off. Across the street was a fast food
restaurant, a two-story building with a covered drive-thru. Brent used the
back of a parked convertible as a ramp and launched himself up onto the
concrete slab that formed the roof of the drive-thru, then leapt again to grab
the top edge of the restaurant’s front wall with one hand and swung himself up
onto the flat roof while people down in the street pointed and gasped.

He dashed to
the far side of the roof and looked down. Maggie was there, running at full
speed down the empty street. She looked over her shoulder but she didn’t see
him running along the rooftop just above her. He could leap down, he thought,
and land on her shoulders, knock her down and then hold her there, wait for the
police to arrive. He was just about to do it when he noticed his shadow. The
sun was just going down behind him and it cast long sharp shadows everywhere it
touched. Brent’s shadow was sweeping along the street just in front of Maggie.
If she looked down—

She looked down.
Then she looked up, and scowled at him.

“Leave me
alone, Brent,” she called up. She wasn’t out of breath, despite the fact
they’d been running at more than thirty-five miles an hour.

The rooftop
ended in front of Brent. He leapt easily to the next one, a tire store with a
tarpaper-covered roof with only a slight incline. The next building down was
an electronics store with a gravel-lined roof that sprouted dozens of air ducts
and satellite dishes and the three flat white rectangles of a cell phone
receiver tower. Instead of trying to navigate that mess, Brent tried to jump
diagonally across the street, to the bare roof of a motel.

Tried—except
Maggie pegged him in mid-air with a razor scooter.

She threw it
hard enough to hurt him, but clearly that wasn’t her main intention. It hit
him right in the chest and sent him into a bad tumble, so that when he was
close enough to grab the roof of the motel instead he slammed up against its
wall, cracking the concrete there and dropping him hard into a stand of bushes.

Out in the
street a little girl was staring at him, a look of total incomprehension on her
face. Maybe her parents had never told her about superheroes. Brent got to
his feet, brushed a few evergreen branches off his torn shirt, and handed the
scooter to the girl. It was dinged up a little but it looked like it would
still work. Brent ran back out into the street and looked around for Maggie.

“Brent,” she
called, from half a block away.

He pivoted
around to face her.

“Catch,” she
told him. And threw a Volvo at him.