Rivals (21 page)

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—he 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.

“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.

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.

“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.