Rivals (22 page)

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.

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 gas 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?”

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.