Rivals

by David Wellington

  “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.

  Chapter 29.

  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.

  With his super-strong vision, Brent had no trouble seeing the screaming woman in the front seat—or the child’s car seat in the back.

  Chapter 30.

  Brent didn’t have much time to think about what to do next. He could catch the Volvo easily, but it was coming at him so fast and at such a steep angle that even if he kept it from smashing into the street, the shock of his catch would probably throw the car’s occupants right out of their seatbelts.

  So instead of just catching it, he had to slow it down before impact. He ran forward, the muscles of his legs screaming as he pushed them harder than he ever had before. When the Volvo was still ten feet up in the air he leapt right at it, smashing into the front end with his shoulder. The car shook and rattled from the impact but not enough to hurt the people inside. As Brent started falling back, away from the mid-air collision, he grabbed at the fender, the hood, even the windshield wipers trying to get a good grip. A moment later his feet touched the ground. His knees bent under him and threatened to collapse, but he managed to keep his legs under him as he gently, slowly, lowered the car to the ground and set it down on its tires.

  He rushed around to the driver’s side and pulled the door open. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  The driver, a woman who kind of looked like his mom, was pale and shaking but she di
dn’t seem to be hurt. Brent glanced over her shoulder at the child safety seat in the back. The boy in the seat couldn’t have been more than three years old. He looked up at Brent curiously, then picked a piece of cracker off his shirt and ate it.

  “I think you’ll be alright. I’m sorry if I damaged your car,” Brent said, trying to meet the driver’s gaze again. She was staring straight ahead, holding onto the steering wheel with both hands as if she was ready to drive off. “It was the only way. Listen, the police will be here soon—you may want to wait until they can check you out, make sure you weren’t hurt.”

  “Thank… you,” the woman said. Then her head fell back against the headrest of her seat and her eyes fluttered closed.

  “Damn,” Brent said.

  He stood up and looked around for Maggie. She was gone, of course. Throwing the Volvo had been a diversion, a trick to get Brent to stop chasing her. It had worked. He couldn’t leave this woman and her baby, not until he was sure they would be okay. Maggie could be blocks away by then, and he had no idea which direction she’d gone. He would never catch her.

  A police helicopter came buzzing overhead first. Brent was sitting on the crumpled hood of the car. He looked up and saw it hovering in the darkening twilight air. He waved it away, trying to tell the pilot he needed to look for Maggie, that everything was under control where Brent was. Instead the helicopter just stood there in the air, not moving. Brent could barely hear sirens over the whirring of its rotor.

  A cop car came racing around the corner and nearly hit the Volvo. Brent started to get up, intending to push it back with his hands if he needed to, but the driver was able to brake in time. Two police officers got out and came running toward him with their guns drawn. “You can put those away,” Brent said, shouting over the noise of the helicopter. “But do either of you have any medical training?”

  “I know first aid,” one of them said. She knelt down by the open driver’s side door and reached in to take the unconscious woman’s pulse. Her partner moved quickly to string up yellow police tape to block off the road.

  “She got away,” Weathers said when he arrived a few minutes later. “She had to smash up half the town but she got away.”

  “Yeah,” Brent said. “Well, now that you’re here I’ve got better things to do, so I’ll just be going—”

  “Not so fast. We’re going to need an official statement from you. A detailed account of everything that happened. Do you know how much paperwork I’m looking at? There are going to be lawsuits enough to keep a judge busy for years.”

  “Forget it,” Brent told him. “You can figure it out on your own.”

  Weathers grabbed his arm. Brent looked down at the FBI man’s hand, then up at his face. Brent tilted his head to one side and frowned.

  “Don’t try to intimidate me. I know your secret weakness, now. So does your sister?”

  “You do?” Brent asked. He wasn’t aware he had one.

  “Yeah. You always do the right thing. That makes you predictable. Maggie knew you wouldn’t let this woman or her baby get hurt. That you would give up chasing her if that’s what it took to save them. That’s a dangerous precedent, you know. What happens next time? How many people will she endanger to throw you off her trail?”

  “Maybe there won’t be a next time,” Brent said. He shrugged off the man’s hand. “Maybe after today, doing the right thing doesn’t look so good anymore.”

  “Like you have a choice,” Weathers said. The he sighed. “Alright. You can go. But stay by a phone. I want you where I can reach you at all times.”

  “I already told you! I don’t work for you,” Brent said.

  “No. In a way, you could say that I work for you. Because you’re on the list of those honest, innocent people I work to protect. Make sure you stay on it,” Weathers said, and then turned away, done with him.

  Chapter 31.

  Helicopters circled the city all night, looking for her. Maybe they thought she had no place to go, and that she would be out on the streets. Maybe they thought she wouldn’t be foolish enough to find a place to lie low. Maggie was too tired to be smart, though. She found a mid-price hotel at the edge of town, out by the airport, and decided to treat herself. If they caught up with her, if the management turned her in—she would just have to fight her way out. It was worth it to have a real bed, a real shower, and maybe even a radio. Maybe she could get some music, and drive away the darkness in her head.

  At the front desk she told the clerk she wanted a room for one night. She had taken the precaution of putting her disguise back on—hoodie, baseball cap, and even a pair of sunglasses, though outside the sun had already gone below the horizon.

  The clerk was a guy not much older than herself. He had long sideburns and the bored, tired eyes of somebody working a job they didn’t take very seriously. He gave her a momentary smile and shoved a book at her. “Sure. Just sign in here and give me seventy-nine dollars.”

  Maggie took a pen and signed herself in as Greta Garbo, because she just wanted to be left alone. The clerk didn’t even look at the name.

  “I’ll just need to see your credit card. We don’t charge you yet, not until you check out, but—”

  “I want to pay cash,” she told him.

  He shrugged. “‘S cool, but I still need a credit card. So in case you trash the room or something we can bill you later.” He looked at her face for the first time, but because he didn’t go pale or run away, she assumed he didn’t recognize her. “You aren’t planning on trashing the room, are you?” he asked, and gave her a smile. It lasted longer this time. “If you are, confidentially,” he said, “I’ll be glad to help. This place could use a little redecoration. And if you want to party, I can get you anything you want—”

  “Look, here’s the cash, upfront,” Maggie said. She laid four twenties on the counter between them.

  He looked down at them and stopped smiling. “It’s our policy. We need a credit card. Everybody has one, right?”

  Maggie sighed. “Sure,” she said. “It’s right here.” She put another twenty on the counter.

  He licked his lips. “You got some ID? Maybe a driver’s license?”

  Another twenty. She had plenty of them.

  “Passport? Birth certificate? Green card?”

  Each time he named a type of ID she laid another twenty on the counter. Then she held up another five of them. “This,” she said, “is a tip.” When he reached for the hundred dollars in her hand she said, “I’ll make sure you get it tomorrow. When I check out.” Hopefully, if the police came sniffing around he would say he hadn’t seen her—because if she had to run again he wouldn’t get his tip.

  He handed her a key and she went up to the room and took a very long, very hot shower. She shampooed and conditioned her hair with the little bottles the hotel staff provided and went through most of a bar of soap that smelled like vanilla and cinnamon.

  There was a bathrobe in the closet. She happily took her field hockey uniform and her disguise clothes down to the hotel’s laundry room and put them all in for the longest possible wash cycle.

  Back up in the room she sank her toes into the plush carpeting and then fell back on the starchy maroon coverlet of the bed. The air in the hotel room tasted of stale air conditioning and ancient cigarette smoke. It was too cold and too dry but—unbelievably, after the conditions she’d been living in the last week or so—she could change that. She could turn a couple of knobs and make it perfect for herself.

  It was like heaven. Room service was more than happy to bring up a steak dinner that cost her another three twenties, including tip. The minibar was full of alcohol she decided she didn’t want—she’d been to parties before where kids her age drank so much they got sick, but Maggie had always been a jock and she’d tried to treat her body right. There was no reason to change that now, so she dug a diet coke out of the back of the little refrigerator and sat down to watch some TV.

  There wasn’t much on. There never was
, but it seemed especially bad that night. There were plenty of sitcoms on about normal happy families laughing their way through problems. There were reality shows about people in situations that had nothing to do with her reality. She almost started watching a show about how wood screws were made, but then caught herself and decided that if she was going to be that bored, she might as well go to sleep. She flipped through one more time and caught a news broadcast. When she saw Brent’s face she turned up the volume.

  Despite what she’d told her brother, Maggie had been following the news pretty closely. She’d watched for any sign of his exploits—despite herself, she’d been proud of her little brother—and any indication of what the police were doing while trying to catch her. She had seen Brent’s speech to her several times, and it looked like they were running it again.

  Maggie sighed deeply and had to fight to keep tears out of her eyes. As always when she saw the video it made her think of when they really had been brother and sister. When Mom and Dad had both still been alive, and Grandma was an unpleasant social obligation she only had to meet once or twice a year. A time when she’d been normal. When everything had been normal.

  She’d planned on going to college, once. She’d planned on having her own family. Now it looked like neither of those plans were ever going to work out.

  “—not going to cause trouble for you. I just want us to be a family again. I want us to be okay,” Brent said.

  “Oh, baby bro,” Maggie said, letting herself weep a little now. “If only it was that simple. If only it were—”

  On screen the face of Special Agent Weathers appeared. “As of tonight she’s still at large. I don’t want to minimize the danger, but I don’t want to cause panic either. If you see Margaret Gill please, please, stay away from her. Don’t under any circumstances try to apprehend her yourself.”