Maggie whipped up her arm. She was holding a nailgun. Before Lucy could finish her sentence she squeezed the trigger and a volley of nails snapped out at Lucy’s face. The girl fell backwards, swatting at her face as if she were being attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes.
Then Brent knocked her sideways, hitting her hard enough to send the nailgun flying out of her hand.
“I’m okay!” Lucy shouted, but Brent didn’t seem to hear her. He was on top of Maggie, pounding her face and shoulders with his fists. Maggie struggled up to her feet as her ears rang and her vision blurred. He kept hitting her, again and again, so she grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and threw him over the top of a construction trailer.
Then she spun around looking for Lucy—but the girl was nowhere to be seen.
“What’s the matter,” Maggie roared. “Did you get scared and run away?”
She spun around when she heard the noise of a diesel engine grumbling to life. A puff of black smoke shot up from the exhaust pipe of a bulldozer off to her right. She squinted and saw Brent sitting in the driver’s seat, pushing levers and knobs and trying to get the thing moving.
“You think you can get away in that? I can outrun that thing, Brent. I can chase it down and tear you out of there. You haven’t got a chance!”
The bulldozer lurched forward and then stopped suddenly. Brent scowled and slapped the steering wheel. Maggie laughed.
Until Lucy came out of nowhere and jumped on her back. Maggie whirled around and bucked madly trying to get the girl off of her, but Lucy tugged at her ears, her nose, her shoulders, always pulling her hands away before Maggie could grab them. The younger girl wasn’t particularly strong—not by Maggie’s standards—but she was faster even than Brent.
“Play fair, you little twit,” Maggie screamed.
Lucy kicked Maggie in the back of the head.
Enough, the darkness said, and anger flared inside Maggie’s brain. She waited for an opportunity, then she reached up and snagged one of Lucy’s ankles. Digging in her heels for balance, she pulled Lucy free of her back and then swung her around and around. Lucy’s arms and her free leg flailed but Maggie had her now. She swung her around in a wide arc and let her go.
Lucy shot away from her like a cannon ball. The younger girl flew through the air as fast as a comet and hit the side of the cylinder with a noise like a bass drum, then bounced off and landed face down in the sandy soil.
Lucy tried to get up but she was badly hurt. It was all she could do to push herself up on one arm and stare in blind panic as Maggie stormed over toward her.
“Brent,” Lucy called. “Now!”
The bulldozer’s engine screeched and its tires spewed up great fountains of dust as it shot forward. Its blade caught Maggie square in the back and knocked her down, but it didn’t stop coming—instead it rolled right over her. The giant tires barely missed crushing Maggie’s bones beneath the weight of the construction vehicle and she thought Brent had made a big mistake—until the bulldozer vibrated to a stop, right on top of her.
Its undercarriage pressed her down in the sand. Maggie tried to get up but the weight of the bulldozer was on her back. She tried to beat at the sand with her hands, tried to push upward with every ounce of strength she had.
But it wasn’t enough.
“Come on, damn it,” she said through gritted teeth. “Come on!” She begged the darkness to lend her strength and felt the anger coursing through her veins like dark magma, felt her muscles push and heave and shove—
But it was no use. She could pick up a car and throw it like a ball. She could punch her way through the wall of a house. But the bulldozer must have weighed ten tons and it was just too much for her. She couldn’t get any leverage—her arms and legs were pinned and the ground under her was too soft to let her push very hard against it.
She could just turn her head to the side. She looked over, and saw two faces peering in at her. Brent and Lucy were down on the ground watching her intently, watching to see if they’d finally got her. If they’d pinned her enough that she couldn’t get up. It looked like they had.
“Brent! They’ll send me to jail forever,” she said. The darkness was leaking away, her anger and her negative emotions fleeing her now that she couldn’t give them the destruction they wanted any more. “Please! You can’t let that happen! You’re my brother. Doesn’t that mean you owe me something?”
“Yeah,” he said, very softly. “It does. It means I’ll come and visit you often, and make sure they’re treating you okay. It means I’ll make sure you get the help you need.”
Chapter 51.
“I’m serious,” Brent told Special Agent Weathers, later on. “I’ll be keeping an eye on her. If I see any sign that you aren’t taking care of her properly, you’ll have to answer to me.”
“And what exactly will you do, then?” Weathers asked. He sounded as if he was just curious. “Will you spring her out of jail because we’re being mean to her?”
“I’ll—I guess I’ll—”
“He’ll make a stink,” Jill Hennessey said. “He’ll go to the TV news and tell them you’re performing illegal experiments on her. Or that you’re defying the Geneva convention. Brent’s a celebrity, and the media will love him after this. You’re with the government. They already expect you to mistreat people.”
Weathers’ face grew dark but he clearly knew she was right. He raised his hands in surrender.
“Thanks,” Brent said. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Yes, I know. Thinking isn’t one of your superpowers.”
“Jill!” Dana said, shocked.
Jill and Dana had done what he said and waited an hour, then went and got the police. A whole fleet of jeeps with flashers and sirens had descended on the cylinder site. SWAT teams with heavy weapons had set up perimeters. The FBI had sent snipers and hostage negotiators. Men in bulletproof vests and baseball caps were everywhere, collecting evidence in little plastic bags or photographing pieces of equipment and vehicles that Maggie had turned into weapons. A whole medical team had showed up to check out Lucy and make sure she hadn’t been hurt by the green fire.
None of it was necessary. Lucy was fine. Maggie was trapped and couldn’t get out. Every once in a while she would scream in rage but that just meant she was alright down there, so Brent didn’t mind. The police would have to figure out a way to hold her once they moved the bulldozer, but that wasn’t Brent’s problem. Maybe they could sedate her until they could move her to some kind of jail cell she couldn’t break out of.
“It’s over, detective. Can we take Brent home now?” Dana asked.
Weathers sighed deeply and took out his notebook. “I’ve still got a lot of questions. Brent, I need you to tell me again exactly how this happened.” He gestured at the ambulance parked at the edge of the perimeter fence. Lucy was sitting on its tailgate while a paramedic shone a light in her ear. “But maybe,” Weathers said, shrugging, “maybe it can wait until later. I’ve got a bad headache right now. A new one. I used to have two headaches, and now I have three.” He wandered off muttering to himself.
Jill and Dana grabbed Brent’s arms, one on either side.
“It’s over,” Jill said. “And we won.”
“Brent won,” Dana said, and leaned her head on his shoulder.
Over at the ambulance Lucy looked up at him and frowned. Then, slowly, her face brightened. She shrugged and smiled at him as if to say it was okay.
“Everybody won, because we’re all safe now. Brent, you saved the day. There’s only one thing left to do.”
“What’s that?” Brent asked.
Jill clucked her tongue. “You’re supposed to kiss the girl, stupid.”
“Oh, yeah.” Brent looked down at Dana’s expectant face. “Sorry about this,” he told her. Then he pulled free of the popular girls’ arms and jogged over to sit down next to Lucy.
She looked surprised.
“Hi,” he said.
She opened her mout
h but for probably the first time in her life she was at a loss for words. So he leaned over and gently kissed her. On the lips. For real.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” he told her. His best friend. The girl who loved him. “I was so blind—I had feelings for you too, I think I always have. I was just worried if I said anything it would ruin our friendship.”
“Dummy,” she said, and leaned into him. Her arms went around his neck. He put his hands on her waist. “You look good in this,” she told him, and rubbed her chin against the costume that covered his chest.
“We’ll need to make one for you,” he told her. “You’re a superhero now, aren’t you?”
She laughed. “I guess so, maybe.”
He pulled her close and asked her, “Can I be your sidekick?”
About The Author
David Wellington was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended Syracuse University and received an MFA in creative writing from Penn State.
In 2004 he began serializing his novel Monster Island online. The book rapidly gained a following, and was acquired for print publication by Thunder’s Mouth Press.
Since then, Wellington has published more than 15 novels, and has been featured in The New York Times, Boing Boing and the Los Angeles Times.
You can find him online at davidwellington.net.
More Books by David Wellington
DIGITAL EDITIONS
Plague Zone
Pass Fail
Rivals
PRINT AND DIGITAL
The Monster Island Trilogy
Monster Island
Monster Nation
Monster Planet
The Laura Caxton Vampire Novels
13 Bullets
99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale
Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale
23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale
32 Fangs: A Vampire Tale
The Frostbite Werewolf Novels
Frostbite: A Werewolf Tale
Overwinter: A Werewolf Tale
AS DAVID CHANDLER
The Ancient Blades Trilogy
Den of Thieves
A Thief in The Night
Honor Among Thieves
A Sample from Plague Zone
If you enjoyed this digital edition of Rivals, look for the digital edition of Plague Zone by David Wellington, in stores now.
Plague Zone
Chapter 1.
Tim gave the Portland Plague Zone a wide berth. What he was looking for wasn’t there.
He’d been walking so long his feet had stopped hurting, or rather that the pain didn’t occur to him much anymore. It was just there, a companion to the grittiness he felt on his skin and the dryness of his lips. He walked on the margin of Interstate Five, between the edge of the road and the guardrail, staying out of the road as much as possible so he didn’t have to spend all his time watching out for speeding vehicles. That had been a problem farther south. There wasn’t much traffic anymore, just the occasional military convoy thundering past, the soldiers waving to him out of their hatches, not even bothering to slow down to ask him who he was or where he was headed. Anyone traveling north had to be either crazy or authorized. The sick people the soldiers were looking for didn’t walk in straight lines, as a rule.
He kicked old picked-over suitcases out of his way. Avoided stepping on the trucker bombs—old drink bottles, bright plastic full of yellow urine. Nobody on this road wanted to stop even to relieve themselves. The weeds he trampled on were softer than the asphalt of the highway, so that was something.
According to the mile markers he was halfway to Olympia when he saw the bus coming. The road was on a slight incline, heading up over a hill so gently graded he was barely aware of the added exertion of walking uphill. The bus was coming directly toward him. It was moving fast, he thought, but it was hard to tell when he could only see it straight on. The rectangular sign above its windshield that should have listed its destination was blank.
It was coming right for him.
Tim had time to blink and to reach up and start to adjust the brim of his straw hat. Then his body took over, his reflexes, and he sprinted out into the road, across two lanes. Fast enough to avoid being smeared. The bus didn’t veer off, didn’t turn to track him. It plowed across the yellow dashed line, jumped as it left the road surface. There was a long, high-pitched squealing roar as it rubbed up against the guardrail. He heard a much lower roar as one of its tires exploded.
Time was breathing hard, shaking. The fear had come back, a fear he’d thought he was done with. The bus ground to a stop fifty feet behind him, rocked on its suspension. For a second everything stopped moving.
Then the doors at the front burst open and screaming people spilled out on the asphalt, grabbing at each other, shrieking, the men and the women with wide eyes, the kids looking terrified. They flowed out like blood from a wound, moving cautiously away from the bus as if they didn’t want to get too far away but just far enough. The driver came out last, a fat man in a blue shirt, and he waved at Tim with both arms, summoning him. Tim loped over, unsure what had happened, unsure what was going to be asked of him. He tried to talk but his voice was rusty after so many weeks alone, his throat too dry from the road. “Everybody okay?” he managed to creak out.
“Inside. In the back—one of them—” the driver stuttered.
“He just had a cold, it was the sniffles,” a woman in a rumpled business suit insisted. “Just a cold!”
Tim sensed what he was being asked to do, even if no one could seem to articulate it. He scratched at his stubble-coated chin and then climbed the steps into the bus. At first he was just happy to be inside, in the shade. The bus was air conditioned against the summer heat and it was some kind of mercy to be cool again. His eyes, long adjusted to the glare of sunlight on a pale road, could make out very little of the bus’s interior.
From far ahead of him, down the serried aisle, he heard a thump. Tim squinted until he could make out the rows of seats upholstered in green and red and orange. He could see piles of hand luggage tumbled out of overhead compartments, a tidal spill of food wrappers and newspapers lining the floor. At the far end of the bus stood a narrow plastic door that was rattling, someone pounding on it from behind.
“Crap,” Tim choked out. He dug his arm out of one strap of his pack. Started pulling at zippers. He’d never done this before. If the driver had given him specific instructions he would have refused, turned away and kept walking. Let the passengers deal with it as best they could.
No, he thought. He wouldn’t have done that. Even this late in the game he was still incapable of turning his back on people in need. But why him? What made them think he was the man for this job?
The narrow door crumpled on one side, pushed hard by someone who didn’t have the brainpower to work the simple lock. With one last heave it broke free and swung out hard, then bounced back. A pale hand grabbed its edge, forced it open again.
The man who staggered out of the bus lavatory wore an oxford cloth shirt with half its buttons undone. The cuffs of the sleeves hung loose as if he’d been trying to escape from his clothes when the change finally came. His head was almost bereft of hair, just a few clumps left sticking up at random angles like obscene horns. His skin was the color of rancid cream and a thin sheet of black drool leaked from his lower lip. His eyes were completely empty.
He wouldn’t have much brain left, Tim knew. The Russian Flu attacked your cerebral cortex first, drilling holes through your gray matter, turning it into a sponge so it could hold more germs. It irritated whatever was left, the medulla, making you clumsy, the amygdalas, putting you in a permanent state of fight-or-flight. The speech centers, the parietal lobe, the parts of the brain that let you read a good book or enjoy a fine wine, shut down altogether.
On stiff legs the man came toward Tim, moving as fast as he could, stumbling over the seats, getting tangled up in the garbage on the floor.
There
was plenty of time for Tim to reach into his pack and take out his 22A. The pistol stank of oil, as it had ever since Tim had bought it from a pawnshop in San Francisco. Back when there had still been a San Francisco.
The sick man took another step, raised his arms with his fingers curled like claws.
Tim took the safety off, took a stance, aimed. Squeezed the trigger. The bullet went in through one side of the sick man’s forehead. The next one went through his eye. He fell down like he was going to take a very sudden nap.
It took a third one to put him completely out of his misery. The .22 caliber long rifle bullets in the gun were meant for target shooting or at best shooting small game. In the end, with enough shots, it didn’t matter.
Want to read more? Look for the digital edition of Plague Zone at your favorite ebook store.
Table of Contents
copyright
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8.
Chapter 9.
Chapter 10.
Chapter 11.
Chapter 12.
Chapter 13.
Chapter 14.
Chapter 15.
Chapter 16.
Chapter 17.
Chapter 18.
Chapter 19.
Chapter 20.
Chapter 21.
Chapter 22.
Chapter 23.
Chapter 24.
Chapter 25.
Chapter 26.
Chapter 27.
Chapter 28.
Chapter 29.
Chapter 30.
Chapter 31.
Chapter 32.
Chapter 33.
Chapter 34.
Chapter 35.
Chapter 36.
Chapter 37.
Chapter 38.
Chapter 39.
Chapter 40.
Chapter 41.
Chapter 42.
Rivals Page 19