Rivals

  RIVALS

  a novel by

  David Wellington

  Text copyright © 2012 David Wellington

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  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

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  About the Author

  More Books by David Wellington

  A Sample from Plague Zone

  Chapter 1.

  “When are you going to start rebelling, kid?” Brent’s father asked. He shifted his pack on his back and started clambering down a rough-walled ravine, where a flash flood had cut through the desert like a knife after last month’s storms.

  “I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to rebel against,” Brent answered. He reached forward with one boot and found a rock that didn’t shift when he put his weight on it. It was easy enough going, but you had to be careful. Brent grabbed at the tough roots of a juniper bush and stopped still when a scree of pebbles started shifting under him. “It seems to me we have it pretty good—you look at some of the people in this world who don’t have anything to eat, or their government forces them out of their homes, and—”

  At the top of the ravine, Brent’s older sister Maggie appeared silhouetted against the sun. “Would you two hurry up?” she whined. “I want to get back to civilization. You know, where people have cell phones that actually get a signal?”

  Brent’s eyes narrowed. He started thinking of the perfect reply, something really nasty, but then his dad put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “Don’t,” his father said. “I wish you two wouldn’t fight so much.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. “I thought this trip would do her good but I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to be having a good time, does she?”

  “We’ll just have to hit the outlet mall on the way back,” Brent said. He was pleased when his father actually smiled, though he knew he would never get a laugh. Their dad was always scrupulously careful not to favor one of them over the other, and that included never saying a bad word about Maggie.

  Even when she deserved it.

  “Come on down, kid. It’s not too much farther. I saw the sun shining on something this morning. It looked like there might be an oasis out here. Maybe we can go for a quick swim!”

  “I didn’t bring my bathing suit,” Maggie answered, but she started carefully picking her way down the rocks. For all her lack of enthusiasm she had no trouble with the climb down. Brother and sister were both experienced rockhoppers. That was entirely thanks to their parents, who had dragged them out into this desert for hikes every year since they’d been old enough to walk. Now that their mother was gone, the hikes were even more frequent.

  Brent didn’t mind at all. He loved how quiet it was when you got more than an hour’s walk away from the highway. He loved the shade at the bottom of ravines like this, and the thin breezes that dried all the sweat on your skin. He thought maybe when he was older he would like to live out there, and just watch the clouds go by overhead everyday until the sun turned them a million shades of red and orange.

  “Hey,” Maggie said. “I think I see it. But that’s no oasis. God, what a stupid goose chase. It looks like an old car somebody left to rust to death.”

  Dad rushed down the bottom of the ravine, where the footing was a lot more stable. Brent hurried after. This would have been a bad place to be when the rain came through—millions of years’ worth of mud and sand had been washed away in a foaming wall of water—but now the ground had dried out so much it shrank away from itself, making a fine pattern of cracks like a gigantic spider web. Tiny flowers surrounded by thick spiky leaves sprouted up through some of the cracks, thriving on whatever moisture remained. The flowers’ petals were soft, delicate colors you couldn’t find anywhere else in the desert.

  “Is it even worth checking this thing out?” Maggie asked.

  For his father’s sake, Brent held his tongue. Maggie had been like this ever since their mother died a year ago. Dad claimed it was because he didn’t know how to talk to a teenage girl so he wasn’t doing a good job helping her through her grief. Brent thought otherwise. He thought Maggie was just a jerk. The two of them had never gotten along very well. There had been a brief time, after the accident, when the two of them had hugged a lot and cried on each others’ shoulders. But that had ended all too quickly.

  “I hate to tell you this, Mags,” Dad said, “but that is no rusted-out car.”

  Brent came up around a bend in the ravine and saw what he meant.

  Cars weren’t fifty yards long, for one thing.

  It was funny, though. He could see why Maggie had been confused about its size. If you didn’t look right at it, it seemed smaller. And it got bigger as he got closer to it—much bigger. It was almost like it couldn’t decide how big it really was, or what its real shape might be. But that didn’t make sense, he thought.

  Whatever it was, it was made of metal and yes, a lot of it had rusted away. But parts of it were still shiny, even though it had clearly been buried in the sand for a long time. The flash flood must have uncovered it, or at least, uncovered part of it. It looked like the top part of something much bigger that was still buried.

  Brent thought it might be a crashed airplane. It had a roughly cylindrical shape. Part of the top of it had been eroded away but the side walls still rose up like steepled fingers to form a series of huge arches. The surface of the object was pitted and scratched by time and weather, but it looked like it had once been very smooth, even aerodynamic.

  It lay across the ravine running perpendicular to the course of the flood. It looked like the water had tried to go around it, failed, and then just gone over it instead. Looking down through one of the arches Brent saw puddles of water inside that hadn’t even evaporated yet. “What is it?” Brent asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dad confessed. He moved closer. Brent started to follow but his dad put up one hand to stop him. “Just let me check it out first.”

  Maggie came up beside Brent as Dad stepped through one of the arches, into part of the cylinder that was still mostly intact.

  “Is this going to take long?” she asked, but before Brent could answer a hundred dusty-winged birds came swooping out of the cylinder and flapped vehemently away. One came close enough to brush Brent’s cheek with its wingtip.

  “Dad!” he called. “Dad!”

  He rushed forward, through the arch—and immediately stopped.

  And shivered.

  The air under the arc
h was at least twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. Shade in the desert was always a startling thing, but this was different. It felt like he’d stepped into an air conditioned hotel lobby. Yet the arch was open to the outside air, and he could still feel the sun beating down on his shoulders.

  He couldn’t explain it. He couldn’t even begin to think of how that might be possible.

  “Dad?” he asked, and stepped further inside.

  Chapter 2.

  Maggie waited outside. You would not catch her climbing around inside some ancient airplane hangar the military had built out in the desert and then left to collapse under its own weight. It just wasn’t safe. The thing didn’t even look normal. It looked like it kept changing shape, but then if you stared at it, it wasn’t moving or anything. Weird, she thought, as in, too weird to be part of my life.

  Of course stupid Brent had to stupidly run inside. He was only two years younger than she was, fifteen to her seventeen, but he could be such a child. And the way he followed Dad around like a puppy made her roll her eyes. He was just like a puppy—exactly like a puppy. He lived for that moment when someone called him a good boy and patted him on the head.

  Maggie decided she would wait ten minutes. That was fair, right? More than enough time to let the two of them have their little boy adventure and realize there was nothing inside more interesting than maybe some brown recluse spiders—the kind that gave you that horrible disease. Then she would demand that they come back out so the three of them could head back to camp. She just got one flickering bar of reception on her Sidekick if she went up on the bluff overlooking their campsite. It was just enough to send and receive short texts.

  She kicked at some pebbles and they bounced off the side of the thing. Instead of the muted clangs she was expecting, they made a sound like they were hitting the stretched skin of a drum. That was kind of weird.

  Had it been ten minutes yet? She wasn’t sure. Maggie never wore a watch. That was what the clock on her Sidekick was for, and she’d left it back at camp. No point hauling it around out in the desert, she’d thought. It would have just been more weight to carry in her pack. Her mom had taught her to always travel light.

  Mom—

  Maggie thought about her mom a lot. Several times a day, in fact. Sometimes she would think about the times they’d spent together and she would cry. Sometimes she’d think about the accident and get angry. The other guy had been drunk. He had absolutely no right to be driving, no right at all to be driving that fast. He’d taken away Maggie’s mom because he was too stupid to be allowed to breathe. He had ruined Maggie’s life in a split second.

  Mom.

  Maggie sighed theatrically—she was working on a new sigh, a long, drawn-out exhalation that told the world she was so over this—and then stepped down into the shady interior of the old building or whatever it was. It had to have been ten minutes, right? She was startled when she felt how cold it was inside, but at least that explained the birds. Animals in the desert would take any shade they could find, any way of cooling themselves down. There were probably jackrabbits and kit foxes inside as well, and maybe even coyotes. Now that would be stupid. Titanically stupid, to get eaten by coyotes because two little boys (one of whom happened to be her forty-year old dad) had to play explorer in the desert.

  Beyond the arches was a section where the ceiling hadn’t been worn away. It looked pretty dark back there. She stepped over some puddles of stagnant water—probably full of insect larvae, yuck—and reached into her pack to get her flashlight. When she flicked it on she saw that the cylinder went on farther than she’d thought. It sloped downward, as if most of it was still underground. Maybe it was the entrance to a mine or something. Maybe the weird chill in the air was just a breeze coming up from some deep cavern.

  Of course, she couldn’t feel a breeze. The air inside was perfectly still. But whatever. She just had to find the boys and convince them to leave. It wouldn’t be easy. They almost never accepted that she knew what she was talking about, and if she said this place was dangerous that would most likely make them want to explore deeper.

  She saw a little light up ahead. It looked like another flashlight, almost identical to the one she carried. She swung her light around and saw that Brent was pointing his own light at Dad, who was bent over something she couldn’t see. They had stopped in front of a row of big tubes set into the wall of the cylinder. A smaller tube stuck up out of the ground, like a pipe, or the top of a well. Dad was looking into its mouth.

  “Guys,” she said. “Come on—” but then she stopped. She could hear her own voice, kind of. It sounded very faint, though. It was like the cylinder was absorbing sounds. She picked up a rock and threw it at the wall. She saw it hit, but didn’t hear anything.

  “Guys!” she shouted, as loud as she could. It sounded like a whisper. The boys didn’t even turn around.

  This place was weird, and creepy. Two very good reasons to leave. She headed towards them, intending on grabbing them and dragging them out if she had to. That was when she noticed she could see her father’s bones, his skull, his rib cage, the two thin bones in his forearm.

  It was like he was being x-rayed. It was like in a cartoon when someone sticks their finger in a light socket. Then she realized she could see his bones because they were burning bright green—and because his skin and most of his flesh was already gone.

  She rushed forward, not even thinking about what she was doing, and grabbed Brent. He was staring at Dad and didn’t seem capable of moving. His eyes looked strange and his skin was glowing. Whatever had happened to Dad was starting to happen to him, too.

  Maggie looked down at her hands. Green fire covered them as if she were burning up. Yet she didn’t feel hot at all—it just tingled.

  She picked Brent up and threw him over her shoulder. Then she ran.

  Dad was dead. He was dead. He was dead! She thought he had to be. Because if he wasn’t—

  Chapter 3.

  “Oh my God, we have to go back for Dad,” Brent howled, beating on his sister’s back. She had thrown him over his shoulder and he could see behind them—all he could see was the dark mouth of the cylinder, and a hint of green fire inside. “We have to go back!”

  “Brent,” Maggie said, very quietly.

  “We have to! He could be really badly hurt! Turn around, Mags!”

  “Brent.”

  “He probably can’t walk, but we can make a travois, it’s only a couple of hours back to the car and then, and then we can drive to a hospital, it’s a long way, but—”

  “Brent!”

  “Just put me down, and I’ll go back for him, I know he was really hurt, I know it looked really bad, but you gotta—Mags—you gotta go back and—”

  “Brent, please,” she said, and stopped running. She knelt down and laid him gently on the ground. “Please stop. Please just stop and think for a second.”

  He fought her. He fought as hard as he could, because his dad’s life depended on it. “No,” he said, and shook his head. He felt like a baby refusing to eat mushed peas. He felt immature and like he wasn’t being realistic, but—Dad! Dad was back there!

  “He’s dead,” Maggie said. Over and over until he started believing it. “Dad’s dead.”

  When he opened his eyes again they were walking through the desert. The sun had set and the moon was up. He shook himself, unable to understand how he’d gotten there—a lot of time had to have passed but it felt like he’d just closed his eyes for a second. It was like his brain had just shut off, turned itself off because it couldn’t handle what was going on, and he had just started walking, his body moving by autopilot.

  He stopped in his tracks. After a second, Maggie, who was a couple strides ahead of him, stopped too. “Where are we going?” Brent asked.

  “Back to the camp. I need to make a phone call. Listen, Brent, you need to let me be in charge right now, okay?”

  “I want to go back.” When she sighed he shook his head. “I kno
w he’s dead, now. But I want to find out why. You and I got burned too, but I don’t feel like I’m hurt, and you look just fine.”

  She stared at him for a while. Then she said, “Better than fine.”

  He didn’t understand.

  In a slow, steady voice, the kind adults use when explaining complex things to children, she said, “I had a pimple. On my neck. It was there this morning. It was almost ready to pop, but not quite. It kind of hurt, especially when I got out in the sun and started sweating.” She lifted her hair away from her neck and showed him the clear, unblemished skin there. “No pimple now.”

  “That green fire—burned off your zit?” he asked.

  “Something did. And I had blisters on my feet, too, because these boots are a year old and my feet got bigger since we bought them. The blisters hurt like hell.”

  “And?”

  She rolled her eyes. “They’re gone now. My feet still feel squashed. But it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  Brent touched the underside of his chin. He had cut himself shaving there the day before. It was one of his first times shaving and he hadn’t gotten used to it yet. The nick and the razorburn had been agonizing in the desert heat. Now they were gone.

  “What does it mean?” Brent asked.

  “I have no clue!” Maggie shouted. Her voice rolled across the landscape, echoing off a line of cliffs. “Let me be in charge, okay? I promise I’ll keep you safe. I’ll get you home.”

  Brent’s throat closed up suddenly and he wondered if it was a delayed reaction to the green fire, if he was suddenly dying. But no. A tear worked its way out of the side of his eye. “Home,” he croaked. “We don’t have a home anymore. We’re—”

  “Orphans,” she said. “Yeah. Which means we have to stick together. And because I’m the oldest that means I’m in charge and you do what I say. Got it?”

  He nodded carefully.

  They didn’t go back. Instead they pressed on, toward the camp. The desert by moonlight was made of silver in a million different shades. There was enough light to see where they were putting their feet, but they stayed clear of the long shadows that were impenetrably dark.