Rivals Read online

  It was a long hike. They should have been asleep by now, safely wrapped up in their sleeping bags. Even when they got to the camp, they would just load everything up in the car and head back to town, to civilization. To a lot of questions they couldn’t answer. Brent kind of wished his brain would shut down again, but it didn’t.

  He heard a rock collide with another rock in the darkness, a soothing Tchok! and then a rattle as the rock bounced and rolled and settled down. He looked ahead and saw Maggie holding a handful of small stones worn perfectly smooth by the water that had left the desert behind thousands of years ago.

  She threw another one, underhand. It went farther this time and the sounds were less clear.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Scaring off coyotes. I don’t know! I’m just—it helps me not think.”

  “Can I try?” Brent asked.

  “You’ve got two hands. Get your own rocks.”

  He bent and picked up a pile of smooth stones for himself. He tossed one at a cactus plant about fifty yards away. One arm of the cactus creaked and then fell off.

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” he said, putting a hand over his mouth.

  “It’s just a cactus,” Maggie said. “There are lots of them.” She threw one of her own rocks at the plant and another arm came off. Water trickled sluggishly down its trunk, brilliant in the moonlight.

  “Hold on,” Brent said. There was something weird about this. He picked up a slightly larger stone, about the size of a golf ball. He picked another cactus, wound up, and threw the stone as hard as he could.

  There was a noise like a gun going off. He had missed the cactus by a few yards. Instead the stone hit the ground in front of it. Dirt and sand flew up in huge sprays and the stone dug a deep crater in the ground. Brent ran over to the hole in the ground and reached inside to find the rock. It was buried a foot down, and it was hot to the touch when he brought it up into the night air.

  “Maggie,” he said, “I think we—”

  He looked back and saw his sister holding a rock as big as a beach ball. It must have weighed a hundred pounds, he thought, at least. It occurred to him that he hadn’t wondered at all how she was able to throw him over her shoulder and carry him out of the cylinder when he was, in fact, a little taller and a lot heavier than she was.

  “Mags, don’t hurt yourself,” Brent said.

  Maggie spun from the waist and hurled the boulder out into the night. Brent watched it fly as far as he could before he lost it in the darkness. It hadn’t started coming down again when he lost sight of it. Neither of them heard it land.

  Chapter 4.

  They made it back to camp a few hours later, but it was more than a week before they got to go home. When they arrived back in town, Brent demanded that they go to a hospital and get checked out, even though Maggie insisted that she was fine and had never actually felt better.

  It turned out that going to the hospital was a mistake. The doctors there had lots of questions. Once they started answering them, they never stopped coming up with more. Maggie said very little about their rock-throwing contest, or how they had been able to hike through the desert for hours without getting tired. The two of them had agreed that whatever had happened to them, however they had changed, they should probably keep it to themselves as much as possible.

  Soon enough reporters started coming around, well-dressed, very nice people who wrote down everything the two kids said. After that a man in a dark blue suit arrived. He sent the reporters away. His name was Special Agent Weathers, he told them, and he was with the government.

  “Can I see some ID?” Maggie asked.

  Weathers frowned, but then he took an FBI badge out of his pocket and showed it to her. Brent had never seen one before and asked if he could take a look, too.

  Weathers had a lot of questions, and they were very similar to the questions the kids had already answered. “Where exactly was this cylinder located? Could you find it again if we took you out there, or at least show me its location on a map? Did you hear, see, or feel anything unusual when you were inside? Please tell me again, exactly how your father died. Please tell me one more time. I just want to be clear, exactly how it happened, exactly how your father died.”

  He asked that one so many times even Brent looked like he couldn’t stand it.

  “That’s enough,” Maggie said, finally. “You’re going to make my little brother cry.”

  “No he won’t!” Brent said.

  “Alright, never mind. I think I understand, anyway,” Weathers said. “I have a team of scientists out there right now looking for this place. When they find it we’ll try to recover your father’s body. Then you can have a funeral and this will all be over.”

  “No it won’t,” Maggie said. “I know exactly how this works. You’re going to watch us from now on. You’re going to have people watch us for the rest of our lives. God, I hate this.”

  “Mags, take it easy,” Brent said. “He’s trying to help.”

  “Help? By asking the same question over and over, like he’s waiting for us to catch ourselves in a lie? We didn’t do anything wrong!”

  “No one said you had,” the FBI man told her. He looked like he was afraid she was going to get violent. “Just take it easy. We’re not in the habit of watching American citizens twenty-four seven like that, that’s just something from the movies—”

  Maggie grabbed the arms of her chair. She didn’t trust this guy—hadn’t, from the first second she saw him. Brent had, of course. Brent trusted everyone.

  “You think,” she said, very slowly, “that we’re making this all up. You think we killed him and we invented this story to cover it up. Don’t you?”

  Brent stared at her as if she’d gone crazy.

  Weathers, however, just settled back in his chair and wove his fingers together. “In a case like this,” he said, “it’s our official policy to investigate the last person who saw the deceased alive. It’s just routine. Whatever I may or may not think is immaterial.”

  “We loved him,” Brent said, very loud. “We would never—”

  There was a loud splintery snap as the arms of Maggie’s chair snapped off in her hands. She hadn’t realized she’d been squeezing them so hard. She held up the two pieces of wood and stared at them.

  Weathers reached up and loosened his tie. Then he pointed at the pieces of wood Maggie was holding in her hands. “Do you want to talk to me about that?”

  “No,” Maggie said. “I want you to leave.”

  The agent stood up slowly from his chair. He was kind of fat and he grunted every time he stood up or sat down. The top of his head was shiny where he was going bald. These things made Maggie strangely happy. They made her want to grin wickedly and laugh.

  But then he spoke again and her blood ran cold.

  “I know you came back from that desert… changed,” he said. “The doctors saw some things. Well. They saw you doing some things that children like you should not be capable of. Do you understand me?”

  Maggie bit her lip. She didn’t look at him, but she nodded.

  “If this is real, if you have… new powers. That’s going to need to be handled very carefully. I’d like you to not talk to the media about this. Alright? At least not until we know what we’re up against.”

  “I really want you to leave,” Maggie said, but he ignored her.

  “We’re going to need to do some tests,” he said instead. “Now would be the best time, actually, while you’re still in the hospital. I’d like to do some stress tests, maybe put you two on treadmills and see what your endurance is like. If you—”

  Someone had come up to stand in the doorway. It was a little old lady, no more than four and a half feet tall, with silver hair parted severely on one side and thick glasses over her eyes. “The young lady told you to go,” she said.

  “Hi, Grandma,” Brent said weakly.

  Grandma scared Brent. There was a good reason for that. Maggie knew
she wouldn’t scare Weathers. At least not yet. He didn’t know her secret.

  “Hello, ma’am,” the agent said. “You must be Mrs. Reynolds, the children’s guardian, is that correct?”

  “I’m seventy-one years old, young man, and it seems I have better hearing than you do. Get out. Now. Or I’ll call the police.”

  Weathers tried to smile. “Ma’am, I am a law enforcement officer.”

  “Then I’ll call your boss and tell him you were harassing a senior citizen and a tax-payer of over fifty years. I would imagine they frown on that sort of thing where you come from, hmm?”

  Weathers’ smile disappeared. “Very well,” he said. He glanced over at Maggie. “We’ll talk again. Count on it. But for now, just try to keep a low profile, okay?” Then he left.

  “Good, he’s gone.” Grandma came hobbling over toward the two kids on her cane. “I imagine you two are surprised to see me here. I was very surprised when they told me I was now your official next of kin. I’ve come to take you home. I’ll be moving in with you since you don’t have anyone else to look after you.”

  Maggie nodded slowly. “Okay,” she said. “But, honestly, we can probably look after ourselves. I mean, I know how much you enjoy your time in Florida—”

  Grandma came closer and reached down to put a hand over Maggie’s. “Margaret Reynolds Gill, your eighteenth birthday isn’t until next July. When that day comes, I give you my full permission to tell me to go to hell. Until then, you will do as I say. You will do exactly as I say. And if you try to argue with what I say, I will give you the back of this hand across your cheek. You’ll notice I’m wearing my diamond engagement ring, the one your mother’s father gave me forty-nine years ago. I put it on today extra special because I knew I was coming to see you.” Grandma turned her head to the side. “Hello, Brent, dear,” she said.

  “Um, hi,” Maggie’s brother managed.

  Chapter 5.

  It took forever for the two of them to get discharged from the hospital. Pretty much every doctor in the place seemed to want to come and talk to them one last time. To ask them more questions. Finally one doctor came in who said he wanted to give them some answers. “Except,” he said, “I’m not sure we have any. Not any that mean much, anyway. You both check out fine, physically. Better than fine, really. Um, Brent—your chart says you broke your arm last year?”

  “That’s right. I was jumping off a diving board into a pool and I hit the bottom with my wrist. It was in a cast for six weeks.”

  The doctor consulted something on a clipboard. “You see, normally that would show up on an x-ray, even after it healed. But I don’t see so much as a hairline or a shadow here.” He looked up and smiled at them. “Whatever happened to you in that ravine—you came back healthier than when you left. Now, we’d love to do some more tests—”

  “Not on my dime,” Grandma said. She lead the two of them down to the parking lot, where Brent got a surprise. A hundred and five pounds of teenaged girl came flying at him like a bullet out of a gun, trailing balloons.

  “Oh my god oh my god oh my god you’re alright,” Lucy said. Lucy Benez had been Brent’s best friend since they started high school together and met at an anime festival. He was truly, truly glad to see her and he actually kissed her on the cheek, something he’d never done before.

  She stepped back and looked at him. She was so excited her face was flushed. She wore her hair in two pony-tails sticking out at angles from the top of her head and she had braces. Not just on her teeth, either—she had braces on her legs as well, metal contraptions she had to wear because one of her legs was two inches longer than the other. The doctors were slowly but surely trying to fix that by stretching out the shorter leg. She said it hurt a lot but she didn’t let it get to her. “When I heard I just about died,” she told him. “But I knew you would be okay. You’ve been out in that desert a million times. And oh my God. Oh my God. I’m so sorry about your Dad. He was so great. Oh, Brent. Brent! Here! These are for you!” She handed him the balloons. They all said GET WELL SOON on them.

  Lucy could only walk at a sort of fast hobble, but she easily compensated for it by talking twice as fast as everybody else. He’d asked her why, once, and she said that she had twice as much to say as anybody, and anyway half of what most people said was just dumb, just hello, what a nice day, I see you’re getting taller when you really weren’t, and she figured she would get that half of every conversation over with in the first couple minutes and by the time the conversation wound down she would have gotten to the really important stuff, the stuff people actually wanted to hear.

  Listening to Lucy talk made Brent out of breath. Still. There was no one he wanted to see more. He was scared, to be honest, and really worried, and he was still screwed up about losing his dad. He needed her friendship more than ever.

  “I am totally here for you. You can count on me, whatever you need, whether that’s someone to talk to, or a shoulder to cry on, or who knows, maybe you just want to go to the movies some time and pretend like things are still normal and nothing has changed and that it’s okay to just go and, say, see a movie. If you want that, I am here.”

  “Grandma?” Brent asked. “Can we give Lucy a ride?”

  “I’m not sure if there’s room,” Grandma said, unlocking the driver’s side door of her station wagon.

  In the back seat, on the ride home, Brent confided everything he’d been secretly thinking to Lucy. He knew he could trust her. He started small. “I don’t think I’m really going to like living with the two of them,” he said, nodding discretely toward the front seats. Maggie and Grandma were talking to each other, loud enough to drown out anything he said. “They argue all the time—it’s awful. It’s been going on for years now, but before, at least they didn’t live in the same house. We only saw Grandma on holidays. They would always get in a fight and Grandma would end up slapping Maggie because she used a curse word or because she said she was a democrat or an atheist or whatever. Most of the time it wasn’t even true, she would just say it to get a rise out of Grandma. I think she wanted to get hit.”

  “But why?” Lucy asked. “Why would anyone want that? Other than a masochist, I mean, and from my experience masochists are pretty rare. I mean, actual masochists. Lots of people do things that hurt them, but—”

  “Because,” Brent said, because he knew Lucy didn’t mind being interrupted, “then Mom and Dad would have to take us home early. But now, where are we going to go if there’s a problem? And Maggie’s already starting in on her.”

  “Your sister is really pretty,” Lucy said. “And very smart, which is a rare combination. Only a very few of us—I mean, of us females, I’m speaking for us as a group here, not for my own self—can say that much. It’s a shame she’s also—”

  “Listen, Luce. There’s something else.” He had been thinking about how to put this. He had failed to come up with the right words, though, the words that would make it sound real. Whenever he said it out loud it made him laugh, even though he knew it was true. “Whatever happened to us, it changed us.”

  She nodded solemnly. “Sure. Losing both parents would have to change somebody. I can’t even imagine what I would do if my dad—”

  Brent shook his head. “Not—psychologically. I don’t mean it changed my personality. I mean it changed me physically. Lucy—I think I have superpowers.”

  Chapter 6.

  Once inside the house Maggie went straight to her room and slammed the door. Grandma went to the kitchen. When Brent and Lucy headed for his room, however, she leaned around the corner of the doorway and scowled. “This your girlfriend, boy?”

  Brent’s eyes went wide. He stared at Lucy, then back at Grandma. “No!” he said. “We’re just—friends, we study together sometimes, it’s—”

  “I’m holding you to the same rule I gave your mother twenty-odd years ago. When there’s a girl in your room, you keep the door open at least one foot, and you don’t play any loud music. I know perfectly
well why boys your age listen to their music so loud.”

  “You do?” Brent asked. He didn’t know whether he played his music particularly loud or not.

  “I do,” Grandma agreed. “I may look old to you but I was sixteen once.”

  “We’re fifteen, Mrs. Gill,” Lucy said, with a huge metallic smile.

  “Reynolds,” Brent corrected her.

  “Mrs. Reynolds. I mean. I guess you were Brent’s mom’s mother? I mean, of course, you still are. Except she’s—but you don’t stop being somebody’s mother, that’s not something you can—”

  “We’re just going to sit in my room and talk,” Brent explained.

  Grandma blinked, every flicker of her eyelids magnified by her huge glasses. “Yes, I imagine you will.” Then she stepped back inside the kitchen and out of view.

  Brent went into his room with Lucy. She unstrapped her leg braces, then flopped on his bed while he put his balloons in the corner. Brent always thought better while he was pacing, so he started a circuit of his room, going from his computer table over to his poster of Edward Abbey and then over to his closet door before starting over on the same path.

  When he didn’t say anything for five or six laps, Lucy sat up on the bed and grabbed at his arm as it went by. “Hey. Hey. Talk to me.”

  “You don’t believe me. I understand that,” he told her. “I wouldn’t believe me either. It’s a ludicrous thing to say. Nobody in the real world has superpowers, nobody in history has ever had—”

  “Brent,” she said, interrupting him for once. “I do.”

  “What?”

  She smiled. “If anybody else said it, then, maybe, yeah. I would be kind of skeptical. But this is you. I believe you. I always do.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair and started pacing again, then thought of something and hurried to his closet. He threw the door open and started rooting around under piles of dirty clothes.