Rivals (13 page)

“Woah,” Brent
said, starting to get up from the table, his lunch completely forgotten, “this
is going too far—”

“Brent,” Dana
said, and he sat back down because she had placed her hand on his arm.
“Please. Jill can be—overly enthusiastic sometimes. But she’s actually
just trying to help me out. I told her I thought you were cute. That maybe I
liked you.”

“You… do?”

Dana smiled.
She had a great smile. “Let’s say it’s a possibility. I’d like to get to know
you first before I fall in love with you or anything.”

“That sounds a
little better,” Brent said, “but seriously, I just don’t have the time.”

“You have to
eat, don’t you?” Dana asked. It sounded like she wasn’t sure, as if she was
wondering whether having superpowers meant Brent no longer had to do normal
things like sleep or breathe or ingest mundane foodstuffs. “Let me make you
dinner. I owe you at least that much for saving my life. Don’t I?”

“I guess it
would be rude to say no,” Brent admitted. Wow, he thought. She smells pretty
good, doesn’t she? And he remembered how she’d felt lying on top of him when
he pulled her out of traffic… “I guess—that would be okay. Maybe—”

He stopped
because out of the corner of his eye he’d seen a paunchy, middle-aged man
weaving his way through the cafeteria tables. It was Special Agent Weathers.

“What’s he
doing here?” Brent asked.

“Tomorrow
night. Seven o’clock. You know where I live? I can text you the address,”
Dana said, but Brent barely heard her. He was getting up from the table and
turning to face the FBI man.

Weathers
looked sweaty. Like he’d run some distance to find Brent. The look on his
face could only mean one thing—and then he said it out loud.

“We’ve got
her,” he said. “We found your sister.”

Maggie knew
how to swear. She supposed every kid did, but back when she and Mandy Hunt
were in middle school together, they’d had a game where they challenged each
other to come up with the worst thing you could possibly say. They started
with “you are a pus-dripping donkey anus,” and worked their way up from there.
You got extra points if you could say it like you actually meant it.

Maggie had
usually won that game. She was a champion at being frustrated, if nothing
else. But maybe not good enough to express exactly how she felt about the bank
vault door. It was proving to her something she’d suspected but never
experienced before: there were limits to her new super-strength.

“Festering eye
socket of a month-dead syphilitic warthog!” she screamed.

It was ten
feet high and just as wide. There was no good way to get her fingers around
its edge because it sat flush with the wall. The hinges were on the inside, so
she couldn’t just tear those off, either. She tried pounding her way through
it with her fists. It made her knuckles bleed but at least she was making
progress of some kind, in that she had seriously dented the metal door.

“Lice-encrusted
scalp of a bastard pornographer!”

After about
five minutes of that she stood back and examined her progress. She had put a
three-inch deep dimple in the surface of the door. It would take hours and
hours to get through the door like that. By the time she did, every cop in
town would be down there with her, probably shooting her repeatedly in the
back.

“This isn’t
fair!” she shouted, and her words echoed in the marble basement that housed the
vault. When the echoes died away, silence returned—silence, except for
the sound of police sirens wailing away upstairs.

She cursed a
few more times, then she just gave up. There had to be easier ways to get
money.

She headed
upstairs carefully, keeping an eye out for anyone waiting for her with a
shotgun. The bank lobby was empty, though. Red and blue light was flashing
off the walls, throwing weird shadows across the marble, but there was not a
single person to be found. Even the teller with the mole on her nose was
gone—she probably ran away the second Maggie headed down the stairs.

Maggie took a
deep breath. Then she turned around and looked outside. Through the revolving
doors she could see the street. A line of police cars stood out there, their
lights whirling angrily. Men in uniform were crouched behind the cars, and
they all had guns. All the guns were pointing at her.

“Crap,” she
said, which wasn’t very inventive but it expressed her emotions perfectly. She
started to run back toward the stairs—maybe she could get out by way of
the roof—when the glass doors shattered and something much bigger than a
bullet came sailing into the room. It hit one of the ATM machines hard and
then dropped to the floor.

Maggie picked
it up. It looked like a spray can of whipped cream—except it was painted
a flat black. There were holes all down its sides. As she studied it, bright
yellow smoke started oozing out of the holes.

Tear gas, she
thought—even as her throat started to close up. She wasn’t invulnerable
to tear gas, apparently. She turned and threw the grenade back out through the
shattered glass doors and smiled as the cops there all scattered.

Something was
popping and crackling behind her. She turned and saw the ATM that the grenade
had hit. The screen was shattered, exposing the machine’s guts—wiring
and circuit boards and a security camera dangling by one wire. Little flames
were popping into life inside the machine as sparks jumped back and forth.

Maggie felt
like palming her face.
Duh
, she
thought. Everyone uses the ATMs these days for cash withdrawals. The teller
had told her as much.

She swung
around and kicked the ATM hard. It fell to pieces and money started spilling
out all over the floor. Some of it was on fire. She left those bills and
grabbed as many undamaged twenties as she could, stuffing them inside her
backpack. There were a lot more of them than she’d expected and she didn’t
have time to stack them properly so they got crumpled up in the pack but it
didn’t matter. It was money—she had her money, the money she needed
to—

“Margaret
Gill,” someone said, their voice amplified by a bullhorn. It was the cops.
“We want to end this peacefully with no one getting hurt. Your brother is on
the way—he says he wants to talk to you before we take you into custody.”

Maggie stopped
what she was doing and looked up, as if Brent would be right there in front of
her. “Crap,” she said again. She had taken too long.

Weathers
parked his car as close to the bank as he could get. The police had already
closed down the road that lead past the bank building, stringing up yellow tape
and parking cars lengthwise across the street to keep anyone from trying to get
in. There were plenty of reporters already who were trying to cross the
barricades anyway. They’d been waiting for this, Brent knew. Waiting for
Maggie to do something bad.

“If I can talk
her down, if I can get her to surrender,” Brent said, “will you let her come
home?”

He knew the
answer, of course. But he waited for Weathers to sigh and say, “It’s gone too
far for that. I’ll need to arrest her—it’s better if I do it than the
local cops, probably. I can take her some place safe.”

“Like
a—” Brent swallowed painfully, “—a psychiatric hospital? So she
can get some help, work out her problems?”

“Maybe,
eventually,” Weathers said. “I was actually thinking that the local jail
wouldn’t be able to hold her. She could just punch her way through the walls.
I have an idea about a place we can put her she can’t escape from.” He sighed
again and turned to look Brent in the eye. “She’s broken a lot of laws, and
she’s hurt people. You have to understand, Brent, that society has a
responsibility to people who—”

“I understand
that she’s my sister, that’s all,” Brent said, and he got out of the car before
Weathers could say anything more.

There was a
policeman standing at the roadblock pushing back the reporters but when he saw
Brent he lifted up the yellow tape and let Brent duck underneath it. Beyond
the tape cars were parked in a semi-circle around the bank’s front door. A few
tendrils of yellow smoke were rolling along the gutters—Brent had no idea
what that was about. The flashing lights and the squawking of so many police
radios disoriented him. Cops with handguns and rifles were crouched behind the
cars. They didn’t look at Brent as he walked out into the middle of the
street. Behind him a police captain with a bullhorn called Maggie’s name. The
amplified voice made Brent wince.

“Margaret—your
brother’s here. Do you want to talk to him?”

Brent stared
at the police captain, then back at the revolving doors of the bank. This
wasn’t going to work, he thought. There was too much chaos, too many people
strained to the pitch of desperation. He needed to talk to Maggie alone. He
looked back at the police captain and said, “I want to go inside.”

“No way, kid,”
the captain told him, holding one hand over the mouthpiece of his bullhorn so
what he said wouldn’t be broadcast to the whole neighborhood. “It’s too
dangerous.”

“I wasn’t
asking,” Brent told him, and walked over to the revolving door. It was
shattered, its glass broken, but the metal frame was intact and when he pushed
it, it turned and let him inside.

Maggie was
waiting for him there. She grabbed him and then jumped back, away from the
door and the windows. She pulled him over a counter and down into a narrow
space behind the teller windows.

“You shouldn’t
have come,” she said.

“Jeez! That
hurt! My head bounced off a cash register,” he told her, rubbing the back of
his skull. The pain faded almost instantly, but still he was annoyed. “Why
did you do that?”

“They’ve got
snipers out there. If I show myself in the windows they’re going to shoot
first and ask questions later.”

Brent took a
long look at her. The light wasn’t great but he could see how tired she
looked. Her eyes were narrowed and her hair was a mess. She looked even more
desperate than the cops outside.

“Mags, what’s
been going on with you?”

“I’ve just
been trying to keep out of trouble.” She glanced up at the white painted wall
behind them. It turned blue, then red, then blue again as the police flashers
outside cycled. “Didn’t work. Listen, I’m going to run away. Leave town.
You’ll probably never see me again. I’m sure that’s what everyone wants.”

“Not me,” he
told her. He stared into her eyes. She looked away but he kept watching her
face. “Did you see the message I sent you? It was on TV all day. And in the
papers.”

“I’ve mostly
been avoiding the news. It’s all about how awful I am and how everybody’s
scared of me.” She shrugged. “But yeah. I saw it. It was… really nice of
you, Brent, to say those things. It’s nice to think there’s one person out
there who might believe I had excuses for everything I did. I wish I could say
it mattered, though.”

“Of course it
matters! That’s why I did it. I want you to come home. We’ll straighten
everything out with grandma. I’ll even talk to her about not hitting you
anymore. Mandy Hunt probably won’t press charges, if you just explain—”

Maggie laughed
at him.

Brent felt his
cheeks getting warm. He didn’t like that laugh. It said he was just a little
kid, still, and he couldn’t possibly know how serious things had become.

“I admit it
won’t be easy to come back,” he said.

“Easy,” she
said. She wasn’t avoiding his gaze anymore. Now she was just blowing him off.
“Easy. Everything’s easy for you now, isn’t it? Everybody loves you. The
big hero. Brent, if I go out there right now with you and turn myself in, what
do you think is going to happen? Do you think they’ll give me a chance to
explain? Or do you think they will just take me off to jail and let me rot
there for the rest of my life?”

“You… may have
to go to jail for a while,” he admitted.

“A while. I’m
seventeen years old. By the time I got out I would be as old as Grandma. Bank
robbery, Brent. Attempted murder—that’s what the papers are saying about
what I did at Mandy’s house. Assault and battery, on Grandma. Who knows what
else they can think up?”

Brent shook
his head. “So you won’t come with me. You won’t come out of here peacefully.”

“Actually, I
will,” she said.

He blinked.
“You will?” She didn’t sound as if she meant it.

“I’m going to
walk out that door with you, arm in arm. That way, they won’t shoot at me.
They’ll wonder if maybe, just maybe, I’ve decided you’re right and that I
should just give up. Take what’s coming to me. Reform and become a model
citizen. They won’t believe it. But maybe they’ll think it for just a second.
Which is all the time I need to get away.”

“Please,
Maggie. Just consider coming home, for real. For me.”

“Let’s go,”
she said, and stood up. She hauled him up to his feet. Together they jumped
over the teller counter and headed to the door. “I’ll know if it’s working in
a second.”

“How?” he
asked.

“If they start
shooting the second I appear in the window, then they aren’t buying it. Come
on. This way.”

“And what if I
refuse to help you?”

“Then,” she
said, “you can watch the police gun down your sister in cold blood, and you can
spend the rest of your life knowing you could have stopped it, and you didn’t.”

Brent squeezed
his eyes shut. That was exactly how he’d killed Dad, wasn’t it? By watching
it happen and not doing anything. He had no choice.

“We’re coming
out together,” he shouted. The police had to be listening.