Rivals 1

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.