Rivals 1

Brent's head spun. He tried to stand up and just fell down to one knee. He rubbed at his eyes - they were full of brick dust - and tried again. This time he managed to stand up.

Then Maggie came at him, swinging an overhead projector like a club. He swerved out of her way and tried to sweep her legs out from under her on the way down. Instead she hopped over him and broke through the room's door with her shoulder.

"No," he said, and dashed after her.

Out in the hallway there must have been a hundred kids standing there, gawking at her. Their mouths were open. Their eyes were wide. They weren't moving. The biology teacher, Mr. Armitage, was trying to lead them away but all they could do was look.

Maggie just laughed. "Go Panthers!" she said, and pumped a fist in the air. Then she turned around to face Brent and brought her hands up like she would grab him and throw him into the crowd.

"Mags," Brent said, picking his way through the ruins of the door, "just hold on a second, okay? Let them go."

"Why?" she asked. "What do I owe them? When I was in trouble, when I was hurting, they all turned on me. They wrote me off, Brent. They gave up on me."

"I didn't." He glanced at the crowd and saw that it was, slowly, moving down the hallway, toward a fire exit. "I tried, again and again, to help you. But you wouldn't let me."

"You couldn't do anything. You were too busy doing dirty work for Weathers. And then you betrayed me."

"I did not! He used me!"

"What. Ev."

The hallway was almost clear. Only a few stragglers had stayed behind to watch, and teachers were pulling them away. He just had to stall a couple more seconds.

"I wanted you to come home. I wanted to fix everything. But you kept hurting people. You kept making it worse!"

The anger drained out of her face. Maggie's shoulders slumped and she suddenly looked very, very tired. "You get to this point," she said, "when it's all broken. When you've gone too far. And after that, everything you can think of just makes it worse. But you keep doing it because you don't have any choices left."

"That's bullshit. You always have choices."

The hall was empty, except for the two of them. Okay, Brent thought. Okay, whatever happens now, it's alright. Nobody gets hurt but us.

"Stop making it sound so easy!" Maggie came stomping toward him. "Stop making it sound like I ever had a chance." She swung at him, and he ducked under her fist. Then he kicked out with one leg and caught her in the stomach.

She went flying, arcing through the air to smash into a trophy case outside the entrance to the gym. Plate glass smashed and glittered through the air and she screamed as the shards of broken glass cut through her hoodie and jabbed her in a hundred places at once. She slid out of the display case and sat down hard on the floor. Then she reached up and picked a three inch long sliver of glass out of her hair.

"Give up," he said.

Knowing she wouldn't.

She reached up and grabbed a golden statue of a football player from the case, then flung it at him with all of her strength. He managed to dodge to one side, but the statue smashed a crater into the wall behind him.

Next came a championship cup for baseball. It grazed his shoulder and went skittering down the hallway. He looked down and saw a deep gouge in his arm, welling with blood.

She grabbed a smaller trophy next, a piece of granite and chrome that she started to chuck at him - then stopped. "This is for field hockey," she said. "I helped earn this one. How about golf instead?"

Brent threw himself to the left and then rolled back up to his knees and got to his feet. She had plenty more trophies to go through, and he knew he couldn't dodge them all. He pushed through the doors to the gym and hoped she was mad enough to follow him. She most definitely was - the doors flew off their hinges as she burst inside.

He'd had a second or two to prepare. As she spun around looking for him, he wound up his arm and then pegged her in the head with a softball.

"Gah!" she screamed, probably more from surprise than pain. She grabbed her head and for a second she wasn't watching him. He charged her and knocked her backwards into a rack of baseball bats that clattered around her feet. When she tried to get up again she tripped on the rolling bats and fell in a heap.

Now, he thought - this was his big chance. He wrapped an arm around her throat and hauled her upwards, leaning back to get her feet off the ground. She was stronger than he was, he knew, but if she couldn't get any leverage all that strength wouldn't help her. He could choke her until she passed out.

"Just stop," he shouted in her ear. "Stop! That's your choice. Stop what you're doing and let somebody else help you for once!"

Her face was turning blue. He eased up, a little, not wanting to choke her to death. Her eyes rolled toward him and he saw pure hatred there. She wouldn't ease up if their roles were reversed.

"I'm so sorry," he told her, and tightened his grip. He could feel her trachea start to collapse.

Then she reached up with one flailing hand and grabbed his left ear. And pulled.

He felt the skin tearing, felt the cartilage in his ear crush under the pressure. She was going to pull his ear right off his head. He felt something give way and blood poured down the side of his neck. Horrified, he released some of the pressure on her throat and then -

Then he blacked out for a second.

He came to and saw a baseball bat swinging toward his face, right at his eyes. Pain exploded inside his head and all he could see was blood. He heard the bat whistle through the air again and the side of his head felt like it was caving in. She hit him again on the chest, again on the legs - it was like she was smashing him to a pulp.

His vision cleared a little as his skull reshaped itself under his skin. He looked around wildly and saw a white painted wall coming toward him - and then he was through it, he could hear himself scream as she kept pushing him forward, driving them both forward as hard as she could, another wall - he saw the inside of the girls' locker room for a second, then another wall - there was so much noise, so much confusion, dust everywhere in the air and bricks falling all around him, and then she threw him and he hit the floor face first, there was pain, there was a lot of pain, and then he collapsed, his shoulders hitting the tiles, his legs kicking out meaninglessly behind him.

"Do you think," she said, sounding like she was a long way away, "that I won't kill you, just because you're family?"

"Weathers - said you would - neutralize me," he tried to tell her. The words that came out of his mouth sounded like mush.

"It's not like it would be the first time," she said. She grabbed a handful of his hair and lifted his head up so he could look at her face. Only one of his eyes seemed to work. "I killed dad, after all. And I liked dad."

She picked him up, shoving her shoulder into his armpit. She was going to carry him somewhere. What was she doing?

And... wait - what had she just said?

Ahead of him he saw the wall of the AV room. The first wall she'd pushed him through. "You - " he said, but there were teeth in his mouth and he almost swallowed them. He spat them out instead. "You - "

Where the wall of the AV room had fallen away it had exposed broken concrete with a length of steel rebar poking out of it. The bar stuck out at an angle, pointing right at him. She was dragging him toward the bar. He knew exactly what she had in mind.

"You didn't - " he moaned.

She was going to impale his head on the bar. He was pretty sure that would do it. That would kill him.

"You didn't kill Dad," he managed to say.