Rivals 1

"Grandma," Brent said, peering out through the car windows at the desert, remembering every landmark. "I'm calling to tell you that I'm about to go fight Maggie. Probably for the last time."

On Brent's cheap cell phone Grandma's voice was very faint and kept breaking up. Some of her words were lost to static. "You're going to - hiss - finish off that little - crackle - now? That's - beep - time."

Brent frowned. He could barely hear her. "I don't know if this is the right thing to do. But she has Lucy and she might... well, she might do something actually evil. I can't let that happen. I'm the only one in the world who can stop her, and - "

"Boy," Grandma interrupted, "if you need to - snap - her - sigh - up, then you do it. If anyone - rumble - her, she broke my - pop."

"I just wish Dad was here," he told her. "He would know what the right thing to do was. All I know is what feels right to me, right now." The phone beeped three times in his hand and he realized he'd lost the connection. Dana's car must have passed beyond cell phone range. There would be no more parental advice.

It meant they had almost arrived. "I really want to thank you for your help," he told Dana, sitting back in his seat and closing his eyes. "I suppose I could have just run down here but I would have been exhausted when I arrived."

"I would do a lot of things for you, Brent," Dana told him. "You rescued me. I owe you, big time."

He blushed and looked out the window. "Here," he said. "This is where I get out." He recognized a butte on the horizon and a stand of nopal cactus. This was where they had set up their camp. It was where they'd started hiking into the desert. The car couldn't get him any closer. "I don't know if I'm coming back or not," he told the popular girls. "Can you wait an hour? If I don't show up by then, just go home and - and tell the police. They won't be able to stop Maggie. But maybe they'll find somebody who can."

"Brent," Dana said, "just be careful. For me?"

He couldn't promise that. He smiled at her anyway and started to get out of the car.

"Wait," Jill said. She leaned over his seat and grabbed his hand. "Just one thing before you go."

"Yeah?"

"Something you need to consider."

"Alright," Brent said, wondering what she had in mind.

"If your sister kills you, Dana won't have a date for homecoming. Okay? So come back to us in one piece. Otherwise it will be incredibly awkward if I have to find her a replacement at the last minute."

Brent closed the door softly behind him and started off into the desert, moving as fast as he could. Maggie had a considerable head start and he had no idea what she was up to. He ran on the flat desert floor, then reached the head of the ravine and started leaping from rock to rock, getting as much air as he could so he could survey the destruction ahead of him. He didn't need super-eyesight to tell he'd come to the right place. The trailers and construction equipment near the cylinder were trashed, torn apart or picked up and cast aside like toys the day after Christmas. He didn't see any sign of Lucy. Maggie, on the other hand, was in plain view. She wasn't trying to hide. She stood near the cylinder, out in the sun. She was holding something big over her head. It looked like a portable generator, though Brent was too far away to make out much in the way of detail.

Then Maggie threw it at him and he got a much closer look than he would have preferred.

The generator came sailing through the air right at him. He jumped aside as it shattered on the rocks, showering him in fuel oil and machine parts. He looked up just in time to see a forklift following close behind. Then a half of a construction trailer. The noise was incredibly loud as he leapt from rock to rock, never more than half a second ahead of the incoming projectiles.

A backhoe hit just behind him. Its digger arm snapped off on impact and went spinning through the air. He tried to duck but it struck him in the arm, sending fiery pain shooting up into his shoulder.

"Damn," he shouted, as he spun around and dropped into the ravine. Maggie must have known he was coming. He moved as quickly as he could down the dried-up wash, keeping his head down as more pieces of equipment came raining of the sky. A satellite dish dug into the dirt in front of him, nearly tripping him. A Geiger counter went whizzing past his head like a bullet, trailing its wand behind it. A truck tire smacked him right in the chest. It was too soft to break any of his bones but it had enough momentum enough to knock him over on his back and drive the breath out of his lungs.

As he lay on the dirt staring up at the sky, he saw a jeep come screaming out of the blue, on a ballistic trajectory right for his head. It took every ounce of energy he had to get his feet under him and throw himself to the left before it hit, sending up enormous plumes of dirt and small rocks. He covered his face with one arm as the ejecta came showering down all around him, stones the size of softballs bouncing painfully off the back of his head.

When the dirt settled he moved. He pushed himself, dug his feet into the ground and threw himself forward, accelerating with every step until the wind was howling past his ears. Maggie kept throwing things at him - a spotlight on a tripod, surveying tools, the engine block of a jeep - but he was moving so fast he blazed right past them. He didn't even feel the ground shake with the impacts.

He came out of the ravine so fast the world around him blurred. He shot right toward Maggie as she picked up something else, a new weapon to use against him, but before she could throw it he grabbed it away from her. Unable to shed his momentum he ran right past her, skidding and plowing deep furrows in the ground as he tried to slow himself by digging his heels into the ground.

It was only when he'd stopped completely, when his dust cloud caught up with him, that he looked down and saw what he'd grabbed out of Maggie's hands.

It was a hand grenade, and the pin had already been pulled.

"Oh, sh - " he had time to say before it went off. His brain didn't have time to react. His arms moved anyway, throwing the grenade away from him as hard as he could. It went off in mid-air, only a dozen yards from where he stood. Fragments of metal and burning gunpowder spattered his face and chest and his body screamed.

He dropped to his knees and curled his arms around himself, trying to shake off the pain. Eventually he could breathe again. Eventually he could think. He looked down and saw that he was still intact, all his parts accounted for. The beautiful costume Lucy had made for him, though, was ruined. Parts of it were burned, and in some places it was still smoldering. The front was full of holes.

He stood up, more angry than he'd ever felt before in his life. The wrath inside of him was like white fire. He turned to look for his sister.

Maggie was standing nearby, leaning against the side of a white construction trailer that had been partially trashed. She was wearing her field hockey uniform - the same costume she'd worn when she committed all of her crimes. It was fitting, he thought. They were dressed for the part. They were supposed to be here, supposed to fight. That was what was expected of them.

"Where is she?" Brent demanded. "Where's Lucy?"

"Don't have an aneurysm, baby bro," Maggie said. She looked bored.

Bored. She had the gall to be nonchalant at a time like this. He would pound that blase look right off her face, he would -

"She's just over here," Maggie said, and walked around the side of the trailer. "I stashed her in the shade so she wouldn't even get sunburned. I've got no reason to - "

Brent stomped around to the back of the trailer and saw a coil of wire on the ground. It looked like someone had been tied up with it, but there was no one inside the coil. Lucy's leg braces lay on the dirt next to the coil. They were twisted out of shape and one of them was broken in half.

"Oh," Maggie said. "That's strange, she was here a minute ago - "

Brent hit her with everything he had.