Rivals

Rivals Page 43

"You - you can let me go now," Lucy said, when they were out on the highway and well clear of town. Maggie hadn't seen any police cars - maybe she'd gotten away in time. "You don't need me anymore. Why don't you just let me go?"

Not yet. Maggie had her reasons.

She turned up the music and let the darkness surge through her. She had to be careful not to drive too fast - the last thing she wanted now was to be pulled over for speeding. But this thing inside her, this evil thing she'd nurtured and grown kept calling out for more, more destruction, more freedom. She couldn't fight it, she'd learned that much. She could try to calm down, try just to breathe but always something would happen, something would trigger her and the anger would roar.

In the seat next to her Brent's little friend was curled up and whimpering.

"Stop looking at me," Maggie growled. She checked the speedometer and saw she was going eighty miles an hour, so she forced herself to let off the gas a little. Outside the desert whirled by, red rock and sunshine. At this speed it looked empty and almost featureless. A blasted landscape where her anger could stomp free, hurling itself against the rocks, leaping from crag to crag and tearing the stunted trees out of the ground by their roots. "I said stop looking at me!"

Lucy turned her face into the stained fabric of her seat. "I'm sorry," she said.

Maggie smacked the steering wheel, not quite hard enough to bend it out of shape. "It's... alright," she forced herself to say. If she hurt this girl she knew it would be a mistake. Brent would never forgive her.

Though if she was honest with herself she knew she'd already crossed that bridge. He had betrayed her to the police. He had tried to choke her into submission - and he had stolen her guilt. He was going to bring her down, eventually, unless she finished him off first -

No.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Then opened them again because she was driving and she needed to see the road. No. She would not kill her brother. She'd come close, definitely. She would have impaled him on that spike, if he hadn't said what he did. If he hadn't made the anger clear away for a second, made her think rationally for the first time in a while. She needed that clarity again.

"I'm not going to hurt you," she told Lucy. "So don't be so scared, alright? Just... don't be so scared of me."

"That's kind of hard," Lucy said.

Maggie hit the steering wheel again. This time it bent. "None of this is what I would have chosen. Do you believe that?"

Lucy shrugged. Her face was still buried in the seat.

"I guess it looks bad, if you don't know everything that happened to me. If you can't see that I didn't have any choices at all."

She turned the music down, a little. The darkness threatened to flood back into her soul but she couldn't think straight, couldn't fight her anger with the bass line throbbing like that, with the drums pounding out the rhythm of her accelerated heartbeat. "It's almost over. I have one last thing to do and then I'm leaving. I'll go somewhere no one will ever find me."

Lucy stirred. "Where's that?" she asked.

"I can't tell you, obviously. I'm going to create a new identity. A secret identity. Nobody can know where I went."

"No - I just mean, where is it you think you can go, where they won't try to follow? The police, I mean. That weird FBI guy. He's never going to give up looking for you. How is this supposed to end?"

Maggie bashed her head backwards against her headrest until it started to crumple under the blows. "I told you. I get out of here, and - "

"Um, sorry, no," Lucy said.

Maggie froze up. The car's speed sagged as her foot came off the gas pedal. After a second she recovered and went back to driving. Keep a consistent speed, she told herself. Don't weave in and out of your lane. Someone might be watching.

"I don't think that's what you want at all. Just to run away? You could have done that like, a long time ago."

"I had things I had to do. I needed money, and a car. I had to talk to the idiot who killed my mom. I had to get something out of my locker - "

"That sounds like a lot of excuses," Lucy said. "It sounds to me like you've been sticking around, even when it wasn't safe, because you were afraid to leave. Why is that? You didn't want to leave your family behind? Maybe some part of you thought that everything could be okay again. That it really could all be fixed."

"Hah!"

"Okay. Then maybe you just needed an audience. You needed everybody to know how much you hurt. In a different town, where nobody knew you - nobody could feel sorry for you, either."

A storm of darkness crashed and thundered inside Maggie's head. It came on so suddenly, with no warning at all this time, that she was defenseless against it. She slammed on the breaks and swerved off the road, pulling to a hard stop on the shoulder. Lucy flew forward, throwing out her arms to brace herself against the dashboard - she hadn't been wearing her seatbelt.

"Say that again," Maggie snarled. "Try to psychoanalyze me one more time. Come on! Do it!"

Lucy pushed up against her door. Trying to get as far away from Maggie as she possibly could in the cramped space of the little car.

"You're so damned smart, come on! Say one more thing, and then I'll hit you. I'll hit you so hard - you're half-crippled now, you pathetic infant. You want to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair? You want to be dead? Say it. Come on. Say it!"

But the girl was silent.

Eventually Maggie pulled herself together, and got back on the road.