Rivals

Rivals Page 45

When they reached the right spot, Maggie just turned off the highway and drove into the desert. The car jumped and rattled and started shaking itself loose as she drove over rocks and plants and potholes and gullies but she didn't care - if the car broke down out here it didn't matter.

Of course it matters, she thought. The part of her that wasn't darkness thought it, anyway. I need the car for my big getaway. I'll need it for when I start my new life.

The darkness just laughed.

She reached the ravine where she'd gotten her powers - the place where her father died and all this began - and brought the car to a stop in a plume of smoke that could probably be seen for miles. She was still a half mile from the cylinder. She turned to Lucy, who looked like she'd been shaken up pretty badly by the wild ride through the desert. "Stay here," Maggie said. "I suppose you could try to run away. But it's an hour's hike back to the highway for somebody with normal legs. It would take you all day. You don't have any water." She shrugged. "I think you're probably smart enough to understand what that means."

"So - what? You just leave me here? So I can die of thirst in the car instead of out in the desert?"

"I'll come back for you," Maggie said. She sighed and turned on the air conditioning. Otherwise Lucy might fry inside the car as the sun beat down on it. Unfortunately that meant she had to leave the key in the ignition. To keep Lucy from driving away, she yanked off the steering wheel and threw it like a discus out into the depths of the desert.

So much for the getaway, her rational brain thought.

She left Lucy behind and headed down into the ravine on foot. She had a good reason to do so. She was pretty sure the ravine was going to be swarming with FBI, and she didn't want her hostage to get killed when they inevitably started shooting at her.

It wasn't long before she could see the cylinder up ahead. Her eyes were stronger now, in the same way her arms and legs were, and she could see a lot farther and a lot more clearly than she used to. Except that with the cylinder, her super vision didn't really help. Its weirdness hadn't changed, she saw. She still couldn't get a good sense of how big it was, or even what shape it was other than long and round.

She could see other things very well. The FBI had surrounded the cylinder with a ring of chain link fencing maybe five hundred yards in diameter. Inside the fence they'd parked a bunch of construction trailers, generator trucks, bulldozers, backhoes and cement mixers. Men and women in body armor and carrying assault rifles patrolled the fence, while others operated a satellite dish or waved weird bits of scientific equipment at the cylinder.

None of them, she saw, came within a hundred yards of it. They'd even planted little neon red flags in the ground around the entrance to the cylinder, probably to warn people not to come any closer.

They were afraid of it. They were afraid of what the green fire could do.

They should be, the darkness thought.

Maggie came at the fence fast and hard, grabbing up handfuls of it and ripping it away. Barbed wire had been strung along its top but it didn't even scratch her skin. Someone started shooting instantly but the bullets felt like hailstones on her skin - painful, but nothing she couldn't just shrug off. There was shouting, and people running back and forth. She ignored it.

She identified the trailer that looked like the command center - it was covered in antennae and small satellite dishes and even a cell phone tower - and headed toward it. On the way she picked up a forklift. She lifted it over her head and threw it overhand into the command center, which buckled under the impact, spewing broken glass and screaming people.

An FBI agent in a bulletproof vest and a navy blue baseball cap came running at her, screaming, his rifle spitting out bullets and fire. She grabbed the barrel of his rifle - it was hot enough to scorch her hand, but she didn't care - and before he could let go of the weapon she swung him around by it and then let go. He flew through the air and crashed down in the sand near the cylinder, with his head just inside the dangerous perimeter of the red flags. He looked around to see where he was and then got up and ran away screaming - not in outrage this time, but in blind panic.

"All of you get out," Maggie shouted. "This place is mine. Get out!"

Some of them did as she said. Jeeps full of scientists and technicians started up and raced for the gap in the fence. Meanwhile the guards in their body armor and special agents in black suits started grouping up in formations, ducking behind cover, finding good firing positions. As if they could stop her with bullets.

What came next took a while. She took their guns away, plucking them out of unwilling hands. Those who tried to hang on to their weapons or who were dumb enough to try to fight her hand-to-hand were thrown through the air, had their arms broken, were hurt badly enough that their friends had to carry them away. But eventually - one way or another - they all left.

When she was sure she was completely alone in the site, she went back to the car and fetched Lucy. The disabled girl fought like a wet cat, but Maggie managed to bring her down to the cylinder by slinging her over one shoulder and squeezing her - hard - every time she tried to wriggle free.

"Now," Maggie said, "I need you to just be quiet for a while."

"How long?" Lucy asked. "I'm not really good at it, I mean, I talk a lot when I'm nervous and right now, well, this is beyond nervous, I think I might be verging on like a breakdown or something, I've never been able to control my mouth for very long and - "

Maggie raised one finger to her lips. "Shh," she said.

Lucy shut up.

Maggie found a shady spot behind the wreckage of the command center trailer and plunked Lucy down in it. Then she grabbed a bunch of chain link fence and wrapped it around the girl, tight enough that she couldn't move.

"Just chill a while," Maggie said, and headed into the cylinder.