Free Rivals by David Wellington

stop you. That’s all.
You’ve seen I can do it.”
    “You can’t
watch me all the time,” Perkins said.
    Brent let him
go. He ran around the side of the school and disappeared.
    “I need to get
home,” Brent said. “I need to talk to my sister about this. Maybe she has
some ideas about what we’re supposed to do with these powers. She’s smarter
than me, maybe she’s already figured this out.”
    Lucy walked
with him. Normally he took the bus home but it had already left without him.
It was a good half hour walk back to his house, and part of it was along the
highway where there wasn’t any sidewalk, just a narrow little path worn down in
the grass. Cars honked at them as they rocketed past and twice he had to pick
Lucy up and get her out of the way of a driver who was too close to the curb.
With her legs in braces she couldn’t jump away as fast as he could. After the
second time he just slung her across his back and carried her piggyback. She
didn’t seem to mind and her weight didn’t bother him at all.
    As they walked
they tried to think of ways Brent could actually help people with his powers
that didn’t get morally complicated. “What if you saw somebody stealing
somebody’s wallet on the street. It would be okay to hit them, wouldn’t it?”
she asked.
    “I guess,”
Brent told her, “but when was the last time you actually saw that happen? You
hear about crime all the time but it tends to happen in dark alleys and really
late at night.”
    “You could
rescue people who get lost in the desert,” she tried. One of her hands was
absently rubbing his chest. It felt good so he didn’t tell her to stop.
    “Sure. If I
could find them.” He thought about it for a second. “I could spend the rest
of my life patrolling the desert, looking for people in trouble. But that
would get pretty boring. I mean, how often does somebody actually get lost out
there? Once or twice a year? I kind of wanted to go to college instead.”
    “I guess you
could carry little old ladies across the street. Or carry their groceries for
them.” Lucy laughed. “They’d probably like that.” She leaned her head on his
shoulder and he wondered if she was getting tired.
    “I don’t seem
to get tired,” he said, because he had suddenly realized this fact. “I suppose
I could go to the power plant and turn a big crank on one of their turbines and
generate electricity all day. That would use less oil and it would be good for
the environment.”
    Lucy chuckled.
“I could bring you sandwiches every day. And maybe read to you while you
turned your crank, so you didn’t get bored.”
    Brent grinned.
That was hardly how he’d seen his life going. But it was a cute thought.
    “Here we are,”
he said, when they finally got to his house. He climbed up the steps to the
porch and stopped before the door. “Um,” he said, “maybe you should get down
now.”
    “Oh, sorry,”
she said, and slid down off his back. “It was just so comfortable up there.”
    “I’ll give you
a ride anytime,” Brent said, searching in his backpack for his key. “You want
to come in, maybe have a snack or something before you head home?”
    She didn’t get
to answer him, though. Before she could open her mouth to reply they both
heard Grandma screaming for help.

Chapter 17.
     
    The music was
the only thing that could save Maggie. It was like a prism, taking all of her
anger and her doubts, her fears and frustrations—
    your
friends aren’t answering your texts
    they won’t
let you play the game you love
    you hurt
grandma
    you killed
dad
    —gathering
them up and bringing them together, like different colors combining to form a
single ray of pure white, narrowing down all the chaos and bewilderment into
one stream of energy she could release by screaming along with the lyrics. It
didn’t matter much what kind of music it might be, punk, metal, industrial,
techno, as long as it was fast and loud and dark, storm winds driving