Rivals
RIVALS
a novel by
David Wellington
Text copyright © 2012 David Wellington
All Rights Reserved
More Books by David Wellington
“When are you
going to start rebelling, kid?” Brent’s father asked. He shifted his pack on
his back and started clambering down a rough-walled ravine, where a flash flood
had cut through the desert like a knife after last month’s storms.
“I’m not
really sure what I’m supposed to rebel against,” Brent answered. He reached
forward with one boot and found a rock that didn’t shift when he put his weight
on it. It was easy enough going, but you had to be careful. Brent grabbed at
the tough roots of a juniper bush and stopped still when a scree of pebbles
started shifting under him. “It seems to me we have it pretty good—you
look at some of the people in this world who don’t have anything to eat, or
their government forces them out of their homes, and—”
At the top of
the ravine, Brent’s older sister Maggie appeared silhouetted against the sun.
“Would you two hurry up?” she whined. “I want to get back to civilization.
You know, where people have cell phones that actually get a signal?”
Brent’s eyes
narrowed. He started thinking of the perfect reply, something really nasty,
but then his dad put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “Don’t,” his
father said. “I wish you two wouldn’t fight so much.” He wiped his forehead
with the back of his arm. “I thought this trip would do her good but I don’t
know. She doesn’t seem to be having a good time, does she?”
“We’ll just
have to hit the outlet mall on the way back,” Brent said. He was pleased when
his father actually smiled, though he knew he would never get a laugh. Their
dad was always scrupulously careful not to favor one of them over the other,
and that included never saying a bad word about Maggie.
Even when she
deserved it.
“Come on down,
kid. It’s not too much farther. I saw the sun shining on something this
morning. It looked like there might be an oasis out here. Maybe we can go for
a quick swim!”
“I didn’t
bring my bathing suit,” Maggie answered, but she started carefully picking her
way down the rocks. For all her lack of enthusiasm she had no trouble with the
climb down. Brother and sister were both experienced rockhoppers. That was
entirely thanks to their parents, who had dragged them out into this desert for
hikes every year since they’d been old enough to walk. Now that their mother
was gone, the hikes were even more frequent.
Brent didn’t
mind at all. He loved how quiet it was when you got more than an hour’s walk
away from the highway. He loved the shade at the bottom of ravines like this,
and the thin breezes that dried all the sweat on your skin. He thought maybe
when he was older he would like to live out there, and just watch the clouds go
by overhead everyday until the sun turned them a million shades of red and
orange.
“Hey,” Maggie
said. “I think I see it. But that’s no oasis. God, what a stupid goose
chase. It looks like an old car somebody left to rust to death.”
Dad rushed
down the bottom of the ravine, where the footing was a lot more stable. Brent
hurried after. This would have been a bad place to be when the rain came
through—millions of years’ worth of mud and sand had been washed away in
a foaming wall of water—but now the ground had dried out so much it
shrank away from itself, making a fine pattern of cracks like a gigantic spider
web. Tiny flowers surrounded by thick spiky leaves sprouted up through some of
the cracks, thriving on whatever moisture remained. The flowers’ petals were
soft, delicate colors you couldn’t find anywhere else in the desert.
“Is it even
worth checking this thing out?” Maggie asked.
For his
father’s sake, Brent held his tongue. Maggie had been like this ever since
their mother died a year ago. Dad claimed it was because he didn’t know how to
talk to a teenage girl so he wasn’t doing a good job helping her through her
grief. Brent thought otherwise. He thought Maggie was just a jerk. The two
of them had never gotten along very well. There had been a brief time, after
the accident, when the two of them had hugged a lot and cried on each others’
shoulders. But that had ended all too quickly.
“I hate to
tell you this, Mags,” Dad said, “but that is no rusted-out car.”
Brent came up
around a bend in the ravine and saw what he meant.
Cars weren’t
fifty yards long, for one thing.
It was funny,
though. He could see why Maggie had been confused about its size. If you
didn’t look right at it, it seemed smaller. And it got bigger as he got closer
to it—much bigger. It was almost like it couldn’t decide how big it
really was, or what its real shape might be. But that didn’t make sense, he
thought.
Whatever it
was, it was made of metal and yes, a lot of it had rusted away. But parts of
it were still shiny, even though it had clearly been buried in the sand for a
long time. The flash flood must have uncovered it, or at least, uncovered part
of it. It looked like the top part of something much bigger that was still
buried.
Brent thought
it might be a crashed airplane. It had a roughly cylindrical shape. Part of
the top of it had been eroded away but the side walls still rose up like
steepled fingers to form a series of huge arches. The surface of the object
was pitted and scratched by time and weather, but it looked like it had once
been very smooth, even aerodynamic.
It lay across
the ravine running perpendicular to the course of the flood. It looked like
the water had tried to go around it, failed, and then just gone over it
instead. Looking down through one of the arches Brent saw puddles of water
inside that hadn’t even evaporated yet. “What is it?” Brent asked.
“I don’t
know,” Dad confessed. He moved closer. Brent started to follow but his dad
put up one hand to stop him. “Just let me check it out first.”
Maggie came up
beside Brent as Dad stepped through one of the arches, into part of the
cylinder that was still mostly intact.
“Is this going
to take long?” she asked, but before Brent could answer a hundred dusty-winged
birds came swooping out of the cylinder and flapped vehemently away. One came
close enough to brush Brent’s cheek with its wingtip.
“Dad!” he
called. “Dad!”
He rushed
forward, through the arch—and immediately stopped.
And shivered.
The air under
the arch was at least twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. Shade in the
desert was always a startling thing, but this was different. It felt like he’d
stepped into an air conditioned hotel lobby. Yet the arch was open to the
outside air, and he could still feel the sun beating down on his shoulders.
He couldn’t
explain it. He couldn’t even begin to think of how that might be possible.
“Dad?” he
asked, and stepped further inside.
Maggie waited
outside. You would not catch her climbing around inside some ancient airplane
hangar the military had built out in the desert and then left to collapse under
its own weight. It just wasn’t safe. The thing didn’t even look normal. It
looked like it kept changing shape, but then if you stared at it, it wasn’t
moving or anything. Weird, she thought, as in, too weird to be part of my
life.
Of course
stupid Brent had to stupidly run inside. He was only two years younger than
she was, fifteen to her seventeen, but he could be such a
child
. And the way he followed Dad around like a puppy
made her roll her eyes. He was just like a puppy—exactly like a puppy.
He lived for that moment when someone called him a good boy and patted him on
the head.
Maggie decided
she would wait ten minutes. That was fair, right? More than enough time to
let the two of them have their little boy adventure and realize there was
nothing inside more interesting than maybe some brown recluse spiders—the
kind that gave you that horrible disease. Then she would demand that they come
back out so the three of them could head back to camp. She just got one
flickering bar of reception on her Sidekick if she went up on the bluff
overlooking their campsite. It was just enough to send and receive short
texts.
She kicked at
some pebbles and they bounced off the side of the thing. Instead of the muted
clangs she was expecting, they made a sound like they were hitting the
stretched skin of a drum. That was kind of weird.
Had it been
ten minutes yet? She wasn’t sure. Maggie never wore a watch. That was what
the clock on her Sidekick was for, and she’d left it back at camp. No point
hauling it around out in the desert, she’d thought. It would have just been
more weight to carry in her pack. Her mom had taught her to always travel
light.
Mom—
Maggie thought
about her mom a lot. Several times a day, in fact. Sometimes she would think
about the times they’d spent together and she would cry. Sometimes she’d think
about the accident and get angry. The other guy had been drunk. He had
absolutely no right to be driving, no right at all to be driving that fast.
He’d taken away Maggie’s mom because he was too stupid to be allowed to
breathe. He had ruined Maggie’s life in a split second.
Mom.
Maggie sighed
theatrically—she was working on a new sigh, a long, drawn-out exhalation
that told the world she was
so over this
—and
then stepped down into the shady interior of the old building or whatever it
was. It had to have been ten minutes, right? She was startled when she felt
how cold it was inside, but at least that explained the birds. Animals in the
desert would take any shade they could find, any way of cooling themselves
down. There were probably jackrabbits and kit foxes inside as well, and maybe
even coyotes. Now that would be stupid. Titanically stupid, to get eaten by
coyotes because two little boys (one of whom happened to be her forty-year old
dad) had to play explorer in the desert.
Beyond the
arches was a section where the ceiling hadn’t been worn away. It looked pretty
dark back there. She stepped over some puddles of stagnant
water—probably full of insect larvae, yuck—and reached into her
pack to get her flashlight. When she flicked it on she saw that the cylinder
went on farther than she’d thought. It sloped downward, as if most of it was
still underground. Maybe it was the entrance to a mine or something. Maybe
the weird chill in the air was just a breeze coming up from some deep cavern.
Of course, she
couldn’t feel a breeze. The air inside was perfectly still. But whatever.
She just had to find the boys and convince them to leave. It wouldn’t be easy.
They almost never accepted that she knew what she was talking about, and if
she said this place was dangerous that would most likely make them want to
explore
deeper
.
She saw a
little light up ahead. It looked like another flashlight, almost identical to
the one she carried. She swung her light around and saw that Brent was
pointing his own light at Dad, who was bent over something she couldn’t see.
They had stopped in front of a row of big tubes set into the wall of the
cylinder. A smaller tube stuck up out of the ground, like a pipe, or the top
of a well. Dad was looking into its mouth.