Rivals

Chapter 9

Brent ran across the roof and jumped after his sister, still convinced somehow that it wouldn't work, that he would fall crashing to the street below and shatter every bone in his body. But the muscles in his legs seemed to wake up as he moved, pumping harder and faster than he'd ever gone before. He pushed hard with his left foot and suddenly he was up in the air, hanging there it seemed - weightless, almost flying. Then he started to come back down and he saw the other rooftop beneath him. His feet pedaled in the air and then came down hard on the shingles, knocking a few of them free. He looked down to watch them spiral toward the gutter and nearly lost his balance. He threw his arms out and they wheeled through the air and he actually felt like he was going to take off, that he could flap his arms like wings and fly. He settled down and looked at his feet and saw the two dark holes he'd made when he landed. "Oh, crap," he said. "I think I broke their roof."
"Please, don't be such a drama queen! It was just a couple of shingles."
"Are you sure this is okay?" Brent asked. "We're not supposed to use our powers. Weathers said - "
"Who cares? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life pretending you're still just like everybody else? Come on! If somebody can throw a baseball faster and harder than everybody else, they give him a multi-million dollar contract. Now we can do all kinds of things - and all the FBI wants to do is threaten us. Don't you want to know what we can do? Haven't you been thinking about it all day? Well, here's our chance. Nobody will see us. How far do you think I can jump?" Maggie laughed and ran away from him, jumping to the next roof. He followed and barely touched down before he was aloft again, flinging himself out into the darkness. This is so easy, he thought - he could jump fifty feet without even really trying. He wondered, just like she'd said, how far he could go if he pushed himself and as Maggie leapt to the next roof in the row he dug down hard with his feet and pushed with everything he had. He flew right past the roof she'd landed on and kept going, crossed the shadowy gap between that house and the next, and as he started to come down he saw the chimney of the next house come up to meet him like a brick wall.
His face smashed across the bricks of the chimney, his arms flapping out to wrap around it. His chest made contact and bright pain flashed through his body, even as he felt the bricks crumbling, felt them shift and start to fall apart beneath him. He reeled back and gasped as the chimney fell, bricks bouncing off the roof and clanging off the gutters.
Maggie dropped out of the air beside him. "Oh my God, Brent! Are you okay? You just hit that thing face first!"
"I'm... okay," he said. He shook his head as if to clear it, but honestly, he felt fine. "I think we're tougher than we look, now."
"Didn't it hurt?" Maggie asked.
"Yeah. Yeah, it did," he admitted. "But only for a second. Then my body just kind of... shook it off." He turned to look at Maggie with a huge smile on his face. "We're like, indestructible!"
"Yeah, okay," Maggie said. "Let's not get carried away." But the look on her face suggested she believed him.
"Oh, there is one thing, though," he told her.
"What?" she asked, concerned.
"You're it!" And then he laughed out loud and jumped for the next roof.
He jumped from roof to roof barely feeling the shingles under his feet. He stopped for a half a second to pull his shoes off - it was easier to grip the uneven surfaces with his toes. It was an amazing feeling to be up in the air, for those few seconds when gravity couldn't touch him, when he might as well have been up in space, and then exhilarating to watch the next roof come up toward him, unable to change his course, looking for the best place to grab on with his feet.
Maggie chased him around the mall and up toward the west side of town. He could hear her laughing behind him, calling out mock threats: "I'm going to get you! You're mine now!" He couldn't remember the last time he'd heard her laugh.
She tagged him in mid-air, grabbing his foot as she streaked past him to land ahead of him on the flat top of a hardware store. Flat roofs were almost harder to land on, because you tended to slide, and after she grabbed his foot she pulled upwards, giving him a wicked spin. He tumbled down onto the hardware store roof and did a face plant right into a metal ventilation hood that crumpled up under the weight of his impact. He was a little bummed to see that it didn't mold to the shape of his face. Instead it just bent in half and the fan inside clanged to a stop. Brent climbed back up to his feet and looked around for Maggie but he couldn't see her. They were closer to the downtown section now, and there were plenty of streetlights, so even the darkness shouldn't have hid her, but no matter what direction he turned he couldn't her anywhere.
"Over here," she called, leaping toward him from across a parking lot that had to be a hundred yards wide. Surely it was too far to jump, he thought. But then he'd been wrong every time he thought he knew their limits before. "Are you blind as well as stupid?" she mocked, rising high up in the night air.
Brent rushed forward, intending to catch her as she came down, but then he saw in horror that she was descending too fast. It had been too far - she was never going to make the rooftop. "Mags!" he shouted, "look out!" But there was nothing he could do but watch. She came in fast and too low and instead of landing on top of the hardware store she hit the side of it, her whole body smashing against the side wall and then sliding down three stories, bouncing off signs, window casings, satellite dishes and clotheslines on the way down. He saw her head smack against a brick windowsill and flop around on her neck as if she were a rag doll.
"Mags," he said, taking a step back from the edge of the roof. "Oh, no. Mags. Mags - "
She popped up over the edge of the roof and landed right in front of him. Her skirt was torn a little at the hem and there was a greasy stain on her t-shirt. Her hair was a little messed up. Otherwise she looked perfectly fine. "I guess we know one thing about our powers now," she said.
"What's that?" Brent asked.
"We can't fly." Then she tagged him on the shoulder and jumped across the street, bouncing off the row of buildings there like a stone skipped off the surface of a lake.