Rivals

Brent poured Grandma's tea and cut a sandwich in half - egg salad, just like she liked. She was propped up on the couch on a mound of pillows, watching television and she grunted acknowledgement when he put her plate and her tea cup down in front of her.

Her right arm was in a cast that covered all but her thumb and ran almost up to her elbow. No one had signed this cast. Lucy had asked if she could, and got a nasty look in exchange. The doctors said it would be at least a month before the cast could come off and Grandma could use her hand again.

Brent had volunteered to play nurse until she was back up to full speed. Every day when he got back from school he made her dinner. At night he helped her into bed and then tucked her in, as if she were the kid and he the guardian. It still felt pretty weird, especially when she yelled at him for not doing things right. He was pretty sure that it didn't matter if he made her bed with hospital corners every morning, or if her tea had a drop too much honey in it. He got the sense she just needed to yell at somebody.

She was angry. She had a right to be angry. Most of the time he left her alone.

"The phone was ringing again all day," Grandma muttered. "More reporters."

"You shouldn't pick it up unless you know who's calling," Brent told her. "That's why we have Caller ID."

"I can't figure out how to use that thing. Anyway, I gave them the same old song and dance. That you're too busy being a hero to talk to anyone."

Brent had changed the voicemail message so it said much of the same thing, though it didn't use the H word. It asked that the reporters respect his privacy and not call back. So instead they emailed - he dreaded turning his computer on in the morning before school because he knew he would have to sort through dozens of requests for interviews and photo shoots and product endorsements before he could find any messages from Lucy or Special Agent Weathers.

He deleted all the emails, even the ones offering money for his life's story. He deleted all the voicemail they got - people he actually wanted to talk to knew not to call his house unless it was an emergency. But he couldn't do much about the photographers who followed him around all day. Some of them were parked down the block, with telephoto lenses sticking out of the back of a van and following his every move, constantly trying to get a look through the curtains over his bedroom window. More of them were camped out outside the high school. A judge had said they couldn't come within five hundred feet of him, but they were always trying for four hundred and ninety-nine.

Maggie had worried about being followed around by the FBI all the time. It turned out the government was the least of Brent's problems.

Speaking of which - the doorbell rang, and Brent went to answer it. He was expecting Special Agent Weathers but he had to be careful, so he twitched aside the curtains and peered out at the porch. No smiling, shouting reporters appeared so he let the FBI man inside and closed the door behind him.

"Have you found her yet?" Brent asked.

"Hello to you, too," Weathers said, and hung his coat on a hook by the door. "Good afternoon, Mrs. Reynolds," he said to Grandma. She waved her good hand at him without bothering to turn around.

Brent apologized and lead Weathers into the kitchen, where he poured him a Diet Coke - it was all he had other than Grandma's herbal tea and water. "I'm sorry if I was abrupt. But I'm really worried about her."

Weathers frowned. "We've had reports. She's been seen around, but - "

"But you can't catch her. She runs away too fast." Brent nodded and drummed his fingers on the table. "I understand. I've been looking for her, too. Patrolling, I guess you could say. I haven't spotted her yet, though. You'll call me on my cell the next time someone sees her, right?"

"Sure." Weathers reached into his jacket pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. He carefully smoothed it out on the table and looked into Brent's eyes. "There's actual news on another front, if you want to hear it. We have not managed to recover your father's body."

Brent gulped. It had been a long time. There hadn't even been a funeral yet. He'd hoped that if he had a body, he'd have something to bury. Maybe if he put a memorial service together, Maggie would feel compelled to come, and then he could talk to her there. If he could just talk to her, figure out what was going on with her -

But no. If she thought the FBI was watching, she wouldn't come anywhere near.

He rubbed his face. His father was dead (you killed him, a nagging little part of his brain reminded him) and he needed to be buried. That was the only important thing. "Do you at least know how he died?"

Weathers took a sip of his drink. "You don't want to know that."

"Okay," Brent said.

"I've got a whole team out there in the desert studying that thing you and he found. I've got people watching it round the clock. A lot of what they're finding out, you don't want to know. I'll tell you one thing anyway. I asked them to send in two guys in hazardous materials suits to get your father's body. They couldn't do it. They made it back out themselves, but just barely. They both died within an hour. They were good men, Brent."

"I'm... so sorry."

Weathers shrugged. "You didn't ask them to do it. I did. I thought the hazmat suits would be enough to protect them, but I was wrong. Whatever that green fire stuff is, it kills anyone it comes into contact with. Except you and your sister. You want to hear some more interesting facts?"

Brent stared at Weathers through his fingers. He wasn't sure how to answer that question. "Okay," he tried.

"We're pretty sure the thing, the cylinder you found, was buried for at least sixty thousand years. They did radiocarbon dating on it and that's the farthest back that particular test can go. Which means human beings didn't build it. Sixty thousand years ago human beings were still figuring out how to make bows and arrows."

"So it's a crashed alien spacecraft?"

"Sure," Weathers said. "Maybe. Those are the facts. You want some more, well, all I have are theories. Which means I can't prove any of it. Now as for what that green fire is, I don't have the foggiest notion. All I know is that it heals you if you're exposed to it - you said it healed Maggie's blisters and your razorburn - so maybe it was an automatic medical station or something."

"But it's killed three people!"

"Three people, yes, all of them over age eighteen. I have a bunch of scientists trying to figure out why teenagers come out of there stronger than when they went in. The best thing they can think of is that it must have something to do with your pineal gland. That's a little pinecone-shaped thing in the middle of your brain. It produces melatonin, or at least, it does until you finish puberty."

"Then what does it do?"

Weathers scratched his left eyebrow. "Then it turns into a lump of bone that does absolutely nothing. By the time you're twenty-one it's completely calcified. Nobody's exactly sure why it does that. Nor do we have any idea how an active pineal gland protected you and your sister from certain death. Again, I don't have answers. In this case I don't even have a theory."

Brent nodded. He squirmed in his chair. He didn't want to know any of this. He really didn't want to know about the two men who died trying to recover his dad's body.

"You won't send anyone else in there, will you?" he asked.

"Oh, no!" Weathers let go of a bitter laugh. "Hell, no. I've got a call in for every available ton of quick-setting concrete in the state. I'm going to cover that thing over until it looks like a big parking lot. A parking lot no one will ever again be allowed to set foot on."

Brent squinted at him. "No way. I thought you would want to study it. Take it to pieces and figure out how it works. Isn't that what you do with UFOs?"

Weathers looked at him for a while before replying. Just looked at him. "You may be under the impression that the government is one big conspiracy. That we're always scheming and plotting away behind the scenes. But that's not who we are. We're just people. People who work very hard, for not much pay, to try to protect American citizens. We'll make sure nobody else dies, Brent. That's my job."