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Maggie knew how to swear. She supposed every kid did, but back when she and Mandy Hunt were in middle school together, they'd had a game where they challenged each other to come up with the worst thing you could possibly say. They started with "you are a pus-dripping donkey anus," and worked their way up from there. You got extra points if you could say it like you actually meant it.

Maggie had usually won that game. She was a champion at being frustrated, if nothing else. But maybe not good enough to express exactly how she felt about the bank vault door. It was proving to her something she'd suspected but never experienced before: there were limits to her new super-strength.Advertisement

"Festering eye socket of a month-dead syphilitic warthog!" she screamed.

It was ten feet high and just as wide. There was no good way to get her fingers around its edge because it sat flush with the wall. The hinges were on the inside, so she couldn't just tear those off, either. She tried pounding her way through it with her fists. It made her knuckles bleed but at least she was making progress of some kind, in that she had seriously dented the metal door.

"Lice-encrusted scalp of a bastard pornographer!"

After about five minutes of that she stood back and examined her progress. She had put a three-inch deep dimple in the surface of the door. It would take hours and hours to get through the door like that. By the time she did, every cop in town would be down there with her, probably shooting her repeatedly in the back.

"This isn't fair!" she shouted, and her words echoed in the marble basement that housed the vault. When the echoes died away, silence returned - silence, except for the sound of police sirens wailing away upstairs.

She cursed a few more times, then she just gave up. There had to be easier ways to get money.

She headed upstairs carefully, keeping an eye out for anyone waiting for her with a shotgun. The bank lobby was empty, though. Red and blue light was flashing off the walls, throwing weird shadows across the marble, but there was not a single person to be found. Even the teller with the mole on her nose was gone - she probably ran away the second Maggie headed down the stairs.

Maggie took a deep breath. Then she turned around and looked outside. Through the revolving doors she could see the street. A line of police cars stood out there, their lights whirling angrily. Men in uniform were crouched behind the cars, and they all had guns. All the guns were pointing at her.

"Crap," she said, which wasn't very inventive but it expressed her emotions perfectly. She started to run back toward the stairs - maybe she could get out by way of the roof - when the glass doors shattered and something much bigger than a bullet came sailing into the room. It hit one of the ATM machines hard and then dropped to the floor.

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Maggie picked it up. It looked like a spray can of whipped cream - except it was painted a flat black. There were holes all down its sides. As she studied it, bright yellow smoke started oozing out of the holes.

Tear gas, she thought - even as her throat started to close up. She wasn't invulnerable to tear gas, apparently. She turned and threw the grenade back out through the shattered glass doors and smiled as the cops there all scattered.

Something was popping and crackling behind her. She turned and saw the ATM that the grenade had hit. The screen was shattered, exposing the machine's guts - wiring and circuit boards and a security camera dangling by one wire. Little flames were popping into life inside the machine as sparks jumped back and forth.

Maggie felt like palming her face. Duh, she thought. Everyone uses the ATMs these days for cash withdrawals. The teller had told her as much.

She swung around and kicked the ATM hard. It fell to pieces and money started spilling out all over the floor. Some of it was on fire. She left those bills and grabbed as many undamaged twenties as she could, stuffing them inside her backpack. There were a lot more of them than she'd expected and she didn't have time to stack them properly so they got crumpled up in the pack but it didn't matter. It was money - she had her money, the money she needed to -

"Margaret Gill," someone said, their voice amplified by a bullhorn. It was the cops. "We want to end this peacefully with no one getting hurt. Your brother is on the way - he says he wants to talk to you before we take you into custody."

Maggie stopped what she was doing and looked up, as if Brent would be right there in front of her. "Crap," she said again. She had taken too long. pqdm.com