Mad Skills

by Greatshell, Walter

  But there was no time to think about that now. Underneath the boxes she hit pay dirt: a bald spare tire, a jack, jumper cables, and a collection of rusty tools. Perfect. She grabbed a big monkey wrench and a screwdriver, then returned to the front seat.

  Placing the screwdriver into the starter switch, she used the wrench as a hammer to bash it in good, busting the locking pin and nearly busting her thumb in the process. Sucking the throbbing nail, she turned the screwdriver to close the electrical circuit. With a clatter, the engine started right up.

  This was kind of exciting. Maddy had her learner’s permit, but she hadn’t driven in over a year, not since before the accident, and even then her actual driving experience had been mostly limited to a few squeamish circuits around the mall parking lot. Her time behind the wheel could be readily computed in minutes and seconds, the way skydivers measure their time in free fall. Her parents weren’t big on teen driving. In their neighborhood, there had been a number of deadly accidents involving underage drinking, and they weren’t taking any chances. She could get a car when she turned eighteen.

  Look Ma, I’m drivin’!

  Maddy backed out of the space, testing the play in the wheel and the response of the pedals. It really was a shit-box; she could hear every loose fitting in the old V-6, but somehow there was something special about driving it, a feeling that even flying the helicopter couldn’t match. She had been too busy to enjoy that experience, just going through the motions as necessity indicated, and afterward her mind had barely retained the memory of flight. It all seemed like a bizarre nightmare, nothing fun about it. But this was driving a car.

  Pulling onto the street, she turned in the direction the van had taken. It was out of sight now, but since Dr. Stevens probably had little reason to think she was being followed, it shouldn’t be hard to find. Maddy hoped. Reasoning that every cop for a hundred miles was tied up in that parking lot, she hit the gas.

  “Nice work, killer,” said a voice from the backseat. It was the raccoon. He was belted into a baby carrier and clutching a live earthworm—a big night crawler.

  “Holy crap,” she said. “Do you have to keep sneaking up on me like that? God!”

  “Hey, you should be thanking me, Princess. How many times am I going to have to keep bailing you out?”

  “Why? Isn’t that your whole purpose?”

  “Depends. You just killed people, honey.” Moses’s voice strained as she swerved around a truck. “Whoa. Don’t you even care?”

  “Of course I care!”

  “No, you don’t.” He ate the worm headfirst, munching rapidly.

  Maddy looked away from the mirror. “Yes, I do.”

  “Then why aren’t you more upset?”

  “Because it wasn’t me back there. It was Braintree. They made me do it.”

  “That’s just an excuse. You’re killing because you can. If you could have done it before your little upgrade, you would have. Many times. I’m not sure I should even be helping you. You’re a cold-blooded murderer. Murderess.”

  “No I’m not—shut up! It was self-defense.”

  “You could have escaped without killing them … if you’d really wanted to.”

  “Not without taking a bigger risk.”

  “So it’s all about playing it safe?”

  “Yes! Maybe. So what?”

  “Just asking.”

  Barreling down the main drag, blowing through all the cross streets and stoplights in favor of the fastest route back to the highway, Maddy spotted the van. Gotcha. It was easy to see, its silver finish gleaming brightly in the morning sun. There was very little other traffic at that time of the morning.

  Now what, genius?

  It would be easy enough to nudge the van into a spin—the dynamics of that classic police maneuver were very simple to figure out. The problem was, there was no telling how the other driver might react, and if he or she was stupid, the van could crash or flip over. This wasn’t a game of billiards—if Ben really was in there, he could be killed.

  No, she would have to disable the van so that it stopped on its own, which would be tricky since the big vehicle was quite a bit newer and more powerful than her clunker. And what then? She was leery of more hand-to-hand combat. The very thought of it suddenly made her sick. Moses was right: She couldn’t just kill everybody who got in her way, even if they were trying to kill her. I have to be the good guy. It was a worrisome prospect, but at least this time she had the advantage of surprise, the sun at her back. In the glare, they wouldn’t notice her approach until it was too late. Perhaps she could avoid violence altogether. The firemen were dead, and Dr. Stevens was certainly in no condition to fight.

  It was a nice thought, as hopeful as it was brief. As Maddy advanced on the other vehicle, two police cruisers suddenly swooped in from a cross street, blocking her car between them. They had been waiting in ambush. Flashing their lights and blurping their sirens, they forced her to slow down as the van accelerated away.

  But Maddy refused to lose Ben again. Flooring it, she simultaneously spun the wheel 180 degrees, clipping the car in front with a lateral glancing blow, then a hip check that spun it into an oncoming bus. The Mercury spun the opposite way, tires smoking, and as the second cruiser came up, Maddy allowed it to bump her so that she completed her spin, describing a full circle and rocketing forward once more.

  Suddenly, her windshield crazed and blew in. Oh shit! Stung by bits of safety glass, Maddy dropped to the floor and slammed on the brake with her left knee, the old car fishtailing out of control for a second until she was able to grab the rearview mirror off the seat and hold it up like a periscope. As the police car tried to jam her in, she punched the reverse and peeled clear, then shot forward into the lane again, bullets knocking out the rest of her windows and thumping into the upholstery.

  Staying crouched below the dashboard, operating the pedals with her knees, steering by the reflection in a cracked mirror, she drove like a bat out of Hell. People witnessing the chase were astonished by the sight of a car without a driver, but to Maddy it was not so remarkable. She was only frustrated that the car couldn’t go any faster. With no view of the speedometer, she had no idea she was pushing a hundred in a 25mph zone.

  The cops were right there with her, trying to blow out her tires. Maddy juked and jived to keep them off her, but their car was some kind of souped-up V-8 police special, and hers was a pile of junk. Bullets pelted the Merc, making a sound that reminded Maddy of squirrels dropping horse chestnuts on the tin roof of the garden shed. Stuff was flying every which way, chunks of foam rubber and door paneling. Her sad little engine was about to explode.

  All right, then. With the police car bearing down hard, Maddy abruptly jumped the curb and sideswiped a row of parked motorcycles, deflecting them into the cruiser’s path. She hated motorcyclists anyway, noisy jerks always drag racing down her street late at night and setting off the car alarms. Well, these hogs would never bother anyone again. They tumbled and spun and came to pieces all over the road, so that the patrol vehicle couldn’t avoid them all. Brakes squealing, it plowed into a big one, a customized Harley outfitted with straight pipes, which flew up over the cruiser’s hood and peeled back half its roof. The motorcycle’s chrome chassis landed in the backseat, spewing gasoline from its ruptured teardrop tank. The cops barely leaped clear before their car careened wildly into an empty sports bar, taking out the kitchen and severing all the gas lines. The explosion was spectacular.

  Maddy missed all the fireworks, focusing on the speeding van. The highway on-ramp was coming up fast, and both of them were racing for it. There were no more police in sight, but Maddy didn’t even bother to get up on the seat—she felt safer down underneath, so close to the engine. Like part of the car. The Mercury was her body, its metal chassis alive with sensation, and she its brain.

  As the other vehicle slowed to take the ramp, Maddy accelerated. This was it.

  Swerving alongside, she impatiently bumped the van in the ri
ght quarter—a gentle tap, hardly more than a nudge, that sent it flying over the grass embankment into a marshy sump. Ducks scattered, quacking furiously.

  Maddy braked hard and backed onto the grass. She hoped someone would appear waving a gun so she could smash them flat. She was not hysterical. She was remarkably calm, in fact, but she was tired and fed up and wanted all this to be over.

  No one appeared. The sight of the disabled van reminded her of the other one, the one she had blown up. Ben’s van. Hearing sirens in the distance, she took the screwdriver and the big monkey wrench and got out of the car.

  Making her way down the steep slope, following the van’s wake through the cattails, she called, “Ben! I’m here! Say something if you can talk.”

  There was no reply. Trying the rear cargo doors, she found them locked, and worked her way through the reeds to the driver’s side. That door was ajar. There were smears of blood on it, and traces on the grass.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hi there,” said a muffled voice from behind.

  It was a doctor—one of the tall, masked surgeons Maddy had seen with Dr. Stevens. The man was standing in the reeds like some kind of weird sentinel, his eyes black slits in a fish-belly white face, leering at her with prurient intensity. There was something funny about the shape of his head. It was sort of … lopsided. Asymmetrical. His nose was bloodied from the crash, and the hem of his blue gown was stained with mud. In his rubber-gloved hands was an alarming pair of cutting shears.

  “I’m just here to take Ben,” she said. “Don’t try to stop me, and you won’t get hurt.”

  The man didn’t move or say anything, and she warily stole a glance into the van. Empty. Shit.

  “Where is he?” she demanded. “What have you done with him?”

  But she already knew; Ben had never been there at all. The van was a decoy. They had tricked her.

  The doctor shrugged. Not a sincere shrug, but a buffoonish pantomime of a shrug, palms raised to the heavens. Oy. What are you gonna do?

  “Let me by,” she said.

  He just stared.

  “Let me by, or I’ll have to hurt you.”

  It was like talking to a wall. All right, then. She went for him.

  Her arms were tired, and her whole body hurt, but as she advanced. Maddy slipped right back into action mode, or what she was beginning to think of as “going turbo.” It required nothing on her part but to hop aboard—it would have been more of an effort to refuse, not to mention a lot scarier.

  As the doctor raised his shears, she pinwheeled the heavy wrench, working up enough centrifugal force to take him out with one blow. Sorry, jerkwad! But as she batted his blades aside and lunged forward, the man was quicker, fluidly sidestepping her blow and catching the wrench on its downswing, using its own momentum to tear it from her grip.

  “No way,” she gasped.

  Vectors realigning, she drove one foot into his knee, the other into his groin, and pushed off, catching the shears handle under her arm and stripping him of it as she vaulted backward. My turn. Rolling to her feet, she held up the long-bladed scissors, and said, “Nice—what do you use these things for?”

  “Grand openings,” he replied softly. Her kicks didn’t seem to have fazed him, and he calmly awaited her next attack.

  She advanced into his strike radius, shears ready at her side. They were playing a game of chicken, waiting to see who would blink first. Maddy understood that by revealing an action, one is already at a disadvantage. She had all his possible moves mapped out, ready to counter them. But what he did was both simpler and more unexpected than anything she imagined.

  He went for the shears with his hand. It was like a child grabbing a poisonous snake. But when she hacked at his gloved fingers, she was startled to find that they were tougher than she expected, too tough to chop through. Not flesh and bone at all—the rubber peeled back to reveal glints of metal. It was a prosthetic. He seized the blades, ripping the weapon away from her. Now he had both large tools, leaving her with nothing but a pitiful, rusty screwdriver.

  “Don’t mess with Sinatra,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The man with the golden arm.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Who are you?”

  “Don’t you remember me, Madeline? I’m Dr. Hellstrom. I assisted in your procedure. We should really be friends, you know, since we have so much in common. We’re both Braintree alumni.”

  Clearly, he was more interested in preventing her from leaving than he was in killing her. It was disconcerting to realize that if he had really wanted to kill her, he could have. Easily.

  So how could she kill him? Come to think of it, how could she kill anyone? Oh my God, how had all this happened at all? For a second or two, she jittered on the ragged fringe of cold, raw panic … then the implant kicked in, delivering a warm, smoothing sensation that muffled the spikes like a blanket over barbed wire.

  “Hey, kid,” said Moses, sitting behind the wheel of the van. “Need a lift?”

  Diving on top of him, she locked the door. The engine was still running. It didn’t sound too good, but it didn’t have to—it wasn’t going anywhere. The front airbag had been deployed, but she used the screwdriver to pry open the door paneling and remove a small package—the side airbag—then reached under the dash for the electrical panel. As the doctor smashed in the window, Maddy dove for the passenger side, but she was too slow. He was already on her, painfully pinning her facedown on the seat. If only she could turn into thin air like that damn raccoon.

  Relieving her of the screwdriver, Hellstrom murmured, “I’ll just take that, thank you very much.”

  “Take this,” she said, and touched the airbag’s sensor terminal to a live jack.

  It exploded between them, blowing the man out the windshield. Maddy, lying tucked in the angle of the seats, avoided the brunt of its force.

  Shoving aside the spent bag, she jumped from the van and ran up the slope to her car. God what a mess. She couldn’t drive the thing anymore; it looked like it had been used for bombing practice. Fortunately, it wasn’t that visible from the road. She could hear sirens in the distance and see plumes of smoke from burning buildings and police cars; no one was bothering much about an old abandoned vehicle in the weeds. Not yet.

  Legs a little shaky, Maddy hiked up to the highway and started walking away from town. The morning traffic was backed up because of the fire, and she felt highly conspicuous—maybe walking wasn’t such a good idea. When someone rolled down their window to talk to her, she thought, Oh God, here it comes.

  “Honey, you need a lift?” called the driver. It was a pretty, dark-haired young woman in a sputtering Volvo station wagon, with two little girls in the backseat.

  “Actually, yeah, I do.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Well, I’m a little lost,” Maddy said. “I’m trying to get to Denton.”

  “Denton … ?”

  “Denton, Colorado?”

  “Oh—wow. Okay. Well, we’re not going that far, but we can get you over to Cheyenne.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Get in.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  PINS AND NEEDLES

  YOU’VE been asleep for quite a while.”

  “Oh—sorry.” Maddy suddenly realized her IV puncture was exposed and covered it up. “Gee, I must have really passed out, I’m sorry. I guess I was more tired than I thought.”

  “I could tell. So what were you doing walking out there?”

  “My car broke down.”

  “Oh! I didn’t think you looked like the type to be hitch-hiking.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “No luggage. You’re not dressed for it. Most hitchhikers are carrying something, a bag or a backpack. I picked up this one kid who had everything he owned in a pillowcase. I was afraid you might be in trouble. I’m on the road a lot for my job, and I try to help out street kids when I see them because I would hope som
eone would do the same for mine if they ever needed it.”

  “That’s cool. Thank you.”

  “Hey, just pass it along to the next person you meet. My name’s Donna Rasmussen, and that’s Faith and Lucy back there.”

  “Hi,” the girls said. The brasher one asked, “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Marilyn, uh, Marilyn Manson—Mason, sorry! Phew, yeah, Mary Mason. Wow. But I’m really not homeless or a runaway or anything. I’m actually on my way back home.”

  The woman asked, “Do you go to school or something, Mary?”

  “Kind of, yeah.”

  “Kind of?”

  “It’s more of a … rehabilitation program. I just got out.”

  “Oh—I understand. That’s okay. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I know where you’re at, believe me. I’ve been there.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. You may not know it to look at me now, but I used to raise holy hell. Got into every kind of trouble you can imagine, mixed up with gangs, drugs, alcohol, you name it. I’ve done my time. Nobody could tell me anything, especially not my parents. But you know what finally turned it around for me?”

  Maddy thought, The Lord Jesus Christ, but she said, “What?”

  “The Lord Jesus Christ.”

  “Oh … yeah?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna start preaching at you. I know how stupid this sounds if you’re not in the right mentality. I rejected it for a long time, believe me. Wasn’t until I hit rock bottom that I was ready, and that’s when He came to me.”

  “So you had some kind of epiphany or something?”

  “Epiphany, yes. Good word. I woke up one night in an abandoned factory, cold and hungry and strung out, and I had no idea where I was. On top of that, I had just found out the day before that I was pregnant. I was scared to death, so I started praying for help, begging on my hands and knees for somebody to save me, when all of a sudden this bright light hit me, like a ray of sunshine, and I knew there was nothing to be afraid of … because He was there. And He’s been with us ever since.”