Mad Skills

by Greatshell, Walter

  “What the hell? And you didn’t think that was something you needed to tell me?”

  “I know, I’m sorry. It’s just so nuts that I guess I thought it was a mental block or something—some little glitch in my brain. Dr. Stevens said there might be things like that. I didn’t want to deal with it, so after a few tries I just gave up on the idea of leaving. I stopped thinking about it … until you showed up. I guess I was hoping maybe your confidence could jar something loose.”

  Oh my God, Maddy thought, trying not to panic. Holding her voice steady, she said, “Do you realize how crazy this sounds? This proves it! This proves what I was saying before!”

  “No it doesn’t, come on.”

  “Yes it does. The whole town is some kind of sick Area 54.”

  “Fifty-one. It’s Studio 54.”

  “And you stood there and let me think I was crazy!”

  The shock of an actual crisis had the effect of dispelling Maddy’s more vague feelings of doom. The Institute wanted her to turn around, of course they did! But she wasn’t going to play their game. All she had to do was get past the aversion barrier they had planted in her mind, no different than the physical barriers that were obstructing their forward progress. The answer to both was the same.

  Heart thumping, Maddy said, “Just go through.”

  “What?”

  “Drive! Now!”

  “I can’t do that!”

  “Oh Goddammit—”

  Maddy lunged for the steering wheel, but Ben held her off, saying, “Okay, okay, I’m doing it!” as he shifted out of neutral and hit the gas. The sign went down, the orange cones and barrels bounced every which way, and they were through, speeding down a dark strip of road.

  Which ended a few feet later.

  “Stop!” Maddy shrieked.

  Ben pulled up hard before a jagged rim of asphalt, their headlights showing the opposite face of a deep ditch. Before Ben could do anything, the pavement under their front wheels crumbled, and the van slid heavily down the eroded bank and plowed into a heap of gravel at the bottom. Clouds of dust and smoke fluoresced white in the headlights.

  Ben cut the motor. “Well,” he said. “Now we’re screwed.”

  Maddy didn’t know what to say. Sorry seemed a bit trite. Taking the bull by the horns, she asked, “You think we can get back on the highway?”

  “Maybe if we had a dune buggy. Not with this thing.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Come on, we better go. Get ready to hold your breath.”

  He left the headlights on, and they scrambled out. The air in the ravine was rank and sulfurous, harsh but seemingly not unbreathable, and there was a trickle of hot water running down the center. Maddy’s mind tripped off the things she was probably inhaling: hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide. Best to move quickly.

  In the haze, she could see that the bank was not as steep as she’d thought. As she climbed, she could hear strange wheezing sounds percolating from the ground, as if the earth were a giant cappuccino machine … and she could hear something else:

  A helicopter.

  Suddenly, the slope gleamed silver-gray, bright as a movie screen upon which elastic shadows of Maddy and Ben stretched stark black. Turning to face the light, shielding her eyes, Maddy could make out the aircraft swooping low over the highway.

  “Ben!” she cried, stumbling on the rubble.

  Pulling himself over the rim, he reached down to help her. “We’re so nailed,” he said.

  “STAY WHERE YOU ARE,” squawked an amplified voice from the glare. “THIS IS THE SAFETY PATROL.”

  “Border Patrol is more like it,” said the now-familiar voice of Moses. The raccoon was sitting on a projecting edge of roadway, jauntily dangling his feet in her face.

  “Oh my God,” Maddy said. “What now?”

  “They’re not rescuers, sweetheart. They’re prison guards, and they’ll kill you before they let you go. They’re here to make sure nobody gets out alive. And even if they don’t kill you, you and your boyfriend are probably scheduled for his-’n’-hers frontal lobotomies as soon as you get back to Lemmington. Now that you know what the game is.”

  “They can’t!”

  “Oh, they can. They will. That is, unless you move your skinny butt and do something about it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like get back in the van.”

  The helicopter circled to land, kicking up flurries of stinging grit and clearing the smoke. A convoy of headlights appeared. Maddy made her move, ducking into the ravine’s shadow and slipping aboard the van.

  “What are you doing?” Ben called from above. Before he could go after her, a large dog pounced out of the glare and knocked him flat.

  Maddy didn’t look back. From the opposite bank, there was a burst of gunfire that kicked up dirt where she had been standing. Narcotic darts bounced off the van’s passenger door. But she was already inside, lying flat amid toolboxes and painting supplies. She didn’t know what she was doing, but fortunately her hands seemed to. Things came together with the automatic ease of long experience.

  Acetone. Benzine. Toluene. Alcohol. The chemical combinations shuffled like cards, dealing out poker hands on the green baize of her consciousness.

  Taking several cans of spray enamel, she removed their caps and set the cans upright in a bucket.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Moses. “That’ll work.”

  Then she removed her new digital camera from her bag, charged the flash, and popped the bulb with a screwdriver. So much for those pictures, but Ben in the flesh would be sufficient proof. If she ever got out of there.

  While the flash charged, she set the timer for one minute. Placing the camera in the bucket with the spray cans, she sloshed in some acetone-based thinner and put a canvas tarp on top, tucking it around the cans and pouring on some methyl alcohol. The last step was to weigh it all down with a gallon can of organic solvent and push in the van’s cigarette lighter.

  “Beautiful,” said Moses. “Now run.”

  Thirty seconds left. She could hear the hissing spray nozzles as she scuttled butt first out of the van—

  Right into the arms of the law.

  “Gotcha,” a man said.

  “You have to let me go,” she said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Maddy remained still as more men came down both sides of the embankment. She could see from their silhouettes that they were wearing fire helmets and breathing equipment. They also had dogs and night-vision gear. Her captor forced her to lie facedown on the hot ground while he cuffed her with plastic restraints, then painfully jerked her to her feet and dragged her up to the highway. Ben was nowhere to be seen; they had already taken him.

  Five seconds. Four … three … two …

  Maddy sidestepped in front of her captor, using his body as a shield.

  The camera flash sparked, igniting the fumes in the bucket, which went up like a bomb, vaporizing the alcohol suspended in the tarp, rupturing the aerosol cans, and atomizing the solvent, so that for half a millisecond, the van’s interior was filled with a dense cloud of vapor. The pressurized vapor shorted the cigarette lighter, causing a volatile reaction in the suspended particles.

  They exploded.

  The force of the second explosion dwarfed the first. It peeled the van open like a paper bag, the shock wave expanding outward at supersonic speed and blasting the nearest men flat as broken reeds, knocking the clothes off their backs, the shoes off their feet, the limbs off their bodies, and the flesh off their bones. All that happened within a radius of about thirty feet. Beyond that, everything was scoured with flying debris, a lethal hail of shrapnel that took out car windshields half a mile away and riddled the Perspex canopy of the helicopter. Spotlights imploded. Any dogs that weren’t killed outright went screaming berserk, attacking their masters in a frenzy of panic.

  Maddy felt her whole body clapped between the hands of a giant. The air was knocked out of her, pressure ramm
ing her ears and sinuses like a sharp stick. For an instant, she thought her head would explode, then the shock wave passed. Just when she thought it was over, something heavy hit her from behind—the guard. His body slammed her against the asphalt, honking her diaphragm like a whoopie cushion.

  Struggling out from under, she realized that the man was either unconscious or dead. Something warm and wet was dribbling on the back of her neck.

  “Don’t waste your chance,” said Moses.

  The whole place was pandemonium, people running around in the dusty void screaming orders and calling for help. For the moment, they seemed to have lost interest in her and Ben. Where was Ben? Maddy couldn’t think straight; she just wanted the dead guy off her. Squirming free, she scrambled to her feet and frantically jumped around trying to shake the blood off. OGodOGodOGod! Some of it was her own, streaming from her nose and ears—she could taste it. The nauseating flavor of her leaking vital fluid paralyzed her with fright.

  “Don’t freeze up now.” The raccoon wheedled. “Check his belt.”

  Still freaking out, Maddy reluctantly knelt beside the man, turning her back and sitting down so she could work her hands under his waist. There it was: the leather snap holding the utility pliers. Even with her back turned, it was easy enough to figure out the tool. Whimpering, she reversed it and clipped the restraint. Then she just sat there rubbing her wrists, unsure of what to do next.

  The man was not dead; he began to move. To moan.

  “Take his gun, too,” Moses said.

  “No!”

  There was no question of her fooling with a loaded pistol—hadn’t things gone far enough as it was? Making a fuel-air bomb out of painting supplies was so outlandish she had had no frame of reference with which to judge her actions, but using a gun … that was a serious crime.

  She could barely bring herself to look at the wounded man. “It’s okay,” she told him guiltily. “Help is on the way.” She figured she would wait there with him until help arrived; after all, she needed medical attention, too.

  The raccoon was still there, shaking his head.

  “What?” she asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “You mean other than save your silly ass?”

  “How? Make a run for it?”

  “Why else did you blow up the van? For the fun of it?”

  The words were like a hard slap in the face. “I can’t just walk out of here!” she cried. “I’m bleeding!”

  “Oh, you’re bleeding. Excuse me.”

  “Well, I am! I’m probably in shock.”

  “Give me a break. You’ve got about five seconds left to do something, and you’re just going to fritter it away like some bimbo pouting at her birthday party.”

  “What do you suggest I do? Fly out of here?”

  “Why not?”

  “What?”

  “Take the helicopter. It’s just sitting there.”

  “Oh sure, I’ll just take the helicopter. Why didn’t I think of that? Good idea—I’m sure they won’t mind.”

  “If you move quickly, they won’t even know until it’s too late.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t fly a helicopter!”

  “How do you know until you try?”

  As if to call his bluff, she got up and started walking along the roadside. More vehicles were arriving by the minute, and she didn’t want to get hit—it was impossible to see anything in the choking dust and smoke. Nobody was looking for her anyway. They were too busy evacuating the dead and injured. Perhaps they thought she was still in the van when it exploded.

  She had given up on finding Ben when she saw him. He was sitting on the ground, leaning against the helicopter. Both he and the aircraft had holes in them. It was clear he had dragged himself there. His guard must have abandoned him or been killed.

  “Ben!” she cried.

  He groggily looked up. “Maddy? What happened? My van—”

  “Don’t worry about that right now. Are you okay?”

  “I think I’m bleeding. Why did you go back to the van?”

  “I don’t know—I’m just trying to get out of this place.”

  Before he could interrogate her any more, she pushed him down and clipped his bindings.

  “There,” she said. “Now I’m gonna go do something very stupid, Ben. You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to—in fact, you probably shouldn’t. Just stand clear, okay?”

  Without looking at him, Maddy yanked the helicopter door open and clambered inside. She had never been in an aircraft cockpit before, but it was all pretty self-explanatory. She could intuit the whole mechanism just from the controls, practically see the hydraulic lines running from the pedals up to the actuators that tilted the rotor blades, trace all the instruments and gauges and especially the joystick, which was so much like something from a video game. Was that all there was to it? The engine was already engaged; all she had to do was throttle up.

  The door opened, and Ben climbed in next to her. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said weakly.

  “Join the club.”

  “Can you really fly this thing?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  And she lifted off.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  HELICOPTER CAMP

  PLAYING with the pedals and the stick, feeling the pitch and yaw and how they matched with the artificial horizon, then adding to that what she could easily infer from the thrust loads and angular velocities, Maddy instantly formed a clear idea of the helicopter’s range of motion. Expecting to be terrified, she instead found herself cocooned in a soothing web of knowledge, borne by a tracery of invisible arrows that clearly showed the way. By simply going with the flow, she flew. In fact, the margin of safety was so great that it was all but impossible to screw up.

  “Whoa,” said Ben, gripping the seat. “How’d you learn how to do this?”

  “It’s just like riding a bike.”

  “Uh … I really doubt it.”

  Maddy rose above the pall of smoke and banked down the valley, following the contours of the landscape. Up there in the moonlight, the visibility was not bad, but she didn’t want to get too low for fear of hidden power lines and transmission towers. Icy-cold wind whistled through the shrapnel holes in the canopy.

  “Where are we going?” Ben asked.

  “Home.”

  “Do you know how to get there from here?”

  “No. Be quiet.”

  Maddy was straining to listen, to feel. Something was wrong. A vibration—something in the gear train was out of whack and getting worse, some kind of dent in the radial plane. Something out of sync. If it broke loose altogether, the gears could just suddenly seize up, the rotor blades could fly off, and they could plummet to their idiotic doom. Stupid raccoon!

  As though reading her thoughts, Moses said, “You should probably find a place to set down.”

  “Ya think?”

  “What’s that?” said Ben.

  “I said we should probably find a place to land.”

  “So soon?”

  “The engine’s giving out.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How don’t you know? Can’t you feel it?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t hear that noise?”

  “You mean the wind?”

  “Ben, let me ask you something. You and I have both had the same operation, right?”

  “I guess so. Similar, anyway.”

  “So how come you seem so … normal?”

  “Normal?”

  “Do you mean to tell me you couldn’t fly this helicopter if you had to?”

  “No.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I never learned how.”

  “Neither did I. It’s not necessary. The mechanism’s so simple, I could practically build one of these from scratch.”

  “Ma
ddy, I don’t understand what you’re saying, but maybe it would be best if we did land this thing.”

  He thought she was crazy. Maybe I am special, Maddy thought. What did they do to me?

  “Look!” Ben said. “There’s a road.”

  Across the piebald landscape was a string of intermittent twinkling lights, red one way and white the other. A two-lane highway that skirted the forbidden valley, separated from it by a range of bluffs; the happy motorists oblivious in their antlike procession, focused only on the distance to the next rest stop; GAS, FOOD, LODGING shining in their headlights like a Pavlovian promise, and perhaps BRAINTREE INSTITUTE, NEXT RIGHT. Yes, this had to be the road they took to bring her here … which meant it also led back home.

  Things were getting really sketchy, so bad that even Ben began to notice. Trying to stay calm, Maddy feathered the aircraft down over an empty stretch of road, seeking any flat, open field. Every clear space was polka-dotted with pine saplings as though it was a Christmas-tree farm.

  All at once the tail rotor gave out, and they began to spin, twirling downward like a leaf. Ben shouted, but Maddy held steady, absorbed in all the swiftly changing adjustments that were required to keep them alive, improvising like a maniacal jazz savant. Slowed by autorotation, the copter touched down reasonably gently, its tail crumpling like a toothpaste tube, but the fuselage mostly intact, canted upright.

  Coming to their senses, Maddy and Ben unbuckled and crawled out of the wreck.

  “Jeez,” Maddy said, “are you okay?”

  “Not really,” said Ben, collapsing in the tall weeds.

  “Oh, Ben, I’m sorry.”

  “I think I hurt something during the crash, or maybe before. I can’t tell. I feel like my stomach’s all bloated.”

  “Oh no.” She checked him. From what she knew about anatomy, it looked like he was hemorrhaging internally. “We better get you to a doctor. Can you walk at all? I need to get you away from the helicopter in case it catches fire.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

  “The road’s right over there. Come on, I’ll help.”

  “I think I can do it.”

  They made their way down the slope of the hill, Ben using the pine saplings as support, staggering from tree to tree. Maddy stayed close in case he needed a hand. When they reached the bottom, he leaned on the highway guard-rail and retched.