Mad Skills

by Greatshell, Walter

  Ah, that was the problem. No Alan.

  For that matter, where was everyone? Having been well shielded from the previous day’s electromagnetic attack, the basement computer vaults should have been the quickest to return to normal, but there was nobody at the workstations; all the lab techs seemed to be out taking a smoke break. Smoke break—that’s a good one: No doubt they were all staring out the upstairs windows at the huge smoke plume rising from the valley. Whispering about the end of Harmony.

  That’s right, that’s right, it’s gone, she thought irritably. All that work down the drain. So let’s just curl up and die, why don’t we? That won’t be suspicious at all.

  Entering the flickering blue light of the teleconference suite, Dr. Stevens suddenly realized something was terribly, terribly wrong. The long table had been tipped over, the plush leather chairs tossed around willy-nilly. The video screens were rolling windows of static, captioned SIGNAL FAILURE. And behind the table … oh God behind the table …

  Inching forward as if in a bad dream, Chandra peered around the canted mahogany surface at a strange, heaving mass on the floor. It looked like an enormous white fungus, a sprawling, furry blob with many wriggling pink tendrils—she understood at once it was a living mound of rat butts. Protruding from underneath the thing were several pairs of half-gnawed human legs. She recognized Dr. Trager’s orthopedic shoes.

  “Goddammit,” Chandra said softly.

  The rats ignored her. They could barely move, they were so engorged. She stood frozen in place for what felt like a very long time, her scrambled brain just rolling and rolling.

  Signal failure … unable to connect …

  Finally, one of the rats waddled toward her, its belly dragging on the carpet. So ridiculous with its little cranial cap. In a burst of blind rage and despair, Chandra kicked the stupid thing across the room, where it struck the center of a plasma screen and splatted like a rotten tomato.

  “Goddamn that bitch.” Opening her phone, she said, “Brenda, call Security. We need an exterminator down here.”

  Dr. Stevens turned and walked out. She made sure to close the door behind her.

  FORTY

  GHOST IN THE MACHINE

  LYING awake beside Maddy, Ben Blevin had a moment to think about the bizarre events of the past week. Bizarre was an understatement: terrifying, unbelievable events—not the least of which was the discovery that he was not really Ben Blevin but some brainwashed stranger named Duane Devlin. As if that wasn’t insane enough, Maddy claimed she was really the ghost of Marina Sweet.

  At first he refused to believe it.

  I know who I am! he had insisted, nearly storming out of their crappy motel room by the truck wash. The Marina thing he could understand to a degree, because he knew Maddy had been nuts about Marina Sweet, but this other stuff was pure nonsense. Who the hell was Duane Devlin? And what did that even mean, his parents weren’t his real parents? How could his father, Sam, be a Braintree doctor named Kaleel Zondervan? Obviously, between her brain implant and everything else that had happened to her, his goofy-ass former-stepsister-to-be had finally lost it.

  But she explained it all, pulling him back inside the room, sitting him down on the grungy yellow bedspread, and calmly, methodically telling him things about himself that no one could ever have known: things from his deepest subconscious that were so powerful and true they brought him to tears. The buried hurts he had suffered from earliest childhood at the hands of those he loved and trusted the most.

  Neither white enough to please his mother’s small-town people, nor black enough to please his father’s, Ben had always felt like a shunned mongrel, caught between worlds, whose greatest comfort came from his parents’ unfailing bond. The race issue meant nothing to them, and their marriage was the best proof against the stupidities of others.

  When Ben’s mother died, it was as though the Earth itself cracked in two—he closed down, refusing to deal. He thought things couldn’t get any worse … until his father started dating again. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, they actually moved in with his dad’s new girlfriend! It was a nightmare. But the strangest thing happened:

  It was the woman’s daughter. An annoying, freckle-faced chick who was silly, awkward, and possibly the only person on the planet more uncomfortable than he was. Maybe because she was so uncomfortable, she drew Ben’s attention away from himself. Out from under the shadow of his towering grief. And every time he looked back, it was a little bit smaller.

  As gently as possible, Maddy told him this was all bogus. His memories weren’t really his; everything before the carnival accident was secondhand. It was like an organ transplant, only instead of a kidney or a liver, he had gotten someone else’s soul. Ben Blevin’s soul.

  But I am Ben Blevin, he said.

  No, she said. And she showed him the pictures.

  Who the hell is that supposed to be?

  That’s Ben Blevin.

  The guy didn’t even look like him. That’s ridiculous.

  She proved it. She showed him evidence that the real Benjamin Blevin was dead, just as the original Madeline Grant was dead, their present identities nothing more than bootleg recordings from lost masters. And even those originals were fakes—the real Ben and Maddy had not been normal children but guinea pigs of Braintree.

  We’re bootlegs of counterfeits, she said. Third-party unauthorized copies downloaded onto stolen computers. But check out the special features.

  She proceeded to repair her head in front of him. Ben could barely stand to watch, but Maddy had insisted he see what they had turned her into, making him sit beside her with a mirror and a spray bottle of topical anesthetic while she pulled out the hasty temporary stitches and reset the implant. It was nasty. He would have needed a microscope to see half of what she was doing in there with those tweezers—damn she was fast—but in a matter of minutes the wound was evenly and minutely threaded back together.

  All done, she chirped. Now it’s your turn …

  Over the next few days, they recuperated in the room. From time to time, Ben stepped out on brief errands (the first thing he had done was get them both some hats—they looked like a couple of skinheads), running through their small supply of cash. They still had all the money from their original escape attempt, Ben’s pocket money, which was enough for about a week at the cheapest lodging they had been able to find: a noisy truck-stop motel on the outskirts of Newark. Ben had smuggled her in, but even at the single room rate, there was little left over for food or other amenities. At least gas was not an issue since they had abandoned the Braintree van in a parking garage. As far as they knew, no one was looking for it; there was nothing about them on the news. The only thing they heard about the destruction of Harmony was a brief story about reported explosions in the Bitterroot Valley region of Idaho. The official explanation was that these were “gas eruptions triggered by spontaneous coal combustion”—the gist being that since the valley was under federal jurisdiction, a restricted no-fly zone, it was of no concern to anyone.

  Despite her crazy abilities, Ben could tell Maddy was having just as hard a time of it as he was. She could no more think of herself as Marina Sweet than he could think of himself as Duane Devlin. That more than anything was what persuaded him it was all true, the fact that she had to keep reminding herself that Roger and Beth Grant had not been her actual parents, that they were strangers to her, real-life mad scientists, and it was ridiculous to mourn their deaths. But she couldn’t help it; they were the only parents she knew. What’s more, they had thought they were her parents—Ben remembered the look on their poor sad faces as she was being wheeled out of the building. At Braintree, self-deception, self-obliteration, was the final reward. Everyone drank the Kool-Aid.

  I killed them, don’t you understand? I killed them.

  Ben comforted her in her grief and guilt, talking her through the long, miserable nights. They separated the single bed in two, he sleeping on the hard box spring and she on the stai
ned mattress, but somehow by morning they always wound up huddled together.

  Thank you, Maddy told him, nestled tight against his body. Thank you for saving me. Thank you. Thank you.

  He said, Hey, it’s you who saved me. If you hadn’t done what you did, I’d still be back there. I’d be one of them. I was down with the program, man.

  But you keep on saving me, just like you tried to save Marina. Is that why you do it? Because of her?

  Ben shook his head. I don’t remember her. Marina Sweet isn’t real to me, Maddy, any more than Duane Devlin is. You and me are all I know. I only believe in us.

  Maddy awoke beside him.

  “Hey,” he said softly.

  Without speaking, she untangled herself and went to wash up. The afternoon sun was beaming in harsh through the blinds—another new day.

  When she came out, Ben was flipping channels on the TV. He said, “I was thinking about what you said before.”

  “What’s that?”

  “About Duane and Marina. Maybe we should do what they tried to do: go to Canada.”

  Maddy sat beside him and muted the TV. “Ben,” she said, “I don’t think I’m going to be doing that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m going to New York. I’m going to find my mother. My real mother—Marina’s birth mother. She’s some actress named Angela Brightly. I don’t know what I’ll do when I find her, but I’ll figure that out later.”

  He nodded. “That’s cool. I understand. We’ll go together.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know what I am, what I can do. What I’ve already done. It’ll be safer for both of us if I’m there alone. I’m sorry.”

  “And what am I supposed to do?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Here.”

  She handed him a piece of paper scribbled with an address in California and the word DEVLINS.

  “I’ve been making some phone calls while you were out. It’s your family—your real family. They filed a missing-person’s report on you last year, but by now they probably assume you’re dead. Maybe it’s about time somebody set them straight.”

  “Shit.” Ben held the paper as though it were hot. “There’s only one problem. We’re almost outta money. How am I supposed to get all the way to California from here? Hitchhike?”

  Maddy laughed and got dressed. “Come on.”

  Leading Ben to the motel lobby, she made him ask the desk clerk, “Has any mail arrived for Room 103?”

  The clerk handed him a mailing box marked OVERNIGHT EXPRESS. The return address was a P.O. box in Omaha, Nebraska.

  “What’s this?” Ben asked her.

  “Like I said, I’ve made a few calls.”

  Back in the room he opened the box. It contained an envelope full of birth certificates, social-security numbers, credit-card numbers, bank statements, and other identity documents, all with his picture, all with different names. A second envelope was stuffed with ATM cards and attached PIN numbers. A third envelope held fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of blank traveler’s checks.

  “Don’t ask,” she said.

  They went out.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Walter Greatshell has lived in five countries and worked many odd jobs across America, including painting houses, writing for a local newspaper, managing a quaint old movie house, and building nuclear submarines. For now, he has settled in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife, Cindy; son, Max; and cat, Reuben. Visit Walter’s website at www.waltergreatshell.com.

  Ace Books by Walter Greatshell

  XOMBIES: APOCALYPSE BLUES

  XOMBIES: APOCALYPTICON

  MAD SKILLS