Authors: Walter Greatshell
Mad Skills (23 page)
Screw it.
Maddy sat up and gingerly peeled the tape off her IV needle. It was stuck in the back of her hand, and it made her a little sick to look at it. Without giving herself time to think, she slipped the needle out and applied pressure with a wad of gauze, taping it back down firmly. It hurt for a second, but she didn’t lose a drop of blood. She unclipped the pulse monitor from her finger and switched off the alarm—there. Too early in the morning for all that noise.
Maddy sat up and gingerly peeled the tape off her IV needle. It was stuck in the back of her hand, and it made her a little sick to look at it. Without giving herself time to think, she slipped the needle out and applied pressure with a wad of gauze, taping it back down firmly. It hurt for a second, but she didn’t lose a drop of blood. She unclipped the pulse monitor from her finger and switched off the alarm—there. Too early in the morning for all that noise.
It didn’t strike her as odd that she understood the workings of every piece of machinery in the room. What was strange to her was how brutally archaic it all seemed, like something out of the Dark Ages. The needles and wires and dripping solutions, the scissors and stitches and sticky tape that were more reminiscent of a kiddie craft fair than a house of healing. All the blood and needless pain. She felt sure there were better ways. In fact, she could think of a few right off the top of her head—something with directed harmonics, exploiting ultrahigh-frequency quantum fluctuations to target specific molecules—but she couldn’t bother about that just then. Her bladder was about to burst.
Making her way past the nurses’ station, she picked up the stethoscope and slammed it on the counter, then hurried to the restroom just beyond. She was worried it would be occupied, but the door opened on a vacant and spotless toilet stall.
After availing herself of the facilities, Maddy emerged feeling much better. She expected to find that the grave-yard shift had returned, but the ward was just as empty as before. The few other patients were dead asleep, curtained off in their cubbies and snoring away unconcerned. For a second, Maddy considered simply returning to bed, but then she saw something that gave her pause.
There was blood on the floor, a line of dime-size droplets that started at the emergency entrance and ran all the way down the hall. The blood was trampled in places; there were partial shoe prints of various kinds, in red patterns as sharply delineated as passport stamps. People running into the hospital? Everyone in such a hurry to get to surgery that the attending physician dropped his or her stethoscope? It made sense … or did it? Even in an emergency, how long would the other patients be left alone? Certainly, it would have to be something very serious.
Or, it could just be a mistake, an oversight. Ordinary, gross incompetence.
Whatever it was, she couldn’t go back to bed without knowing what was going on. And if it gave her an excuse to ask about Ben, all the better.
Maddy found her clothes and shoes in a plastic bag under her gurney and got dressed. Then she ventured down the dim hallway, careful not to step in the blood.
Following the signs, she found the Intensive Care Ward, and was shocked to see that there was no one on duty there either, the unconscious patients wheezing un-supervised inside their plastic oxygen tents. There was also no sign of Ben. She was really getting worried now.
Where is everybody?
Where is everybody?
Any minute, Maddy expected to run into someone, a security guard or grumpy nurse, and be yelled at for trespassing, but the whole staff seemed to have cleared out. She peeked into Radiology and Imaging, into various labs and offices, but all she could find were more signs of a hurried departure: clipboards on the floor, spilled papers.
With trepidation, she glanced into the surgical suite, but it was just as empty. It stank of pine disinfectant. All that was left was the Neonatal Wing. If nothing else, there would surely be someone taking care of the newborn babies!
The lights were off in that section, as they were in a lot of the hospital, the only illumination coming from the exit signs and the flashing red and blue lights of emergency vehicles outside the window.
Pushing through the double doors, Maddy said, “Hello?”
“Hello,” a man’s muffled voice replied, and a powerful hand clamped over her mouth, yanking her backward into the speaker’s chest. Pinning her arms and carrying her, he said, “Don’t make a sound, or they all die.” He kicked open another set of doors.
Unable to scream, barely able to breathe, Maddy’s eyes widened at the sight before her.
She had found all the missing hospital personnel. They were right there, doctors and nurses and orderlies and anyone else who was on duty—about forty people altogether—sitting on the floor of the Maternity Ward, tied up in pairs, back-to-back, amid cradles of newborn infants. Hostages. And standing above them all were four armed men in black clothes and ski masks. She could smell the men’s sweat, their fear, and suddenly Maddy realized that the lights and sirens outside were not ambulances but police cars. These men were cornered here, capable of anything.
Pinning Maddy down, two of the men hogtied her with an Ace bandage, taped her mouth shut, and shoved her among the others.
“Here’s what we’re doing,” one of them announced, holding up a cell phone. “In a few minutes we are going to walk out of here and drive to the airport. Each of us will be holding babies, as many as we can carry. Anything that happens to us will also happen to the babies. We will board a plane and fly to an undisclosed location, where we will then release the plane and the babies. We don’t want to hurt anyone. We will take good care of these babies as long as everything goes smoothly … but at the first sign of trouble, we will abort. Do you understand? We will abort.”
At the word
abort
, several people on the floor went crazy, making desperate sounds of pleading through their gags. Their eyes were bugging out in terror, their faces red and streaked with tears—perhaps they were new parents.
abort
, several people on the floor went crazy, making desperate sounds of pleading through their gags. Their eyes were bugging out in terror, their faces red and streaked with tears—perhaps they were new parents.
Oddly enough, at the sound of the man’s voice, Maddy began to feel calmer. At first she had been so surprised and overpowered that she had given in to the assumption that she had no choice but to surrender—it was a habit born of a lifetime of submitting to adult authority, especially
masculine
authority. You did not resist power, boys were stronger, end of story. Against the male will, your only defense lay in the hands of others: parents, teachers, school counselors, police. And if none of them were around (or worse,
they
were the ones doing the dirt), God help you. And God was a man.
masculine
authority. You did not resist power, boys were stronger, end of story. Against the male will, your only defense lay in the hands of others: parents, teachers, school counselors, police. And if none of them were around (or worse,
they
were the ones doing the dirt), God help you. And God was a man.
But as Maddy looked at these men, she couldn’t help but feel an unaccustomed sense of contempt. Especially in the hospital setting, she was inordinately aware of their inner plumbing, the rickety scaffold of bones, sinews, and pulpy muscle that held them together. Humans were so complicated and frail; there were literally a million things that could go wrong, drop them in their tracks.
Ever since the surgery, Maddy had been having anxieties about her own frailty, worrying she was becoming a hypochondriac. Too much knowledge was a dangerous thing. Fortunately, her mind had a way of steering itself away from such pointless fears before they paralyzed her completely. But there was nothing to stop her from projecting these thoughts onto others. By turning them outward, she suddenly realized she could transmute helpless fear into empowering scorn. Scorn for all this shambling, loathsome humanity.
The man nearest her, for example. She was looking at the back of his knee, which though sheathed in black trousers was naked to her in its flimsy mechanical structure. Right there at the joint, everything was exposed: the bone and cartilage, the popliteal, the effectors and motor neurons, the sensitive muscle spindle that triggered the poly-synaptic reflex. It might as well have been a house of cards.
A wet nose touched her ear, whiskers tickling, and the raccoon’s voice hissed, “Now or never, sweetheart—once these guys are on the move and carrying babies, it’ll be much harder to intervene.”
Taking a deep breath, Maddy swiveled her shoulders, slackening the tight bandage just enough to slide her bound wrists under her butt and get her arms in front of her. It was not a particularly amazing feat, merely the normal dexterity of a teenage girl, but she was surprised and pleased with herself. It was one thing to know something was possible as an abstraction, another actually to make it happen.
Focus, focus—stay on track …
go
!
She rocked backward and drove her bound feet as hard as she could into the crook of the man’s supporting leg. As she expected, his flexor sprang like a mousetrap, causing his leg to fold under him like a bent cardboard tube.
go
!
She rocked backward and drove her bound feet as hard as she could into the crook of the man’s supporting leg. As she expected, his flexor sprang like a mousetrap, causing his leg to fold under him like a bent cardboard tube.
Caught completely off guard, the man fell backward, flailing for support, and found only the hard pedestal of Maddy’s heel in the base of his skull—
crack!
The force of her second kick, combined with the man’s own mass and velocity of descent, caused a severe rupture of his C-1 vertebrae at the point where it joined the skull. He fell into her lap, unconscious, perhaps paralyzed, and she took the toylike 9mm pistol from his twitching hand and fired three shots, each of the remaining three men collapsing in turn like a synchronized building demolition, falling where they stood, and three neat arcs of blood trailing them down—1-2-3.
crack!
The force of her second kick, combined with the man’s own mass and velocity of descent, caused a severe rupture of his C-1 vertebrae at the point where it joined the skull. He fell into her lap, unconscious, perhaps paralyzed, and she took the toylike 9mm pistol from his twitching hand and fired three shots, each of the remaining three men collapsing in turn like a synchronized building demolition, falling where they stood, and three neat arcs of blood trailing them down—1-2-3.
Her man was still twitching, and Maddy pulled off his ski mask to see if he was breathing. No—he was dead. But she was alarmed to see that there was a fresh scar on the back of his bald head—a familiar, crescent-shaped surgical incision.
Oh shit,
Maddy thought.
Oh shit,
Maddy thought.
The man had an implant—he was one of
them
.
them
.
TWENTY-SIX
HOPSCOTCH
ALL of a sudden, she understood everything: The body on the gurney had been Ben’s. Dr. Stevens had come to take him back to Braintree, using the hostage thing as a diversion, and if Maddy had not gone to the bathroom when she did, they would have taken her next.
Stupid!
Stupid!
Tossing the gun aside, Maddy undid her cloth bindings and peeled the tape off her mouth, then said sorry to the other hostages and ran from the room. There was no time for an explanation—not if she wanted to save Ben.
Running down the hall, she heard a massive commotion of breaking glass and trampling footsteps. The cavalry was finally arriving. Smoke canisters rattled down the corridor, spewing noxious clouds threaded with laser light and burgeoning with black-helmeted SWAT troops.
“GET DOWN, GET DOWN,” they screamed at no one in particular, battering through locked doors and dispensing flash grenades right and left, setting off the fire alarm and the sprinklers, so that every patient who didn’t die outright from the shock shot bolt upright in utter panic, thinking it was the end of the world, pissing their beds and screeching for mercy. All at once, the hospital became a zoo, an insane monkey house from which there was no safe exit.
Not wishing to be mistaken for a target, Maddy sat down on the floor and put up her hands, crying, “Don’t shoot! I’m a patient!”
“GET DOWN! GET DOWN!”
“I am down!”
“Stay there and don’t move!”
“I’m not, I’m not!”
Speckled with red points of laser light, she held still as scary-looking commandos in gas masks descended on her out of the artificial rain and fog, guns trained on her face.
“WHERE ARE THEY?” they demanded.
“Back there, in Maternity.”
“STAY HERE AND DON’T MOVE.”
They swept past her, taking up positions around the bay doors. Maddy half hoped she could just slip away without being noticed, but as she started to move, someone shot her. The impact was so hard it knocked her down, as stunningly painful as if she had been whammed in the back with a major-league fastball.
Sprawled on the floor, struggling to breathe, she thought wildly,
I’ve been shot!
I’ve been shot!
Powerful hands grabbed her under the arms and started carrying her away.
“You shot me!”
she cried.
she cried.
“You moved. Relax, you’re okay.”
“
Okay?
I’ve been
shot
, you jerk! Oh my God!”
Okay?
I’ve been
shot
, you jerk! Oh my God!”
“It was just a beanbag, calm down.”
“A
what
?”
what
?”
“A nonlethal munition. Take it easy.”
“
You
take it easy, dickhead! It
hurts
!”
You
take it easy, dickhead! It
hurts
!”
The man lugged her outside. It was a traffic jam out there, the hospital parking lot crammed with emergency vehicles of every type, their crews anxiously sitting around waiting for the go-ahead to enter the building.
The SWAT guys handed her off to the regular cops, who took her name and signed her over to some EMTs, who gave her a quick once-over to make sure she wasn’t suffering from any life-threatening condition. She wasn’t, though they admitted she was going to have one heck of a bruise. “No shit, Sherlock,” she said. Pushing through a line of reporters, they wrapped her in a blanket and put her in a makeshift corral with a number of other ambulatory patients who had fled the hospital. Dawn was coming up beautiful and clear, and there were volunteer firemen handing out donuts and hot coffee. Everybody seemed to be enjoying the excitement—a real-life hostage crisis!
All she could think of was how she was going to sneak out of there. Once they found the dead guys and heard what had happened from the hostages, it was all over—she’d never escape.
“Madeline! Miss Grant! Over here!”
Oh no. Following the voice, Maddy turned to see a burly female figure at the edge of the police cordon. It was that woman deputy who had picked them up on the road, Tina Reinaldi. What now? Trying to play it cool, Maddy went over.
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