Mad Skills Read online

  With a loud pop, both barrels fired at once, launching the pill bottles straight into the man’s face. Blue pills and bits of orange plastic shrapnel exploded in all directions. The man fell backward, bellowing in pain, but Maddy didn’t hesitate: She quickly loaded two more pill bottles, ramming them home with the toilet brush, and fired again. Then again and again. As the men fell back, she stood up and followed … to the limit of the hair dryer’s cord.

  A blinded man was writhing at her feet; another one was crawling away—probably the one who’d been electrocuted. The other two were nowhere to be seen, but as Maddy stood there in the rain of the sprinklers, she realized she had a more serious problem.

  The condo was full of dense smoke, getting thicker and more toxic every second. It was coming in through the front door—if it hadn’t been before, the building now really was on fire. Dropping the fluffy pink weapon, ducking low, she approached the doorway and could see that the entire outside hall was in flames. The heat from the open door was murderous; she had to back off fast.

  Making sure the apartment was empty of human—or inhuman—threats, she crawled on all fours to the kitchen and found the fire extinguisher. Empty! And the phone was dead! She couldn’t believe it. Furiously grabbing a DustBuster off its charger, Maddy hurried back to the bathroom. She could hear the kids coughing in the tub.

  “Okay, guys, we have to play a little game.”

  “I want my mommy!”

  “I know, Dani, your mommy’s coming. But we have to meet her outside, okay? You don’t want to stay in here with all this yucky smoke, do you?”

  “No. It hurts my eyes.”

  “No, I know it does, Sammy. Then you both have to do what I say. Get ready, this might be a little chilly …”

  Maddy turned on the shower, soaking the complaining children from head to foot and draping wet towels over their heads. She then covered them with the clear plastic shower curtain and cinched it around their middles with another pair of dirty nylons, tucking the DustBuster in with them, nozzle downward. When it was turned on, the shower curtain inflated around the children’s heads like a bubble—a bubble of filtered air.

  “Okay, now everybody hold hands—we’re gonna take a quick walk into the living room.”

  Leading the children, shielding them from the two injured men as well as the worst of the heat, Maddy hurried them into the living room and sat them by the open window. The street far below was hectic with sirens and the red and blue lights of emergency vehicles—real ones, she hoped. But even if they were, no rescue could come soon enough to save them. There would have to be another way.

  “Listen, you guys, stay here by the window and wave so the nice men can see you. Breathe through your towels, like this. I have to go get something—I’ll be right back.”

  Covering her upper body with the shower curtain, using the DustBuster to draw relatively clean air from the floor, Maddy searched the apartment for solutions, for some magic carpet to fly them out of there. What she wanted was rope, a nice, sturdy nylon rope—about five hundred feet of it—but the best she could find was bales of extension cord and old USB cable, pretty poor substitutes. Searching for something better, she began twining the available cables into a crude harness—a sling chair strong enough to hold the children.

  But what to hold the harness? Some kind of parachute? A hang glider made with duct tape and garbage bags? A hot-air balloon? A chemical arresting rocket? Everything she needed was there in the apartment, but even a rope of knotted bedsheets would take too long—she had maybe two minutes left to assemble the raw materials and build anything. As it was, she could barely see; the smoke was becoming impenetrable, her makeshift breathing hood starting to melt, and she could hear the kids crying and coughing their little lungs out.

  Maddy was nearly at the point of despair when she noticed the dining-room rug.

  Hey. Flying carpet indeed—this was her day for miracle rugs.

  In the center of the dining area, nearly covering the floor, was a handmade braided carpet—an Amish rope rug at least fifteen feet across. Damn. Quickly doing the math, a simple spiral algorithm, she figured it should be very nearly long enough … and hopefully strong enough. She couldn’t believe she had almost missed it.

  Moving as fast as possible, smoke and sweat stinging her eyes, Maddy shoved the dining table and chairs out of the way, then tried dragging the heavy rug into the living room. No chance—it was soaked from the sprinklers and weighed a ton. Okay.

  Finding the outside end of the rope, she cut the binding threads with the toenail clipper until she had enough slack to tie it to a massive china hutch. Then, moving to the center of the rug, she freed the inner tip of the spiral, fastening it to her half-fashioned cable sling and unspooling the wires back to the living room. Her fingers were bleeding.

  The kids started moaning for their mom at the sight of her, but Maddy had no time to reassure them—the sprinklers had cut out, the heat at her back was withering. Pressing the kids’ shuddering chests together, she cinched the cable straps between their legs and up under their arms. It might pinch, but it would support them.

  “Now hang on tight to each other!” she shouted, and threw them out the window.

  The kids fell, screaming, until the slack ran out—till the wires drew taut and started stripping rope from the braided rug. With a not-too-painful jerk, their rate of descent slowed dramatically. It slowed too much, dropping them in fits and starts and finally stopping altogether, leaving them kicking and screaming down around the thirtieth floor.

  Maddy was afraid the line might be tangled, but when she yanked on it, the rug grudgingly paid out more rope. The kids were just too light, the carpet’s binding threads stronger than she thought—maybe because they were wet. Gravity was not enough; they would have to be lowered by hand. That was not good, because the dining room was an inferno: Wet or not, the rug was going to start burning through any second. And if they weren’t down by the time it broke …

  Maddy’s brain was lit up like a Christmas tree, wires buzzing with all the mathematical variables, the myriad unknowns. She was in highest gear, and it still wasn’t enough—some problems went beyond simple mousetraps.

  Deeply worried that the rag rope couldn’t support all three of them, she decided there was no choice. It was scary: Maddy didn’t like heights and wasn’t sure how to go about rappelling down the side of a building, especially not when she was shaking like a leaf. If only she could improvise a descender, some kind of friction device … but she was cornered; there was simply nothing left to use. Only her bare hands.

  Okay … well … here goes …

  But before she could climb over the windowsill, a hulking, helmeted figure lunged out of the smoke and pulled her to the floor. A raspy voice croaked, “I gotcha now!”

  It was one of the fake firemen. He was burnt nearly to a crisp, his face and hands blackened, blistering, oozing blood. He was blind. Black lips peeled back from blood-worm teeth as he spoke.

  “Where you think you goin’? You ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  Maddy reached up and grabbed the taut rope, trying to pull herself up, but the man had her well pinned. He didn’t seem to have any plan beyond restraining her, holding her in place and letting the fire do the rest.

  Screw that.

  Straining her skinny arms to their limit, Maddy pulled the rope down and crossed it under the man’s chin … then let go. It sprang upward; the kids dropped another five feet, their weight stripping more line and causing the coarse braid to saw against the man’s throat. He flailed against it, gagging. Maddy added to his difficulties by kicking him away and sliding out from under.

  “Come on, baby doll,” he snarled. “Stick around for the weenie roast.”

  She got to her feet, and as he leaped at her again, Maddy ducked under his arms, drove her shoulder below his center of gravity, and locked her hands together behind his right leg. Using her body as a fulcrum, she rocked backward, allowing herself to fall under
his onslaught, pulling his body where it wanted to go, guiding it up and over her, unbalancing him, then centering both feet in his groin and pushing as hard as she could with her legs so that a man twice her size briefly became weightless, a human missile following a trajectory that carried him over the windowsill and outside the building.

  But he had her. He had her sweatshirt in his clawed fingers, dragging her out with him, headlong into the void, so that in all of time and space, the only thing she had left to grab was the rope, and suddenly the rug was unraveling like somebody had harpooned a leviathan—two for the price of one.

  Falling, Maddy couldn’t believe what was happening. Stupid. How could she have been so dumb? Could have just finished him off in the apartment, but oh no. Gone straight for the carotid, the jugular, the basal ganglia. But she was too nice—it was her biggest failing: not wanting to kill anybody with her bare hands. Now they would all hit the ground like a cluster bomb, kids first. That was if the neck of her sweatshirt didn’t choke her to death on the way down—it hurt.

  Kicking herself, Maddy didn’t wait, didn’t think, but simply let go of the rope. That took the pressure off her windpipe—at once, she and her attacker were in total free fall. Oddly enough, even though their rate of descent increased, everything seemed to slow down. She had plenty of time to think.

  The toenail clipper. Yes, there it was, still in her pocket. Maddy took it out and, with a swooping motion, reached behind her back, grabbed the man’s fist, found his fat thumb, and with her other hand drove the clipper’s steel beak deep under that big horny thumbnail.

  His reaction was reflexive, instantaneous: He released her shirt as though it were a live wire, jerking his thumb away and hoarding it tenderly to himself, crumpling his whole body around it like a recoiling mollusk. Rolling away across windy space.

  That took all of a split second, then Maddy fell onto the kids.

  It was not exactly a devastating impact; they had been accelerating too, as the rug disintegrated ever more quickly. So it was back to babysitting again, humming “Rock-a-Bye Baby” as she and her charges hurtled together toward Ninth Avenue, and Maddy was barely able to find someplace for her legs before the rug spun apart entirely, its last outer coil twirling in the flames like an infernal lariat before abruptly springing taut, and the burning wooden hutch to which it was anchored—a piece of solid, Colonial-era craftsmanship, heavily freighted with family silver and wedding china—flipped over with a massive crash to charge like a loose cannon across the condo, billowing sparks as it gouged deep tracks in the parquet flooring. Other items of furniture piled up in its path, acting as a drag, so that by the time Maddy and the children touched down on the sidewalk, the impact was no more than a mild bump. Then the rope snapped.

  The kids were all right. Maddy didn’t wait around to see what would happen next. She ran.

  ONE

  MADDY AND BEN

  Denton, Colorado, pop. 33,473.

  Two years earlier.

  HERE is what Maddy remembered of that night:

  It had been raining for days. By Sunday night, the sky had finally cleared, and people had come out in droves to salvage something of the weekend. There was a big concert early in the evening, and the fairground was churned to mud. Everything had an ethereal glow—the cheesy soft focus of television flashbacks—and the carnival midway smelled of popcorn and wet sawdust.

  Twiddling their plastic wristbands, Maddy Grant and her almost stepbrother, Ben Blevin, raised their voices above the hubbub. “That was ridiculous,” Ben said. He was taller and darker than she was, with a seriousness that belied his sixteen years.

  “I totally agree,” Maddy said. “That was amazing.” She was fifteen, buzzed from attending her first concert and secretly basking in the bronze godhood of her stepsiblingto-be.

  “That’s not what I meant. Can we go now?”

  In the few months since her mom had started seeing Ben’s father, Maddy had scarcely been able to think straight, jumping on every opportunity to hang out with her future relative. She knew it was sick, but she couldn’t help it—she was well aware of her physical limitations. Pale, gangly-limbed, and freckle-faced, Maddy was not a troll; but neither was she a fairy princess … and she certainly had never been a magnet for the opposite sex. She’d never so much as been asked out on a date. So being thrown together into circumstances of enforced intimacy with a hunk like Ben was a godsend. Not that she pretended her new stepbrother had any such feelings for her.

  Ben had personal issues she couldn’t even imagine, issues he tended to keep to himself. For the first few weeks, she’d thought he hated her, and she couldn’t blame him. It was one thing for your parents to get divorced, but to have your mother die—then to have to cope with your dad moving in with someone else—was beyond outrageous. Not wanting to intrude on his grief, she’d tried to be as invisible as possible, slinking around like a burglar in her own house, until one day he came up to her, and said, “Can we stop avoiding each other? Because this is getting ridiculous.”

  After that, things were easier. Not that they were BFFs or anything, but they could be in the same room together and sometimes even exchange words. The best, though, was being seen in public, especially at school. Maddy had never been Miss Popularity, but since Ben’s arrival, she was suddenly in demand, all the bitch-queens cozying up for a backstage pass to her smokin’-hot new relation. And Maddy had played it for all it was worth … until Ben started going out with her best friend, Stephanie. That could have been a disaster, but fortunately it didn’t last long. Maddy liked having Ben to herself. Being out with him made her feel better—made her look better. Ben was the ultimate fashion accessory.

  “Oh, we can’t leave yet.” Maddy said. “I want something to eat. ”

  “How about a candy apple?”

  “You know I can’t eat those things. They gum up my braces.”

  “Well, then, let’s get you some saltwater taffy.”

  “What? Didn’t you hear what I—”

  “Or some chewy, chewy caramel corn? Oops, sorry—the B word, I forgot.”

  “Very funny. I probably don’t need all the carbs anyway.” Maddy froze, staring. “Oh. My. God.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t look, don’t look! I think that’s her!”

  “Who?”

  “Marina Sweet.”

  “Oh God, no. Where?”

  “Right there!”

  Maddy’s bedroom was a shrine to Marina Sweet. Pictures and posters and calendars showed doe-eyed Marina at all stages of her career: child sitcom star, flirty tween idol, touring sensation, international superstar, tarnished icon. Maddy’s diary was an ode to this platinum-banged, platinum-selling recording artist, into which she poured all her girlish grief and yearning. She longed to be Marina, and on some level she felt that Marina was within her, a glamorous pop princess yearning to break free. Maddy had obsessed and fantasized and stared at Marina’s tabloid residue for so long that she knew the other girl’s life better than she did her own, as if by denying her own boring existence, she and Marina could somehow swap places.

  Marina Sweet was the reason Maddy had begged her mother to let her go to the carnival on a school night: to finally see the legend in person. “Rare public appearance for the increasingly reclusive star,” was how some of the news reports put it. Others were not so kind: “Small-time venue for troubled starlet.” Maddy didn’t care; she wanted to go.

  Their folks were busy, so they made Ben take her to the show. He wasn’t happy about it, being about the only guy in a sea of screaming teenyboppers, but Maddy had the time of her life. Swept up in a blur of group euphoria, dazzled by the lights and the sounds, she swayed and sang to the music she knew so well, tears streaming down her face. It was the most intense thing that had happened to her since her parents’ divorce.

  Fortunately for Ben, the concert was short—shorter than it should have been because Marina Sweet abruptly disappeared. Disappointing her fans, she took o
ff before her big finale, the megahit single, “Soon, Ami.” No thank-you or good-bye, no curtain call, nothing. Everyone just stood around stupidly, the musicians and dancers as confused as the audience, until a stagehand came out and announced that Marina had left due to a “pressing engagement.” The show was over.

  “WHERE?” Ben asked doubtfully. “I don’t see her.”

  “Right there! In the fun-house line. The one in the hooded raincoat, with the sunglasses.”

  “Her? No way.”

  “It’s her, I swear to God. She’s incognito. I’d recognize her anywhere!”

  “Are you serious? That girl doesn’t look anything like Marina Sweet.”

  “It’s a disguise, don’t you get it? That’s what you have to do to ditch the paparazzi—the trick is to do it before they even know you’re gone. Leave right before the end of the show and slip out a side exit. Put on a wig and an overcoat and sneak away while everybody’s still screaming for an encore. Stars have to do stuff like that, or the press will eat them up—look at what happened to Princess Diana and Michael Jackson. It’s definitely her—come on!”

  “Then how come nobody else seems to recognize her?”

  “Cuz they’re dumb! Come on!” Maddy grabbed his hand and pulled. “She’s going into the fun house.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  THE fun house was a portable plywood cave, painted black and red, with jigsawed flames and a fiberglass gargoyle suspended above the entrance doors. Tiny, two-seater cars rattled out of sight down the dark track, ferrying pairs of riders along its squeal-inducing itinerary before emerging a moment later and banging to a stop. The passengers were released, shaken but unharmed.

  Maddy and Ben got in line behind the hooded girl, close enough to touch. For several minutes, they silently bickered over how best to get her to turn around, but before they could come to a decision, the object of their attention boarded a rickety black car and started off down the track. Following close behind, they got into the next car and belted themselves in. As the car jolted forward, Ben said, “I told you, it’s not her.”