by Pike, JJ
Alice shrugged. “Sometimes the world offers you oranges, rather than lemons.”
It wasn’t an idiom he’d ever heard, but it warmed him on the inside. His wife was a trooper. He’d never found the pill that Aggie longed for, the one that scrubbed your mind of the horrors of your past, but Alice had found a way through that pain and made a life for herself. No, she’d done better than that. She’d made a life that counted. They had four wonderful kids, a house in the city, another in the country, and until a few days ago she’d had a job in a firm that was going to change the world.
“Ironic” was the word that came to mind.
It had already changed the world in ways none of them had seen coming.
While he was standing there thinking about how incredible she was, Alice had taken the bag of guns back to the van, which she’d parked around back. He needed to get his ass in gear.
The military radio was still active, Sergeant Pottinger demanding to know where they were.
“We should leave this here,” he said.
“Why?” The dogs circled Alice, waiting for her next instruction. She collected another bag—had she unpacked the whole van? did he need to help her repack?—and went out back.
“It’ll have a GPS. They’ll be able to find us.”
Alice smiled.
Bill checked behind the bale of hay and found a medium-sized backpack. He could manage that. He threw it over his shoulder. Bad move. It started up a twinge that traveled from his shoulder to his spine and back again.
Alice didn’t stop working. Neither did she seem bothered by the idea that they might be hunted down by a man with a tank.
Bill put the backpack down. The radio was right there by his foot. He raised his leg and smashed his heel into the contraption. Alice might not be worried, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
“Bill!”
“Get rid of the phone, too,” he said.
Alice sat on a bale. “I’m going to call Fran. She said she’d be in touch, but we haven’t heard from her in hours. Something’s wrong.”
Fran picked up on the first ring. “Alice? Here. You talk to her.”
Someone on the other end was shouting. Bill couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it was loud and it was angry.
“Christine?” Alice raised her voice. “Christine? It’s me. It’s Alice.”
Fran repeated Alice’s name several times before Christine finally came to the phone.
“What?”
“Walk away from the people,” said Alice. “Find a quiet place where we can talk.”
“There are no quiet places. We’re in the back of an armored vehicle. They put me in here with Michael Rayton.”
“Christine?” Alice waited.
On the other end of the phone, Professor Christine Baxter went on a tirade that lasted several minutes. Michael Rayton was a traitor who should be strung up. He should be court martialed. Charged with treason. Made to tell the truth. She was going to get someone to attach electrodes to his nipples…
Bill laughed. It was a very Christine solution: attach the electrodes to the wrong body part. She was an innocent in a world that was far harsher than her sensibilities.
When she was done screaming at Rayton, Christine came back on the line. “He’s just sitting there like the smug turncoat that he is.”
“Look away.” Alice had her eyes closed. She was using her “calm, kind, I’m-your-best-friend” voice. “Don’t let him rile you. Listen to me, Christine. I want you to look in the opposite direction of Michael. Can you do that for me?”
“Why aren’t you here with us?”
“I got separated from you guys. I was in the subway. I found Bill.”
“What was Bill doing in Manhattan? Is he a moron? No one should have been in Manhattan who didn’t need to be there.” Good old Christine, blunt as ever. At least she sounded like herself again.
Alice opened her eyes and looked over at Bill. “He came to find me.” She smiled. “He is an idiot, you’re right, but he’s my idiot and I like him that way.”
“So are you coming?”
“I don’t know where you are, Christine.”
“Hey! Driver! Yes, you. Where are we?”
The driver of Christine’s armored vehicle talked to her, but Christine was by no means satisfied with the answer.
“He won’t tell me. National security. I tell you, Alice, these people are making me insane.”
“Let’s talk about something we can control,” said Alice. Whatever spell she’d cast on Christine Baxter, it was working. The woman wasn’t shouting at Michael Rayton and her outburst at the driver was short-lived.
“Okay. Something I can control. You’ve got it. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening,” said Alice.
“There’s an initiative. They’ve been working to clean up the Giant Pacific Garbage Patch.” The professor was in her favorite mode: lecture and educate your captive audience. She didn’t need to know the audience was faking their interest just to keep her occupied and calm. “Have you heard of them? Anyway, it doesn’t matter if you have or haven’t. I want to talk to the director.”
“Director?”
“Operation Ocean Cleanup. It’s a Dutch charity. A collaborative of over 80 scientists and engineers all working together to capture ocean-going plastic and remove it from the water.”
“I can help with this,” said Alice. “You know I can. I always help you with the logistics, don’t I?”
“You know about gyres?”
“I don’t. What are gyres?”
She was faking ignorance to keep Christine talking. That was one of his wife’s great strengths. She made people feel like they counted and were heard. It was a gift. By her account, Christine Baxter was one of the world’s great minds. She would want to keep her talking in hopes of finding a solution to their MELT woes. At least, that was Bill’s take on the matter.
“The ocean’s currents circulate, making massive circles we call gyres. Once plastic is trapped in such a gyre it begins to break down into microplastics and then nanoplastic which is mistaken for a food source by ocean-going creatures of all sizes.”
Christine wasn’t a woman who knew how to change tracks. If she was in a groove that was her groove and she was going to play it to the end. Bill watched his wife handle her colleague without looking like she was doing anything of the sort. No one on the other end of that phone would guess for a second that they’d been close to a gunfight or that the military had been shelling some biker gang. Alice walled all that feeling off and talked to Christine like they were standing at the proverbial water cooler.
“The microplastics become part of the weather cycle and are sucked into the clouds. Did you know that?”
Even Bill knew about the plastic raining down on the Rockies and the plastic in the Arctic Circle and the plastic in the Mariana Trench at the bottom of the ocean. There was nowhere plastic had not spread its endless fingers and no chance, it seemed, of the professor getting to her point any time soon.
“The upside to plastic being trapped in a gyre is that we can collect it. This is where The Ocean Project hopes to make an impact. They’ve designed a floater which sits on the surface of the water, using the ocean currents to power its movement, with a deep, mesh skirt hanging down from the floater. The plastic can’t leap over the top of the floater, it’s a buoyant tube, but fish and other marine mammals are able to swim under the skirt, so there’s no by-catch. The floater and skirt together capture plastics, which are then removed from the water and sold on to facilities who either can—or claim to be able to—dispose of them safely.”
The professor paused, presumably for praise or encouragement. Alice jumped in and made all the right noises. “How’s that going to stop MELT from burning through the plastic around the Hudson Bay?”
“We’ll need them to modify the design.” Baxter made it sound so simple. Like it could work. Like she’d cracked the puzzle and they’d all be home
in time for dinner.
Alice nodded at the phone while shrugging at Bill.
“And I’ll have to find a way for the net to capture microplastic.”
Oh, so she hadn’t come up with a solution. She was just spitballing?
“At least it’s a start,” said Alice.
“That’s just one of the solutions I’ve come up with. They’re pressing me for ideas every five minutes. I’ve told them. I’m a scientist, not a magician. I need time and quiet. I need my team. I need you, Alice, to keep them away from me.”
“I’m a long way away, Christine, but you know what? I have an idea.” It was like talking to a child. His wife handled her so-called “genius” like a toddler. “I want you to sit in the quietest place you can find—maybe you have to go in the front with the driver? I don’t know—but find the quietest place in your transport and think about how we’re going to stop this from getting any worse.”
Christine didn’t answer.
“Can you do that for me?”
“Okay.”
“I’ll call you in an hour. How does that sound?”
“Good. That sounds good.”
“I’m glad. Thank you for all your hard work, Christine.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to hang up now, but I promise I’ll call back and we can talk some more. Ignore everyone around you. Just hole up and think deep, science-y thoughts.”
“Are you and Bill whole?”
“Sorry?”
“Has MELT attacked your flesh?”
Alice shook her head. “No. We’re clear.”
“Right.”
“What does it mean, Christine? Why are some people falling apart and others walking free?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I think it has to do with how much plastic is in their bodies.”
“Tell me what that means, Christine.”
“It’s just a theory, but based on my observations, people who grew up eating non-packaged foods seem to be less likely to be taken down by MELT.”
Alice frowned.
“You grew up in Guatemala, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Did you ever have anything pre-packaged or canned?”
“No.”
“Where did your food come from?”
Alice leaned her elbows on the bale of hay. She was absorbed, enraptured, hooked. “It was locally grown. I doubt we ever had any food that wasn’t grown by someone we knew. Certainly it wouldn’t have come from any further than a twenty or thirty-mile radius.”
“Just as I thought. You didn’t ingest plastics as a child. And since you’ve been an adult, you’ve been like me. You avoid synthetic everything. Your home is a model of de-plasticized living. This is good news for your children, though they won’t have the same protections as you.”
“How large is your sample size? How much have you observed this? Have you been interviewing people? Where did this theory come from?”
Christine sighed. “We had a screening protocol back in New Jersey.”
“You went to the labs there?”
“We were set up to test the rats, the fish, the cadavers. But it fell through. Quite literally. The compound was eaten up by MELT-plus.”
“And this was where you observed that some people had a kind of immunity to MELT?”
“We ran with only what we could carry. I’ve been working with Fran to collate the data from the intake sheets, but it’s hard to work in the back of a truck.”
It was hard, but not impossible, to follow what Baxter was saying. She’d been out at their New Jersey lab; there’d been a series of tests planned; people had completed forms of some kind; she believed there’d be answers in those forms. Bill thought he had that right.
“Ask Bill what he ate when he was growing up.” It was the first sentence out of Baxter that sounded like the scientist that she was.
“Poor kids’ food,” he said. “We couldn’t afford high-end, processed foods.”
“Just as I thought,” said Christine. “Though there may be a genetic component. That’s the missing piece. It could be that some people have a natural defense mechanism. I won’t know that until we have access to a lab. But I’m going to go with a mix of nature and nurture as my working theory.”
“Good,” said Alice. “Good.”
“Alice?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. Talking to you helps me find myself.” Baxter hung up, leaving Bill and Alice with one shared thought: what about their kids?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Mizz Morgan.” It was one of the general’s men. Jo didn’t remember his name. “Could you come with me, please? The general has asked to talk with you.”
Christine followed Jo; head down, hands in her pockets; all business. Jo didn’t try to stop her. There was no point trying to get the professor to do anything other than what she wanted to do. And, in any case, Jo didn’t have the energy.
The general and his men had split into two groups. One group was by the side of the road, the other backed up against a large truck. Jo couldn’t tell which set of men looked more miserable, but they were all downcast. If she hadn’t known better she’d have tagged it for a firing squad and their line up but the general was with the roadside crew so that wasn’t what she was faced with. Her brain was running on a single Twix and three packets of chips, which was all she’d eaten over the course of the last 24 hours. Not enough to sustain a medium-sized, relatively active specimen such as herself, and certainly not brain food.
“We have a complication,” said Hoyt.
“There’s no alternative to Fort Monmouth?” Jo had barely had time to process the news that the army base—which had already been stripped refitted with an all-glass, all-copper, no-plastics or plastic-coated-anything laboratory—was too close to Indian Point to be considered a sensible place for them to go. In the back of her mind she’d held onto the hope that the general and his team would find them a suitable substitute to Fort Monmouth, but it was a small hope which evaporated the second she brought it out into the open.
The general rolled up his sleeve. “Sadly, you’re right. Fort Monmouth isn’t replicable in the time we have. We’re going to need to find a new place to house the team though I can’t promise it’s going to have the kind of laboratory or equipment Professor Baxter is used to. But we shall find you somewhere. You have my word.” He rolled up his sleeve. “That’s not why we need to talk.”
There was a gash running the length of his forearm, fresh and red and split in the middle.
“Well, damn,” said Christine.
“Precisely.” The general didn’t need to say more. He’d found the infection on his own arm.
Extrapolating, Jo reasoned he’d made his men do a self-inspection, separating out those who’d caught the disease.
“We know how to control this,” said Christine.
“Glad to hear it,” said Hoyt.
“We need tilapia skins.”
Hoyt didn’t miss a beat. You’d never have guessed they were on the run, out of options, facing nuclear poisoning as well as death by MELT. “You mentioned them before. These are the farmed fish that helped the girl who was in the hyperbaric chamber at K&P?”
“Angelina, yes. They saved her life. Without them she’d have been dissolved in no time.”
Jo had barely given the girl, Angelina, a thought. Professor Baxter had been obsessed with her back at the labs. The kid had to be part of their convoy. Baxter would never have left her behind. Jo scanned the vehicles wondering which one held patient zero. They had to have taken her out of the hyperbaric chamber and moved her fragile, tiny, infected body into their transport. Was that when the soldiers got infected? What did it matter: when and why and who gave this to me? They had it. A death sentence. She needed to work out what that meant for their current mission. The general had opened all kinds of doors for them. Without him the MELT team, such as it was, might still be in a New Jersey lab, fending off their
creation with nothing more than the plastic they could wrest from the buildings around them. He’d put pressure on the powers that be to find them a place to work. The base at Fort Monmouth, which they had painstakingly prepared for the K&P team, might be a no-go now that Indian Point was on fire, but they were still looking for a suitable place to house the team. She couldn’t let the general die.
“Fun fact,” said the general. “It hurts less than I thought it would.”
“Where did you grow up, General?”