BURN - Melt Book 4: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series)

by JJ Pike

  There were far more rats. No, that one wasn’t a rat. It looked like a rat, but it was a sneaker. A grey sneaker with grey laces waving around like a tail. Its buoyancy must have made it float. She didn’t want to think about its former owner. A sneaker in the water didn’t mean there was a body out there, too. Lots of people had cast off their shoes in order to get into small craft like this one, even though it wasn’t much more than a glorified dingy with a motor and a large, square umbrella over the steering wheel.

  Up ahead she could already see the water main that drained into the East River. She and Paul had inspected that very drain as scores of rats poured from the subway tunnels out into the water. There was another fascinating riddle. Why hadn’t more rats come up to the street? How did they drown so fast? They were swift little critters. They could have outrun the water. It teased her mind, begging for inspection. There were so many dead rats they made a kind of blanket between the boat and the wall. What did it mean? Perhaps they hadn’t drowned. Perhaps they’d died of other causes. She wanted to reach into the water and scoop some out, but 1) she had nothing to scoop with, 2) she had nothing to store them in, and 3) she didn’t want to put her hands into the filthy water. She could see that raw sewage had made its way into the mix. That meant there had been failures at several key points, though without further data she couldn’t guess where the locus, or more likely loci, of failure might be.

  Concentrate on what you know and work out from there.

  MELT had malfunctioned. It wasn’t merely that it was more virulent than they’d anticipated. It was acting in a way it had never been designed to act. MELT was an enzyme, a plastic-eater, not capable of replicating as this compound appeared to be replicating; nor was it designed to survive on the human epidermis. Her creation had been tampered with. There was no other explanation. There had been some minor kinks she’d wanted to work out—the stabilizing agent she’d developed needed some refining—but that didn’t come close to explaining the mass destruction they’d seen. No, MELT had been thoroughly and successfully sabotaged. She knew by whom. Michael Rayton was the guilty party.

  Utterly captivating thoughts, but not relevant for the time being. Stay focused. What killed the rats?

  MELT, as it was originally envisioned, broke plastic into its component parts, releasing bisphenol A (BPA) and PS Oligomer (which she had privately dubbed PSO, for the sake of rhetorical parsimony). BPA and PSO were, respectively, a hormone disruptor and a known carcinogen. Neither were supposed to be released into the environment. MELT was to be administered in structured, closed settings where plastics could be broken down immediately and be reconstituted into usable plastics. While she herself would never use plastic if she could possibly help it—the leaching of BPA and PSO was far too dangerous to the human body—recycling plastics using MELT was a decent stop-gap measure when one thought about the impact of newly-manufactured plastics on the globe.

  Key question: is this line of inquiry helping you solve your rat death problem? That’s the 30,000-foot overview. Narrow your focus further. Keep thinking.

  The central problem remained: she didn’t know what had been added to MELT to make it so virulent. What, then, could she infer or deduce, absent those important facts? MELT, pre-tampering, would have released BPA and PSO into the environment. Were those substances toxic to rats, immediately? She could not begin to calculate the amounts of BPA and PSO that had been pouring into the waterways around Manhattan, to say nothing of the many other contaminants—synthetic and organic—that had been let loose. The ecological impact of this spill was going to last for years, perhaps even centuries. But the rats. Did they die of post-MELT poisoning? She stared at the thick, dank carpet of carcasses undulating on the waves. They could have died of a million causes. She couldn’t jump to conclusions. She had to apply at least some methodology to her thinking. When she presented her findings to the relevant authorities, she wanted to be able to give them more than theory or supposition. She wanted to present all the facts. She needed samples. She could stop and gather a few rodents while she was retrieving Angelina.

  What else might she do that would be of scientific merit? Someone had to be working over at the pit by K&P, gathering MELT in situ. That part of the equation was already seen to. She needed to hone in on the things closest to her and do her part. The rats were in the river, water pouring from out through the sluice gates from under Manhattan. Water samples. She needed water samples. There’d be clues there, too. She could make a short stop and gather something from a drain, where it would be less diluted than the water around her. She didn’t have anything to gather her samples in, but that didn’t matter. Necessity, the midwife to invention—she didn’t hold with the mother analogy, mothers had nothing to do with the matter—necessity would spur her to creative solutions.

  They slowed, but the captain didn’t cut the motor entirely. “Where is this girl, then?”

  Christine pointed. The last place she’d seen Paul and Angelina had been a little north of the seaport. She hoped he hadn’t moved. Why would he? He was exhausted. The girl was heavy. He’d have rested.

  The captain eased them towards the bulkhead that made up the man-made shoreline. There were no piers or ramps or docks; no place to moor a boat and disembark. There were only gargantuan swells and a concrete wall.

  And people. Everywhere people. They must have seen the boat coming closer and moved downtown, rather than uptown where the real rescues were happening. This boat was full. They must be able to see that.

  The captain cut the engine and dropped anchor. “No one is allowed to board this boat, you hear me?” He made his way to the stern, Christine at his back. He was steady footed, she lurched with every wave. “If they try, you have my permission to throw them back in the water. We’re almost at capacity. It’s for their good as well as ours. We’ll be taking on a young girl. That will stretch us to our limit. I ain’t messing with you.”

  It didn’t seem very likely that anyone could possibly get to them in these heaving waters, but he was the boss. Christine held on to him, hoping she wouldn’t vomit. There was nothing in her stomach, but even bile is vile on the way up.

  Naomi joined Christine and the captain, whispering in Christine’s ear. “You’ve got five minutes. Ten, max. I can’t keep this lot quiet for any longer than that and I doubt we’ll be able to stop people from trying to board the ship if we’re near the wall for long.” Naomi was kind or good at her job, which was all about handling people. Christine was grateful someone had her back.

  “She’s not going ashore,” said the captain. “I am.”

  Christine opened her mouth to protest. How would he know how to find Paul and Angelina? What about her samples? She’d been imagining a little trip to a bodega so she could “borrow” some glass bottles. The high-end carbonated water she preferred came in a nice green bottle. It would have been perfect for grabbing sewer samples. The closer she got to the source of the possible contamination, the more useful her data would be.

  “Tell me again what she looks like.” The captain had a rope in his hand. The rope terminated in a three-pronged hook. If she hadn’t known better, Christine would have called it a grappling hook. But who on a boat needed a grappling hook?

  “What does she look like?” He was in her face, his tone sharp, close to shouting.

  Christine had to fight the urge to shut off all incoming data ports and go and sit aft, where there were no people. She didn’t have that luxury. She had to be brave. He was only asking because she was so slow to answer.

  “She’s wrapped in a sheet, so you won’t be able to see her.”

  “God give me strength.” He was shouting now.

  Christine donned her passive face.

  “You don’t know what she looks like?”

  “She’s covered in fish skins. Tilapia, to be exact.”

  The captain let the grappling hook hang loose in his hand. He was preparing to jettison the mission. “Does she really exist? In reality? Our
reality?”

  All eyes were on her, she couldn’t blow this one. She needed to be firm and friendly, but persuasive. “She’s a little girl. She has beautiful dark hair.” She remembered the hair from the film shoot. But then it was gone. She shouldn’t have mentioned the hair. The captain was breathing so heavily, she could smell what he’d had for lunch. Corned beef on rye, with mustard and mayo. She needed to ignore those factoids, even as they threatened to overwhelm her, and keep going. “She was in an accident. The fish skins are to cover those burns. She was wrapped in a sheet to…” She pulled up, aware that she must not under any circumstances finish that sentence. Her brain was close to a complete shutdown. Breathe. Breathe deep. Let the words come. Don’t shut them out. “To keep her dressings clean.” It was close to the truth. Better than that, it opened a doorway for her to control what was coming next. She was so bad at the kind of contouring of facts other people seemed to be almost careless about that she was shivering with the effort, like a tuning fork gone mad. She’d felt it before, which was why the comparison came to mind so quickly. “She needs to be protected at all times. That’s what the sheets are for. Her skin is delicate. You’ll need to keep her wrapped.”

  “But where in the Sam Hill is she?”

  “With Paul.”

  The captain swore, as captains should, being sailors at heart. She knew that it was appropriate language for one in his line of work, although it was a mite saltier than she was accustomed to. No one in the lab would have known half the words he used.

  Naomi stepped up, her hand gentle on Christine’s arm. “Who’s Paul?”

  Naomi was so kind. Christine latched onto the tone and the soft contours of her face. Naomi had made her eyes crinkle at the sides. That meant she was sympathetic. That was something to look for in a panic situation. “Paul is the son of my friend and colleague Alice Everlee.”

  “Keep going…”

  The passengers were grumbling and talking amongst themselves. She couldn’t let it get to her. She’d gotten so far, this could not be her undoing. “He came looking for his mother when K&P collapsed.”

  Naomi rolled her hands over and over, which meant she was supposed to speed up.

  “We joined forces and he—Paul, Alice’s son, Paul Everlee—agreed to carry Angelina to safety.” She needed a lie to fill the gap. She needed not to blurt out that she and Fran and Jan van Karpel, who was almost certainly dead, were unwilling to carry the girl because the mutant enzyme—coupled with a contaminant capable of self-replicating, both now cohabitating on her skin—was transferred on contact and could inflict terrible burns. “He’s young and strong. It was less of a burden for him.”

  “Good. So, Angelina who is wrapped in a sheet is with Paul?”

  “Correct.”

  “And what does Paul look like?”

  Christine stopped to think. This was always a hard question for her. She saw the parts, not the sum of the parts. He has his mother’s eyes—dark brown, wide lashes—and her chin, which was impossible to describe. She pulled up Alice’s husband’s face, to see if he had any dominant features that Paul shared that she could latch on to. Eyes, no, like his mother. Nose, nope, didn’t come from that side of the family. Hair? Hair was like his mother’s.

  “Christine?” Naomi shook her arm gently, but it was enough to rouse her from her musings.

  “He’s just shy of six feet, I think. Brown hair, brown eyes…his nose is…”

  “Never mind the nose…what was he wearing when you last saw him?”

  “Oh, yes!” Christine grabbed Naomi’s hand, relieved by the lifeline the woman had unwittingly thrown her. “He is in hospital scrubs. Green. Two piece. You can’t miss him.”

  “How hard was that?” said the captain and wound his arm back to throw the grappling hook aloft.

  You have no idea, thought Christine. It’s a battle every day of my life to talk to you people. You have a code that you all know but don’t know you know, made up of invisible signals and shifts in tone, tempo, and intonation. I have none of the receptors that would allow me to interpret those signals, so I walk through your world like a blind woman, seeing and not seeing.

  The grappling hook snagged the wall. The captain pulled to make sure it was secure. “No one else in this boat, you hear me?” He wound the rope around his waist and wrist in some overly-complicated design and pulled again.

  A leg came over the top of the wall, followed by a butt. Someone was already trying to climb down the rope. It wasn’t theirs to climb. Christine banged the captain on the back, but other passengers were already shouting and pointing. She should let them take the lead. She was no good in crisis situations. She would shine once she got Angelina back to the lab.

  “You come down this rope…” The captain had procured a bullhorn from the cubby under the seat in front of him. “…and I will send you right back up.”

  The man didn’t stop. Down he came, hand over hand.

  “Back up or overboard, your choice.”

  The man was flushed, grinning. “You’d never do it.”

  The captain stepped up, his chest almost touching the interloper’s heaving chest. “Back up or you’re going overboard.”

  The man leaped further into the boat. He wasn’t listening. Even Christine, who’d struggled to answer the captain because he was so intimidating, understood the captain’s meaning in this moment. It wasn’t a threat, it was a promise. Perhaps she should tell this young man how profoundly serious the captain was? She could add another detail: there were doubtlessly contaminants in high doses in the water so close to the sewer outlet. No, best not say that. Even absent that factoid, no one wanted to swim in sewage and rat carcasses. That might dissuade him.

  While she was running through all the things she might say in order to assist in this tense standoff, another person had begun climbing down the rope.

  Frank stepped around her, bellowing. “Back up.”

  The grumbling around her stopped immediately. Why did Frank’s opinion carry so much more weight than the captain’s? The captain was the boss. They should be listening to him.

  The silver in Frank’s hand was the answer. The ultimate article of inducement and negative seduction. It was a theory of her own making. There was as much in the world to negatively persuade you to do something you might otherwise prefer to do—shame, fear, terror, loathing, to name but a few—as there was positive. In this case, fear of having a hole blown through his torso might induce the would-be space thief to return to shore.

  “You, too.” Frank used his gun as a prop to guide the first invader back to the rope.

  “I can’t climb up.” He was close to tears. “I don’t have the upper-body strength.”

  If Christine had been a betting woman, she’d have put three hundred dollars on him telling the truth, but it was so far outside her area of expertise she knew to keep her mouth shut and her wallet zipped.

  “I’ll climb,” said the captain, “then hoist you up after me. Anyone here know how to rig a harness from a piece of rope?”

  Three men and one woman stepped forward, each of them wide-eyed. Two of the men had already begun discussing which knots to use, while the woman was making passengers move so she could open all the seat drawers, presumably for supplies.

  “Don’t shoot him if you don’t have to,” said the captain, “the paperwork’s a bitch.” He grabbed the rope swinging from the side of Manhattan as if their world wasn’t undulating beneath their feet and went hand over hand up the wall like the monkeys Christine had seen in Thailand. He was fast and sure and over the lip of the wall in no time.

  “Please let Paul be there,” she whispered. “Let him not have moved.”

  The captain peered down at the boat. “Ready to hoist him when you are.”

  News of the gun must have spread because the people on the sidewalk seemed to have evaporated or at least stepped back. The hoist team, however, were at odds as to how best to secure the interloper, but she could be of no assistanc
e in that department. Her expertise lay in biochemistry, mathematics, and logic. Practical matters, especially those heavy with emotion like the situation at hand, left her cold. She retreated to the front of the boat to wait it out. There was a gun in play, so the interloper wasn’t going to get far.

  She closed her eyes, the better to visualize MELT. She knew its lines and curves, its atomic weight and valences. She smiled. Strange how those simple concepts she’d learned long ago still brought her so much satisfaction. The periodic table had been her refuge as a teenager. When the world pressed in too tight, she let herself dissolve and disappear into its order.

  “You have to take me with you.” It was the man who’d lowered himself onto their boat. He had a loop around his middle, but he was wriggling and writhing, resisting at every turn.

  Frank looked up at the captain. They nodded at one another. For no reason she could nail down, a wave of panic ran up and down Christine’s spine. She’d never been given to bouts of intuition, but her mouth was dry and her brain told her that something terrible was about to happen.