by JJ Pike
Jim rolled the wheelchair to the left of the ambulance doors, steering clear of the puddle that was forming underneath the back step.
“Betsy?” Petra didn’t let up on the pressure over her mouth, which meant she had to shout. “Was that there before?” She pointed at the puddle.
“It was.” Jim was quick to answer. Too quick. He couldn’t be seeing what she was seeing. She kept her eyes on the ground as her neighbors inspected the inside of the abandoned ambulance.
An IV stand fell over with a gigantomous crash, taking part of the bench out as it slid towards the floor. Betsy waved at Jim to wheel her backwards. “Not right,” she said. “Get us away from here.”
Petra took as many pictures as she could with her free hand, but she was happy to leave the ambulance bay and follow Jim and Betsy towards the parking lot.
“Tell me what you saw.” Betsy faced Jim.
“Chemical damage to the interior structures of the vehicle. Whatever burned these people also burned the equipment. The IV stand fell, knocking a chunk of bench off the wall, because it was already weakened by the acid spill.”
“Maybe.” Betsy cocked her head to one side. “What did you see, Petra?”
“I saw what you did: a huge mess, medicine and blood and chemicals dripping all over the place.”
“What else? Tell me about the puddle.”
“When we first arrived, there was a trickle of what looked like blood coming out of the back of the ambulance. That trickle increased, making a puddle, but the puddle was deeper than the liquid that had come out of the van.”
“Conclusion?”
“It’s not possible,” said Petra. “It had to be a trick of the light.”
“Tell me what you think and I’ll tell you if I agree.”
Petra shrugged. “The action of the acid on the street dug a hole in the concrete.”
“Correct,” said Betsy. “Whatever agent they transported to the hospital was still potent enough to cause corrosion to the street as we stood there. That’s faster than any agent I know of. Jim? Thoughts?”
“Beats me,” he said.
“Unknown agent. Burned and slashed humans. Crumbling equipment. Disintegrating concrete. I don’t know that this is one compound. It sounds like several to me. If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say this was the work of a chemical weapon, though it’s so virulent and its effects so wide-ranging, I can’t begin to imagine what it might be.”
The trio stood, muted by the puzzle that offered more questions and no answers.
“How do we get Midge and can we do it safely?” said Petra. She feared for her sister’s life even more, now that she was trapped in a hospital alongside a chemical weapon.
“She needs to be lying flat,” said Betsy. “When she comes out of surgery, her head will be well protected. She’ll need a helmet and cushions and someone beside her to keep her stable.”
“That’s after she’s out,” said Petra. “How do we get to her now is my question?”
“I will get her,” said Jim. “You get the car ready.”
Petra had visions of Jim storming the hospital with his rifle, but she didn’t care how he got Midge. Let him blast his way in, if that was how to get her baby sis to safety.
She turned her attention to the parking lot. There was no way Jim’s vehicle was a suitable form of transport for someone who’d undergone major surgery. They needed a car or truck with a roomy trunk and seats that folded so she could make a bed for Midge. Good thing the security guard’s office doubled up with the valet service. She had keys galore.
“Stay here,” she said. She dug the stolen keys out of her pockets and started pressing the unlock buttons and searching. It didn’t take her long to find a car with a roomy rear. She pulled it around to where Betsy sat, deep in thought, and helped her from her wheelchair into the front passenger seat. Once Betsy was settled, Petra dug through trunks and back seats and glove compartments until she found a flathead screwdriver. She ran back to Betsy’s new ride and whipped the license plates off the front and rear of the car. Strange what she knew how to do. Listening to Mom’s whackadoo lessons on self-sufficiency and flying below the radar were paying off.
“Oh, my,” said Betsy. “What do you want me to do with these?”
Petra smiled. “Nothing. I’ll stick them in the trunk. When I bring the car back, I’ll replace them.”
Betsy smiled. Petra couldn’t tell if that meant she approved of the theft or the plan to return the car but at least she hadn’t interfered. She hid the plates under a blanket and slammed the trunk shut. “Stay here and look like you belong. If you act like it’s your car, people will believe it’s your car. I’m going to get cushions and sterile sheets and whatever else I can lay my hands on.”
Navigating the hospital and helping herself to everything she needed was a breeze. There was an air of panic about the place and though she didn’t see any more running nurses, there were a lot of pinched, nervous faces and hushed talk.
She built a makeshift bed in the back of the car with the cushions from the visitors’ lounge chairs and covered them with layers and layers of clean sheets. “Will she have a helmet already or do I need to find one?”
Betsy shrugged. “It’s going to depend on the surgeon and the surgery. If it’s a craniotomy and the skull fragment is returned, she might have swathes of bandages with plans for a helmet later in her recovery. If they’ve had to perform a craniectomy, they will have preserved the skull fragment so they can replace it later, but they will leave the skull open to allow the brain swelling more time to go down.”
“Her brain might be exposed?”
Betsy nodded. “The cerebral cortex may sustain injuries resulting in seizures, so she’ll be on medications to prevent that. Bacterial meningitis is also something we’ll have to keep an eye out for and, of course, she’ll be on hopped up on morphine.”
The prospect of her sister’s brain being exposed to the world chilled Petra until the blood in her veins stood still. How had she let them talk her into taking Midge home? It was madness. She walked back towards the hospital on autopilot. She was a robot, following instructions from her controller, Betsy.
As she reached the front desk she saw a quarter-sized bubble of red on the linoleum. The blood that had dripped from the nurse’s hand had made a hole in the floor. She shuddered. They were in the presence of a kind of living acid. She snapped back into full consciousness. Jim and Betsy were right; they needed to get out of the hospital licketysplitsville. She was ready, in ways she’d never been ready before, to sacrifice anyone and everyone to save the people she loved.
CHAPTER TEN
Christine Baxter never expected to find herself in a boat, anchored feet from Manhattan, with a young girl lying in the belly of the aforementioned boat. Stranger still: Angelina was almost conscious. Her eyelids fluttered, threatening to open.
She wanted Angelina to be comfortable—that went without saying—but it was also of paramount importance that she remain perfectly still. She glanced up at the brave young man who’d carried her from the midtown hospital to this place of (relative) safety. Without him, they’d be worse off. He’d kept Angelina alive. He deserved, at the very least, a medal. She had no such thing, but she wanted him to know how grateful she was; how cognizant of his bravery and sacrifice. She grasped his hand in hers and shook it vigorously. She’d seen her boss, Jake, do it many times. It always ended in back-patting and laughter.
Paul blushed.
Perhaps she didn’t have the handshake right. No matter. They needed to move on. There’d be time enough later to laud his efforts on behalf of Manhattan and her citizens. “Do you have any more morphine?” she said.
Paul shook his head.
The rest of the passengers were craning to see this girl they’d done so much to rescue, though Christine had managed to convince them that the child needed calm and quiet, so they were at least an arm’s length away.
Angelina wasn’t as well secured as C
hristine would like her to be, but she couldn’t tie her down, nor could she allow anything plastic to touch her skin. She’d kept the child covered with the sheets and wedged her between a couple of large, stainless steel coolers. She didn’t explain herself. Instead, she asked for what she wanted and was given it. Perhaps that was the way to go forward? Forget about understanding them and let them wonder about her meaning.
Paul was covered in slime and grime. He had to have come in direct contact with the girl. Christine knew she had an obligation to warn him about what might happen to him and caution everyone on the boat not to get any closer than they were, but she’d just watched them kill a man and throw him overboard. They’d do the same to her and Paul, though for different reasons. Her because she was a real-live Dr. Frankenstein, him because he would soon enough turn into one of her creations.
MELT --> Angelina --> burns --> communicable burn capacity --> fluids/corrosive compounds on Paul’s skin, including but not limited to MELT --> potential death sentence for an upstanding young man who’d only tried to do what was right.
It was a straight line from her laboratory to this point. She needed to reverse that course, by getting Angelina to K&P’s laboratory in New Jersey and her burn tissue under a microscope.
“Have you seen my mom?” Paul asked. He either had his sea legs or the rocking of the boat was something he’d adapted to remarkably fast. He almost appeared to be standing still. “You’ve been gone for a couple of hours. I was hoping you might bump into her.”
In all the chaos, the young man’s primary concern remained finding his mother. Christine wished she’d seen Alice, for her sake as well as his, but she hadn’t. She shook her head. “I ran until I found a boat. Then I came right back for you.” It was a slight exaggeration. She’d come back for Angelina, but the language allowed for a singular and plural interpretation of “you.” She was allowed that measure of a lie. It might bring him some comfort to know an adult was looking for him, when he’d been so dutifully searching for that one particular adult. Alice was lucky to have such a son. If Christine went missing, she was certain no one would come looking for her.
“I’ll be on my way,” said Paul.
“Sorry?” There was nowhere to go. They were momentarily tethered to the sea bed beside Manhattan. Any minute now the captain would raise anchor and set sail. There was no sail. It was a figure of speech. He’d push the throttle and steer the wheel and they’d make their way through the breaking wake brought on by the massive ferries, navigate his way around the tip of Manhattan, cross the Hudson River, and be in New Jersey within the hour.
“I explained to the captain here that I was going to stay behind to look for my mother. He was kind enough to let me bring Angelina to you, but now I’ve got to get going.”
Paul knew how infectious Angelina was. Had he insisted on carrying her in order to ensure no one else was exposed? Christine couldn’t ask because that would open them both up to the kind of scrutiny she’d rather avoid, but it sounded as though that might be his private meaning. “The captain was kind enough to let me bring Angelina to you,” might be Paul’s code for “I insisted that he allow me to carry her,” but Christine was not good at “taking hints” or “reading subtext.” There was no way to tell Paul that she was grateful, that his name would be among the names of the heroes, that his mother would have been proud.
Christine fought to find the right words to tell him she understood what he’d done and would do her best not to let that effort go to waste, but they didn’t come. Paul was already at the back of the boat, the rope around his waist and wrist, just as it had been when the captain had climbed ashore.
The captain nodded. “You got this?”
Paul smiled.
How was it so easy for them to establish that kind of communicative rapport? They’d said fewer than five words, but were in agreement. It would have taken her a minimum of fifty words to get to an understanding with anyone as to what she meant. Triple that to understand what they meant.
“If you find her, tell her I’m here and looking,” said Paul. “I won’t give up. Not until I find her.”
“I’m not sure she’d want you to stay in Manhattan,” said Christine. “Particularly now that the Brooklyn Bridge has fallen. I can’t tell you without a proper investigation why that happened, but whatever hypothesis you might have embraced—be that musings concerning its structural integrity, the positioning of the pylons on the riverbed, and/or the added weight of so many cars attempting to cross at once—you have to agree that it’s not a good sign.”
“MELT is eating its way across the city, Professor. It’s as simple as that. Doesn’t matter if a building is new, old, or anywhere in between. Everything’s going down.”
The blood drained from Christine’s extremities. It was a sensation she had some acquaintance with. She needed to sit in case she fell. She didn’t want to hit her head. Could it be that simple? Could MELT have made its way clear across the city? That hadn’t occurred to her. She’d considered the possibility that the sewers had been compromised and the subway flooded, but nothing more. She was narrowly focused. She had to be or her brain would take off and be to the moon and back with competing theories. Had she been too narrow? Did she need to widen the parameters of her investigation?
Paul was halfway up the rope before she remembered to say goodbye. He made it look so easy. He was young and strong and full of hope. That wouldn’t protect him. If he was right and this new, sabotaged version of MELT had already made it this far, Manhattan would be a smoldering heap within a week, perhaps sooner.
Angelina moaned. The girl was in great discomfort.
Naomi stepped forward. “You asked the young man for morphine. Is that what she was on?”
Christine nodded.
“Anyone got any oxy?” Naomi was back in charge. Christine was glad to hand over the reins. “Pain meds of any kind? I don’t want your whole stash, just enough to keep the girl out until we get to New Jersey.”
“Everyone take your seats,” said the captain.
The messy business of Paul going ashore and the grappling iron being returned to its place had happened while she’d been looking at Angelina and trying to determine what level of pain she was in. She didn’t dare touch the sheets and she needed to make sure no one else did either.
The boat roared back to life. They cut a path through the rats and past the bobbing, bleeding body. How was she going to get pills into the child without touching her? And if she was successful in doing so, how was she going to explain her reluctance? Once again Christine was thrown against her weakest point—thinking under pressure and coming up with an explanation that dodged the plain facts—and forced to think in ways that made her brain hurt.
“I’ve got one T3, 10mg of hydrocodone, and 100mg of tramadol. Which one is best?”
They were pills for adults, not children, but she could split a pill and make it work. The hydrocodone was the strongest, the tramadol the weakest. She should start with the lowest dose possible and add more as needed. “Tramadol.” Medicine wasn’t her field of expertise, but it was based in data and far easier to navigate.
“Whatever you say, Doc.” Naomi knelt beside Angelina.
“Don’t touch her.” Christine hadn’t come up with an explanation. She was going to have to wing it. Again. How appalling to spend so much time among non-scientists who needed such delicate hand holding. “She’s in a lot of pain. Her skin is broken in many places. There could be lesions…cuts or bumps or scrapes…in her mouth that might bleed if we handle her roughly.”
“I’ll be gentle,” said Naomi, reaching again for the child.
“You might infect her with something. Please keep your distance. With her skin so badly compromised, she’s more vulnerable than you or me. You know, I’m sure, that pathogens of all kinds exist on your skin. They do you no harm because you have a robust immune system, but once you’re compromised, they become deadly.”
Naomi sat back on her h
eels. “Tell me how to do this, Professor, because I don’t want to listen to her cry from here to New Jersey.”
She was correct. Angelina was crying. For her it evoked no discernable response, but she knew other people found it irritating and would go to great lengths to make it stop.
“Does anyone have a thermos? Tea or coffee, it doesn’t matter.” It had come to her. She knew what to do. “I need something to dissolve the pills in. Any liquid will suffice.”
No one had a thermos.
The captain leaned over Naomi and handed Christine a hip flask. “Will this do?”
Christine unscrewed the top of the flask and sniffed. Whiskey. Would that work? Could she in good conscience give the child alcohol? Did she have a choice?
“I can finish it, if you want,” said the captain. “There’s water in the seat under her.” He pointed to the right of the boat.