by JJ Pike
“But you lead me to a good point. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. A fence would do that. Give me a minute.”
Sean’s phone buzzed. He tapped, the phone buzzed. Buzz, tap, buzz, tap. “We’re good on insulin, Lovenox, and Aubagio.”
“Insulin I know, what are the other two for?” Mimi was interested in the least stressful input in the room: how they were skimming prescription drugs.
“He says Lovenox is an anticoagulant and Aubagio treats MS.”
“Unless you’re setting up a pharmacy, they don’t seem like leading black market drugs.” Mimi was usually kind. It had to be the Baileys talking.
Sean’s phone buzzed again. “More, incoming. We have contacts in all the major pharma companies.”
“And people who are willing to lose their jobs for a little extra cash?” said Mimi.
“This is a wonderful arbitrage opportunity, Mrs. Everlee. Most of these guys make peanuts. If they want to skim a little and I can help them afford to pay their bills, is that so bad? The companies they work for make millions. In some cases, billions.”
“But it’s theft,” said Mimi. “It’s not okay.”
Sean nodded. “What they make is daylight robbery, you’re right. Do you know how much debt a college student carries these days? Or how expensive it is to become a chemist for one of these companies? They’re drowning in compound interest…”
Jim held up both hands, urging them to peace. “We can debate this later. Now, we have to make our place of refuge really safe. We’ve had two invasions, both from the same family. That means we’re not on anyone’s radar, as far as we know. Soon enough there are going to be people wandering out here, looking for anyone who has a full pantry or, if they have any knowledge of preparedness, a root cellar. Most of them won’t. Some of them could. We need this place to be a fortress and we need to build it ourselves.”
“Too bad Midge isn’t here. She’s the Queen of the Fort.” Petra felt the old urge—to collapse herself into magical thinking and make a deal with the universe—rear its ugly head. Midge was safe. Midge was under the care of two nurses. “That reminds me!”
“What reminds you?”
“Midge designed a million forts. She’d have us building twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week if we’d let her.”
“Okay.” Jim was listening and writing at the same time.
“When Dad first told her that we had to remove all plastics from the cabin and secure ourselves against robbers, she took it very seriously.”
“Cute, but get to the point.” Jim was in action mode. He didn’t need the warm-fluffy details about Midge telling Pippy the Goat bedtime stories that were more and more elaborate each night. Aggie had overheard her when she was turning out the horses. Get to the point, Petra. Time’s not on our side. “Midge designed a moat.”
“Too much water. The soil’s not right. We’d have to seal the bottom and create a kind of wrap-around swimming pool, otherwise it would drain away as soon as we filled it.”
“Midge’s moat was filled with spikes, not water.”
Jim smiled, but didn’t look up from his list. “Draw up a plan, run it by me, then get the backhoe running.”
Petra was itching to go and find Midge, but smart enough to know that Jim was right: no one else in the group could put together a cogent map as fast as she could. She had a 3D imagination, thought in topical features, knew the lay of the land. She grabbed a pen and paper. Betsy always had stacks of little “Take a Memo” pads by the phone. She drew the same circle Jim had drawn on his whiteboard. Damn, she hadn’t collected the weapons from the back of the car, she needed to go and get those before someone else did. Each X inside the circle represented one of their houses. She tapped the pencil against her teeth. Jo was MIA. Should she include her house or have the border be smaller?
Shoot, Reggie. She hadn’t thought of Reggie. “Where’s Jo’s dog?”
No one answered.
“Mimi? Sean? Where’s Reggie?”
“I let him out this morning,” said Mimi, “but he never asked to come back in again. He probably went back to Jo’s place. He misses her something fierce.”
“Are you still here?” Jim didn’t look up or raise his voice or inflect it in any way. He could have been asking her to pass the ketchup for all the emotion he displayed. “I thought you were going to sanitize the guest room, Mimi. Midge’s health depends on it.”
Petra went back to her drawing. It would be impossible to dig a spike-hole around all three houses. Jo’s house could be like an old-school gate house. Sean could buy them a pressure alarm so they’d know when anyone was coming down the road. They needed how many points of ingress and egress? She was shocked at how much of her mom’s prep lessons had stuck in her head. She’d always told Paul that she was going to go “strictly city” as soon as she got the chance and never go back to slumming it in the woods, but here she was, drawing up plans to keep out possible invaders.
She’d hardly given her mom a thought in days. She loved her and missed her. She paused for a second. Did she? Miss her? Mom was always so busy with work and she favored Paul, who eclipsed her. Mom was more of an idea than a person. Dad, on the other hand was cool. She missed him. No time for chewing the fat, even if it was with herself and only in her head. Back to the drawing board, literally.
Four points of ingress/egress. We don’t want to get caught in a bottleneck. We also want at least two of those points to be highly secret, not places ordinary folk would stumble upon them.
Hard as it was, she placed their burned cabin as well as Jo’s cabin outside the cordon. They could move their supplies from both root cellars to Jim’s. She wanted to leave enough room for them to flee if they needed to once a vehicle had triggered the pressure alarm.
Electric fences, guard dogs, sniper lookouts, those were all things to think of later. Now she needed a simple map to show Jim so they could go and start digging.
Jim nodded, made a couple of adjustments to accommodate the summer flow of the river, reminded her that the animals were all still under their care and should either be moved inside the barrier or let loose, and sent her on her way. She had more responsibility and autonomy in that moment than ever before. It was heady, giddying. Being one of one instead of one of two might not be the nightmare she’d always dreaded.
The backhoe leaned over the tunnel Jim and Michael had started digging like a bright yellow stick insect. Petra had enough experience to know she needed a helmet and goggles. Jim would have a ton in his garage. She heaved the heavy sliding door to the right. There was a distinctive click, right on the other side of the door. It was the sound of a hammer being cocked.
Petra dodged to the side of the door. She’d taken her vest off and left all her guns inside. There were guns buried a few hundred yards behind the composter in one of Jim’s “secret” stashes, but she couldn’t get there and back in time. They’d slam her in the back if she took off running. Sean had said there might be four shooters. She’d let her guard down when they’d eliminated three.
She had her phone. She could text Sean and have him send Jim out.
The rifle exited the barn ahead of the shooter. She grabbed the barrel and twisted. The gun went off, but she’d backed herself right up to the shooter in order to disarm him.
“Did you miss me, Sis?” Aggie was disheveled and dirty.
“You could have killed me.” Petra was grinning. It was so good to see Aggie.
“There was a lot of gunfire around here recently. I was being cautious. I wouldn’t have shot you. I never miss and I never miss-aim. You know me.”
“Where have you been?”
“Wrong question,” said Aggie. “What we need to decide is, where are we going?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Christine ran out of the glass-encased lab into the main room, shouting General Hoyt’s name.
Hoyt and his entourage were by her side in a flash.
“Quarantine any building that has samples brought her
e from Manhattan. Quarantine the people, the boats, the vans, everything that has touched anything from Manhattan. Separate out the things from the people and burn them.”
“Slow down. Tell me what’s going on.”
“The samples are contaminated.” Christine’s brain ran ahead, but she reeled it back.
Hoyt nodded. “Contaminated with what?”
What could she call it? It wasn’t MELT any more. It was MELT+. “It’s alive. It killed the rats, but rather than dying, as a parasite might when the host died, the enzyme (or rather the mutated formula which perhaps contains the original enzyme), lives on. MELT-plus, for want of a better name, is in the building. It’s eating its way out of the vacuum-packed rats as we speak.”
“MELT is in this building?” The General turned to his aide. “Get Field Marshall Crayton on the phone.”
“It’s in the cadavers, the fish, probably the water, though that idiot Fouge didn’t test the water for anything connected with MELT.” She stopped. She had heard people use phrases like, “I froze” or “my heart stopped;” she’d even tried to read a novel in which the writer had used the ridiculous phrase, “the blood turned to ice in her veins,” but she’d always racked it up as hyperbole. However, she was momentarily immobilized, like those terrible dreams when she struggled against an unknown and invisible assailant and no one came to her rescue. She was frozen solid, so great was her horror and dread.
“Professor? Would you like a cup of coffee? Tea perhaps? You’re tired, overwrought.”
She couldn’t go to her private, happy place in her mind. She couldn’t lean on Alice, because Alice was nowhere to be found. She needed to gather her strength, dial down her panic, and create a plan that might contain the disaster. She’d thought it tragic. Turned out it was epic.
She smiled at the General, though it felt like a grimace. “You should consider MELT an epidemic, rather than a spill or an accident. Cordon off every place you believe MELT has infiltrated and do not let anyone enter or leave that area.”
The General had led her, almost without her noticing, to a small cubby where his own desk and chair had been stashed. He steered her to the chair and signaled for another to be brought for him. “We need complete isolation.”
Christine felt the jitters coming on. She’d been so focused, from the beginning, on MELT’s success that she’d shut herself down to what was happening around her. She’d seen the walking wounded in Manhattan and taken their wounds for collateral damage, brought on by falling debris and such. She had to question all of that. She closed her eyes. How many boats had left Manhattan? How many of those people were already infected? What about the fish? The birds? How were they going to stop MELT-plus from destroying everything? She needed to get back to the science. If MELT-plus was eating the fish, she might be able to harvest enough to examine the new enzyme, or mutated compound, or whatever it had turned into, and find a way to stop it. She had to. She’d made this thing. She had to unmake it. She stood, eager to get to the makeshift laboratory and reclaim as many fish and rats and cadavers as possible. They’d created a plastics-free room for Angelina when they’d taken her to St. Joseph’s hospital. She could do it again. “Angelina,” she said. “Where is she?”
The General handed her a cup of tea. It smelled of chamomile. Might as well drink grass and twigs, as far as she was concerned. She pushed it across the table and focused on the General. “I need a lab…”
He held up his hand. It was her father all over again, shushing her. She felt the wind leaking out of her as she slunk back into her chair. “Tell me what you believe has happened and together we will formulate a plan.”
“MELT has made it to New Jersey.”
“I gathered that.”
“It’s alive. It’s eating its way out of the plastic pouches that contain the rats.”
“Okay.” He leaned back and muttered instructions to his second in command. “Go on.”
“I don’t know what the half-life of this new version of MELT might be, but it has showed no signs of slowing.” She paused. “I need to see Angelina.”
“Might I accompany you? We might walk and talk. I can brief my people as we go.”
“If you wish,” said Christine. She wanted time alone to think, but that wasn’t possible. She was going to be surrounded for as far into the future as she could imagine. Fouge was right about one thing, this was more than a microbial or bio-contaminated stew, this was a concoction that had so many components she was at a loss to know how and where MELT-plus might spread. Would the higher levels of nitrogen in the water slow it down? Could the lead be a factor? She had ideas about the first level of defense, the one that dealt with the “MELT” side of the equation, but as to the “plus” she was stumped. Whatever biological agent Rayton had added to the mix was so potent as to seem unstoppable. That wasn’t the case. Nothing was “unstoppable.” But it felt that way as they raced through the corridors and down the stairs. She didn’t stop to catch her breath, nor did she try to engage the General in conversation. She would brief him when she was ready.
Michael Rayton sprang back when he saw the Professor approach. Had he had his arm around Fran? What a lecherous, disgusting excuse for a human being he was.
“Arrest that man,” said Christine. “He claims he’s innocent, but don’t they all? He’s responsible for this.”
She didn’t need to watch, she heard the scuffle, Michael’s protestations, the soldiers marching him away. Good riddance.
“Which room is she in?”
The General shrugged. “I have no intel on any Angelina.”
“She’s here, though? I brought her in. Did they kidnap her?”
“Did who kidnap who?” The General’s tone had changed. He was irritated. Maybe. Maybe it was more that she really did need to slow down and explain herself.
“Angelina was the first human to be infected with MELT.”
“She’s down here,” said Fran. “In the isolation ward. Like I told you, she’s safe.”
Christine joined Fran at the door to the isolation ward. “Frank and Naomi didn’t take her?”
“No. She’s safe. If you want to gown up, we can go in together and see her.”
“No one should go in there but me,” said Christine. It was her mess. She needed to mop it up.
“Professor?” Fran had her hand on Christine’s arm. “Professor!” She shouted.
Christine looked Fran in the eye, though in her heightened state of agitation it was especially difficult. “You all want me to explain. I get it. But before I go off like a geyser again—sorry about that, General Hoyt, I was agitated. I apologize for alarming you and your people—before I go careening off the deep end, I want to see how MELT has behaved over time. Angelina has been infected for longer than anyone else. She’s our bellwether. She will tell me what I need to know.”
Fran and the General looked at each other in that terribly annoying way that Normals looked at each other when they didn’t want to say something important or embarrassing.
“I am not a child. Say what you have to say.”
“You’re risking your life,” said Fran. “You were the Chief Scientist at K&P. You know more about MELT than everyone else put together. I was checking with the General to see if he agreed that we could risk your life by allowing you to go in there.”
Christine grabbed a surgical gown from the shelf, along with a hat, mask, and booties. “We’ve all been exposed. As we discussed, you’ve been in the water. You’ve probably swallowed MELT. The only question you have to ask yourself is ‘how much’ and ‘when will it begin to act?’” She pushed open the door and left them to their arguments and flapping.
The room was calm and clean. Angelina, who’d barely seemed like a child to her in all the time she’d been thinking about her, lay in a tubular glass container, covered in tilapia skins. They’d done a fine job of covering her wounds. Fran had to have had a hand in that. The woman was three steps ahead of everyone. If only she had trained to
be a scientist, she would have been world-class. She was leagues better than Hogue, who’d barely been able to think her way beyond the basics of information gathering.
“I need a doctor. Who’s been seeing to this girl?” The room was empty, but she knew there had to be people listening in. Techs at the very least, possibly RNs, probably not doctors. They came when called; they didn’t see to round the clock care.
The door on the opposite side of the room opened slowly. “We’re not supposed to come in, Professor. Doctor’s orders.”
“I’m overriding those orders. I need you to assist me.”
The nurse rounded the door sheepishly. The word was fitting. The woman looked like a creature accustomed to chewing grass and not much else.
“Open the container. I need to examine her.”