Melt

by JJ Pike

  Petra shrugged, but he saw the shift in her eyes. He was usually the “kind dad,” the mild one, the one who listened. That he’d batted her back more than once sent a signal stronger than all the lectures in the world. He waited. Finally, his daughter nodded. That was all he needed. With her on board, Paul would follow. They could lick this. They were a team.

  “For starters, I need you to help me get the animals bedded down and the generator up and running. Aggie’s with the horses and Midge is tending to Pippy. They’re going to need your help. Your mother says we’re in grave danger. Everything we’ve done over the years—the stockpiling, the training, the sustainable life we’ve built out here—it’s all going to pay off. I need you to bring your best game, kids. This is what we’ve worked for.”

  Paul slipped off his loafers and yanked on his boots, one hand on his sister’s shoulder.

  Petra whipped out her phone. “I need to document this.”

  The twins had gotten themselves smartphones almost as soon as they left home for college. It made sense. They’d been forbidden them throughout their teenage years. Alice wanted them to be “in the moment” not “in the ether.” Bill didn’t disagree. His kids had turned out great, in spite of the “terrible privations” they believed they’d endured.

  “Everyone will get a kick out of my ‘rural chic’ make-over,” said Petra.

  “Make-under?” said Paul.

  “True,” said Petra, then flipped the camera on her phone so it was facing her. “I am reporting to you from an undisclosed location in deepest, darkest Upstate.”

  Bill grimaced. They still didn’t totally get it, but at least she was following the rules. “Never let anyone who doesn’t need to know, know we’re here,” was one of Alice’s guiding principles. She had drilled it into them, year after year, when they came out to the cabin.

  Midge came charging up the hill, lungs full of fresh, country air; her cheeks all roses.

  “Midge!” Paul swept his baby sister off her feet and gave her a bear hug. “We missed you, munchkin.”

  Midge hiccupped, on the verge of tears. They were real tears, not “get what I want waterworks.” Bill knew the difference. “What’s the matter Maple Syrup? Did you see something?”

  Everyone stopped, eyes on Midge.

  Bill stepped forward. “Honey bunches, what is it?”

  Midge’s lip trembled. “Bear,” she said. “And baby bears. In the barn…”

  Aggie raced up the hill, shouting, though the words didn’t matter. They all knew what she was saying. “Bears. Bears, bears, bears, bears, bears.”

  Bill took Midge by the hand. “We all know what to do. Stay calm, stay focused, we will get through this. Tranquilizers are in the gun cabinet.”

  Paul set Midge down gently and raced to the house, headed for the gun cabinet. Petra kicked off her designer heels and yanked on her boots.

  “Petra, you back Paul with the rifle, just in case the tranq isn’t enough.”

  Aggie was already charging towards the barn.

  Bill bent down and kissed Midge on the check. “Stay indoors, sweet pea. Stay safe.”

  Chapter Five

  Alice’s cab cruised up the West Side Highway, the sun glistening off the Hudson. She didn’t take in her surroundings. She was totally focused on her phone. Her assistant, Fran, was feeding her data:

  Angelina, Mount Sinai, Critical Care Ward, Room 1493.

  Alice scrolled down to the meat of the message:

  Second- and third-degree chemical burns over head, chest, and arms. Not looking good.

  How was that even possible? Angelina had barely touched MELT. And she didn’t have foundation makeup all over her body, which knocked Professor Baxter’s theory out of the running. There had to be something else in play. Had to. Alice stared out of the windows, but the scenery was so familiar it passed her by in a blur of concrete, glass, and steel. Her phone buzzed again.

  Surgical reconstruction cannot begin until burning stops.

  She wanted to write back to Fran and ask what that meant, but she didn’t want to consign any more data to the official record. The kid was still burning? How? Why? Nothing she had learned in the lab helped her understand what was going on. She needed to get to the hospital and talk to the specialists. There had to be answers. She straightened her collar and pulled her jacket down. She was ready for whatever the world had to throw at her next. She was always ready. Heck, she was born ready. Her phone beeped. It wasn’t going to be good, but she had to look.

  Update from med team: condition deteriorating.

  Alice’s heart plummeted. She banged on the plastic partition between herself and the driver. “$100 if you get me there in 5 minutes.”

  The driver shrugged. “Can’t do nothing about the traffic, lady. It is what it is.”

  “$200.”

  He cocked his head.

  “Fine, $500,” she said.

  He hit the gas and started weaving through the cars ahead of him. Mount Sinai might be way uptown, but that wasn’t going to stop Alice from getting there in record time. She’d been there often enough. Her mother-in-law had gone there when she’d first been diagnosed with stage-three lymphatic cancer, also known as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. And they hadn’t been disappointed. The doctors were top-notch, the nursing staff second to none.

  After months of chemo, radiation, and monoclonal antibody therapy, her mother-in-law had been given a reprieve. The “cure” came with its own complications. Not just the hair loss that everyone complained about, but a degree of pain and nausea that Alice hadn’t expected. But still there wasn’t a day that went by that Alice wasn’t grateful to have her around. Better a grouchy grandma than no grandma at all. Which reminded her: she needed to call her. Tell her to get out to the cabin. Just as soon as she’d seen Angelina and solved this mystery. No, that was a euphemism. She didn’t mean “mystery,” she meant disaster. The movie studio could be rebuilt, the lab sterilized, new scientists hired, Project MELT gotten back on track, but for one little girl this was an unmitigated disaster.

  The cab switched gears and slowed. Alice felt a chill run up her spine as her cab approached the hospital’s all-glass front entrance. Something wasn’t right. The security guards were at their posts, the admin staff behind the front desk, but there were also scads of doctors and nurses—the docs in their white coats and penny loafers; the NICU nurses sporting their teddy bear print scrubs and sensible white shoes—milling around inside the lobby.

  She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Perhaps it was that there were too many of them or that they were moving too fast. It was like some kind of manic social, with all the wrong people in all the wrong places. There simply shouldn’t have been that many people in the lobby at noon. She handed the taxi driver a wad of cash as she stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Keep the change.”

  The cab driver grinned and sped away before the crazy lady could change her mind.

  Alice watched the sleek, swishing automated doors open and close, then open and try to close against the surging mass of eager humans pressing against them, then open and stay open. But the people weren’t coming and going. They were all going.

  Alice snagged a nurse, though she was careful not to touch the baby bundled in her arms. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re being evacuated,” said the nurse. “Level Three contaminant on the fourteenth floor.”

  Fourteenth floor. Where Angelina was being housed. “What’s a Level Three contaminant?”

  The nurse shrugged and pushed past her. “Above my pay grade. All I know is they told us all to get out, patients included.”

  “Excuse me…” Alice tried, more than once, to waylay someone who looked like they might know what was going on, but no one stopped. They were all intent on one thing: getting to the doors.

  “Move along,” said the security guard, sounding more bored than anything else. “Everyone keep moving along. Keep calm and move right along.” He had his hand on his nightstick, though
Alice could see no evidence that there was any chance of a riot. Perhaps he was just being overly cautious. Then again, perhaps he knew something she didn’t.

  Alice’s phone buzzed again. She was starting to dread the sensation.

  Hospital evacuation underway. More as I know more.

  At least this time Alice was ahead of the curve. Perhaps she could text Fran with good news. Well, not good news, but less-bad news, once she had talked to the doctors.

  The elevator doors hissed open and a stream of patients, most of them still in gowns, several toting IV stands or holding sloshing bags of meds, streamed out into the lobby. Alice pushed against the tide of humanity, but didn’t make it to the elevator before the doors eased shut and the metal box sped away to gather its next band of evacuees. Alice watched the numbers over the elevator doors climb then descend, determined to get on the next car, but as soon as the doors opened, a swarm of panicking patients pressed her against the wall in their dash for the main doors.

  There was a steady stream of people trickling out of the stairwell to her left, but nothing like the crush of sickness coming at her from the elevators. She slipped her patent leather slingbacks off her feet and padded up the stairs.

  “S’cuse me. Coming through.” She muttered the same phrases over and over as she trudged up the stairs, her breath coming harder and faster with each level. She was fit, but not exactly fourteen levels of stairs fit. She needed to get on top of that, just as soon as she tamped down this madness.

  By the time she reached the fourteenth floor, she was covered in a sheen of sweat, with her blouse plastered to her back. She leaned against the cool wall, determined to get her breathing under control. She would have taken her jacket off if it weren’t for the fact that she needed to look professional if she was going to get the doctors to talk to her about what the hell was going on.

  Alice pressed her aching feet back into her heels and pushed the doors to the fourteenth floor open. Phones and beepers and alarms dinged and pinged and rang but went unanswered. The front desk had been abandoned. Charts and clipboards and stacks of paper were piled at each station; lab coats and reading glasses and half-drunk cups of coffee abandoned in place. Alice peered down the corridor. Nothing and no one in sight. The place was a ghost town. Perhaps she needed to go up a level to find someone in charge; someone who could tell her where Angelina had been moved to.

  As she turned to leave, a wail cut through the silence. The flesh on her forearms puckered. It was an unearthly sound that reminded her of the coyotes that hunted in pairs around their cabin. She’d lost more than a chicken or two to those sneak thieves, but this sound had more “pain” than “hunt” as it trailed off. She shook herself. Nothing to be afraid of. Someone had been left behind in the rush to evacuate. It couldn’t be Angelina. She was so sick, she had to have been one of the first patients they evacuated. No, this had to be another poor soul, screaming for assistance in an abandoned ward.

  She slipped her heels off again and tiptoed down the corridor, her back to the wall, casting one eye over her shoulder, unsure of what to expect, but expecting something bad all the same. There’s nothing like an empty hospital corridor to jangle and jar the nerves, especially when you’re used to the hubbub of city life. She spent her days in a busy office and her nights in a crazy-happy-talkative family. There was no silence in Alice Everlee’s life. She was used to the sound of humans talking, not the contours of silence that lay under the electronic beeps and pings of the abandoned machines. It creeped her out.

  A mechanical crackle broke the stale air, then a hiss, and Alice was backing up as fast as she could only to smack into a massive wall of a man. Then there was only the sound of her own yelp to shatter whatever calm was left in her bones. She slid to the floor, then scrambled to gain some purchase and get back up before the hulking giant of a human crushed her beneath his booted foot.

  A guard stood over her, more amused than annoyed. He held out a hand as he barked into his shoulder walkie. “Doing my last sweep of fourteen, over.”

  Alice pushed her hands up behind her back and padded her way up the wall. She didn’t take her eyes off him. He could be anyone. Heck, he could be an agent from the Centers for Disease Control. If there was a contaminant, wouldn’t the hospital have called them in? She was getting ahead of herself. The CDC couldn’t get there that fast. The guy had to be regular old-fashioned security.

  “You seem to have taken a wrong turn, Ma’am.” He was courteous, but his manners had an edge that signaled he would brook no opposition. He had more than just a nightstick at his belt. He had a gun. And he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He was in civvies. That meant he was very senior. The boss of security, perhaps. Someone with answers.

  Alice had no credentials to flash at him. She had a brief moment when she thought of all the plucky heroines in movies who remembered to filch a lab coat or someone’s security pass before they went snooping around a newly-abandoned hospital. But she was no heroine, nor so fast on her feet that she’d remembered to come up with a cover story for why she was there when everyone else was headed in the other direction. She righted herself. Michael Rayton’s alarmist babble had gotten under her skin. There was no conspiracy, no industrial espionage, no hijacking of their biological compound. There was just one girl in a critical care ward who needed her attention. Nothing more.

  Alice swallowed hard. She needed to find Angelina. Her assistant had told her she was in room 1493. Now that she’d been evacuated, she needed to know where the kid had been evacuated to. She couldn’t let the situation get any further out of hand. “I called ahead,” she said. “I’m here to see Angelina Feldspar.”

  The guard took her by the arm. And not in a gentle way. “I don’t care who you are, Ma’am. You still need to evacuate the floor.” He pressed his finger to his earpiece, nodded, and strode towards the elevator. “One more. Coming down. Then fourteen is clear.”

  A scream from the other end of the corridor stopped them both in their tracks.

  Alice spun around and took off running, the distraction making it easy to break his grip on her arm. She had to find out who was screeching. She could hear the security guard thudding along behind her, reporting as he went. She was more agile than him, but he was going to catch up with her eventually. Then what? She slid to a stop, rounding the door to the room where the racket was coming from. Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw next.

  Angelina, or rather what was left of her, lay on a marble slab, her skin peeling from her flesh, eyes sunk back into their sockets, her gorgeous hair nothing but a memory. Gone was the beautiful child who’d held Klean & Pure’s future in her elegant, tiny hands. In her place, was a monster. She would be MELT’s first casualty if Alice didn’t do something to save her.

  Alice felt the tears rise. She took a step inside the room, but the guard yanked her back into the corridor.

  “There’s nothing you can do here. You need to leave immediately.”

  “Where’s the med team?” said Alice.

  The guard shrugged. It wasn’t a callous gesture. Just factual. “They’ve been evacuated.”

  “Where are her parents?”

  The guard shook his head. “No clue.”

  “But…” Alice stammered. What did she want to say? Her mind reeled back to the horrors of her youth. She’d seen this before, back in Guatemala. She pushed those images from her mind. The kid lying in front of her was a living war zone. She had to do something. She couldn’t leave her there.

  “They tried everything, from what I heard” said the guard, “but they couldn’t even get a line in. Everything that touched her disintegrated.”

  Angelina screamed. The sound seared itself to Alice’s synapses. She was never going to forget it. Never. “Can’t we find some pain meds? At least give her some relief?”

  “Look…here’s the thing…” The guard pulled Alice down the corridor. “They told me it’s contagious. That’s why I didn’t come down here. They said their team
would get her out. I was to steer clear…”

  Alice yanked herself free. “What in the name of…” She couldn’t wrap her head around what she was hearing. “What are you saying?”

  “They’re calling her ‘Patient Zero.’ There are five nurses and three doctors who have second-degree burns because they tried to help her. Like I said, they were going to move her from ICU to some secure ward—like the ones where the MRSA patients are housed—but they ran out of time.”

  “Patient Zero?”

  The guard nodded. He was keeping his eyes on Alice deliberately. He didn’t want to look at the devastation on that slab any more than she did. “She’s never going to make it through the night,” he muttered.

  Alice glanced over at Angelina again and felt her breakfast rise in her gullet. What had she done? She’d unleashed a nightmare on Manhattan. She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “I am not giving up on her and you’re not going to stop me. In fact…” She scanned the guard’s face. He had kind eyes. Or at least he sustained eye contact and didn’t give her the creeps. She was going to gamble on him being one of the good guys, a bet she didn’t often make. She totted up the data she had on him, scant as it was: he was horrified by what he’d seen, but he was still here. In spite of what he’d heard about Angelina, he was doing his job, trying to get people to safety. He’d help her, she was sure of it. “…you and I are going to rescue this child.”