by JJ Pike
Sean nodded.
Bill didn’t want to lean too heavily on the kid. He’d already said enough. He knew how keenly teenagers felt…well…everything. There was no way they couldn’t. Their brains were still under construction. He’d spoken what he believed to be the absolute truth: he needed to rebuild the ruined stocks of pemmican so his family could survive. If Sean wanted to help, great; if not, well, then he would need to go back to the city. Simple as that. His apology didn’t mean much if he wasn’t willing to back it with action. Bill waved Paul back over and stood.
“I’ll let you think it over,” he said.
Sean came around the other side of Bill and offered him an arm to lean on. “No need. I get it. I’m with you. If the economy is going to hell and there are going to be raids and shit, I don’t want you guys to be caught short. Especially not because of me.”
Bill clapped his hand on Sean’s shoulder. “Thank you. You won’t regret it. I can promise you that.”
Sean smiled.
“But mind your language around the little one.”
An hour later, with the bear and her cubs long gone, the goats and horses fed and watered, and the cabin well into its disaster preparedness makeover, the two of them—man and boy—were sitting in one of Bill’s favorite blinds waiting on the deer. He’d shown the kid how to track, explained how he knew the droppings were fresh and which way the deer were headed, now all that was left was the waiting. At least the kid had learned not to drown himself in cologne. That was a start. Bill would make a survivor of him yet.
The tell-tale rustle of the oncoming deer set Bill on high alert; hands tingling, eyes focused, muscles ready to spring into action. He nudged Sean, who was off daydreaming again. The kid hadn’t heard a thing. Bill pointed out the blind. Sean searched the tree line and shrugged, his eyebrows doing a good impression of someone who hasn’t got a clue. Bill pointed again, then whipped his notebook out of his fishing jacket. “North-northwest of us. White tail. Standing between the two balsam firs.” He paused. Chances were Sean couldn’t tell a balsam from a birch. “Between the pine trees,” he wrote.
Sean nodded and concentrated his gaze where his new boss had told him to look. Bill had to give it to him, he was staring really, really hard. But he obviously couldn’t see a damned thing. He needed the deer to move so this newbie had half a chance of bagging him before winter took hold and they all died of starvation. Bill tapped his pencil on the rim of the lookout.
The deer started, turned towards them, her beautiful face all alertness and limpid brown eyes. It would never get old: the natural beauty of the forest. Bill silently thanked the deer for her sacrifice, then nudged Sean. It was time. He needed to take the shot.
The compound bow Bill had set him up with was a powerful weapon. If he just took his time and breathed into the shot, there was no way he could miss. Bill didn’t like a messy kill. He wanted it to be as humane as possible.
“Deep breath in,” he whispered, “then release.”
The arrow went high and wide, arcing over the deer who sprang into action, flipping her butt at them as she bound off into the brush.
“Damn it,” said Sean. “I thought I had her right in my sights.”
“See that birch?”
Sean looked out at the sea of trees.
“The one with the silvery trunk?”
“Yup,” said Sean.
“Hold your thumb up, so that it covers the trunk.”
Sean held his thumb up, as instructed.
“Close your left eye.”
Sean closed his left eye.
“Is the birch still under your thumb?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, now, open that eye and close your right eye.”
Sean did as he was told. “Woah.”
“Did you see it jump? Did you see the tree move?”
“Man-o-man, that’s cool.”
“That tells us which eye is your dominant eye. When you close one eye, you lose binocularity.”
“What’s that?” said Sean.
Good sign that he was willing to admit when he didn’t understand something. It was going to be easier to teach him what he needed to know if he was willing to admit when he was floundering. “Binocularity is your brain’s ability to make two pictures into one.”
“Two pictures?” said Sean.
Bill nodded. “One from each eye. I’m guessing you just closed the wrong eye.”
Bill sat back and let Sean experiment with each eye until he had a good sense of how to properly line up the bow’s site.
Then the two of them sat back and waited.
Chapter Nine
Alice’s fear of flying was compounded by the fact that the chopper had no doors. It didn’t matter that the pilot was lecturing her on “gravity, centrifugal forces, torque, and thrust,” making it sound like it was scientifically impossible to fall out of this tin can with blades.
Alice squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted the flight to be over in the worst possible way even though it had just begun.
“You can’t fall out,” he shouted. “Gravity doesn’t work like that. It’s not a sideways deal.”
“If God had meant for us to fly,” she whispered, “he’d have given us wings.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” said the pilot. “You’re thinking you’re going to die. But you’re not. I’ll deliver you safely. We’ll be there in no time. Enjoy your flight.”
Enjoy? Enjoy! What was there to enjoy? Flying was to be endured, end of story. Alice summoned all her courage and opened her eyes. She needed to brief the medic who was prepping a saline bag with anticonvulsants and more pain meds. They’d gone over the basics as she and Maxwell had bundled Angelina into the helicopter. Alice prayed that Maxwell hadn’t been injured by his contact with Angelina. In the short time they had worked together, he’d proven himself an ally, a friend even. He’d carried the child up the stairwell to the roof as if she were his own, whispering through the sheets that she was going to be alright, that Alice had a team who knew what they were doing, that he would keep her in his prayers. He waved them off the helipad and went right back to his job: making sure the staff and patients in his jurisdiction were safely evacuated from the building. The world needed more Maxwells.
The ground pulled away from them and Alice had to fight to keep her lunch. She needed her wits about her, even if she was terrified. Angelina, still wrapped in hospital sheets, was alive. Barely. The child needed Alice to bring her best brain to the table.
“You can’t touch her,” said Alice.
The medic recoiled. “I can’t treat her if I can’t touch her.”
Alice tilted her head and pursed her lips. He had a point, but she was adamant that no one else be burned by whatever was on Alice’s skin.
“Find a way,” she said. “If you touch her, there will be blisters, peeling skin, perhaps worse.”
“There’s no way I can do that to her, simply by touching her.”
“No,” said Alice, “that’s what will happen to you.”
The medic’s eyes bugged clean out of his head. “Necrotizing fasciitis doesn’t spread on contact.”
“It’s not flesh-eating bacteria…” Alice stopped herself. She had no clue what it was that was eating its way into Angelina. For all she knew, the enzyme was some kind of flesh-eating bacterium, just not that particular one. “Trust me, you have to treat her without ever touching her skin.”
The medic rummaged in his bag.
The chopper banked to the left. Alice dug her fingers into her seat, willing the banking to stop. She heard the snap of latex.
The medic held his hands up. “Double gloved. Good enough?”
Alice shook her head. “Sorry. You can’t touch her with plastic, either. It will dissolve on contact.”
“Alice…” he said. “May I call you Alice?”
Alice nodded.
“There is no way I am going to treat someone who has a communicable disease without protecti
ng myself.”
It was a fair point, but “fair” for whom? Not for Angelina, that was for sure. “Do you have cotton gloves?”
The medic snorted. “No. And even if I did, I wouldn’t use them after what you just told me.”
The contrast between the medic and the security guard could not have been more stark. Maxwell had been willing to risk his life, even though he had seen how terrible Angelina’s condition was. This…what would she call him…she could barely call him a “man.” He hadn’t earned that honor. This coward hadn’t even laid eyes on the weeping sores and flayed flesh that covered Angelina, but he was already refusing to do his duty. Alice had no time for shirkers. She turned her face away from him, dug out her phone, and dialed Fran.
“I want the medics on the ground to agree to treat Angelina, no matter what,” she shouted over the wind.
“We have three surgeons and a team of nurses on standby, we’re good,” said Fran.
“No,” said Alice, “brief them fully. They’re on staff, right?”
“Well, the nurses are in-house, but we had to recruit the doctors from around the city. This was strictly a doctors-for-hire deal. Most of them turned us down. Litigation exposure. We got who we could.”
That meant the team wasn’t going to be top-flight. They were going to be opportunists. She wouldn’t be able to bargain with them the way she could bargain with the K&P in-house nurses. If the doctors had been on staff, there would have been a way to subtly suggest that they either did what she told them to do or could expect a pink slip at the end of the day. Consultants—and surgeons in particular with their astronomical wages and ridiculous savings—were far too self-sufficient. They could walk away as soon as the going got tough; unless Jake signed off on enough funds to keep them working in spite of the danger to themselves. Money, she’d found, was a language most professionals were fluent in. It stopped them from walking.
“Brief them. Tell them this is a highly communicable disease. We need no skin-on-skin contact. They need to affirmatively sign off on working with someone who is sicker than anyone they have ever treated and is a direct threat to their own lives.”
“On it,” said Fran. “Anything else, boss?”
“We’ll be there in about three minutes,” said Alice. “Make sure they’re ready. And I mean really ready.”
“You’ve got it.” Fran signed off.
Alice closed her eyes to block out the nauseating horror of being in flight in a flimsy bubble of impossible tech, but her thoughts ran on ahead. The doctors Fran had roped into helping them wouldn’t have signed the company’s standard non-disclosure agreement. She did not need this situation leaking. She would have them sign an NDA as soon as they landed. At least they had taken the Hippocratic Oath. That counted for something, didn’t it? People still took their oaths seriously?
She opened her eyes for a millisecond. All of Manhattan was spread out below them. To think: some people paid to see the City from above as the sun was going down. It was considered a luxury; flying over the Chrysler Building, seeing the Empire State Building off to their west, the Statue of Liberty down in Hudson Bay. She couldn’t look downtown directly. It made her too sad. She had been in Manhattan the day the planes hit and that sight—the Towers going down—was there every time she scanned Manhattan’s southern skyline. That was one thing she did not need in her brain today: an image of unimaginable horror and a disaster that had reinforced her belief that fanatics and zealots were a blight upon the world.
The helicopter banked and turned, banked and turned, did far too much tipping for her taste, but little by little it eased its way towards St. Joseph’s Hospital and finally came to rest on the roof.
Fran hadn’t exaggerated. There was a med team of six people at the door of the chopper with a gurney, just as soon as the pilot gave them the thumbs up to approach.
Alice scanned the gurney for traces of plastic, but all she saw was the reassuring glint of good, old-fashioned steel. The nurses reached gently into the helicopter and eased Angelina out and onto the gurney.
“Use no plastics,” said Alice.
“We’ve got this.” The doctor’s name tag pegged him as one “Jeremy Martin.” She didn’t know what his area of specialization was, but she had to trust that he knew what he was doing. Now, she had to do what was possibly hardest of all; she had to let go. She was no longer in charge of Angelina’s care. Her life was in the hands of the professionals.
Fran was at her elbow, tablet in her hand. “Shall we debrief up here?” What she meant was, where we are sure we won’t be overheard. That worked for Alice. She watched the gurney heading towards the elevator. They’d have her down in the surgical suite and pumped full of life-saving meds in no time. She turned her attention back to Fran. “Talk. Tell me everything I’ve missed.”
“Jake’s having a fit.”
“Not unexpected.”
“The cement project is going to cost a fortune. It’s not as simple as filling the hole MELT has made in the building. If they just pour the concrete in, it will spread until it fills the entire building.”
Alice nodded. “So…they’re going to cauterize the edges of each hole, where MELT is active, then…do what?”
Fran smiled. “Well, they haven’t got that far. We still don’t know how MELT spreads, so…”
Alice knew it was going to be quicker to walk—no, run—to K&P’s Headquarters, which was just ten blocks south and a couple of blocks west. She could do a mile and a half in under 12 minutes. It’d take a cab at least three times that to crawl downtown.
Everyone on the street looked so normal; so hurried and bored and wrapped up in their own affairs. She wished she could tell them that their nonchalance was ill-placed, that life was short and precious.
She stepped off the sidewalk to get out of the way of an oncoming gaggle of tourists. They always walked so slowly. She wished she could hurry them along, get them to walk at Manhattanite speed, but they deserved their fun. The City was a treat for the senses. She needed to respect the fact that this was all new for them. They could amble and ogle all they liked. She just needed to get by.
As she stepped backed onto the sidewalk, she noticed two dead rats on a grate over the storm drain. It wasn’t that uncommon to see a rat, not even a dead rat, but two was not something she expected to see. She didn’t want to fall prey to overfitting. She knew she was inclined to do that: take fact one and fact two and create hypothesis three, when those facts were not strictly correlated with the conclusion she’d drawn. Two dead rats didn’t mean there was a contaminant in the sewage pipes. It meant that rats live and die in Manhattan. The end.
She grabbed a pretzel from a street cart, slathered it with mustard, and ate as she speed-walked back to the office. K&P looked so neutral on the outside. There was no indication that anything appalling was going on in the heart of the building. She checked her mouth for traces of her hurried lunch, reapplied a touch of lipstick, then ran up the stairs to find some answers.
In less than five minutes, Alice had pulled Professor Baxter from her lab and summoned her to the silent room. She needed to be briefed, fully, with no chance that their conversation could be tracked. She was glad that the firm was at least that paranoid. She’d insisted they build the “tech-free” room, years before anyone else believed that their smartphones were tracking them, and her caution and persistence had paid off. Now, they could say what needed to be said.
Baxter looked like hell. It wasn’t just that she was unkempt and bedraggled. Her eyes were bloodshot, her mouth drawn, her skin grey and pinched. Strange how stress can add years to your face in a matter of hours. Baxter rolled her neck and massaged her own shoulders. “We still don’t know how MELT is doing this.”
“Eating through the floor?”
“Oh,” the Professor brushed her hair out of her eyes and for a second she looked like her old self—in command of her surroundings and oozing authority rather than this “deer-in-headlights” creature she had be
come—“We know that. The flooring throughout the building is coated with an epoxy resin. This coating is commonly used in laboratories and clean rooms. It’s slip-resistant, easily cleanable, and…”
Alice nodded. “I get it. The floors are made of plastic.”