Melt

by JJ Pike

  “Is it Mommy?” said Midge. “Can I talk to her?”

  “Plastics?” said Bill.

  “Yeah,” said Alice. “Make sure they’re all gone.” She sounded like she was practically strangling on the words. Her work was all about plastics. Was she telling him that the disaster had something to do with plastic? He wished they’d practiced more. The code was hard as hell to understand when you didn’t have Alice to reinterpret what she’d just said for you. He didn’t want to overstep and get her into trouble. He was sure she was with colleagues or didn’t want to say something that might incriminate her firm, so she was being doubly careful.

  “Don’t let the family get into the plastics?” he said.

  “Hmmm,” said Alice.

  Midge tugged on his jacket. “Let me say hello, Daddy.”

  “Just a second, sweetheart.” He wasn’t getting it. There was another layer of information he needed to get.

  Alice laughed. Bill felt himself break out into a sweat. She was giving him all the signals that he needed to listen very, very carefully.

  “I have to get back to work,” she said. That’s not how they signed off. So, yes, it was a work-related disaster she was taking care of. Good, he understood that much.

  “Got it,” he said.

  “Just make sure you eradicate them for good.”

  “Okay,” said Bill. Had she really just told him he needed to get rid of all the plastic in the house? That would be crazy.

  “Now let me say a quick goodbye to our little one.”

  Bill handed the phone to Midge, who lit up and burbled into the phone before Alice cut the call short. Alice never cut calls with Midge short. Bill was trembling. It was worse than he’d feared. Alice was in trouble and they were all in real danger.

  Midge handed the phone back to him, crestfallen that her mom had told her to give the phone to Daddy so quickly.

  “I love you, my darling husband,” she said.

  Bill choked up. He had to say it, but he was so overcome the words backed up in his throat, threatening to undo him altogether.

  “Just remember, all of them. Because the skunks get into everything and the smell they leave is impossible to get rid of. Even if you think you can wash it out, you can’t. So, if you think they have gotten into anything at all, just trash it. Take it to the new landfill and get rid of it all. Okay sweetheart?”

  Bill’s heart was racing in his chest. His wife of 20 years had just told him he needed to get rid of all plastics. “I love you,” he said.

  The line went dead.

  He looked at his phone. What was he going to do without it? Did she honestly mean he needed to get rid of that, too?

  He pulled up the kids’ phone numbers and sent a text. “Back to base. Protocol…” he paused. They hadn’t thought of a protocol that covered what he was contemplating. He let it hang. They’d understand. They might freak out, but they’d definitely understand.

  Chapter Eleven

  Professor Baxter took Alice to what she called “the safe side of the pit.” They were behind glass and a good distance from the hole that ran through the center of the building. It was unreal; as if she was looking at it on a TV screen.

  The pit was exactly that: a pit. Far worse than she had been imagining. The word “hole” had a neatness to it; spoke of order and geometry and clean lines. “Pit” on the other hand conjured up the unhallowed mess that MELT had wrought on the building. It had eaten its way through the floor, the wiring, the pipes, the insulation in the ceiling of the floor below. They’d had to turn off all power to the west side of the building, so they were working with a generator and floodlights. Alice and the Professor toured what little they could, nodding at the science team who were in way over their heads, doing their best to look unfazed.

  There was nothing to say that wasn’t either profane or immensely depressing, so the two women left the pit, trudged down the stairwell and onto the street. They held their counsel as they made their way from K&P to the hospital to see Angelina.

  The clean, tiled walls and fresh, starched uniforms lent the ward an air of professionalism that calmed Alice’s frazzled nerves. If she could’ve waved a magic wand and turned back the clock, have Jake listen to Professor Baxter and hold off on the launch, all that chaos could have been avoided. But she had no magic at her disposal. She had only science. She took her prayers and laid them at God’s feet, asking that he bless the surgeons with steady hands and willing hearts. “Big brainy ideas, too, please God.” He wasn’t so busy he couldn’t hear her plea.

  God has time for those who make time for Him. Her adoptive mother had been a good woman who trusted the Lord. Alice had never forgotten her kindness, nor her faith.

  Professor Baxter paused outside the nurses’ station, waving a doctor over. She did the introductions and Alice asked the question on everyone’s mind, “How’s Angelina doing?”

  “She’s a train wreck.” Dr. Martin, who was apparently the most senior doctor on the team, didn’t pull his punches.

  Alice looked through the glass window into the makeshift Intensive Care Unit.

  “Suit up and I’ll show you.”

  Alice and Professor Baxter were gloved, masked, and booted in record time.

  Alice entered the room tentatively. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see Angelina for fear that she might have deteriorated even further, but she knew she had to look.

  A nurse stood at Angelina’s side, needle in hand, saline bag hanging on the stand. Her hand was steady, but Alice could feel the tension in the room. One slip and she herself would be bloodied and blistered.

  “We haven’t been able to sedate her yet.”

  Alice’s blood pressure ticked up a notch. What did he mean they hadn’t sedated her? She’d delivered the child pumped full of morphine.

  “If we’re to address the wounds, we need her to be fully under. I know you did your best...”

  Alice could feel the “but” coming.

  “But in cases like these, you can use a great deal more morphine than is usually prescribed.”

  Alice nodded. She hated the idea that she’d given Angelina just enough morphine to quiet her down but not enough to knock her out. Being inside the charred case that had once been her beautiful body must be a form of hell.

  “The single-use needles have a plastic component, there at the end of the needle. Can you see it?” Dr. Martin had a soothing voice, almost melodic. Alice found it annoying. The man shouldn’t be talking to her as if she was a civilian. She could handle herself. She needed all the facts.

  “When that touches her, she screams the place down. And it will touch her because we’re still searching for a vein underneath all that bloody scar tissue. I’m calling it scar tissue, but that’s a misnomer. It’s tissue that’s pulling together…” He made a gesture with his hands that Alice would never forget: each hand a claw, each claw scraping against the sides of something relatively intractable with great force as they drew closer to one another. Dr. Martin grimaced as his fingertips touched. “The flesh is closing in on itself. It’s new. It’s not something we know how to treat. We’re doing our best.”

  Alice cringed. “Has anyone secured some old-fashioned syringes and needles? You know the ones I mean. They’re glass and metal. No plastic.”

  Dr. Martin shrugged. “You know where we could get something like that?”

  Alice considered her museum friends for a second. One name rose to the top of the pile. “Give me a minute.” She nodded at Baxter. “May I borrow your phone?”

  “My phone?”

  “I threw mine away.” She hadn’t shared her fears with anyone except Bill, but she’d gotten rid of her phone after their last call.

  Baxter handed over her phone without comment.

  Alice stepped out of the medical suite and dialed Fran. “I want you to track down Dr. Stephen McKan. He works at the Museum of Natural History. Use my maiden name…”

  “Stephen McKan,” said Fran. “Got it. And
what am I asking McKan for?”

  “Tell him we need turn of the century medical equipment. Needles, in particular, but also anything else he can think of that might have been used in a surgical setting in the early 1900s.”

  “How am I going to convince him to part with that? That’s got to be worth a mint.”

  Alice turned her back on the room. She didn’t need anyone else hearing her private history. “He’ll do it, trust me. Tell him it’s for me.”

  She could feel Fran’s skepticism seeping through the phone. “We were an item for a short time back in college.” What she didn’t say was that she had broken the man’s heart when she left him for an engineering student named Bill, who made her laugh and her heart sing; that Stephen referred to her, still, as “the one that got away;” that he’d gotten a little tipsy at their last New Year’s bash and told her that he’d never married because no one measured up to her. He would have lassoed the moon and sold it off to the highest bidder if she’d asked him to. Fran didn’t need to know these things. Or that Alice was willing to leverage the feelings he had for her to whatever end she needed.

  She turned back to find Professor Baxter right behind her. “I have a thought,” said Baxter. “I’m thinking perhaps that MELT is merging with her skin.”

  Alice shook her head. “It’s a plastic-eating compound, Christine. How would it bond with her skin?”

  Baxter leaned in close. “Did you review the files I gave you?”

  Alice shook her head. When had there been time? She’d been running from one fire to the next.

  “Do that, then let me know what you think.” Once again, Baxter was whispering. The woman was genuinely afraid. But of whom? And why?

  Alice nodded. “Just tell me what you think happened.”

  Baxter shook her head, glancing at her phone.

  Alice knew what that meant. The phones were listening. She didn’t know Baxter was that cautious; she’d taken her as someone, rather, who laughed at her own belief that they were being closely monitored. But the NSA or FBI or CIA or whoever might be tracking them at the national level wouldn’t care if Baxter shared her suspicions about an industrial accident at a mid-sized firm in Manhattan.

  The Professor was still looking at her phone.

  Was there spyware on their corporate devices? Did she think Jake had a shadow team monitoring their every move? That was even more bananas than her own conspiracy theories. At least hers were grounded in fact.

  She took Baxter’s phone and left it behind the counter at the nurses’ station and powered them into the stairwell. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “You’ll see on the files I gave you…” Baxter was still in whisper mode, checking the stairwell for foot traffic. “…something was added to MELT.”

  “What?” Alice wasn’t whispering. She couldn’t. The idea that MELT itself wasn’t defective was an incredible relief. But what could anyone possibly add that would cause it to go off the rails like this?

  “I don’t know what and I don’t know who but there are clues. In the data on my files and the closed-circuit footage I gave you. I started my review but then Jake came by with the lawyers and I panicked and you’re the only one I trust…”

  “But, Christine…” She never used the Professor’s first name. They were colleagues, not friends. “Why not tell Jake this? Why the cloak-and-dagger?”

  Christine’s eyes grew wide.

  “No way,” said Alice. “He loves K&P. He’d never do anything to harm our reputation.”

  Christine gave a half-nod, half-shrug. “I’m scared. I don’t know who to trust. If I am wrong, Jake would end my career. I would never work again.”

  “You’re telling me that Jake Prudela knows that MELT has been tampered with and is doing nothing about it? I don’t believe it.” Alice leaned up against the wall and thought for a second. She didn’t believe it. Not for a single second. Jake might be a tough boss—driven, hard, calculating—but he wasn’t crooked. Christine had this wrong.

  “Blackmail? Bribery? I don’t know. Maybe it’s him, maybe it’s someone else.” She wrapped her arms around herself, to stop herself from shaking. The woman was genuinely afraid.

  “You have proof?” Alice was agitated. She wanted to know the truth, but she couldn’t take it on board.

  “There’s proof in the files I gave you. I know it. Something was added to MELT.”

  “Okay, what?” It was all infuriatingly vague. She needed facts and figures. She needed hard data.

  Christine shrugged. She was turning out to be a terrible investigative collaborator. She had a hunch. She claimed there was evidence on the thumb drive. That was it. Alice needed more than that. She needed rock-solid proof.

  “Your team is at the pit taking samples and readings, right? They’re assessing what’s going on so they can find a way to stop the spread.”

  Baxter nodded.

  “The solution is simple.” Alice paced across the tiny landing. “We go in and we take a look at their findings. And if there’s a contaminant—and we can prove it was deliberately added to MELT—then we look into who had access to the labs when and for what purposes. This isn’t rocket science, Christine. This is straight up research.”

  “If I’m right and Jake is in on this, you’re going to have a hell of a time gaining access to my guys’ data.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said Alice. No one told her she couldn’t look a disaster head on. She was a Senior Vice President and she wasn’t about to be shut out of an investigation that had caused so much damage and pain. Neither would she be party to a cover-up.

  Alice left Baxter on the ward and took the elevator down to the lobby. Unlike Mount Sinai, this hospital was in perfect working order. No one was panicking, there was no press for the automated doors. She stepped onto the street. Once again, she was struck by the ordinariness of the day. People just going about their everyday lives, worrying about work, worrying about the boss, worrying about promotions and raises and corporate nonsense. Like Christine, who wouldn’t speak up because she was worried about her career. A building was imploding and a child had been, at best, scarred for life, and she was worried about a job? The whole purpose of being alive was to make a difference, to take a stand, to do what was right. Did any of these people rushing past her know that every second counted? Did Christine?

  She pushed away the thoughts. It didn't do to be so judgmental, not even about her spineless colleague. It wasn't her job to make everybody care. It was only her job to make sure that she did the best she could with whatever time she was allotted and make sure that her children did the same. The children. What must they be thinking? Bill surely had told them that they were on high alert. They had to be worried. All of them. But she was sure, as sure as she had ever been, that they would be doing fabulous work. If anyone was going to change the world, it was going to be her children.

  As she reached the door of Klean & Pure she noticed a pigeon struggling in the little raised garden that ran along the outside café. It wasn’t just poking and pecking and doing city-bird things, it was floundering. If she hadn’t known better, she would have said it was drunk. Which meant it was dying. Was that normal for Manhattan? Were there always animals dying on the street? And it was dying, there was no doubt about that. She wondered if it would be too strange to put the creature out of its misery. She hated suffering. Perhaps she could quietly take the bird inside and do what was necessary.

  As she picked it up, the bird struggled as she knew it would. She draped her jacket over the back of the poor bird to quiet its wings and held each of its feet in her hand. She also covered the bird’s head so it wouldn’t peck at her in its distress. It got a couple of good, hard nips in before she managed to wrap it gently in her $600 jacket. It was worth it, though. No creature should be allowed to suffer like this. She caught a couple of people looking at her as they scurried by; too busy to stop and help, but not so busy that they couldn’t mind their own business. Probably t
hought she was some kind of kook. A pigeon lady. Not uncommon in Manhattan. But then not usually in a dress suit and high heels.

  She hustled into the lobby of her building. To her left was the café where she usually got her coffee and croissant in the morning. To her right there was a general waiting area for guests. Neither of them was suitable for putting a bird out of his misery.

  She approached the front desk. “Jerry,” she said, “any chance I can just duck behind a desk for second?”

  Jerry was a good guy; worked double shifts then went home to his wife on Long Island. He always had a smile and kind word for her when she came and went from the building. But even Jerry gave her a quizzical look. She crawled under the desk with the pigeon still in her jacket. As she loosened her hold, it flapped, frantic and distraught. She closed her eyes, put her hand on the pigeon’s neck and with a quick, practiced move let the bird go. She felt a kind of peace. She had done a good thing. Now she had to go and do something better. But first, she had to dispose of a dead pigeon. She couldn’t very well leave it with Jerry.