by JJ Pike
“Daddy’s not okay, Midge…I mean, Margaret. Daddy’s kind of a mess. But, if you give him a couple of minutes, he’ll be all better.”
Midge climbed up the pipes as if they were monkey bars in a jungle gym and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Mommy says it’s okay to cry when you’re sad. She says it lets the bad chemicals out and leaves room for the good ones to come back.”
Bill sobbed on his youngest daughter’s shoulder, unashamed and unfettered. He needed the good chemicals to come back and he needed them now.
Chapter Thirteen
Alice frowned. They hadn’t sent Jake’s assistant, Frank. They’d sent some kid who was barely out of short trousers, super wet behind the ears, and more afraid of Jake than he was Alice. She wasn’t usually a fan of the workplace powerplay but in this instance she thought it was probably best that she use whatever seniority she had.
“I want a full tour,” she said. She stood too close to him, looked at him without blinking, raised her voice, squared her shoulders, did all the things she knew to do to take up space and command authority. It was all done in the most subtle way, but she was practiced. She knew how to get what she wanted.
The kid laughed. “Whatever you say, Mrs. Everlee.”
“What's your name?” She brushed some invisible lint from his shoulder.
The kid flinched and backed up a few inches. Good. He was feeling the pressure. “My name is Martin. Martin Lepton. But people call me Marty.”
She smiled her most convincing smile. They were in it together, co-conspirators. “Well Marty, where have they told you I can't go?”
The kid snorted so hard he almost hacked up a lung. So, she was right. He was supposed to take her on a truncated tour. Well that wasn't going to happen.
“I think I need a hard hat,” she said. “And booties? What else are they wearing in there?”
“That's right, you need full protective wear. There’s a suit hanging in the stairwell. I wanted to get you a private room, but there aren’t any real rooms left…” He trailed off, worried he’d said too much.
Alice was cooler than a cool, cool cucumber. And sharp. This kid was going to be a pushover. “Not to worry,” she said. “I’ll be two secs and back here in full bunny suit regalia in no time.” She turned and walked towards the stairwell. She couldn’t hear the kid walking away. “Don’t you need to go and change, too?”
Marty gave a sheepish grin.
“Let me guess,” she said. “They told you not to let me out of your sight.”
He looked away. Someone really needed to coach this kid in How To Make it Through Corporate American Without Being Eaten by a Shark. He couldn’t have faked his way through a checkers match, let alone a game of chess. If she hadn’t been hell-bent on getting to the scene of the accident, she’d have given him a few pointers. Instead, she needed to rethink her strategy. It was going to be tough to give him the slip.
Alice paused to gather her thoughts. Someone understood what was going on, she just wasn’t sure who. Not Christine Baxter. If she’d been the one to scupper MELT, she wouldn’t have given her the thumb drive and told her to start an investigation.
If it was an inside job, it had to be someone close to the top. There simply weren’t that many people who’d have both motive and opportunity. Though, theoretically, a janitor could be “motivated” to get to MELT if the price was right. That would take a whole lot of high-level planning though. No, if Christine was on the right track and this was a deliberate act, it had to have been someone who had routine access to the labs.
Alice didn’t have a whole lot of data, but her short conversation with Jake led her to believe he wasn’t in on it. She turned her mind to the science team: probably not Van Karpel, he was a nerdy germaphobe, not someone who could get his hands dirty—literally or metaphorically. Still, she would need to go back and check his files; see what his security profile said about him. Then, of course, there was Michael Rayton. He niggled at her gut. She trusted her gut. If he felt off, it was off for a reason.
She found the suit hanging where Marty said it would be. She pushed her hands into the sleeves, thinking about how she might get away from her guide. Go down or up? Was the whole building compromised? Had MELT infiltrated the stairwell she stood in? Might they all end up like Angelina, roasted and toasted and battling a microbe that no one understood?
She pulled the bunny suit up around her waist, then stopped abruptly. The material was slick and water repellant. She hadn’t thought about her clothes until that minute. Was there anything safe when it came to the spread of MELT?
“Marty,” she called from around the door, “I don’t think this suit is going to help matters. Nor the hat, nor the booties.”
“You have to put them on, Mrs. Everlee. No one goes anywhere without protection.”
“But they’re made of Tyvek, aren’t they?” She ladled on as much sarcasm as she could. She wanted him to feel her scorn. She wanted to find his weak place. He’d recover but if she didn’t get answers, Angelina might not.
“Are they?” She heard the rising anxiety in Marty’s voice. She waited. He needed to panic a bit more before he’d be willing to help her.
“What’s Tyvek?” he said.
Alice shook her head. How could Marty work at K&P and not know what Tyvek was? “It’s a kind of polyethylene. You know what that is, right?”
“Plastic?” he said.
“And we’re fighting a plastic-eating microbe, so how about we don’t put these on but instead go and talk to someone who understands why this is so dangerous.” Alice pulled her skirt around so the back was in the front and checked the label. It was a wool blend. Not good. The “blend” part had made the suit more flexible than plain wool; easier to wash and less expensive, but that was before. Now, it was an invitation for MELT to attack her.
She could hear Marty on his walkie-talkie. She sidled up close to the door.
“She says that Tyvek is plastic and all plastics are dangerous. I don’t know what she’s doing, but she’s been in there a long time.” He paused. “Yes, the north stairwell. We haven’t even started the tour yet.”
Alice flung open the swinging door and took the phone from the trembling assistant. “Jake, I know you think I’m going to make trouble, but I want to help. I truly want to help. Let me see the damage and talk to the team so that I can do my job.”
Jake didn’t answer.
“The kid’s right, though. I do think Tyvek is a dangerous thing to wear if your techs are going to be touching anything that’s infected with MELT. I’ve seen what Angelina looks like; you haven’t. I’m telling you, get our people out of there until we have a way to properly protect them.”
She heard Jake scrabbling on the other end of the phone. She’d bet on him being in a Tyvek bunny suit and by the sounds of things, she’d rolled the dice and won.
“I want you to walk me around the hole in the floor and tell me what our people think is going on. That’s all.”
“Give the phone to Marty,” he said.
She watched Marty’s face. The slackening of the jaw, the relaxation around the eyes, the hint of his smile muscles warming up again told her that bossman Jake had given him the go-ahead to take her to his illustrious leader. He rang off and nodded at her. “You win.”
“I know,” said Alice. “Don’t play unless you mean to win.”
Marty pulled at his collar, then his tie.
“You might want to take that off,” she said. “Unless it’s silk.”
Alice watched Marty’s panic rise. She had a moment of terrible guilt that she’d taken him to that level of anxiety with a few well-placed words. But she wasn’t wrong. None of them should be in there unless they were wearing cotton, silk, or hemp fibers. But who dressed like that? No one she knew. And Marty couldn’t afford high-end clothing. He was strictly a polyester trousers and cotton-poly-blend shirts man. He unbuttoned his top button, paused, then ripped the shirt off his back, buttons popping and pinging
on the floor.
Alice put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Why don’t you stay out here, instead. It’s safer.”
“I’ll lose my job if I let you out of my sight,” he said. He was close to tears.
“I’ll vouch for you. I’ll say I made an executive decision, relieving you of your duty. You don’t want to strip just so you can escort me to the studio.”
Marty laughed, this time relief mingled with his anxiety. “My boxers are cotton, I’m pretty sure of it.”
Alice nodded. “Well, I’m glad of that, but I still don’t think it’s necessary for you to accompany me.”
He wouldn’t hear of it. Marty, stripped to his undies, marched Alice through what had been a maze of sparklingly clean corridors but was now a dimly-lit warren, criss-crossed with hazard tape and discarded hazmat suits. Someone had gone to the trouble of placing a trail of stand-alone garden pathway lights along the floor leading to the studio. It was eerie—the two of them being lit from below—but at least there was a tiny bit of light to steer them. The rest of the building had been plunged into darkness.
They stopped short. Alice looked around, to make sure she had her bearings. The studio was around the corner, at least another 500 feet away. Had Jake given Marty a coded signal to stop her before she got there?
“When you turn this corner,” said Marty, “hug the wall. The scientists say they aren’t sure about the structural integrity of the building but that the safest place to be is near the walls.”
Alice peered around the corner. They’d strung up massive floodlights, way, way overhead in the rafters. The accident site was ablaze with light. Alice could see every jagged piece of drywall, every dangling bundle of useless cables, every dripping, gaping, smashed pipe. The smell was indescribable: fresh sewage meets copper wiring meets electrical fire. She’d seen it from a distance, but now that she was up close, she was reeling. MELT was the most powerfully destructive agent she’d ever set eyes on. It was as if several bombs had been detonated all at once and had wiped the building’s infrastructure off the map.
Way across the other side of the hole, Jake waved. She shook her head. “Give me your phone.” Marty handed it over without a word. She hit Jake’s number. He picked up immediately. “You have got to be kidding,” she shouted. “Why haven’t you evacuated the building?”
Jake turned his back on her but kept talking into his phone. “I have Baxter’s best scientists on this. They’ve been taking samples, keeping me up to speed. We’re close to understanding what’s going on here.”
“Not close enough,” said Alice. “I’ve only been gone a few hours and look at what’s happened in that time.”
“What would you have me do, Everlee? Everything we have worked for is buckling under us. I need to salvage what I can.”
“No,” said Alice. “You need to get the people out. The formula can be reconstituted, the lab rebuilt. We talked about this already. Everything is replaceable except for the people.”
Jake didn’t answer.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Stats just came back,” he said.
“And?”
“MELT has increased its burn rate by 11 seconds per millimeter. That’s weighted, of course.”
“You’ve kept me out of the loop, Jake, so I don’t know what that means. What’s weighted? What was the rate of increase last time you measured? How many measurements have you taken? Someone has to be graphing all of this.”
“I’ll send it over,” said Jake.
He’d caved. But why? Why was he suddenly willing to tell her what was going on? “I don’t have my phone,” she said. “Send it to Fran.”
“Fran’s not in the building,” said Jake.
Alice felt a chill run over her shoulders and down her spine. “Where is she?”
“At St. Joseph’s.”
Alice’s heart fell, her blood pressure rose, tears stung her eyes. “How?”
“No, she’s not infected,” said Jake. “She’s taking care of the nurse.”
“The nurse?”
“The nurse who was treating Angelina.”
Alice clapped her hands over her mouth. She didn’t usually wear her heart on her sleeve like that. She resisted the urge to cry. That wouldn’t help anyone. She had to stay focused. She’d feared for that nurse and now it had happened. Another person had been burned by their shining star of a product. “How bad?”
“Not too bad. The thing we need to do is sequester them, keep them away from the rest of the hospital. They can’t touch or be touched.”
Son of a gun, she’d told him that not 24 hours ago. Christine Baxter was the one who first told Alice to get the nurses away from the general population. She’d probably been saying the same to the boss in the time Alice had been gone. It wouldn’t do any good to call Jake on it. In fact, if he thought it was his idea, he would fund their care better, take more interest, in short, make sure it was a success. That was how successful people operated. Power went to their heads and addled their brains.
“I’ll get the data from Fran and we’ll reconvene in…” she looked at her watch. “Thirty minutes?” Could she get to the hospital and back in that time? No, she would have Fran come to her. The irony of wielding her power—over both Fran and Marty—didn’t escape her notice, but she was doing it for the good of the whole, whereas Jake had been doing it for the bottom line; for the shareholders. There weren’t any shareholders in the building, however. They were probably all safely off in their penthouse suites or second or third homes in the Hamptons. The people who mattered—Angelina, the nurses who’d taken care of her, the countless people in this very building who were risking life and limb to get this crisis under control—they were the people she’d gone to bat for.
The floor shuddered beneath her feet. She hadn’t imagined it. She turned to Marty who’d lost all the color in his face and was backing down the hall just as fast as he could. She turned back again to see the south wall crumble and cascade into the pit.
Her mouth formed a perfect “O.” That was her boss, falling, falling, falling—through the sparks and water and jutting pipes—falling to his death.
She had no choice now. She had to call the Mayor. It didn’t matter what happened to K&P’s stock or their future or the development of MELT. They had a genuine emergency on their hands and they needed all the help they could get.
Chapter Fourteen
The kids had all gone their separate ways, off buying non-plastic containers for their restocking project. It was just him and Midge in the cabin. Rats, he was going to have to rethink what he called her, even in his mind, because it was going to take a massive amount of discipline to call her “Margaret” all the time. Though she’d been named after his mother, he rarely thought of Midge as a “Margaret.”
“Shoot,” he said. “I need to call my mom.”
Bill’s mother lived alone in her Morningside Heights apartment in the far reaches of Manhattan where city folk went when they wanted a little more of a laid-back vibe. Not that any of Manhattan was ever laid back, per se, it was just that the neighborhood still had that neighborhood-y flavor. People knew each other, stopped to say hello and picked litter up off the streets. Well, “anyone over 40 and with half a brain cell picks up after themselves” according to Margaret Sr., aka Grandmimi, Mimi for short.
His father, a kindly man with a gentle disposition, had died suddenly in his mid-30s. He’d been a mine inspector. Loved his job. Couldn’t get enough of going underground and telling the kids about the gold rush and Colorado’s warren of mine shafts and caves. Heart attack. No warning. Found dead at his post. It had devastated the family, leaving an unworldly and barely-educated widow with four young boys and no income. Margaret Everlee had always done what was necessary, though. She’d learned to type, gotten herself a receptionist’s position at a dentist’s office, cleaned offices after dark, and took in sewing. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for her boys. But no matter how many hours she put in
, a woman with nothing beyond a high school diploma and no work experience in the ’70s was never going to earn big bucks. They’d had to cut back.
They’d lived a modest life when their dad was alive, but when they had to move into a 2-bedroom house and forego their summer holidays—panning for gold with their dad and racing their beat-up Chevys up the winding back roads that led to Evergreen and Nederland and all the wonderful, funky mountain towns in the Rockies—that old life seemed like a luxurious dream. Instead of Wonder Bread, there was homemade wheat bread, something none of their friends’ moms would dream of buying. They hunted and fished, heck they even learned to forage. They had a country life in a suburban setting. And they got by, though they were the butt of endless jokes at school.
Weird how something as savage as your dad dying when you’re seven could end up being such a blessing. You could have dropped Bill Everlee in the middle of the forest, a thousand miles from civilization, and he’d have you a well-rounded, fully-cooked meal by the end of the second day. Hardship had made him the man he was. He had no regrets.