by JJ Pike
He had certainly never held his childhood privations against his mom. She’d done her best, no one could do more. When he and Alice started making money, he made sure to give his mom as much as she would take. She was a proud woman and refused, outright, to let them buy her a house, but she would accept a little handout here and there; though god forbid they ever call it a “hand out.” She’d have given Bill a tongue lashing about “standing on your own two feet” if he’d dared call it charity. She’d moved from their dinky little house on the outskirts of Denver to an apartment in upper Manhattan when he and Alice had moved East, and she’d never looked back. She loved city life. Loved, loved, loved it.
Bill picked up the phone—he was right to hold onto the phones just as long as he could—and dialed her number.
“The Yankees are having a dismal season” She never had been one for small talk. “I think I need a word with their manager about the pitching because if they don’t get that figured out, there’s nothing going to save them.”
“How are you doing, Mom?”
“Same old, same old,” she said. She wouldn’t have told him if she was in pain. He’d have to see her in person to know that.
“Hey…” He tried to sound casual. “We were hoping you might come up to the cabin for a few days.”
“Why would I want to do that?” she said. “It’s way out the back of beyond, you don’t have cable, I can’t walk to the store, and I would miss my games.”
Bill didn’t have any answers for her objections. She was right on all counts. He was going to have to throw himself on her mercy to get her to budge.
“Alice is caught up in a work situation.” Understatement of the century. “And I need some help.”
Margaret was silent. “The Yankees are playing the Dodgers this weekend.”
There was nothing on God’s Green Earth that would get her to miss that game. She was hot, hot, hot for baseball and with a major game between teams she still considered major rivals, he would have had to rent a forklift to pry her out of her seat. She had season tickets and never missed a game if she could help it.
“Can I come and pick you up on Sunday?”
Margaret sighed. “You have Aggie, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She can do more than me these days.” That was a huge admission on her part. She prided herself so on her ability to do everything and anything. Bill’s heart sank, just a little. Watching your parents grow old was a blessing and a curse. More blessing, of course. She still had her wits and she was able to live alone. The cancer hadn’t taken that from her. Nevertheless, the thought of her not being hale and hearty was a weight on his heart.
“Sunday, then?”
“Oh, if you insist,” she said.
“You’ll enjoy it when you get here,” he said. “You always do.”
“Be sure and have some cola on hand for me. I know you don’t hold with soda for the children, but I’m not a child.”
The cancer had left her with a sweet tooth. It worried him. Was it the disease that was craving the sugar? He feared it was. But what were you to do when someone was possibly terminally ill? Did you keep forcing cruciferous veggies on them or did there come a time when cola and candy and chocolate-laced cereal was okay?
“Love you, Mom.”
“I know,” she said. She never dialed off. She just hung up. It was her way. She couldn’t bear overt demonstrations of love. He put it down to losing her husband so young. The pain of that was so deep, the scar so profound, that she simply couldn’t allow anyone too close to her heart for fear of experiencing that again. Still, he didn’t want to diss her; not even to himself. She did what she did because she had to do it. He hadn’t lived her life so he wasn’t going to judge her decisions. If she was happy living alone and keeping her children at an arm’s length, he had to make his peace with that.
“Midge,” he shouted, “Mimi is coming to stay next week.”
“Margaret,” she said. “Please call me Margaret.”
“Of course, I’m sorry. Give your dad a little time to get used to it, okay. We’ve been calling you Midge for seven years.”
“I’ve found a way to keep all our food safe,” she said.
Bill smiled. She was a firecracker, that one. Nothing fazed her. She probably had come up with a cute idea. He needed to get to his maps and work out where all the underground mines were, but he decided to spend half an hour with his girl first. “Tell me your thoughts, Margaret. How can we keep all our food safe?”
“We have a root cellar.”
“We do.”
“And when we grow things, we can put them in there, because it’s like a walk-in fridgigator.”
“That’s right.”
“But people know we have a root cellar.” She stared at him without breaking her gaze. She was right. All the neighbors knew they had a root cellar. Jim and Betsy next door had loaned them their backhoe to do the initial digging. It was no secret. Jim even came by and helped harvest the veggies from the hydroponic farm. Everyone around here knew everyone’s business. That didn’t matter. They were friends. Friends help friends, even in a crisis. He didn’t interrupt Margaret to tell her that. It was far too cute that she was thinking ahead.
“And if other people know we have food, they might want our food.”
It sounded an awful lot like Margaret—little Margaret that is—had been listening far more carefully than he had given her credit for. She knew about the possibility of rationing or, worse yet, full-on raids in the event of a national crisis. It was less cute than he’d thought it was going to be.
“I am right, aren’t I? Too many people know where our cellar is.”
“Come here,” he said and patted his knee.
Midge climbed into her daddy’s lap, popping her thumb in her mouth as she rested her head on his chest. “If we put exploding locks on all our doors,” she said. “Then no-one can get to our food.”
Bill stifled a laugh. She was thinking out of the box, he had to give her that. It wouldn’t do to laugh at her, though. He wanted to encourage her creativity, not quash it. “That’s one idea, Margaret, but wouldn’t that damage the doors? And what about the people? It’d damage them, for sure.”
She was silent for several minutes. Bill soaked up the moment. Who knew if she would ever sit in his lap again? Demanding to be called “Margaret” was just one step on the developmental path to independence. He wanted to slow time and keep her there forever as a little girl in her daddy’s arms, safe from all harm.
“Then we could put poison on the locks. That way the doors are safe,” she said.
Bill grinned. “But that still hurts the people, punkin.”
She looked up at him, deadly serious. “If they are trying to take our food, Daddy, then they deserve to hurt. It’s ours. We got it, we stored it, it’s ours.”
Bill nodded slowly. There was a logic to what she was saying. “I will think about it seriously.”
She climbed down, smiling. “And we can wear special gloves when we touch the locks, so it doesn’t make us go…” she held her hands around her throat and made a gargling, choking sound before falling to the floor in a fit of giggles. Death wasn’t real to her yet; it was still a kind of game. She had no sense of the fragility of life or the permanence of death. He was glad of it.
“I will give it some serious thought,” he said.
“Socrates used hemlock…”
Where did she get this stuff from?
“Cleopatra used an ass…”
“Asp. I think it was an asp.”
“That’s what I said, ass. Napoleon was killed with cyanide.”
“I think you know what I think, Margaret.”
Midge nodded. “You think it’s bad to want to poison people. I know. But I think it’s worse to eat our food which will make us die, so we would be killing them before they killed us and that’s okay…”
Bill laughed. She’d given it too much thought. He ruffled her hair.
“I promise I will think very carefully about how to keep people out of our supplies.”
Midge nodded, satisfied.
“Daddy has to go and work now, Margaret.”
“I know,” she said. She marched to the kitchen and continued to sort food into “wrapped in plastic” and “not wrapped in plastic” piles. She was going to be more help than Paul or Aggie had thought she would be.
Bill turned to the maps spread out over the dining room table. They’d bought the house because of its remote setting and rustic charm. Someone had done a hatchet job on the interior in the ’70s, installing mustard-yellow carpeting and slapping leaded paint on the walls, but they had left the bones of the place intact, not bothering to upgrade the copper pipes or replacing the wood stove. Bill traced his finger over the plans. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. The main house was going to be alright. He’d have to make some modification—rip out the boiler, reconfigure the water pipes, and do something about the electrical wiring—but all in all, it wasn’t that bad.
He reached back with both hands to lace his fingers behind his head, something he did habitually, but his left hand was still a puffy, screeching sore. He lowered it carefully and cradled it in his lap. He’d overreacted in the barn. They were going to be able to turn this around. The kids were on board, Midge was barreling ahead with plans to poison or blow up the neighbors, and Alice would be home soon. She had to be. They couldn’t lock her up and keep her at work forever. And there was still nothing on the news, so he was more convinced than ever that she was dealing with a localized event; a disaster in her small world but not an actual “disaster-disaster.” It would be hard for her, coping with all those starched suits who didn’t know how to handle themselves in a crisis, but she’d whip them into shape. Plans to rip the wiring out of the walls in the main house could go to the end of the list. She’d come home to find a pantry free of plastic wrap, plastic ware, or plastic wrappers and be proud as punch of her pack.
In the meantime, he figured he’d head on over to their neighbors, Jim and Betsy, and make an offer on his Austin Ten-Four. Jim had been trying to get him to buy it for years. He had a four-car garage crammed full of vintage cars, and a shed filled with parts. The man was more than a hobbyist, he was a full-time enthusiast. He took his “big old metal babies” to car shows and retro festivals and even rented them out to local filmmakers. Jim had asked $10,000 for the Austin. The car was in great shape, its curvaceous body polished to a high shine with mint-condition, white-rimmed, vintage tires and headlamps that would do Gatsby proud. Still, Bill reckoned he could get Jim down to $7K. He had cash enough stashed around the house and what the tax man doesn’t know, the tax man doesn’t know. Jim would snap up the offer.
“Margaret, would you like to come over to Jim and Betsy’s with me?”
“Do I have to, Daddy?”
He weighed leaving a seven-year old alone in a cabin in the woods. He’d phrased it wrong. He couldn’t leave her there. Not a day after a bear attack. “Sorry, what I meant to say was, we need to go to Jim and Betsy’s for a little visit.”
Midge slumped in her chair. “Mrs. Betsy touches my hair and tells me she wants to put Dippity-Doo in it and make curls like her creepy dolls.”
It was true. “Mrs. Betsy” as Midge called her, did have a creepy collection of dolls, most of them about a foot tall and wearing fake, turn-of-the-century crinolines. She had three display cabinets of them in the sitting room, perhaps designed to convince burglars or axe murderers that the house’s inhabitants weren’t to be messed with.
He took Midge by the hand. “We won’t stay too long, I promise.”
Midge didn’t get off her chair. “You didn’t give me my dollar, Daddy.”
“Sorry?”
“When we were back at home you said I would get a dollar if I got the most chickens in the car and I did, but you never gave me the dollar.”
He could see where she was headed. It was good. Bad, but good. He pulled out his wallet and handed her two dollars. “Not a word,” he said, “to the others. They would skin me alive if they knew I had just done that.”
Midge laughed and it was the best sound in all the world.
Chapter Fifteen
The Mayor's Office had their own emergency procedure protocols. Building collapse? Call in the Fire Department. Alice pushed for a meeting with the Mayor, but she was knocked back by a senior aide who was every bit as practiced as she was at the corporate-heavyweight-meets-political-shark game. They wanted to debrief Alice and then cut her loose. That was out of the question. She’d already given their “Liaison Officer” the run down, but she got the distinct impression that they didn’t understand the gravity of the situation and were going about things the wrong way. They called in the Fire Department. Great outfit, wrong answer.
Even though she told them they were facing a biochemical disaster, they still insisted that it was a task for the Fire Department. All she could do was talk to the men on the ground and try to get them to see reason. She knocked back two energy drinks in quick succession: three parts marketing, two parts caffeine and a shot of ginseng. She was running on fumes. She hadn’t sat down since this all kicked off almost 15 hours ago and needed something to keep her alert.
She raced to the front of the fire engine closest to the building, found the man in charge, and told him everything she knew.
“Slow down,” he said. “And start from the beginning.”
Alice checked the officer’s uniform. He was a Captain. Good. “Your name, sir?”
“Captain Cervantes,” he said. “I was briefed by the Mayor’s office, Mrs. Everlee, and understand your concerns…”
“This is a unique situation,” she said. “I know you already have an Emergency Response Plan and I am sure your ERP is top-notch, but you can't enclose this building in a tent.” They were already unloading the scaffolding, evacuating people from nearby buildings, closing down the roads. Part of what they were doing was excellent—getting people out of the building for starters—but they were treating this very specific biologically-induced implosion as a regular building collapse.
Alice had seen the men and woman of New York’s Fire Department at work before. A façade had crashed to the sidewalk on the Upper East Side narrowly missing a couple of pedestrians just a few years back and they had been all over that like butter on toast. They had done outstanding work. They were heroes, no doubt about it, but they wanted to treat this building collapse in much the same way. And that was a deeply flawed plan.
“Madam, we’ve already had the safety meeting with the crews on site…”
“The LCES, I know. You’ve covered ‘lookout, communications, escape routes, and safety havens.’ I know all that. What you haven’t covered is how—precisely how—this agent works. It’s an enzyme…”
Cervantes talked right over her. “Then you know we’re prepared. It’s an unstable building. We’re going to be extremely cautious. I do not want to lose any of my men or women. This is as personal to me as it is to you.” He touched her arm, briefly. She flinched and he moved away. Alice was too jumpy to have some official try to placate her and far, far too seasoned to fall for the, ‘I care about you...here, let me lean in and touch you as if we’re friends’ routine.
“Captain Cervantes, if you would just give me a couple more minutes of your time.” Alice ran to keep up with the senior firefighter as he barked orders at the crew heading into the building. He was at least a foot taller than her and had a long, fast stride.
“Please don’t send them in,” she said. “Not all of them will come out alive and those who do could be badly burned.”
Cervantes glanced at her then went right back to work talking steadily to his Lieutenant. “Heinman, I want your guys to go down, not up. I want you to liaise with the engineering team and I want this done slow and steady. They’ve already lost portions of the center of the building, so you’re looking at burst pipes, unsecured electrical wires, and raw sewage.” He turned to A
lice. “Mrs. Everlee, you reported a fatality.”
It hadn’t sunk in, the horror of watching Jake fall to his death. “Yes,” she said.
“Are there one or more bodies in the building?”
She shook her head and rubbed her arms against the cold which crawled down her shoulders and settled on her chest. The night was drawing in and with it a sense of profound doom. “I am not sure. I’ve been tending to…” She paused. She needed to tell them just how severe Angelina’s injuries were. She’d told the chipper, overly-smiley liaison officer the entire story—the initial mishap, the growing disaster, Angelina’s rapidly deteriorating condition, the skin-to-skin transfer of the enzyme—but it was clear that her message hadn’t landed. They still didn’t see MELT as a living culture, one which was still at work devouring everything in its path.