Melt

by JJ Pike

  It galled her to be breaking ranks. She was now the whistle-blower. She loved K&P. She’d dedicated close to a decade of her life to the production of MELT. To be ratting them out like this felt like the worst kind of “right thing to do.” She knew she had to do it—tell the Captain himself the entire story from start to finish—but the words felt dull and thick in her mouth. “I’ve been tending to the burn victims and I’m not sure how many fatalities there have been.”

  “Burn victims?”

  “Yes,” said Alice.

  “There was a chemical spill? I was told it was a low-risk contaminant with a limited range and that it had been fully contained.”

  “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but that’s not the case. In fact, you’re dealing with the opposite.” It was hard to find the right thing to say. She wasn’t sure she could explain it herself. “There’s a mega-enzyme. We call it ‘MELT.’ It is designed to reduce plastic to its component parts, thereby relieving the planet of its plastic plague.”

  Captain Cervantes narrowed his eyes. “An enzyme?”

  Alice nodded. “MELT.”

  “MELT?” he said. “Is that an acronym?”

  Alice shook her head. “It’s a brand name. Like Tide…”

  “And MELT eats plastic?”

  Alice nodded again, this time more emphatically.

  Cervantes looked at the building. “Well, doesn’t look like there’s much in the way of plastic left in the building. We’re looking at beams and concrete as I understand it.”

  She felt her jaw seizing up. It was involuntary. It was the shock of watching Jake die, coupled with the frank admission that MELT was malfunctioning, and having to deal with a smart man who was doing his job but doing it utterly wrong. How could she get him to see? To understand? She needed to sit down, but she was scared if she plunked to the sidewalk that the Captain would walk away and she would lose her chance to explain why no one should go into the building until Professor Baxter gave them the go ahead.

  “MELT’s not done yet. Think of it like a slow burn, subsurface forest fire. The humus, peat and dead vegetation is dry enough to burn and the fire catches, but you can’t see it because it’s below ground. It’s moving, growing, undermining your forest, creeping up inside the trees, hollowing them out…until BOOM! It bursts out of the flaming tree and you’re looking at acres and acres of live fire where there was none, or at least none to the naked eye. This is what MELT is doing to the building. It’s crawling under the surface, waiting to make the whole place implode.”

  “An enzyme did all this?” he said.

  Alice nodded.

  The Captain snorted. It was a tiny noise, barely audible. If Alice hadn’t trained herself to read people so closely, she might have missed it. But she caught it before he had time to retreat behind his professional mask. Underneath his polite shell, he felt nothing but derision. He thought she was a flake, perhaps worse. He had already returned his features to their “on duty” configuration: serious, attentive, listening to what she said and caring about the meaning. But now that his mask had fallen, she knew he privately thought she was full of steaming, honking manure. She needed to bring her A-game to the table.

  She straightened herself up, shook off the image of Jake screaming and flailing, shattering his spine on the steel rebar in the bottom of the pit, his arms dangling aimlessly at his sides as the life leaked out of him. She, too, had a professional face and she knew how to use it. She shut down every last feeling she had about the horrors she had seen in the last 15 or 16 hours and took to plain reporting. “MELT is corrosive.”

  “I understand that.”

  “It ate through five floors of this building leaving nothing but steel beams and a concrete shell and they might not last much longer.” She racked her brains for Professor Baxter’s term for secondary infection, but it wouldn’t come. “The entire structure could be infected.”

  “Infected?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “So, this enzyme, ‘MELT’ you call it?”

  She nodded.

  “It not only eats its way through plastic, it infects non-plastic? How does that work?”

  Alice wanted to quote chapter and verse: a scientist had discovered a mutant enzyme which had evolved in a contained environment to consume plastic. K&P’s team had tweaked that mutant enzyme, altered its DNA, created a mega-mutant-enzyme and paired it with an accelerant. There was more, things she had yet to discover, but that was the bottom line. Klean & Pure Industries had manufactured an enzyme with the plastic-demolishing power of a nuclear explosion.

  “Captain?” Lieutenant Heinman called his boss over. “We have word that the sub-basement is no longer stable.”

  “Get them out of there,” said the Captain. He turned to Alice. “My apologies, Mrs. Everlee, we’re going to need to wait for the cadaver team to retrieve your friend’s body. I had hoped we could pull him out of the shaft, but it’s too unstable. Once we’ve secured the building—perhaps tomorrow—we will be sure to go in there and collect his remains.” He rested his hand on her shoulder.

  He didn’t get it. She didn’t care about Jake’s body. It was just his body. Everything that mattered about him had vacated that shell. What mattered now was that his errors—not allowing Professor Baxter to work up an antidote, not getting the pit sealed with concrete as he had said he would, allowing so many people to be harmed by this formula—those errors needed to be addressed.

  Captain Cervantes and Lieutenant Heineman had their heads together. Alice listened intently.

  “We call a halt to operations tonight,” said Cervantes. Heinman nodded. “We erect the scaffold, enclose the building, have a cordon three blocks wide in every direction, and allow no one in or out.”

  Alice butted in. She had to. If they didn’t listen to her things were going to get much, much worse. “MELT will eat its way through your enclosure. You’re going to see more damage than you could possibly imagine. You need to fill the entire heaving pit, from the bottom up, with concrete.”

  The Captain stared at her as if she had landed from another planet and had a minimum of two heads.

  “I am not joking. Fill the entire place with concrete or you’re going to be looking at a disaster none of us could fathom. Nothing that has touched MELT can be left unsecured. You need to bury it.”

  The Lieutenant cleared his throat. “She might not be wrong, boss.”

  “Say what?” said Cervantes.

  “She might have a point. I’ve been talking to Klean & Pure’s science team. This enzyme they developed is virulent. They had no clue what they were unleashing. I believe they have, perhaps unwittingly, made a formula so powerful not even they know what it can do.”

  Who had he been talking to who had that much clout? Alice turned and scanned the faces of those clumped around the fire engines. Van Karpel was there, but he wasn’t convincing. He was their clean-room guy. What could he know that a firefighter would think was more plausible than what she had to say? It must have been Baxter. Hooray for the Professor and her grip on the facts. She’d finally stepped up and spoken the truth. Hooray, hooray, hooray.

  Then she saw Michael Rayton. He was leaning up against the truck. He was too casual, too contained. He didn’t look like a man watching the collapse of his life’s work. Alice stared and stared, determined to remember what it was about him that made her so uneasy. He smiled and waved, which put her on high alert. The man was playing her, perhaps playing all of them. She needed to talk to him, immediately.

  Captain Cervantes clamped his hand down on Alice’s shoulder. “Take me to the Professor. I need to understand the underlying chemistry of this MELT compound. If you’re right—and the building is going to continue to deteriorate at a faster and faster rate—we may need to call in someone else.”

  “Who are you thinking, boss?” Heinman was worried. The guy sounded sincere. Alice liked him.

  “The Teamsters.”

  Alice frowned.

/>   “You may not like their history, Mrs. Everlee, but you have to admit, they know how to pour concrete and they certainly know how to bury a problem.” He laughed at his own joke.

  Heinman smiled politely.

  Cervantes thought he was being funny. She didn’t care. As long as they got the spread of MELT under control, he could be as witty as he liked.

  It didn’t take long to find Baxter. She was huddled with the rest of the K&P science division looking every bit as exhausted and hollowed out as Alice felt. She couldn’t see any of the Board or Admin personnel. No, that wasn’t true. Jake’s lowly assistant, Martin, was there in his boxers and a fireman’s jacket. He’d made it out. She was glad.

  “Christine?” Alice rarely used the Professor’s first name, but they’d been through something together. They’d survived. And now she needed her to help convince the authorities that there was only one way forward. “May I introduce you to Captain Cervantes?”

  The four of them—Alice, Baxter, Cervantes, and Heinman—stepped to the back of the hulking fire truck.

  “Mrs. Everlee tells me that we shouldn’t move forward with our plan to secure the building,” said the Chief. “You’ve read the operational plan, I take it?”

  Baxter nodded. “Does the tent your men are erecting contain any kind of plastic?”

  Cervantes nodded.

  “Don’t do it.” Baxter had an outstanding professional demeanor—flat affect, low tones, no drama. Alice crossed her fingers, mentally. In the real world, she stood to attention. “Any plastics of any kind—and I’m including nylon, rayon, polyester, polyethylene…shall I go on?”

  “I get the picture,” said Cervantes.

  “Any fiber that began as oil will attract MELT. If you encase the building in this tent, which I believe is Tyvek, you’re inviting the enzyme out of the building. That is not what you want to do. What I recommend is you seal the basement from below, so MELT can go no further, and then literally lower a sarcophagus, like the one covering the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, over the entire building.”

  Cervantes didn’t hold back. He flat-out laughed.

  Neither of the women cracked a smile.

  “Where would I find the funds for that?” he said.

  Baxter looked at Alice. “Will the Board authorize those funds?”

  Alice didn’t have the authority. She knew that. She also knew they had to act fast. If they didn’t do something, more people were going to die.

  “Do we need to go to someone more senior?” said Cervantes.

  “Do it,” said Alice. “I’m an SVP and I speak for the Board. Do it.”

  Lieutenant Heinman stepped up. “We’re going to need that in writing.”

  “Consider it done,” she said. It might be the end of her career but at least she was doing the right thing. She felt a surge of satisfaction run through her veins.

  Baxter clapped her on the back. The women nodded at one another. They’d done it. They’d saved lives.

  Alice turned to Cervantes. “May I use your phone?”

  Cervantes handed her his iPhone. Cervantes and Heinman stepped away to do whatever needed to be done logistically. It was a waiting game, now. They had to pray that the Fire Department could create a concrete housing faster than MELT could eat its way through the building.

  Alice dialed Bill.

  “Bill Everlee.” Oh, that voice. She had needed to hear that voice.

  “Honey?” she said. “We’re good. You can stand down. We’re all good.” She had to fight to hold back the tears.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” he said, “what in the world?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get home. Give me…” she checked her watch again. “I don’t know…perhaps another 24 hours. I just need to make sure they do this right.”

  “But you’re okay? You’re not hurt?” She could hear just how worried he’d been.

  “I’m better than alright; I’m golden.”

  Cervantes waved to Alice to follow him.

  “I’ve got to go. Love you.” She dialed off before he had a chance to answer. If she heard him say sweet things to her, she’d crack and she couldn’t crack. Not here. Not yet. She turned to thank Professor Baxter for making the impossible possible, but ran into Michael Rayton instead.

  “There’s a certain magnificence to what’s happening,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Alice did her best not to let her lip curl. “I see nothing magnificent about it.”

  “Come on, Everlee, there’s a poetry to this. We thought we could solve our plastic problem only to make it worse. It’s an eminently human exercise in futility.”

  Then she remembered where she’d formed her bad opinion of him. He’d been a debate captain at Uni. How had she forgotten that? He’d been funny, too, but in a way that left her cold. He was, at his core, a nihilist. He wanted things to go wrong, because for Michael Rayton, the world was already wrong. She remembered the precise moment she’d decided that he was a dangerous guy. There’d been a debate. High profile, end of the semester, for some reason everyone was buzzing about it. There’d been an uproar. He’d argued that Humankind should be euthanized. All of them. Without exception. He had taken great pleasure in making his opponents squirm. And he’d been as convincing as hell.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bill swung Margaret up onto his shoulders, grimacing at the pain that shot from his hand up his left arm but doing his best to ignore it. Life was outstandingly perfect in all regards. Alice was safe and coming home soon. He hadn’t told the kids because her estimates of how long a work “situation” might take were notoriously off, but his heart was full and his mood buoyant. There was nothing that could possibly get him down. He had decided to let the kids keep sorting. If this could happen once, it could happen again. There was no disaster that happened that didn’t teach them something. And if it ended up being a lesson in team building, then all to the good. He was fine with that outcome, too.

  The woods were perfect at this time of year. They were still full of life but with that hint of decomposition just around the corner. The rhythm of the seasons was etched on every leaf. He only had to look at the trees to know what month it was. And underfoot? Underfoot were all manner of glories: mushrooms, wild lettuce, chestnuts. They were going to be fine.

  He’d already begun doing an inventory of their property. To the south was the river, now low, but which could swell to incredible heights and would swallow you whole if you didn’t know what you were doing. Don’t mess with water! He’d taught the kids that from the minute they were able to crawl. It looks benign, but it has a hidden power that will take you under and keep you there. It wanted them, he was sure of that, wanted their vitality and flesh and fish-cleaned bones.

  The land rose towards the house which meant there was plenty of scope for a new “root cellar” above the water table. He had decided he’d call it a “root cellar” even though it was to be their new SIP dugout.

  Bill lifted Midge off his shoulders, pulled a twig from her hair, and gave her their secret pinky shake for luck. He didn’t need to knock on Jim and Betsy’s door. Mrs. Betsy was right there, pulling her apron off. “You’re just in time,” she said. “We knew you were back, so I’ve been baking. I’ve got a cobbler and three tarts for you to take home with you. I’ve had peaches coming out of my ears all summer. Couldn’t can them fast enough.” She waved them in.

  The kitchen was a canner’s paradise. Betsy was known for her preservation skills, but she had outdone herself this year. She had beans and tomatoes and zucchini and chilies; blackberries, blueberries, chokeberries, and loganberries. The place was piled high with mason jars of every size, filled with foods of every hue. Sure enough, there were pies on top of the stove.

  “I have something special for you, Midge.” She brushed her hands over Midge’s hair as she passed.

  Midge ducked away, scowling.

  Less than a minute later, Betsy came back with a slice of pecan pie loaded high with ice
cream, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce.

  “That’s too much,” said Bill.

  “I know you don’t hold much with sugar, Bill, but a little treat now and again doesn’t do a body any harm.”

  Midge looked up at Bill, her eyes wider than the plate in her hand. “Can I, Daddy?”

  Bill cocked his head to one side. Alice definitely wouldn’t approve. “Why don’t we share it, eh? That way I can have some naughtiness, too.”

  “Let me get you a spoon,” said Betsy.