Melt

by JJ Pike

  “And for loading chickens.”

  Bill hung his head. He was in it now. He needed to stash up on one-dollar bills.

  By the time they had built the fire, Paul and Petra were back and everyone was ready for hamburgers, baked potatoes, and s’mores.

  “Sorry, Sean.”

  “Why sorry?” said Sean.

  “Because outdoor hamburgers are the best in the world.”

  The kids murmured in agreement.

  “Nothing but fresh, crisp night air and grass-fed beef. I tell you. It’s the life…”

  Midge took that as her cue, chomping down on her burger.

  Bill’s phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but then Alice often called from unknown numbers. It was going to be Alice and it was going to be more good news, he could feel it in his bones. Once she said she was on her way home he could tell the kids and the s’mores would taste even better than a burger cooked under the stars.

  “You on your way?”

  “Is it Mommy?” Midge threw the half-eaten burger into the fire. “Let me talk to her. Is she coming home? Mommy, we miss you!”

  “No,” said Alice. “I was wrong.” Her voice was trembling.

  This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Don’t say it.”

  She sobbed. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. They’re just idiots. But I had to tell you. I was wrong. We have to move forward. Mutant Pineapple is still in play.”

  Bill slumped. “Can’t you let someone else take care of it? You aren’t the only person in the world who can solve this, you know.” He regretted it as soon as he’d said it.

  “I may not be the only one,” she said, “but I am the right one. I need to see this through. You do your bit and I will do mine.”

  That wasn’t how he wanted to leave it. He wanted them to part friends. “I know, hon. I just miss you is all.” But she was gone. There was nothing but static and empty space. He’d bungled it and he knew it. He turned back to the fire and four very disappointed faces. “She’s doing good work,” he said.

  Paul got up and left without a word, but his silence spoke volumes.

  “I’ll clear up,” said Petra.

  “Let’s make the s’mores anyway,” said Bill. But the kids were all gone. Everyone missed Alice. And not even melted chocolate and mouth-scorching marshmallows could make up for that. Bill reached for the fire bucket and put out the camp fire. So much for his happy day.

  The kids had retreated behind their bedroom doors. The house was unhealthily quiet. He couldn’t fault Alice for having a big heart. He knew she did what she did because she believed it to be right. But he sure missed her ability to bring them all together. He was good but he was just one man, and being a single parent was one heck of a job.

  He stewed in his own disappointment until he could stand it no more. He slipped his shoes on quietly and padded down to the barn. If he was going to do this he was going to do it properly. Mutant Friggin’ Pineapple was on and the mandate was to get rid of all plastics.

  He pulled on the door and surveyed his indoor vegetable garden. Jim had helped him set it up in better days. They’d shared seeds and growing tips. They’d had some good times in this barn.

  “If we get raided by the Feds,” Jim said, “all we need to do is let them taste the produce. There’s no one going to mistake my wild dandelions for marijuana.”

  Bill snorted. “It doesn’t look anything like weed, Jim.”

  Jim paused. “I know that. It was a weed joke. You know…dandelions…weeds…get it?”

  Bill laughed even harder.

  “Some days you’re pretty slow for an educated fella,” said Jim.

  That was back then. This was a new day, apparently. His wife had given him the green light to take the place down. Bill heaved the axe over his head and let it fall. As he smashed and hacked his way through the indoor garden, he discovered a tiny crack in his heart. He loved this place and all it stood for. He kept on swinging until the entire system was smashed to pieces.

  When he was done he sat on the floor, completely spent. His hand was bleeding through the bandage. Tough. Everything was falling apart. It made sense that he was too. He was going to need to find a way to do it without PVC. He went back to the drawing board, determined to build something even better.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The street was floodlit. K&P’s headquarters looked like a bombed-out building. There were no lights on, no signs of life, nobody was in. Alice paused. Jake was still in there. Would he mind? Would his family mind? If he was buried not just beneath the rubble but also beneath solid concrete?

  She couldn’t find Captain Cervantes nor the kindly Lt. Heinman. All she could see was worker ants scurrying around following orders, doubtlessly thinking they were doing the right things.

  Professor Baxter was still there, Fran at her side. Thank goodness for allies.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Positioning explosives. They plan to take it down in a controlled explosion, have a hazmat team remove the debris, then pour concrete over whatever remains.”

  “But that makes no sense,” said Alice. “Any explosion will only spread MELT further.”

  Fran shrugged.

  “Christine?”

  Professor Baxter didn’t respond.

  “Christine.” Her tone was sharp. Just one notch down from shouting at the Professor. “What are your thoughts on this plan? Because it sounds like madness to me.”

  Professor Baxter turned slowly towards Alice. “I did my best but they brought in their own specialists. I kept telling them, over and over, no plastics and no plastic derivatives. I pray they heard me. They say they can prevent the spread of dust particles, but we’re out of the loop.”

  Alice was swamped with adrenalin. How had they let this happen? Why didn’t they get her on site sooner? “Have they at least secured the foundation?” she said. “Because if they don’t, MELT is going to keep eating through and through and through the foundation until it hits the subway.” They had all felt the Number 7 train rumbling along beneath them during their workday. It had to have occurred to them that the trains ran directly beneath the building and that MELT could reach the subway. If it did what then? There would be no way to contain it. Once it hit those massive wires, the nerve center of New York’s pride, there would be no way that they could prevent MELT from infecting the entire subway system. And from there where would it go?

  “They’ve pretty much secured the basement,” said Fran. “It’s solid concrete now. Almost completely filled in.”

  “How?” said Alice. “How could they do something that complex so fast?”

  “Just like the man said, they used the Teamsters. You’ve never seen so many cement trucks. They’re still at it. They’ll be done within the hour.”

  “Why the change of plan?” Alice rounded on Fran. “Why aren’t they building something that will house this monster?”

  Fran shook her head. “In the end, they wouldn’t go for the sarcophagus."

  “Why not?”

  “Too expensive.”

  Alice felt the blood rush to her face. “I authorized that.”

  “We know.” Baxter nodded. “You were overridden.”

  “By whom?”

  Baxter shrugged. “Who knows? Someone higher up than us. Someone who has their eye on the budget. Someone who still does not fully understand what MELT does. A suit.”

  Fran was on her phone frantically typing away. “The price difference was astronomical,” she said.

  Alice swung around and stared at her assistant. No way Fran had turned on her. “You did this?”

  “They came back not just with the quote—and those numbers had a lot of zeroes, let me tell you—but with a time frame. To build a sarcophagus that would surround the building of this size would take weeks. I knew you wanted to get this done. Fast. So I made it happen.”

  Alice let her head drop to her chest. She was exhausted. Even the people who knew didn’t kn
ow. She couldn’t reprimand Fran though. She done the best she could given the circumstances. “How do we stop them from detonating the explosives?”

  “I don’t think we can,” said Fran. “They need to get rid of the structure. We have no clue how much MELT is in the carapace. All we do know is that it will keep going until we stop it.”

  Alice had said the same not two hours earlier. She couldn’t argue. What she needed to do was get to the Captain and stop him from blowing up the building. All it would take was one piece of an infected shard of building material to land outside the “contained zone” and everything that the Fire Department was trying to do would be undone.

  She had some time. She could be methodical. She was going to search until she found him.

  All of New York's firefighters had shown up for the disaster. They weren’t called New York's bravest for nothing. Some of them had been downtown when the Towers went down. They were the men and women who ran in when the buildings weren’t just burning, but burning because planes had plowed into their sides. The Towers burned, the people jumped, and still they had gone in. As they always did. They went in, not because they were stupid, but because they were brave. Because they believed that life should be saved. Alice didn’t disagree. But in this case lives might not be saved.

  She snagged a firefighter. “Excuse me. Where might I find Captain Cervantes?”

  “He’s at Command Central,” said the firefighter

  Alice frowned and cocked her head to one side. She had no clue where that might be. They had moved it since she had last been on site.

  “Command Central has to be far away from the blast site. For safety reasons,” said the firefighter. There was no rancor in her voice; she believed in the chain of command, in her bosses, in doing what she was told because she was a well-trained part of a well-oiled machine and by being such, she would save lives. Alice could barely remember a time when she had trusted her superiors. “It’s on 45th and 9th.”

  They were on 34th and 11th. Command Central was only 11 blocks north and two blocks east. She could do that. Alice took off running. Half a block later, she took off her heels. It was a trade-off. Run slowly because she was in heels or run quickly but end up with shredded feet. She needed to run. Her feet would heal so she hiked up her skirt and ran. The streets were empty. Dark. It really was like 9/11. Everyone was pulling together. Everyone wanted the same thing. Everyone cared about everyone. But there was one significant difference. The enemy was not from without, the enemy was from within.

  Alice kept running, pushing that nagging fact out of her mind. She needed to hone her message down to a single point and convince the people in charge not just to listen to her, but believe and obey. They needed to understand that MELT was a living organism: insatiable, unstoppable, and deadly. Cervantes was doing his job, and did his job every day, the way she wished all humans did their jobs – with absolute conviction. But he had no reason to believe her, no reason to trust that she knew what she was talking about. She wasn’t the scientist or the CEO. She was a frantic woman who was getting in his way. Whether Jake Prudela or Michael Rayton had done something to MELT to bring this down on their heads would have to wait.

  She liked the dark. It wasn’t the dense, rich darkness like the forest around their cabin. But the concrete jungle she found herself in had a kind of peace. It was marvelous what man had wrought: buildings that reached up with steel fingers to brush the sky with longing and ambition; streets that led in straight lines from one place of wonder to another; planetariums, museums, statues, restaurants; high-kicking dancers, full-throated singers, and well-paid actors who thrilled and chilled and sent the children home with their brains full of ogres and revolutionaries, princesses and villains, drums and puppets and wonders. Manhattan was an homage to the human spirit. There was nothing she didn’t like about it.

  She heard it before she felt it. The rumble and shake. She’d felt it once before. On that day. That horrible, horrible day. She’d been a few blocks away at a meeting, but they’d all felt it and held on to their desks. They hadn’t been evacuated. Heck, not even the people in the Towers had been evacuated. They’d been told to go back to their work stations, that it was under control. So they’d sat, their hands gripping their desks, as the Earth registered the death of almost three-thousand souls. No one knew it at the time. They all thought there would be survivors. Because we thrive on hope; we live on hope; our veins are filled with the never-ending elixir called hope. We wanted to believe and so we did. But in the end there were no bodies coming out of that rubble. No survivors.

  Alice turned. The ground shook again. Harder this time. They couldn’t have detonated. Surely not. Not yet, anyway. The cement mixers wouldn’t have finished their job filling the basement full of life-saving, ever-loving cement. There hadn’t been time.

  She started running back towards K&P and the sound of the explosions, tears streaming down her face. Because now it wasn’t just the memory of 9/11 come back to haunt her. Now it was her childhood. The ground under her feet, something she couldn’t rely on. The people at her door, no longer friends. The voices in the dark urging her on, neither friend nor foe. Nothing she could rely on. No one she could turn to. Her home a pile of rubble. Her sister a scream in the dark. Her parents buried alive. And the village on fire. She ran and ran and ran. Nothing could stop her. Nothing and no one. That was her mantra now: she would survive. “I survive, I survive, I survive,” she panted.

  She rounded the corner, the breaths coming hard and fast. “I surv…” The word jammed in her throat. K&P Headquarters was no more. There was a pile, a cloud, and a flotilla of screaming fire engines. More than that she didn’t know. She slid to the sidewalk and wept.

  Chapter Twenty

  A car screamed up their gravel driveway and skidded to a halt. The horn sounded: three bars of La Cucaracha. It was Josephine. She owned the farm to the north of their property. Bill pelted from the barn to the cabin. Nothing good could have brought her here. She was banging on the front door yelling his name as he reached the porch. He didn’t want to startle her since she was always armed. He waited until Paul answered the door, then followed at a safe distance.

  “Have you seen the news?” she said.

  Bill’s stomach dropped a good foot. He shook his head. His tongue was glued to the top of his mouth. He couldn’t speak. Just as well since voicing his fears might bring them to life.

  “Come with me,” she said. You’re going to want to see this. There’s been an incident in Manhattan. And, like I said, it’s made the news.”

  They didn’t have cable at the cabin so going with Josephine was the only option. Her car smelled of lavender and patchouli. She’d never shared her story and he’d never asked, but he imaged a colorful youth and a checkered adulthood. The CD player—or was it a tape player?—blared Led Zeppelin all the way back to her place. At least it was No Quarter rather than Stairway to Heaven. The irony of that would have finished him off. They didn’t make small talk which was just as well because Bill had nothing to say.

  Jo had left her front door open. Her dog, Reggie, was sitting patiently, waiting for her return. He nuzzled his big, soft Labrador head against Bill’s leg as he squeezed past into the front room.

  Anyone else would have said something like, “Don’t mind the mess,”—and cleared a space through the mountains of old newspapers and spread-eagle books on the couch so he could sit down—but Jo just sort of waved him in the direction of the buried couch and went directly to the old TV set and flicked it on.

  “Did this ‘incident’ just happen?” he said.

  “Ongoing,” she said, still waiting for the TV to warm up. Apparently, someone in the modern world still had a cathode-ray-tube-style TV and that person didn’t care that it took a minute or two to get going. “They’ll all be reporting soon enough. Give it a second.”

  The picture on the TV eased into focus. “We’re reporting live…”

  Bill shot up from the couch. It wa
s Manhattan. His eyes scanned the scene behind the reporter, but the camera remained fixed on her face.

  “…from the West Side.”

  “Oh, no…” he said.

  Jo nodded. “I thought so.”

  “Did they say where it was? Exactly?”

  She shook her head. “But it sounds like it’s over by Midtown, on the west side, right where she works.”

  Bill prayed. The “district where she worked” was a large area. Perhaps she had been calling him because of a problem in another building? He could see the chaos behind the reporter: fire engines and fire fighters and reporters and lookie-loos. Perhaps it was just that Alice was helping out, being a good Samaritan.