BURY - Melt Book 3: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series)

by JJ Pike

  The barman looked them over. Bill could taste it. They were close to a break. “Easy, Arthur,” he thought. “Go real easy with this one. Don’t tip your hand. If you look desperate, this lead will evaporate.”

  Arthur was cool, though. He should’ve had a rum with breakfast. It made him bold. People trust bold. They respond to confidence. Arthur had stepped into his translator role with gusto.

  The bartender nodded. His answer was more than a simple “yes.” Bill watched his gestures, his face, his demeanor. He was ready to tell them what they needed to know.

  “Slide the money across the bar. Don’t say a word. Let the money do the talking. It’s an international language. You scratch my itch and I’ll lay some scratch on you.”

  The barman nodded again, this time more vehemently. The money had done its job; greased the wheels of information exchange. He had a slip of paper at the ready. He licked his pencil and dug an address in lead into the page.

  “Gracias,” That was the full extent of his Spanish. “Thank you.” But he meant it.

  “Do we go now, Senõr?” Arthur—language major, football buddy, someone willing to take a trip and not ask too many questions—had stayed in character all day. He was the dutiful translator looking to his client for instruction.

  Bill shook his head. They had an address, but it could be a trap. Mateo Hernandez had been a violent predator. His gut told him no one honestly shed that behavior and became “a good man.”

  The barman might be setting them up. If they didn’t do this right they might be shipped back to the States in body bags. He couldn’t do that to Alice. He had to succeed.

  In his old life—before he didn’t know the details of what had happened to Alice—Bill had believed in redemption and forgiveness. Now? Not so much. It was worse than that. It wasn’t only that he didn’t believe, he didn’t want to believe Mateo had turned his life around. If he had, the choice wasn’t so simple. If Mateo had laid his sins at God’s feet and begged for forgiveness, was Bill Everlee the man to pass judgment? The choice burned in his gut.

  “Let’s give it a day. Or at least sleep on it. If no one comes looking for us, we can go scope it out,” he said.

  They parted ways. As agreed. Best not to be seen together too much.

  Bill returned to the stand where he’d had his first meal. He smiled at the chef, pointing at the trays, rubbing his belly and grinning for good measure. He felt like a stupid American tourist who hadn’t bothered to even get a phrase book, but the chef gave him a double helping, waving the extra money away. She smiled, broad and bright. “Enjoy,” her face said. “If my food brings you pleasure, that gives me joy.”

  Alice could have been one of these women, open and artless and happy. Bill shoveled the food into his mouth. He knew that was a gross simplification. He was seeing what he wanted to see. He wanted happy people, he saw happy people. He wanted someone to make him a meal and give him her blessing, well hey presto, look what she did. Without the burden of language, Bill was having the trip of a lifetime. Or he would be if it weren’t for the chunk of plastic down by his shoe.

  Bill ambled back to his room, Mateo Hernadez’s address eating a hole in his pocket. The night was hot and long, the rum sweet. It burned on the way down, but Bill didn’t care. He needed one night of not knowing what was to come. He drank until the flowers around his motel room blurred and the water from the little pond out front shone and the moon was a wheel of cheese, smiling down on him.

  He was ready.

  Chapter Twelve

  Petra was at the front door, letting all the heat out, putting Sean at risk of infection. Did the girl have no common sense? She raced out to meet Jo and Michael as they pulled into one of the parking spots. “How’s Midge?”

  “When I left, she was headed for a scan,” said Jo, slamming the car door and marching towards the house. Reggie at her heels whining and nudging her leg and demanding attention. She rubbed his head and gave him a smile. Why wasn’t Petra more like Reggie, warm and wiggling and willing to forget the day that had passed?

  Petra was at her side, scanning her face for clues. The difference between Reggie’s gaze and Petra’s couldn’t have been any greater. One made Jo relax, the other made her tense up. “And before you ask, it’s looking good. They’ll stitch her up as soon as she’s out, but first they have to check for a brain bleed…”

  Petra wailed. Aggie had warned her about this. Petra was given to histrionics. Jo needed to bring all her calming skills to bear to get the young woman to chill. Freaking out helped no one. And it was infectious. If she went nuclear, she could destabilize Rayton or Mimi or even Sean, if he was awake and alert. She needed everyone to stay cool.

  “It’s good,” said Jo. “Really good. As good as it could possibly be under these circumstances. I had the bleeding from the flesh wound under control before we even got to the hospital.” Petra seemed not to care about the facts. If anything, her cries were getting louder. Jo doubled down, hoping she could get Petra to see reason. “Any laceration to the head looks worse than it is. There are so many blood vessels up here…” She tapped her temple.

  It was no use, Petra couldn’t hear her over her caterwauling. She sobbed into her hands in the hall, the front room, and all the way to the kitchen. Jo eyed the brandy on top of the fridge. Couldn’t hurt to give her a shot, for medicinal purposes. There were countries all around the world in which children under 21 were allowed spirits. She grabbed the bottle and popped the cork, hunting through the cabinets for a shot glass. She knew Betsy had some, but she couldn’t find them. She opened cabinet after cabinet with no joy. Reggie skipped and hopped and did a couple of turns. Cupboards meant cooking and cooking meant dinner. He wound about her legs, his tail thumping out a happy song. After several minutes of fruitless searching, Jo remembered the glasses were on the drinks trolley in the front room. She didn’t have time to go out there and come back. Petra’s crying was unbearable. She grabbed a coffee mug.

  Mimi strode across the kitchen and took the mug from her hands. “Leave her to me. Go do what you need to do.”

  Jo and Mimi held one another’s gaze for a beat longer than was strictly necessary. The grave look on Mimi’s face said it all. Pinched mouth, drawn eyes, wrinkled brow; she was in no doubt as to what had gone down. Jo wasn’t going to have to launch into “damage control” after all. She’d been planning on feeding them some story about “cross fire” or “collateral damage” or some explanation of how they’d come to have a dead man on the property, but Mimi had already put it together or Jim had told her. Or Aggie. Bottom line: her precious granddaughter, Aggie, had pulled the trigger and killed a man. Some might say murdered a man, but not Jo and from the looks she was giving her, not Mimi either. He’d come at them guns blazing. It was self-defense.

  Mimi glanced towards the front room and back. “Best get back to my patient. He’s doing well, but I don’t have Betsy’s skill or training. I’m going to keep him still and on pain meds and antibiotics, but my skills don’t run to much more than that…” Today was the day for unfinished sentences and unspoken agreements, apparently. Mimi looked back at her, nodding slowly, silently begging that she do right by Aggie.

  Jo was a believer in the rule of law, but there were times when a higher law prevailed. This was one such time.

  Manhattan was in chaos: fact.

  There were about to be mass evacuations: terrifying, if unavoidable, fact.

  She was seven years into an undercover operation that could be blown wide open any day now: unfortunate fact. She did not want that op to go the way of Waco. She’d put too much of her heart into keeping the situation at Wolfjaw Ridge stable. If any of Manhattan’s evacuees stumbled onto her secessionists’ land, it was not going to be pretty. And once that kicked off, law enforcement would come down on them. She’d come to care deeply for those hardcore preppers who’d made a home for themselves deep in the forest. They weren’t like Jim and Betsy or Alice and Bill. They embraced a whole other lev
el of readiness. As long as they did no harm, she was able to protect them and their right to live however they pleased. The minute they kicked off—and it was only a matter of time before they did; they were “shoot first, ask questions later” people—it’d be out of her hands. Messy. Messy, messy, messy. She needed to be on top of that, making sure cooler heads prevailed, rather than running around the countryside getting rid of bodies.

  But she couldn’t do that just yet because she was tangled in a major case of industrial espionage. That intriguing and complex fact led to:

  One of their prime suspects was right there in the palm of her hand: opportunity. She couldn’t let him slip away.

  One thing at a time, Jo. Bury Arthur, interrogate Rayton, get back to surveilling Wolfjaw and make sure they’re not ready to blow. In that order.

  Conclusion: hats off to the boys in blue, but she didn’t need them tromping through her patch and scaring Michael Rayton off or getting too close to her other case.

  “With me?” She nodded at Rayton on her way through the living room. Reggie was at her side. “Sorry boy, you’ve got to stay here. Keep them safe for me.” She rubbed his head and neck, cooing at him. “Good boy. Good, good boy. Now, stay.” His ears dropped back and he slunk towards the fire. He’d obey, even if he didn’t want to.

  Jo held the door for Rayton, then marched to Jim’s treasured garage and grabbed a couple of tarps and shovels. She handed them to Michael.

  “Why not use the backhoe?” he said. “It’d be faster.”

  “Where we’re going, we can’t take the backhoe.”

  Jo stashed the brandy under her seat. She was going to need it later. She was not looking forward to the next few hours of her life. She’d never buried a murder victim before. Or committed a crime. Or become an accessory after the fact. It was a day for firsts.

  She got the Jeep as close as she could to Arthur’s body. They’d only been gone a few hours, but Arthur had already been host to some woodland creatures. Aggie had shot him in the chest and head at close range so he was a pulverized mess, but there was further damage to his facial tissue, inflicted by something with sharp claws and sharper teeth. Not even his mother would have been able to recognize him.

  “You grab his shoulders and I’ll get his feet,” she said.

  “Clothes?” Rayton pulled at his shirt. He was right, they were going to get messed up. Couldn’t be helped.

  “We’ll deal with those when we get back.” Jo shook the tarp out like a bed sheet and laid it on the ground beside Arthur’s body.

  “And if we get stopped on the road? How do we explain the fact that we’re drenched in blood?”

  “One, we’re not going on the roads and two, you could have been hunting. Now grab him and let’s get going.”

  Michael hoisted Arthur up, resting his back on his knee, while Jo scooped up his feet and pinned them to her side. He was a stout gentleman, but they were both able-bodied so it didn’t take them long to get him onto the tarp, undress him, wrap him in heavy plastic, and lug him into the back of the Jeep.

  “Follow me in his SUV,” said Jo.

  Michael stuck his head in Arthur’s car window. “No keys.”

  “Check his pockets,” said Jo. She was starting to second guess herself. The questions Michael was asking weren’t questions she’d expect from anyone who had even the most basic intelligence training. Unless it was a bluff. If that were the case, he was damned annoying. This was not the time to play games. She hovered by the door of the Jeep, wishing she were already at home with a nice snifter of brandy rather than watching Rayton’s ham-fisted and poorly organized attempt to search the man’s clothing. There was no structure to his search. Jo wanted to scream, rip the clothes away from him, and do it herself. But the less she touched, the better. Let Rayton get his DNA over everything.

  Michael searched Arthur’s pants, his jacket, his shirt. “Nothing. No keys.”

  That was a complication, but not a show-stopper. “You’ve got a hitch on the back of your truck, haven’t you?”

  Michael nodded.

  “Hitch him up and follow me.”

  The sun was going down by the time the bloodied convoy set off. Jo took it slow, even though Jim’s Jeep could handle the terrain. It wasn’t her vehicle she was concerned about. It was Arthur’s 4Runner. It had seen much better days. The bumpers were dinged and crumpled, the trunk caved in, the driver’s side door pitted with rust. No saying what the suspension was like.

  Rayton kept pace in his brand spanking new Ram 1500, his lights dipping and rising, flashing her side mirrors and temporarily blinding her every five paces, but he hadn’t made a run for it. Didn’t he have family or friends he could go to? Something was keeping him hanging around the compound, and she intended to find out what that might be.

  It was a gamble, having this many people in the know. She thought through the players and their relationship to Aggie. Jim and Betsy were solid. Jim hailed from the “Volunteer State” of Tennessee. Like many of his countrymen, Jim believed there were certain people who “needed killing.” He’d never turn Aggie in. Grandma Mimi would never blab. Ditto Petra and, when she came around, Midge. Jo paused. There was the outside chance Aggie would be overcome with guilt and turn herself in, but once she understood she’d be taking them all down with her if she did that, she’d reverse her decision. No, it was Michael Rayton who was the wild card. She needed him up to his eyeballs in culpability to keep him quiet.

  She took them over rutted roads and along darkened paths out to the head of the quarry, approximately ten miles from her place. The quarry had been abandoned for years. Rumor had it that local kids had played in the man-made lake, until there was a diving accident. All you need is one dead kid and the atmosphere tanks and the place becomes off limits. She cut her lights and waited for Rayton. It’d be nice and quiet. No neighbors, no patrols, no passing police cars. They’d have time to dig a grave without the threat of interruption.

  The head of the quarry towered over the man-made lake. The lake itself was at least a hundred feet of sheer cliff face from where she stood and so deep she’d never seen the bottom, not even on the sunniest day she’d been out there. There was a pebbled beach to the south, accessible only by a couple of rough trails barely big enough for a car to pass. The seclusion made it the perfect place to bury Arthur and get rid of his vehicle.

  Michael pulled up alongside her and rolled down his window. “What’s the plan?”

  Jo cricked her neck to each side. It was a bold wager, splitting them up and letting him go off on his own, but it had plenty of upside and was worth the risk. “Take his car down to the beach. You can back it up and push it over the ledge and into the water.”

  “I’m not taking my truck down there.” The lake rippled and shimmering in the dying sun. “How deep is it?”

  “I’ve never seen it dry up,” she said, “and we’ve had some scorchers over the past few summers. Don’t let the beach fool you. There isn’t a slow incline into the lake. The beach is made up of fifty feet of pebbles and crushed rock, but after that the lake wall drops into oblivion.” She used her hands to mime the geography of the perfect dump site. Flat beach, yea long, then 45-degree angle and dropping as far as her arm would go. He got the idea. The lake was deep, the approach short. “It’s plenty deep enough.”

  “Am I understanding you correctly? You’re asking me to push a car off a ledge? Manually?”

  She wasn’t asking, she was telling. She pointed to the south. “Take that road, back Arthur’s car into the water for about ten feet but no more, uncouple the vehicles and then push.”

  “How’s about we let it drop from up here?”

  The idea of Arthur’s car falling over the cliff gave Jo a brief shot of adrenalin in her feet. It wasn’t vertigo, exactly, more of a feeling that she might accidentally leap. She’d read about it in her psychology class. That urge to jump and what drove it had been dubbed “High Place” theory. It had nothing to do with suicidal ideation.
People from all walks of life—many of them just like herself, psychologically sound and demonstrably happy—had experienced this very physical urge, coupled with a rush of fear, to jump from a high place.

  The French called that impulse to jump, “L’Appel du Vide” or the call of the void. That was a bit flimsy for Jo’s more scientific leaning. There were as many theories as there were academics, but her own reading landed her somewhere between “the autonomic fear response emanating from the amygdala” and “vestibular confusion.” In other words, the crazy impulse to throw herself off a bridge or a skyscraper—or, as in this case, the top of a cliff—had to do with all humans’ natural fear of dying and her brain’s inability to accurately tabulate the distance. Something like that. Whatever it was, she knew she had to step back.

  Rayton watched her closely. “I had a sister who was afraid of heights.”

  Fine if he thought that. She didn’t need to try to explain what was going through her mind. Most people wouldn’t believe it wasn’t a suicidal impulse, though she knew for a fact it wasn’t. “If you want to back Arthur’s car up and let it loose from here, that’s up to you, but if it gets stuck or there’s an outcropping on this side that I don’t know about or anything else goes wrong, you’re in charge of making it right. What I can tell you is the beach drop is a reliable dump site.” She didn’t tell him how she knew that. She hadn’t even told her boss she knew about this place.