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

by JJ Pike

  “Her kids don’t know everything about her.”

  Jo nodded. Wait. Wait. Don’t look too interested. He’d been at Alice’s house in New Paltz for a reason. What did he think he’d find? She’d been through the lock box herself. They were family papers—birth certificates, marriage license, inoculation records—nothing connected to K&P Industries.

  “Whatever,” he said. “Let’s get this done, then we can go take care of my truck.”

  He’d been inches away from telling her something. She’d seen him weigh the pros and cons. He’d hit on some detail and elected to keep his trap shut. No matter, they’d have time later. She was making progress. Now she had to offer him a bone, let him know they were on the same side. Kinda.

  “We have time to get both jobs done before sun up, but if anyone passes the quarry—and by the way, I haven’t seen a human since we left the house—if anyone does come this way, we can explain the car situation far more easily than talking our way out of having a dead body in the back of Jim’s Jeep.” She didn’t mention the fact that she was certain they were being watched.

  Michael grabbed the shovel and stomped towards the hole.

  Hiding a lie in the middle of a truth came as naturally to her as breathing. She hadn’t seen a human since they’d left the house, but she sensed that someone was close by, which meant she’d picked up a clue that hadn’t been sent to her visual cortex.

  Her professor always managed to explain complex processes in terms that were easy to grasp. “The eyes see raw data, but the brain files that data on a ‘need to know’ basis. Not everything the eye collects is sent to the ‘image processing department’ so it’s not logged as ‘something I’ve seen.’ It’s how we navigate the world around us. We see what we need to see and literally, at the sense-perception level, do not see the rest. Take TN, for example…” Jo had flipped her textbook to the chapter on TN so she could read along. “TN was cortically blind, which meant his eyes were in working order, but the part of his brain that processed ‘sight’ was unable to do so. He couldn’t ‘see’ what was around him, but his brain was still receiving data. TN was shown pictures of faces, some looking at him others with their gaze averted. His amygdala, the fear center of the brain, fired up when the people in the pictures were looking at him directly.”

  Her prof. had gone on to talk about “gaze theory” but she’d remembered the pertinent information. We are constantly “seeing” and not seeing at the same time. She had no active memory of anyone being hidden in the trees because her eyes were focused on the road out to the quarry and her mind was on Rayton. That “sixth sense”—a nagging feeling that there was someone watching them—was her brain telling her certain data had bypassed her visual cortex and was stored elsewhere. She’d learned to pay attention to those subtle clues that told her she’d missed something she ought to have registered. While Michael dug the earth, Jo dug into her brain.

  She started with the likely suspects. Who’d be out in the woods after sunset? Aggie, naturally. Jim said she’d taken off on horseback for some “me time.” That meant she could be anywhere. Jo didn’t know the young woman well enough to know where that might be, but the quarry was as good a place as any to hide out. Jo closed her eyes and let her mind’s eye drive the road from her house to the quarry in slow motion. No horse-shaped shadows or Aggie-shaped riders lurking along the road or in the dense cover. What had Aggie been wearing? It wouldn’t have been camo. Jo cocked her head to one side. She didn’t know that for sure. Aggie and her dad were big-time hunters. Aggie might have changed into camo before she left the house. File that under: possible, but not likely. If there was a horse, she’d have heard hooves or a snort or leaves underfoot. You can train a human to creep and stalk and remain hidden, but a horse is a different matter.

  Who else? Her secessionists loved the woods and they would be in camo, top to bottom with painted faces, leaves in their hair, and deer poop on their jackets. They didn’t do anything by halves. They could be crawling all over the outskirts of the quarry, but why? She’d been so busy with the Everlees and securing the compound, she’d scarcely had time to check in on their activities. Her audio feed from Alistair’s house was her last remaining piece of working spyware and all it told her was that he had the TV on full blast. That meant they knew about the situation in Manhattan. It made perfect sense that they’d have scouts in the woods. File that under: most likely scenario.

  Jo leaned back against the car, confident she’d solved that part of the puzzle. She was being watched, but it was fine. It didn’t hurt her cover if they saw her doing something illegal. In fact, it made her cover even tighter. No one would suspect an FBI analyst of committing a crime of this nature. As to the exposure, they would never alert the authorities. They’d each made their way to Wolfjaw Ridge for their own reasons, but once there they swore an oath. It was only three words, but it united them in a way Jo had rarely seen a diverse group of people unite. “Us against them.” As far as they were concerned, she wasn’t part of “us” but neither was she “them.”

  Michael hauled himself out of the square grave and joined her by the truck. “There’s going to be physical evidence all over the body,” he said. “We took no precautions. No gloves, no aprons, no visors.” The cop shows, with their sexy lab montages and forensic investigators, had made experts of an entire generation, but he wasn’t wrong. Arthur would have hair and skin and transfer evidence all over him. He’d be worm food soon enough, but if they were going to be uber-cautious they didn’t have much choice. They needed to burn the body in situ.

  “Get the gas canister from the back of the Jeep.”

  Michael was tired enough that he was biddable.

  Jo looked down at Arthur’s sad corpse and whispered a prayer of release. He’d done a bad thing, opening fire on them, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was a bad man. He’d probably had his reasons. His wife—at least she assumed the other shooter had been his wife, she was about the right height and build—had seen him go down, but she’d been party to an unprovoked assault. She would be highly dis-incentivized to go to the police. Jo’s gut turned. She’d never met the woman. She couldn’t put together an accurate profile. It was nothing more than exhaustion and wishful thinking to say she would avoid the authorities. Her Wolfjaw guys: yes, absolutely. She was in no danger of them shopping her to the police. But Arthur’s wife: unknown entity. It didn’t sit well. She’d need to have someone pay Arthur’s wife a visit. There were a lot of options if she got the Bureau involved.

  Michael shook the gas can. “Empty.”

  Jo nodded. It was that kind of day. If it could go wrong, it was going to go wrong. What did they have that she could use to burn the evidence from the corpse? There were flares in the Jeep. They’d be good, if the goal was to draw attention to themselves. Rubbing alcohol. There was a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the med kit. “Get me the STOMP First Aid kit.”

  “You going to gauze him to death?” Michael hadn’t budged. He was moving from anger to belligerence. She couldn’t have that. She needed him to be motivated to help, even if it was coming from a hostile place. She needed more of his I’ll show you impulse to be driven by the urge to do something than the desire to dig his heels in and obstruct the plan.

  “Don’t be a moron.” Needle him. Treat him like a subordinate who doesn’t deserve respect. Get him off balance. That’d stoke the fires and get him moving again. “We’re going to use the rubbing alcohol. Any idiot could have inferred that.”

  “Geeze. No need to be such a bitch.”

  “Call me a bitch again and you’ll see what a bitch I can be.” Whoa. She hadn’t expected that to come out of her mouth. She was tired, teetering on the brink of exhaustion. She wanted this done, but it wasn’t going to be done for an eternity. She rubbed her face. It was a private, intimate gesture that would subconsciously signal to him that she was letting her guard down. He wouldn’t even know she was playing him. She softened her tone a little. “Just get the kit,
would you?” She’d added the tag “would you?” deliberately. It was all subtle stuff, but it had been shown to work over and over again.

  Rayton trotted off and collected the med kit. “If we shred the bandages into strips and soak them in the rubbing alcohol, we can make it go further.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea, but the bottle was tiny. They weren’t going to be able to burn all the physical evidence. What about the underside of his body? They were up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Then she remembered the brandy. She smiled. “I’ll be right back.”

  Jo pulled the Hennessy—so, technically cognac—from under her car seat and took a slug, then handed it off to Michael. He wiped the bottle on his sleeve and took a sip. “Douse him,” she said.

  “Do we want to say anything?”

  “I’ve said all I need to say.” Jo’s prayers were private. She didn’t need to share them.

  Michael bowed his head. He was full of surprises. “Into your hands, O Lord, we commend his spirit.”

  Jo looked away. She hadn’t expected to be moved.

  Rayton slid into the grave and poured the cognac over Arthur, turning him gently so it sloshed over his back as well as his front. He hauled himself out of the hole in a single, practiced move, like an Olympic swimmer exiting a pool.

  Jo almost felt bad handing him the matches, but reminded herself that he needed to be fully implicated. She couldn’t leave him any wiggle room. She needed him silenced for good. The only way to do that, short of death, was to appeal to his self-interest. She was banking on the idea that no one wants to spend time in a Federal lock up.

  Michael didn’t look at her as he took the matches. “Will the cognac be enough?”

  “I thought you were going to soak the bandages in rubbing alcohol.” Jo let it sit like an accusation. She had to continue with this punishing regimen of bullying if she was going to keep him off balance.

  He didn’t bat an eyelid. He was as committed to getting his DNA off the body as she was.

  Michael added the alcohol-soaked bandages to the cognac and dropped a match into the grave. The flame was not spectacular, which was perfect, seeing as they were on a cliff in the dark, overlooking a quarry and could have been seen from any number of directions.

  They filled the hole quietly, almost reverently, and piled into the Jeep. They were tired, dirty, and the night wasn’t anywhere near over. They rode down to the beach in silence. They’d buried a man after deliberately burning their DNA off his skin. It didn’t look good or smell good or feel right. Jo was going to need to soak herself in the tub when she got back, then pickle her brain with a good alcohol rinse.

  They turned the corner and her headlights caught his truck. It was impossible not to laugh. Rayton was right, it was sticking out of the water at an angle for all the world to see. She was worn to the bone, but she was going to have to bring all her ingenuity to bear if they were going to get his truck to sink, along with Arthur’s SUV.

  Step one: tell Rayton he was never going to see his vehicle again. “Do you have anything that identifies you, inside your truck?”

  He nodded, frowning.

  “Get it out.”

  “No…” Rayton backed up against the passenger-side door. “You want me to abandon my truck?”

  “We can’t get it out of the water without a tow truck and if we hire a tow truck, we’ll need to do some explaining. We’re already seventeen steps too far into a complicated narrative here. We want to get this back on track. We want clean lines and no dangling threads.”

  Rayton hung his head. Like many men, he loved his truck. Why not? It had power and style.

  “You’re going to need to climb in and get every shred of personal data out of there. You’ll have to remove your plates and scrub the VIN. Do you have GPS?”

  He nodded. “You’re going to need to remove that, too.” Getting rid of a modern vehicle was no easy task.

  “How am I going to do that without tipping it into the water?”

  “You’re not,” said Jo. “We’re going to go get a wet suit, sink it, and you’re going to go diving.”

  “I’m going to do that underwater? Take the license plates off? The whole nine yards?”

  “You got a problem with that? Because as I see it, the alternative is possible prison time.”

  Rayton was silent all the way home.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The day the anchor that held Alicia to the wall came free was like every other day she’d spent chained up; hot, muggy, and still. The sounds of the forest had dropped to inaudible levels, she was so used to them. The creep of the tapir, the rustling of leaves, the wind in the trees was all a silent curtain on which one sound resonated. All Alicia heard was the wheels of his car, the crunch of his boot, the squeak of the door on its ancient hinges. But the man was foolish. He had a routine. Even at eight Alicia was smart enough to notice that he came after the sun went down.

  But the sun was at its zenith, beating down through the hole in the roof. He wouldn’t arrive for hours.

  The whole apparatus of her imprisonment came crashing into the shack in one piece, complete with a chunk of the wall. The man had nailed the metal loop to a block of wood on the outside. It was as if he’d made her a ball and chain, though the ball was a square and not so heavy as a cannon ball. She lifted the chain and swung it over her head, bringing the wooden brick down on the floor, but it remained in one piece. She gathered it up in her hands. She would carry it. Later, when she was far away, she would take it apart.

  She hadn’t left her room for a month. The outer room was double the size of the place she’d been shackled, practically palatial. Though there was no one there to see her, the size of the place left her exposed and vulnerable. She hugged the wall for cover, tiptoeing towards the door.

  She stopped. There was one more thing she had to do. She walked back to her room. She would never set foot in there again, but she had something she wanted to say to the ghosts who hovered in the dismal corners and rotten floorboards. “I will never forget you. One day, I will make the man pay. I don’t know how or when, but I will make him hurt. Now you can leave. Go away to the people who love you and forget you were here. Your mama will make sweet cakes drenched in syrup, and your papa will throw you high over his head as if you were a plane. They will be so glad to see you. You will make their circle complete.”

  Had she been so wise? So eloquent? So brave? Dr. Moore said it didn’t matter whether she’d said those exact words. What mattered was that she had one good memory that had stayed with her. She encouraged Alice to replay that scene as often as she liked, when her mind went there. “It can be the thing you hold on to when the darkness threatens.”

  Alicia tiptoed to the door. The soles of her feet had healed, but if she went out into the forest in her bare feet, she’d only cut them up again. There were no shoes. Only the sleeping bag. She hated that thing. Ripping it into ribbons and making bindings for her feet was just punishment for an ugly lumpen bag. She barely wanted to touch it, but Papa ordered her to take it and use it. “It’s a thing, my heart. It has no power. Use it to keep you safe.”

  She banished the power of the thing to the sky and wrapped it around her waist. She’d make shoes of it later. Now she had to open the door and face the world. He hadn’t locked her in. He hadn’t needed to. He thought there was no escape. He was an idiot, a sadistic evil moron. She smiled. “May all evil men be brought down by their hubris.” She definitely hadn’t thought that at the time, but she’d thought it often enough later. She wished short-sightedness, poor planning, arrogant presumption, and a puffed-up sense of invincibility on her enemies.

  The creak of the hinges made her skin crawl. It had been the sound of him arriving. Now it was the sound of her escape. She closed it quietly behind her. Let him think she was still there. Let him be surprised. Let him get angry. Let him do anything but find her.

  The light outside had a different quality. She’d been able to see the sun and moon and star
s though her broken-roof skylight, but it was nothing compared to the real deal. The blue went on forever and the clouds were nothing but balls of wool. There were tire tracks where he parked his car each evening. There would be a road that way. She would go the other way. She hurried to the back of the shack and disappeared into the trees.

  Alicia walked until the sun was no longer beating down on her directly, but not so long that he might be on his way. He had a car. She only had her feet. He would have a flashlight, she’d have nothing to light her way. She would stop, but only long enough to make covers for her feet.

  The sleeping bag came apart easily. She made long strips and wound them about her feet. She didn’t have tape or laces to hold the strips closed. She tried tying a knot, but it was too bulky and came undone in less than ten steps. She looked around. What would Papa do? “Look at the essence of the thing, rather than the thing itself, my little porcupine. Ask yourself what can it do, not what is it for. String is just string until it’s around your throat. Then it’s a garrote or a noose or thread on which to hang your pendant.”