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

by JJ Pike

  There were twigs and sticks, things she could use to catch a fish or roast a mouse or fashion into little spears that went into the strip of fabric, slid under the inside, then came back out again like a brooch pin. She speared her shoes closed with sticks that were vertical but that only lasted a mile or so. They jabbed her ankles. She stopped and moved her wooden pins so they lay across her instep. Much better.

  She looked up at the sun. It had moved further towards the horizon. She still had to put more miles between her and the shack. He couldn’t bring his car this far into the woods, but he might run. She took the wooden brick in one hand and the remaining strips of sleeping bag in the other and set off at a trot. She could hear the river in the distance. “Keep moving, my pitaya. The water will carry you home.”

  Home. There was no such place. Her home had been destroyed, her family with it. Valentina’s cries filled her ears. Mama had been at the door, holding them back when the men came with their huge knives. How was she to know this was unlike any other time? They came, they asked for food, they took what they wanted, and they went away again. It was as regular as breathing. But this time Papa went out and told them “no.” Everyone in the village complained, once they were gone. They were brave when there were no knives. But when the knock came at their door, they gave whatever was asked of them without a peep. She was proud of him standing up to them.

  “Take your little sister and crawl under the house,” said Mama. “Go out the back door, under the steps, and stay there.”

  Alicia protested. Papa had done what everyone said they wanted to do; he had answered back. She wanted to see these men back away and never return. She held Valentina’s hand, but didn’t move further back than the door to the kitchen.

  It all happened too fast. Mama went outside. Alicia followed to watch. The men hacked her parents down. Alicia ran to grab Valentina and hide, but it was already too late. The soldier snatched her away, reaching for Alicia. Alicia ducked away from his hands, but tried to circle back and grab her sister. She couldn’t. He was so tall and strong. She had failed. If she’d done what Mama told her to do, they’d both be safe.

  Alicia stopped by a large outcropping by the river. It wasn’t the tears that made her pause. It was the brick in her hands. The less she had to carry, the faster she could move. She searched the forest floor for a rock to smash the hideous thing with. The one she found was a little larger than her hand. It didn’t need to be smooth. It only needed to be large. She raised it up and brought it down with enough force to kill a hundred soldiers. The wood was dry and hard. It took many blows to destroy it.

  When she was done, she sat on the forest floor to catch her breath. She couldn’t stay there long, but she at least deserved a small rest. “No rest for the wicked.” Papa didn’t mean it in a bad way. He had never said a sour word to her in her life. But it was right. She was wicked. She’d let her sister be taken. She should have fought the man, stood up to him, like Papa. “But then you would be dead like me,” he said. “And I do not want you to be dead.”

  The river was cool and clean. She waded in up to her waist, her chain trailing behind her, and let the current pass around her, taking the filth of the beast out to the sea. She stood quite still until the sun went down and the bats came out and her feet had turned to hunks of ice. It was a million times better to be here with icicles for feet than in a cabin with him.

  She waded to the bank and retrieved the strips of sleeping bag. She scrubbed them on a flat rock, rolling them over the way Mama did with their laundry in their yard, then wrung them out, lining them up like newborn monkeys with their grippy tails and huge eyes. She’d only ever seen a kinkajou in a cage, but it was the cutest thing ever. Papa said it wasn’t a monkey but more like a raccoon, but she didn’t believe him. It looked like a honey-colored monkey to her. So it was with the sleeping bag strips. They might look like one thing, but be another. The man had laid her down on that thing as if it were her winding sheet, but she’d made it into shoes which would help her escape. Nothing need be the thing it was intended for; all could be fashioned to her will.

  Dr. Moore reminded her that she was allowed to make sense of what had happened any way she could. If turning lumps of laundry into pet monkeys helped then she should do it.

  Everywhere she turned, Alicia had done the same thing. “This tree is my friend, my house, my companion. The cloud is my water, my umbrella, my hat. This mouse is my dinner. Sorry, mouse. You would have been my friend if I hadn’t been so hungry, but I have eaten moss from the trees and grass from the ground and I am hungry and tired and in need of meat.”

  The days ran into each other, but Alicia never stopped walking. When she heard a human, she hid. When she smelled a campfire, she turned the other way. When a car drew too close, she dove into the water, though the skin under her ankle cuff stung and bled and cried out for relief and the chain threatened to take her under and keep her there. Humans were her enemy. The forest her friend. The river her salvation.

  She waded into the river each night to wash him away. She closed her eyes and smiled at the moon. If she could be empty again, she’d fill herself up with only good things. The water pushed her this way and that, the chain clinking on the pebbles below.

  They clinked harder, louder. It was too regular, that sound. The river didn’t have a beat.

  Was it a clink or a tap? Alice opened her eyes, the blood rushing in her ears to the tempo of her heart beat. Her feet were wet and there was a sound, but she wasn’t in the river and she wasn’t a child. She was Alice Everlee, in a cleft rock under Manhattan, the water rising.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mateo Hernandez looked like such an ordinary man. He had no mustache or thick, dark, slicked-back hair or any of the things Alice had described. He was balding, soft around the middle, paunchy. He sat on a wooden chair outside his house, his elbow on the table, his feet on a low stool. There were flowers in an earthenware mug, a cat sloping by, a garden full of trees. His home was comfortable, but by no means ostentatious. If he’d made money in the war hiring himself out to the government or the rebels, that money was long gone. Then again, his children could be living in luxurious apartments in the city, driving fancy new cars and drinking imported wines. There were a million ways to hide money if you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself.

  Mateo flipped open a box that sat on his table and retrieved a cigar. He rolled it between his fingers, trimming the end with a guillotine cutter and drawing his smoke slowly and carefully. It gave him great pleasure, which caused Bill equal pain. A woman joined Mateo on their little patch of sidewalk, a glass of beer in her right hand, a plate of fruit in the other. Life had been good to Mateo. There he sat, waited on hand and foot, while Alice screamed into the night. They didn’t speak, Mateo and the woman, but there was an easy, almost bored, familiarity that said she was his wife. She sat, fanning her face against the heat, while Mateo drank his beer and smoked his cigar.

  A neighbor passed. They greeted one another, exchanged a few words, laughed. Was it fear that made them wave? Had his past tracked him into retirement?

  A kid came out of the house. Bill fell back into the shade. He’d thought about Mateo having family, but seeing them was different from imagining them. Was Mateo a good grandfather? Kind? Had he remade himself, leaving the life of an assassin behind? The child climbed into his grandmother’s lap, chattering and reaching for the fruit. She stroked his hair and let him talk. Mateo said something. They laughed. Mateo balanced his cigar on his ashtray and beckoned to the child, who ran to him. There was a story, mimed as the kid sat on his grandfather’s lap. Bill recognized the routine. Bounce, bounce, bounce…here it comes…the kid knows it too…bounce, bounce, bounce and then…drop, you fall between my knees, but I am your all-powerful grandfather, so I catch you before you hit the ground, both of us screaming with delight.

  Bill’s fist curled. It was insupportable. Mateo Hernandez had made a sweet life for himself. It took Bill several minut
es to get his breathing under control. He knew this was how all monsters looked to the people who loved them: ordinary, kind, unremarkable. There are a thousand stories of a hundred murderers and rapists and war criminals who have gone home to their families and never breathed a word of what they’d done or seen or allowed to happen on their watch.

  Mateo was no ordinary soldier. He couldn’t fall back on the age old “I was only following orders” excuse. He’d taken his work seriously, killing families and abducting young girls.

  Bill scanned the road. He’d passed a bar on the way in. He slid away from Mateo’s home, doing his best not to draw attention to himself. It was impossible not to be noticed, but perhaps if he had a beer and a plate of cheese or olives or whatever they had on offer he could pass himself off as a tourist.

  The wrought iron gates that shielded the bar’s door had been flung open and secured to the wall. There was a female figure perched on the half shell on one side and a fearsome male figure the other. Ribbons of twisted metal ran under their feet, signifying water, while fish leapt up and were frozen in their attempts to reach the sky. It was stunning and unsettling at the same time. Bill didn’t need art and beauty to cloud his mission. He needed, “Una cerveza, por favor,” a beer, if you please. The bartender rattled off the names of several beers. Bill was lost. How to say, “I want something to make me feel better while also allowing me to make a decision?” He threw up his hands in what he hoped was the universal gesture for, “I haven’t got a clue. Give me whatever you like best. And charge me double because I’m a tourist and I’m too lazy to learn even the most basic sentences to help get me around.”

  Bill retired to a corner with a bottle of foreign beer. Perhaps that was just as well. The beer he’d had at the food stand a night earlier was a watery lager that did nothing for his taste buds. The mojitos were cheaper and probably bursting with flavor, but he didn’t need the rum clouding his brain. The bar filled gradually, each new patron checking him out and giving him a wide berth. They were the regulars who didn’t have to ask for their drink by name. They sat and their order came to them as it might have in another century, when neighbors knew each other and no one moved far from the place of their birth.

  Bill downed his beer faster than he’d intended to and ordered another. Who were these men? They were all old enough to have served during Guatemala’s brutal civil war. He studied their faces, wishing they each came with a little bubble over their head, like the comic book characters of his childhood. You knew what the baddie was thinking before he set off for Gotham. You weren’t left to wonder. These men looked like an affable set of retirees. They’d spent more time in the sun than your average New Yorker, so they were more creased, but other than that he could have been sitting in a bar in his mom’s neighborhood with the pensioners throwing back warm beer and playing table games.

  He was getting nowhere fast. He ought to go back to his motel, sleep on it, and make a decision in the morning. He tipped back his beer and drained the bottle. The universe had other plans. As soon as he decided to call it a night, Mateo Hernandez walked in. The bar exploded with cheers and laughter, invitations for him to come join this table and that one. They were vying for his attention, these gentle old men, in a way that stank of rotten meat and age-old fears. Unless Mateo had been a hero in these parts. Which begged the question, what would make you the toast of your peers? Which side had they been on? Whose hero was he?

  Bill sat back down with a thump. The last thing he needed was to delve into national politics. He needed to know what this one man pressed up against the bar ordering drinks was made of. He would never be able to forgive him, no matter what his faith urged him to do. He wasn’t constitutionally made that way. He would hate him all the days of his life and never forgive what he’d done. Never. But he was a better man than Mateo Hernandez, he was sure of it. He could walk away. Go back to his life. Enjoy his beautiful, if fragile, wife and glorious, brilliant children.

  And yet he sat, glued to his corner, unable to move.

  Mateo made his way to Bill’s table and gestured, requesting Bill’s permission to sit.

  Bill nodded. There was no way he was leaving now. Less than five feet away was the man who’d been responsible for destroying Alice’s happiness. He had to talk to him, sound him out, get what he’d come here for. He needed answers, if not revenge. Was Mateo a changed man or not? Did he regret what he’d done in the war? Had he atoned for his sins since? He needed a way to talk to the man or at the very least understand what he was saying.

  Bill pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed Arthur. “Hey. Any chance you can come meet me?” Arthur whined and resisted. He didn’t have a car, Bill had taken it. He was in a club having a good time. Yes, with the waitress from earlier. No, he didn’t want to come. Fine, double his regular fee. He’d find a taxi. He’d be there. Sure he was a little drunk, but what did that matter?

  Bill hung up and made his way to the bar. The bartender served him a beer, different brand this time. He explained, though Bill understood nothing.

  “This is a better beer.” There was a man at his side. His English was heavily accented, but it was English.

  Bill felt the tension ease out of his shoulders. He could communicate, not stick out so much. “Tell him thank you. I’m sure it’s delicious.” He tipped the glass back and took a sip. It was a far more flavorful beer. He smiled and nodded. “Gracias. Tell the bartender that I like it.”

  Bill’s new translator relayed his message over the bar and brought one back. “It is a gift.” He pointed over at the corner where Bill had been sitting. The corner where his nemesis sat, now surrounded by other patrons. “That man buys you the drink.”

  The beer soured in Bill’s mouth. He forced a smile. The rules of hospitality were unlike New York rules. In New York you kept yourself to yourself and went about your business as fast as possible. That’s how you showed respect. By talking fast, moving fast, getting out of people’s way, you signaled that you valued their time almost as much as you valued your own. Guatemala was the opposite. You were supposed to toast your host, wish them health, thank them for their generosity, say how kind Guatemalans were in general. Arthur had drilled this into him before they’d left America. Smile more. Make more eye contact. Say thank you often. The words stuck in Bill’s throat. He had to do it if he was going to sound Mateo out. He had to ape affability, if not warmth. “You must thank him for me.”

  Mateo waved them over, shooing a couple of men along the bench so there was room for Bill and his new buddy.

  They squeezed into the space. No one seemed bothered by the crush, his new translator thanking them as they sat. “Your name?”

  “I’m Bill. You are?” Bill held out his hand.

  “Andreas.” He pointed around the table, rattling off names. Bill shook hands, repeating but not retaining any of them.

  The last hand he had to shake was Mateo’s. The man had a grip. He held Bill’s hand while he talked and Andreas translated. Mateo never once looked at his translator, but right into Bill’s eyes, as if he was sizing up the man who’d invaded his bar. “You are welcome here. We like Americans. You were our friends, during the troubles.”

  Bill nodded. That told him which side Mateo had fought on.

  “We like the peace more, now. And we like your American dollars coming here with the tourists. It’s good for the economy.”

  Was that a hint? Was he supposed to buy a round? Might as well, to keep the man talking. The bar erupted in another round of cheers.

  The liquor flowed and Bill sat back and watched, while Mateo held court. From time to time Andreas translated an anecdote, but it was local gossip and held no interest. Bill drank as slowly as he dared, all the time watching while hoping he appeared not to watch. It was the slowest hour of his life.

  Arthur arrived in a cloud of rum and bon homie, with the waitress from this morning’s breakfast on his arm. The woman’s arrival caused a ripple of consternation to run through the b
ar. This was a place for men, with none of the troubles of hearth or home or wives or girlfriends. Like bars the world over, this was a small haven where they could be themselves, be that asinine or insensitive or puerile, brave or glorious or unsinkable. Their lips would be loose, their jokes blue, their hopes as high as the moon, with no one to censor them or shoot them down. Here, in a place of no women, they were heroes and conquerors, filled with the spirit of limitless daring and adventure. When they left the confines of that establishment, they’d don their responsibility along with their hats and go home to be dutiful husbands and fathers and breadwinners, who could no more kill a puma with their bare hands than they could walk to the moon without a spaceship. The waitress changed all that.

  She and Arthur conferred and she excused herself, slipping around the corner to the bathroom.

  Arthur smacked his hand on the bar, laughing and pointing and throwing money at the bartender. He wasn’t merely drunk, he was skunked. Bill hoped he wouldn’t claim him as a friend.