by Pike, JJ
The interstate which they’d skirted for three days—with its incomprehensible mash of cars and MELT-riddled cadavers—was impassable. The secondary roads weren’t much better. Sure, the pile ups were more evenly spaced and fewer cars meant fewer bodies, fewer flies, and less bodily effluvia, but the dark patches of long-dried blood didn’t necessarily mean a lower chance of contracting MELT, cholera, hepatitis, smallpox, tuberculosis, or any of the other diseases that lived on long after the demise of the host.
The dead—bloated, blackened, ready to split—were, according to General Hoyt, “heaving bags of deadly putrescence” and Michael was glad to obey at least one of the General’s commands: Touch nothing unless you’ve been cleared to do so.
Though he knew it to be a ruse, they were still officially headed toward Indian Point—itself a bloated carapace which bled and belched poison into the environment—where, ironically enough, they’d be given orders to embrace death rather than avoid it.
Why, though? Why use them for this when they could do direct testing on their immune systems? What kind of bonehead was directing this op? What other idiotic thing might they have lined up for their test subjects?
Best not think about that now. Best deal with that lie when the time was right.
A drone buzzed the convoy then zipped up and away. No one flinched or ducked or pointed their weapons at the interloper the way they had in the first months of their trek south.
Michael turned his attention back to the present. To say he was disappointed to find himself in the company of a combo of disgraced scientists and disgruntled soldiers was an understatement. It was a waste of time and resources to be on this particular mission. He wasn’t a nuclear scientist. He had nothing to offer the team in this hair-brained patch up job they were supposedly going to execute.
Hoyt had said they were needed in the Hot Zone, the infected, dripping, melting, gooey, gone-to-hell-zone formerly known as New York which was, inch by inch falling into the toxic soup called Hudson Bay, strangling the fish, flora and fauna as it went. Perhaps it was happening faster than that? Perhaps the cities that dotted the coast were falling away meter by meter? No one knew. There were no first-hand reports, no photographs, no reports of any kind; not for a month or two at least. All Michael could do was look at the world around him and extrapolate. None of his projections were pretty. They pointed to a total collapse of the Eastern seaboard. Not a metaphorical collapse. Not the economy or society or civilization. The actual, physical collapse of the landscape as MELT gnawed its way through every structure known to man. The only question that remained was, sooner or later?
And, for the people the other side of the Atlantic, the question remained, if or when? What were their plans? Were there any plans? Was there anyone left who knew a damn thing about MELT? Had Professor Zhang made himself known? Outside of Klean & Pure’s MELT team, Zhang was the only ranking scientist still in play who had a clue about the mechanism of MELT. Had he stayed in touch with the powers that be? Who were they? Where were they stationed? Who was running the show? So many questions, so few answers.
Michael rolled his shoulders and tried to position his foot so his boots didn’t exacerbate his blisters. It was pointless. The boots were too big. His feet slid and rubbed, even with two pairs of socks and newspaper jammed into the toes. Blisters were part of his daily life. As were campfires, boiling all water, army rations, forced marches, and orders not to hold up their progress.
Michael had considered going AWOL (even before Alice had made a run for it), but two things stopped him. One, where would he go? The closest Clean Zone was several hundreds of miles west at least. He’d die of radiation exposure before he got to civilization. If he stuck with the military he had access to potassium iodide.
Two, only twenty-four hours earlier, Hoyt had given the go-ahead for a deserter to be shot in full view of the entire company. Deliberately. It wasn’t some “kid was running toward me with her weapon drawn, it was self-defense” deal. Corporal Mitzy Truman had been caught sneaking out of camp, was reported to her superior officer who reported her to Hoyt who gathered everyone together, lectured them on the importance of their mission, and then nodded at her Lieutenant who shot her through the head at close range.
No one stepped forward and spoke in her defense; no one moved her body from where it lay. They got the message, loud and clear: This is catch-and-kill, not catch-and-release. They’d marched on.
Michael wanted to mutiny, turn them around, get them all to safety, but how and with whom? He was a fuzzy-brained resistance movement of one and not even he was sure he knew what he was mutinying against.
The troop had been on the move for an eternity. Not the short, fun kind of eternity when you’re busy and time flies but rather long, blunt, brutal months that test your metal and lay bare your weak points.
Michael had always known he preferred action over inaction, but what he’d learned about himself while on the move was that he wasn’t fond of hills, streams, boggy marshland, uneven terrain, or wet socks either. But that was his life for the foreseeable future: Hunkering down when the General told him to, eating MREs, (he let the others feast on squirrel and rabbit), sleeping in shifts, startling at the smallest noise, then hiking in formation for hours on end across land that had been left alone for a reason. The terrain was inhospitable: Gnarled, warped, knotted, and willing him to fall and break his neck. He wasn’t going to give it that satisfaction.
They stopped every few hours, ostensibly so “the civilians could catch their breath” but the operational mandate was to make sure no one else had gone AWOL or been picked off by a sniper (they’d seen no snipers), kidnapped by bikers (ditto on those non-sightings), or fallen prey to MELT (they checked each other for welts and lesions daily, hoping they’d find nothing, but ready to consign anyone who showed signs of infection to the back of the line and “latrine duties only”).
The convoy had halted close to a copse of copper beeches. Michael took his place toward the head of the screening line, careful not to touch anyone.
Corporal Juan Sandrino demanded name, rank, serial number, and a show of hands. It was the same at every stop. “Rotate them slowly from front to back and over again. Thank you.” He checked a bunch of boxes on his clipboard. Not that these stats were being sent to a lab which could analyze the data. The days of real science were behind them. Michael could only dream of electron microscopes and slides and bell curves that showed which way the contagion was trending. This inspection was nothing more than an exercise in boosting morale. The General was clever that way. Make your men feel like you care about their welfare and they’re less likely to slit your throat in the night.
Not an altogether stupid thought. Might the men follow him if he dispatched Hoyt?
“Next?” Sandrino stopped in front of Michael, his eyes at half-mast and his attitude even less engaged. “Name…”
“Professor Michael Rayton, M. Phil (Oxon), K&P scientists with a list of credentials you wouldn’t understand…” Michael held out his hands, palms up, then flipped them over. “In addition to the long list of letters which graced my office door back when there were office doors in the world, I find I’m quintessentially a G-S.O.B., the ultimate in fact since my shoes sprang a leak and I had to switch to Army-issue boots three sizes too big, but I remain the MMLTSTSS.” It was one way of staying sane, make every boring-ass chore into a puzzle.
Corporal Sandrino cocked his head. “The G is for grumpy, as always. You’re the quintessential grumpy SOB…” He chewed the end of his pencil. “And, Man Most Likely To…?” He waited.
Michael waited.
“I give up. Most likely to what?”
“Man most likely to solve this…” Michael trailed off, inviting Sandrino to take another guess.
“Don’t tell me.” Sandrino grinned. “Man Most Likely to Solve This…S-S?”
“Shit Show,” said Hoyt.
Sandrino laughed, caught himself when he realized who was behind him, came to a
ttention, threw his shoulders back, and saluted.
Hoyt’s eyes met Rayton’s. “You think you’re going to solve this?”
“Give me access to your comms,” said Michael, “and I’ll have my team fax over the antidote.”
Hoyt didn’t acknowledge Michael’s humor. “I’d say your team have done enough. I wouldn’t trust them to deliver pizza, let alone an antidote” He wrapped his right hand around his left wrist, tightening the plastic wrap that held him together, and marched back to his vehicle. “Dismissed.”
The line fell apart, soldiers and scientists finding whatever they could to sit on for their ten minute break.
Sandrino joined a gaggle of soldiers, gabbing about what kind of topping he wanted on his pizza, while Lieberwitz tried to pick a fight over deep dish versus thin crust.
Michael eased himself onto a tree stump and kicked off his oversized boots. He didn’t comment on the Great Pizza Debate, but he kept his mind busy, ticking off what you’d need in order to produce a pizza. First up, you’d need farmers and harvests and wheat fields, operational dairies, cheesemakers, tomato plants, pepperoni wizards, and flying pigs. Once the impossible ingredients had been grown and processed and packaged, you needed the infrastructure to get them to the place where some magician conjured electricity from a hole in the wall and Hey, Presto! a slice of heaven at your fingertips. Something so simple and ubiquitous, so American, gone in a flash.
It was going to be a long, long time before any of them saw pizza again.
Michael kept his distance from the herd, but that didn’t mean they kept their distance from him. A soldier sat on a fallen tree trunk not five feet from where Michael had paused.
Too close. Always too close. Why couldn’t they get it into their thick skulls? Anyone could be carrying. MELT didn’t show its colors right away.
“Never underestimate the importance of dry feet. Some say an army marches on its stomach, but it’s no use having a full belly if your feet are on the fritz. Tell me I’m not wrong…” Sergeant Emily “call me Emmie” Klyon was chipper for someone who was about to die by manual strangulation.
Michael wasn’t a violent man by nature but having someone state the obvious while rolling dry socks over their recently powdered feet was testing his last nerve. His own feet were blistered and bleeding inside his expensive wool socks. He could see a patch of dull ochre oozing on his left heel. Just a blister. Not a MELT-related lesion. He wasn’t about to be consigned to latrine duty. He jammed his foot back into his boot and laced it up tight. Nothing to see here. Moving right along.
“The key is to keep them dry or, if they should get wet, change out your socks as soon as possible. I like to hang my damp socks on the back of my pack, so I’m never caught short…”
Michael turned away from the chronic optimist, tuning out her incessant chatter. He held his fingers up toward the horizon. How many fingers until nightfall? They’d stop once the sun dipped below the trees, giving them time to set up camp. He didn’t want to be the one to say it—the General was very much a “winners never quit, quitters never win; whine and I’ll give you something to whine about” kind of guy—but everyone had to be thinking the same: We’re done for the day.
“It can mean the difference between life and death.” Klyon (“no, seriously, call me Emmie”) might have been passably charming before MELT had forced them all to their knees, but she—like so many of their number—seemed to have given up on making herself presentable. She’d pinned her hair back with twigs, smeared her face with some sort of camo-greasepaint-concoction, and lathered her uniform in mud. She seemed to be held together with little more than dirt and good cheer.
Not so, Michael Rayton.
The army-issue boots were his only concession to the apocalypse. For the rest, he was decked out like the dapper, charming, woo-the-birds-right-out-of-the-trees elite scientist he’d always been.
It was mad to be wearing a long-sleeved shirt. He knew that. But old habits die hard and he was used to dressing for the job. The world might be falling down around their ears but he was determined to maintain his standards, MELT be damned.
He’d even stopped at a strip mall in Beacon on their trek south with the express goal of finding clean clothes. Why or how the mall was standing was anyone’s guess. There were small pockets of buildings which seemed to have been spared. Michael tucked the fact away in the back of his mind to let it germinate in the dark along with all his other private musings.
As anyone with half a brain cell would expect, the grocery store had been gutted, the shelves laid bare. Ditto the hardware store, the gardening center, and the jewelry retailer. Menswear, however, had been left relatively intact. He was able to snag three Boss, button-down dress shirts (100% cotton, as the Professor insisted), two pairs of linen pants, and several Christmases worth of wool socks.
There were the dead bodies scattered about the mall and its parking lot, naturally, but Alice had been all about inspecting and cataloguing them so he left her to it and went clothes shopping which was the only reason he had a half-way decent outfit and dry socks.
Michael beamed his thoughts into the back of the General’s head: Stop now. Stop and order the chow crew to start boiling whatever passes for food today. Do it. Do it now.
Behind them, someone or something crashed through the undergrowth.
Maggie-loo, the slobbery Pitbull who’d turned into Alice’s Velcro dog, bounded into the clearing.
Emily wasn’t the only soldier on her feet with her weapon drawn, but she was the first to direct her comrades to lower their weapons.
“Here girl.” Michael held out his hand. He wasn’t good with animals. People, yes; creatures of instinct, not so much. “Where’s your mistress? Where’s Alice?”
The soldiers had gathered round, cooing and petting and offering Maggie-loo scraps they’d saved from their rations. It was good to be a dog, even during the apocalypse.
It wasn’t until Emily had her hands on Maggie-loo’s ears that Michael noticed the blood smeared down the keel of the dog’s chest.
“Is she injured?”
Emily ran her hands down the dog’s flanks and under her belly. The dog didn’t react. Emily checked again, this time more slowly, feeling the pup’s ears and paws and finally her gums. Maggie-loo wriggled and leaned against the soldier but didn’t give any signs that she was in distress. “I don’t think it’s hers.” Emily ran her hands across the grass.
Michael handed her his canteen. “Wash. Now. You don’t want blood on your hands. Who knows where it came from or what it’s carrying.”
“It’s Alice’s,” said Professor Baxter. “Who else’s could it be?”
She had a point. Alice and Maggie-loo were inseparable. Which begged the question: Where was Alice?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MARCH 2022
Jacinta watched in horror as Lila Nawrocki pulled off a perfect impression of her kissing Alistair’s ass. They called it “improv” but it had to have been rehearsed. It was too slick to be off the cuff. Or they were far more talented than she’d given them credit for. She did as Triple-H had instructed and laughed in all the right places even as she cringed internally. Was that what they thought of her? That she was a kiss ass and a brown noser?
The sketch ended with Alistair, played by one of the new soldiers who’d only just passed the Wolfjaw tests, crowning Lila “Queen of Downy Feathery Fantasy Land,” their stage name for Wolfjaw Down.
Jacinta stood and applauded, nodding and smiling and encouraging everyone in the canteen to do the same. “Wonderful!” she shouted. “Bravo!”
The players came out and took their bows, pleased with the reception.
Jacinta bounded onto the stage and shook each of their hands. “Good job. Well played. It’s nice to see we don’t take ourselves too seriously. If you can’t laugh, what can you do?” She made it all the way down the line to Lila and made a show of hugging the actress tight. “Lord have mercy, you do a good me!”
&
nbsp; Lila took the crown off her head and placed it on Jacinta’s. The crowd erupted in cheers. Jacinta took a bow letting the crown tumble to the floor. “Thank you, thank you!” She was shouting, but that was appropriate, the applause thundered around her. “Don’t forget to vote. We’re counting on you!”
She shook hands as she exited the canteen, wishing each person a good night and accepting babies—literally, people were handing her their kids, it was unreal—for kisses.
Triple-H had said she needed to do at least three “big” things that would be remembered. She’d done one: Sat through a humiliating play which painted her as little more than a toady who’d been handed her position rather than earning it.
Next up, drinks with “the team.”
Chrissy was close by, as always. Jacinta wondered if the little girl had been shadowing her all this time.
“Want to find Meredith for me again?” She smiled and watched Chrissy sprint toward her chambers.
Trish was in the hall, hovering, nervous. The woman might as well have had a neon sign over her head blaring “UNCOMFORTABLE, MUST REPORT TO THE BOSS” for all to see.
“Shall we walk and talk?” said Jacinta.
Trish nodded.
There was more glad-handing to be done. It seemed everyone and their dog had come out to see the play. There were some notable exceptions, of course. Triple-H wasn’t there. Nor Meredith, Marcus, Jamie, or Christine. Jeff Steckle was the most obvious absentee, but he was known for keeping himself aloof and apart. If she hadn’t heard what she’d heard from Triple-H, she’d have assumed he was in his quarters, doing a crossword or playing Scrabble with his equally standoffish wife.
