by Pike, JJ
He looked back at the pictures on the floor.
He’d been inside the gray. He’d known New York was a lost cause, but to see everything east of that line written off permanently was depressing in a low-grade “what the hell are we going to do now?” way.
Michael didn’t want to take his seat belt off and gather up the papers in the aisle. He let his eyes wander over the charts and graphs. The bell curve hadn’t hit the zenith. Deaths were still on the rise.
There was a sliver of good news. The Search and Rescue Optimization Planning System (SAROPS)—a simulator used by the Coast Guard to work out where lost and/or stranded ships and boats might have drifted—had kicked out some excellent maps. Though the maps only covered a two-month period, they showed that ninety-percent of all particulates stayed in New York Harbor. For weight/size purposes they’d simulated the possible trajectories of:
1) a cargo ship (marked on the maps in PINK)
2) a surfboard (BROWN), and
3) liquid waste (GREEN).
Applying a hazard (Hurricane Erin) didn’t push MELT out to sea as they’d assumed. Instead, the ocean did what it did: Pushed and pulled the materials in and around the land with a suck-and-spit rotation. Never had Michael been so glad of the tide. The simulated cargo ship (the heaviest object, obviously) had only drifted 1,200 nautical miles in two months. There were smatterings of green (MELT) close to the ship, but the vast majority of the GREEN dots were concentrated close to Ground Zero.
New York, New York, the town so nice they burned it twice.
Gallows humor, it’s how we get through the grim times.
Add in the gyres in the Atlantic, along with the Atlantic’s garbage patches (different, visually, from the Pacific Garbage Patch, but just as dense and deadly) and MELT might take years to make it to mainland Europe. If Europe hadn’t been infected they had a place to go to work/find answers.
The maps opened up all kinds of possibilities. They could isolate the States; treat it as a leper colony/plague ship; move uninfected personnel away.
The turbulence kept Michael in his seat, but he was itching to talk to Pennrith.
Why weren’t there more recent simulations?
What of the aerial simulations? Had anyone done an airflow study?
Where was the furthest point MELT had been tracked?
Was air travel shut down (themselves notwithstanding)?
Who’d closed their borders? Did that matter?
Was there a test for carriers?
Were there treatments?
Baxter hadn’t cracked her folder but Alice had read it and put it to one side.
“So? What did you make of it?” She might be pissed she’d been found and extracted but she’d shown him kindness when he was in the hospital. Surely they were finally on the same side? She had to see this was none of his doing.
“They sent us east as an experiment.” Her voice was only slightly higher than a whisper. “We’re lab rats. You get that, right?”
Michael nodded.
“What did they shoot us up with? Where are they taking us now? Why should we trust them? Pennrith says we’re here for the science and our know-how, but why does the data cut out after two months? What aren’t they telling us?”
No use talking to her while she was so angry. Give her time to cool off. If anyone should be angry it should be him. He’d successfully managed to avoid the vaccine (if that’s what they’d been testing on them) only to end up in a military hospital pumped full of drugs with no names.
He flexed his hands and inspected them, front and back. No lesions. They’d been in the most densely infected zone but had remained healthy.
Then it struck him, he wasn’t angry. Why not? He’d been kidnapped and drugged against his will. He ran through what remained of his shredded memories of the last few days but at no point could he drum up any feelings of betrayal or outrage. He had no symptoms of intoxication, but the sense of well-being was at odds with their situation. It couldn’t be the water. If it had been Alice would have been as mellowed out as he was. The harder he tried to get agitated the weirder it became. He simply couldn’t drum up a negative emotion.
“We should bottle this and sell it,” he said to the air.
Baxter had dropped off and Alice was sulking and scratching at the window. Her fingernails were filled with black paint but it would take hours to make a hole large enough to look out of and, in any case, Pennrith would be back and there was no hiding a peephole in a blacked-out window.
Michael lay back in his chair. They’d get where they were going whether he railed and fumed or simply relaxed. Whatever they’d given him produced feelings of bonhomie which wasn’t a mental space Michael Rayton often visited. Might as well enjoy the ride. Literally. It would end soon enough. And when it did, he could fire up the old anger-engine and have at it. He closed his eyes and let sleep wash over him. He dreamed of Fran and Paris and a long weekend that made his toes curl. She’d done everything he’d asked of her and more. It was delectable. He’d wined and dined her but she’d repaid him in ways not even he could have imagined into being. It was the weekend that had eased her from being “a nice enough young woman with whom one might have fun” to “a sex machine I can’t get enough of.”
When he woke he ached for her in all the wrong places.
She’d betrayed him. She didn’t get to invade his dreams like that.
He focused all his energies on the data and maps and green dots on the ocean, trying to banish her. It took several hours of irritated, loopy thinking, but he finally convinced himself she was out of sight and out of mind. His job was to work out how they were going to escape their current nightmare.
Neither Alice nor Baxter would talk to him so he was left with rather limp fantasies of grabbing Pennrith’s gun and forcing the plane to make an emergency landing. No dice. The cockpit would have a steel-reinforced door and there were likely agents from Business through First Class, waiting to take him down. Where was his training? His smarts? His know-how? He’d been stripped of everything that made him HIM and he couldn’t work out what to do about it.
When they landed Pennrith was strapped into his seat up by the curtain like a truculent air steward who’d failed to produce a drink cart and was therefore despised by his passengers.
“Ice and snow,” said Alice. “And lots of it.”
If Pennrith had seen the quarter-sized peephole she’d scratched into the blackout paint on her window he seemed unfazed by it. He left her to ogle the landscape.
Michael unlatched his seat belt.
“Stay seated,” said Lt. Pennrith.
“Even facing a global cataclysm,” said Alice, “there are first class passengers who must deplane first.”
Pennrith didn’t respond. He had his orders.
Michael watched the feet pass the bottom of the curtain. Two men and a woman, based on the shoes. And not any old shoes, either. Whoever was up front hadn’t been fitted with wooden clogs. They were sporting footwear from a time when you might wear rubber soles without fear of your feet melting out from under you. A data point.
They sat in silence for half an hour; long enough for the VIPs to be stashed away from the proles.
Pennrith stood and nodded. Their sign to get moving.
The walkway from the plane to “Destination Alpha” (Pennrith’s first hint that they were where Michael assumed they were) was a frigid two-minute walk.
They’d been evacuated to the South Pole. Data point.
They were escorted to the sick bay under armed guard. From behind the porthole windows crew smiled and waved, but no one joined them in the corridor. Quarantine. Again. Fun times.
Baxter protested. Loudly. But Michael and Alice stepped behind the privacy curtains which divided the room into “male” and “female” subjects and allowed themselves to be stripped and inspected. Temperature. Mouth swab. Lights in eyes. Nozzles down ears. Blood; always blood samples taken.
Michael’s sense of ease was w
earing thin. He’d lost some muscle mass and his skin was gray and ashy. The stubble on his chin told him that they’d been in the air for over twelve hours.
“Anyone going to tell us what’s going on?”
His nurse—whose hazmat suit couldn’t hide the fact that she was good looking, well-kept, and hadn’t been on the run or through the wringer the way they had—glanced at him but didn’t answer.
“You’ll be briefed soon.” The voice came from above. The sound system was built into the walls. Someone was listening. As always.
The nurse handed Michael a stack of clothes, folded neatly with a pair of sneakers on top.
Sneakers. No MELT here, then.
“Get dressed but stay in your cubicle until you’re called by name.”
Michael took in the sights. The cameras weren’t hidden. Neither were there blind spots. It was safe to assume the pod was heavily mic’d.
“I want Hoyt.” Baxter had one note and she was sounding it hard. “I’m not going to be party to your experiments until you collect and deliver my husband.”
Her nurse muttered something which Michael couldn’t hear and which didn’t mollify his colleague.
“Can’t you calm her?”
Alice was at the entrance to her cubicle. She shook her head. “She’s right to be pissed. She would have walked into hell for answers if they’d just treated her right. Now we’ve lost the best mind available and it’s all because some snot-nosed paper-pusher put policy over people. You can’t treat them like numbers or statistics. You have to take into account what makes them tick. Without a…”
He let Alice drone on while he cataloged his surroundings. There was a room off to their left, possibly a surgical suite. From memory, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was a patch-and-ship facility. No fancy surgical interventions here. The station had been fitted to study neutrinos and cosmic microwave backgrounds, neither of which were useful in the study of MELT.
New questions:
Was the location significant? (How could it not be. Situated at the southern-most tip of the world, the base was 9,000 feet above sea level. Safe from MELT?)
Was the weather significant?
Had the science team been evacuated or required to shelter in place?
Were they going to be allowed to work alongside the scientists or would they be kept under observation/quarantine?
Who was funding this? Not the United States government, surely? They’d already shown they weren’t interested in finding a cure for MELT. He ran through his list of high-profile, science-positive capitalists one more time. Gates and Musk were the front runners but they were both camera/attention hogs. They wouldn’t hide from the team. They’d want to be “seen to be doing good.”
The speaker crackled overhead and a woman’s voice was piped in. “Michael Rayton, Alice Everlee, Christine Baxter, please step forward.”
Michael and Alice stepped into the room. The nurses had left. It was just the three of them.
“To your right you’ll see a large screen.”
Their narrator was correct. There was a flat screen hanging from the ceiling. “There’s a remote on the desk below the screen.”
Michael and Alice both stepped forward. Michael gave a small bow and let her take control.
“Turn to channel three, if you please.”
Alice flicked through the channels.
“Well, I’ll be…” Michael stepped forward, mouth open, brain reeling.
“Greetings.” Jan van Karpel, who he’d last seen in Manhattan in August 2021, and whom Michael had presumed was dead, smiled from the screen. “How are we doing on this fine day or night, we don’t know which because it’s dark now, here, all the time.”
Alice slapped her hand over her mouth.
Michael put his arm around her shoulders. She was doing what they all wanted to do, crying with happiness.
“Professor van Karpel…” Baxter stood close to the screen running her fingers over her colleagues face. “Is that you?”
Van Karpel laughed. “I didn’t know who made it out alive,” he said. “Min lykke strømmer over.”
“Mine, too,” Michael’s face ached from the force of his grin. “It means ‘my happiness overflows.’” Didn’t matter too much if his colleagues knew he spoke a little Norwegian.
“Å være midt i smørøyet.” Van Karpel’s face was serious again.
Michael laughed. To translate it directly would give nothing away, but he was fairly certain van Karpel was signaling heavily and didn’t want to be understood. Alice and Christine were waiting. Staring. He couldn’t very well NOT translate. Their captors would notice. “It’s a lovely Nordic expression which, literally translated, means ‘I am in the middle of the butter’s eye.’ There’s no English idiomatic phrase like it. It means you’re in the right spot.”
Van Karpel nodded. “We have everything we need here. Equipment, funding, distance from the outbreak. It’s the perfect set up made better by you joining the butter.”
All four of them laughed.
Michael wanted a secure room with no bugs or cameras or people listening in. Van Karpel had said they were in the right place, but what did he mean? They had to talk but sound like they weren’t communicating anything special. “Where did they find you, Jan? I thought you went down with Manhattan.”
“We’re tagged.” Jan held up his left hand and turned the back to the camera. “Here. In the little place between your tendons at the base of the hand where it becomes the wrist.”
“Tagged?”
“Ja. With trackers. I don’t know when but it seems Klean & Pure injected us with digital trackers.”
Alice, Christine and Michael all protested at once.
“That’s not possible.” Michael ran his fingers over the back of his hand searching for the grain-size hardware. “And in any case, there’s no GPS with that kind of range. They’re pie-in-the-sky. Theoretical only. There’s no tracker.”
“You tell yourself that if it helps you sleep at night,” said van Karpel. “I’d made it all the way to British Columbia, but they found me anyway.”
Christine marched to the surgical suite, dug through the drawers, found a scalpel and was etching a series of small x-s in the back of her hand.
Alice took the knife from her and pulled her back to the viewing area, whispering. “Stop that. You need to behave normally. They’ll take you away if you freak out like this and I won’t be able to help you.”
“I have the right,” said Christine, “to remove hardware that was not lawfully installed on my person,”
“Maybe later we can talk about the trackers. I think it is the moot point already.” Van Karpel waved off screen. “I have with me a friend from Alice’s.” Van Karpel waved off screen. “Dr. Stephen McKan is joining us with the team.”
Alice slumped against Michael. Not in a dramatic, attention-grabbing way; just a small lean that said she was shocked. No one spoke for an embarrassing number of seconds. She couldn’t have made it any clearer if she’d just come out and said they were involved though it was news to Michael.
“Dr. McKan,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure?”
“Mr. Rayton. Your reputation precedes you. I’m pleased to join the team. Though I’m not in your league, I hope my penchant for taxonomy will come in handy.”
“What have you got to do with anything?” Alice blurted.
Stephen shrugged.
Jan clapped him around the shoulders. “Already he is useful. He, like me, likes the meticulous organization of data. He will be useful, ja?”
“Of course.” Alice blustered. It was a terrible attempt at a cover up, but Michael played along and looked interested. “He used to work in the Museum of Natural History. Stephen was kind enough to break out some equipment, some turn-of-the-century equipment, when Angelina was first infected.”
“Excellent.” Michael was trying to put the pieces together but it was as if two puzzles had been thrown in the air and th
e pieces placed in random boxes.
“Also, I have another friend from Alice.” Van Karpel was full of surprises.
Alice braced against Michael, her face taut and pinched.
“Ta-da!” Jo Morgan, Alice’s neighbor and Michael’s FBI counterpart, stuck her head into view. “The gang’s all here.”
They were being watched, monitored, recorded. There was no way to ask how long Jan van Karpel, Stephen McKan, and Jo Morgan had been on the base; what they knew about the task; whether they’d been allowed to roam freely; if they were also lab rats.
“You will be isolated until we can be sure you’re not a threat to anyone on base.” The voice on the loudspeaker broke into the awkward reunion. “Chow will be delivered to your pods while you’re in isolation. You can order from a menu which you’ll find in your side table. I recommend you eat well and get a good night’s sleep.”
The guards who escorted them to their sleeping pods were hidden away in hazmat suits.
It was the last time Michael would see Christine Baxter and Alice Everlee for a month or more, though none of them knew that as they were marched to their rooms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MARCH 2022
The kids had followed Theo to the back door of Down, leaving Jacinta and Tamsen alone.
“I need to be there. With them. I need you to help me get to them. I can’t let them…”
