The Melting

by Christopher Coleman

  “Why did you run?” one of the veiled soldiers barks. The voice is feminine, a woman, and she sounds a bit too nervous for my comfort level.

  “Because I don’t even have a Swiss army knife.” I chuckle, trying to bring levity to the scene.

  “Who’s with you?” another asks. It’s one of the men from inside the restaurant this time, and I know from the Midwest accent it’s Jones.

  “It was me who killed that one in the shop,” I reply.

  Jones pauses and lets his eyes examine me a moment. “That wasn’t the question.”

  “I’m alone. There’s no one with me. I was on the river, my clothes were soaked. I saw this place so I came in to get warm. And I noticed the sign for the gift shop. These bags—” I put the tips of my fingers through one of the straw, hooped handles at the top of one of the bags.

  “Get your fucking hands back on your head!” the outside male soldier screams, mimicking the nervousness of his female partner.

  I swallow once and begin to nod, my hands returning to the top of my head. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I was just going to show you that I came here for clothes. I was freezing. All I have with me are clothes.

  “Clothes didn’t kill that ghost in the gift shop,” Abramowitz says. “How’d you manage to do that with no weapon?”

  The knives. I now realize those might have been a good thing to bring along, though in the position I am currently, they may have gotten me killed. “I did have a weapon inside—a couple of knives from the kitchen. But I don’t have them anymore. I left them.”

  The four soldiers continue to stare at me for a couple of beats, and then the soldier who originally ordered me to freeze orders me to exit the boat and walk back towards them.

  I come slowly, my hands still on my head, and as I walk past the group and towards the restaurant, I notice there is something a little different about these four. They certainly have the weaponry of soldiers, and the demeanor and movements as well, I suppose, but they’re not dressed uniformly, and they lack some of the discipline and nomenclature of enlisted soldiers. From this proximity, they no longer invoke the images of the colonel who tried to murder me and my group back at the exit ramp.

  My back is now to the soldiers, and one of them, I’m not sure which, taps the back of my head with the muzzle, encouraging me toward the door of the Clam Bake.

  “Who are you?” I ask, knowing a question like this has the potential to be rewarded with the butt-end of the rifle finding its way to my skull.

  “You don’t fucking ask—” the woman starts—and I know it’s her now who has me at the end of her gun—but she’s cut off mid-threat.

  “We’re gonna hold off on the introductions on our end for a few more moments,” Abramowitz explains. “Why don’t you tell us who you are first. Once we’re inside.”

  The woman leads me into the middle of the dining room to a table by the window, and then motions for me to take the seat next to the window that faces the bar. “This is lovely,” I comment. “Did you reserve this?”

  Abramowitz grins at the joke and then sits down at the seat facing me. The other three soldiers position themselves at various seats around the dining room, making sure that all entrances and exits are covered. “Now, let’s get acquainted. Who are you and what do you know?”

  “Name’s Dominic. I’m an English professor. I know a lot about the Romantic poets. Coleridge. Byron. I know a bit about the Neo-classicists as well, but the thrust—”

  “That’s very funny, Dominic,” Abramowitz interrupts, and then his grin wanes by half. “What do you know about this?” He motions toward the window, and the bleak landscape of the world outside. “How did you end up here?”

  I have no reason to hold back on my story—at least not on the bulk of it—so I don’t. I’m surrounded by four semi-automatic rifles, each of which has an index finger only millimeters from the trigger, and nothing I say now is going to make the situation worse. Besides, if these people wanted me dead, that deed would have been carried out by now.

  I start with the first moments of the blast and the weeks at the campus with Naia. I include the details of my infidelity, not seeing any point in being discreet, especially since the events in my foyer with my wife are part of the tale. I tell them about my escape with Naia to the diner—and her subsequent death—and then our decision to leave, eventually ending up in my neighborhood where I discovered the thing that was formerly Sharon.

  I omit the chapter about Stella and Terry’s confession in the diner and their initial involvement in the experiment that led to this apparent apocalypse. And the part about Terry’s connection with the colonel on the exit ramp also doesn’t make its way in. These are large parts of the overall story, of course, but they’re also chapters that, given the quasi-military appearances of the men and woman before me, could be connected to this particular group. My instinct is that they don’t know much more about what happened than I do, but it could all just be an act to get me to spill everything.

  “So we left Warren and headed north,” I continue, “and drove until we got to the Maripo River Bridge. But as I guess you know, it’s blocked.” I look around the room now, studying the faces, trying to see if they actually do know that. I get only blank stares. “So that’s when I came up with the plan to charter that lovely traitor of a boat right out there.”

  I point out to the pier and the dead Sea Nymph, and a wave of despair suddenly hits me like a right cross. Danielle. Tom. Stella and James. It’s been hours now since I left them. If they weren’t able to get the cruiser started, unless they found an armory of ammo on board, they wouldn’t have been able to hold the crabs off for this long. And more ammo didn’t seem likely. That boat was more of a pleasure cruiser, one for millionaire weekend guys; it wasn’t made for the sort of guy who would be packing major firepower.

  The image of my group suffering instils a renewed sense of urgency in me. “I got separated from my group. I had to leave them on the river. But they’re expecting me to come back. I have to get to them. I have to help them.” My voice is pleading, desperate.

  “How did you get separated, Dominic?” It’s Abramowitz again, his tone nonchalant, indifferent of my desperation.

  “We...I...saw another boat, one I thought we could trade up to, I guess. Listen, we don’t have much time. We need to go now. If you’re still interested in my life story, I’ll tell you the rest on the way, but I need to go after them.”

  “And how do you plan to do that?” the woman soldier asks. “Your boat ain’t startin.’ And even if it was,” she scoffs and shakes her head, “if I was you, I wouldn’t get in that thing if it was in a damn swimming pool.”

  “Wait. You mean you don’t have a boat?”

  She smirks and shakes her head.

  “How did you..?” But I already know the answer. These soldiers haven’t come from the Warren County side of the river. They didn’t spot me from the water during some river patrol. They were already here.

  “Got us a big ass RV though,” she adds, and then smiles proudly at the laughing reaction of her partner.

  I can hardly breathe now. The news that my river voyage has come to an end is debilitating, and a piece of me accepts that I’ll never see my former group again. This doesn’t mean they’re dead, of course, not necessarily, not if they got the boat started. But I face the reality that this separation is bound to be permanent.

  “We were hoping,” I start, and my voice sounds distant in my ears. But I hold Abramowitz’s stare tightly. “We thought that maybe, since they blocked the bridge off, that the blast and the aftermath had all been contained just to our side.”

  Abramowitz drops his eyes from mine. I look over to the aggressive male soldier and see that the residue of his smile, created by his female partner’s joke—fades in a flash.

  “How far does it go?” I ask him.

  “Damned if we know for sure, bro,” he says, his voice as defeated as mine. “We’re not exactly getting the nightly
news broadcasts over here either.” He frowns and shakes his head slowly. “But we know where the edges of the cordon are. And we see them damn ghosts everywhere now.”

  Ghosts. It was the word James used back at the pier, and it’s a more appropriate term in every way. The whiteness of them. The way they blend in silently with their surroundings. The fact that they’ve replaced their former bodies with a malevolent new force. Not like crabs at all. Except when they move.

  “You all are soldiers, right?”

  There’s silence amongst them and then Jones speaks up. “That’s right.”

  The heads of the other three soldiers snap up in unison towards Jones, their collective eyes nearly popping from their sockets.

  Abramowitz seems to will Jones’ eyes to his. “Don’t speak again, Jones. You understand me?”

  “Or what, Abramowitz? What are you going to do? Shoot me? Have me court martialed? What’s the point of keeping secrets anymore?”

  Abramowitz is seething now, and the two other soldiers seem ready to pounce if the command is given.

  The thick coating of tension hovers in the dining room like poison gas, and I know if it comes to a head, it could be both Jones and me lying in a pool of our own blood on the carpet, a smoking bullet hole in the middle of our foreheads.

  “I don’t care what you know,” I say pre-emptively. “I mean, that’s not exactly true, I guess. I want to know what happened, of course, to the world, but first I need to get back to trying to save my friends. I put them in the danger they’re in now, so it’s my responsibility to get them out. I at least need to try. Please, just let me go so I can find another boat. What threat am I to you? Who am I going to tell?”

  “Let’s help him, Bram,” Jones says, calmly now, the hint of pleading in his voice.

  Abramowitz holds Jones’ eyes until he drops them to the floor, shaking his head in disappointment. “That’s not going to happen, professor. Even if my friend here is correct and the end of the world is at hand, we’re sticking together until we find out what you know.”

  “I just told you everything I know. Which is apparently way less than you.”

  Abramowitz—Bram—pauses and then looks at his cohort, giving each member a full second or two, measuring them. “What Mr. Jones said is true. We are soldiers. We were brought in just before the event happened. None of us was ever told what was coming exactly or even what our mission was. Only that we were to guard the perimeter of a cordon and make occasional excursions into the interior. The day before the blast we were inside the cordoned off area, and each of us got separated from our troop at some point.” He pauses. “We know now we were abandoned intentionally.”

  I note the nods from the other three soldiers.

  “We met up with each other at one point or another and here we are. Stuck on the inside just like you.” Abramowitz pauses and says, “Now that’s my story. And I have a feeling what we heard from you was the abridged version of yours. I want to know more about your friends. Who they are exactly and where they came from. I get the suspicion there are a few gaps you left out in that first telling.”

  Abramowitz story rings true, but I’m still reluctant to lay all of my cards on the table. “My friends are people I met at a diner a couple of weeks ago. I don’t exactly know their deepest desires.”

  “No? Well I guess we’ll see then.” Bram stands and nods to the other two soldiers. “Smalley, Stanton, let’s go.” The two soldiers rise immediately and then aim their rifles back on me, motioning with their barrels for me to get up and follow Bram out the door.

  “Okay, listen, maybe I do know a little bit more. But you have to promise me that if I tell you what I know, that you’ll help me find my friends.”

  “Maybe we’ll just hold your head over the sink and waterboard you until you tell us. There’s always that option too.” It’s the outside male, whose name I now know is Stanton.

  “Fuck off, Stanton,” Jones says, apparently outranking the large soldier. “That’s a deal, Dominic.” Jones doesn’t look at Abramowitz as he walks to the front of the restaurant.

  Abramowitz follows Jones with his eyes and then begins walking behind him. “Okay, Dominic, I’ll honor the deal. But first we’re going to take a little ride.

  Chapter 5

  The RV is, as Smalley referenced earlier, quite large, about the size of a small charter bus. But there is nothing military about it at all. Instead of the rugged camo look of an army truck, the vehicle looks like something picked off the lot of an interstate Camping World, the surprise gift of some rich dad who has impulsively decided to take his family on a cross-country summer road trip.

  The RV can’t be more than a year or two old, as the body of it still has that new, shiny factory luster; and the dark, swooshy, boomerang symbols that pop against the white sides and back of it give it the look of speed and transcendence.

  Inside, the layout of the camper is nicer than most of the apartments I lived in for the first thirty years of my life. Leather couches and granite countertops line the interior, and there are at least two flat screen televisions anchored at the ceiling, along with various video game consoles below.

  “You guys heading out to the Grand Canyon once the weather clears?” I ask from my seat at the elbow of two couches; Smalley and Stanton are flanking me on either side.

  Abramowitz is standing at the threshold dividing the driver—who is Jones at the moment—from the living space where I sit currently. “You think your friends would appreciate the smart ass replies right now?” he asks. “Stranded out on that boat as they are?”

  “Probably not,” I concede. And then, “Well, maybe one of them would. So what do you want to know, Bram?”

  Abramowitz scoffs at the familiar nickname and then retaliates with, “Everything you’ve got, Dom.”

  I stare the soldier down for a moment, trying to maintain some air of confidence, hoping to impart the seriousness of my character and the desperation of my plight despite my banter. “Everything I told you was true, but there is more. I know about an experiment.” I pause, “Let me correct that: I was told about an experiment. One that was conducted by some research group. Government contractors, I think.”

  I check the room for any looks of recognition on the soldiers’ faces, but I see none.

  “The way I understood it—they way they told us—was that it was supposed to be some kind of psychological experiment, to see how people would react in the event of some global catastrophe. In this case, some nuclear Armageddon or something. They said didn’t really know the details.”

  “They?”

  “They were two of the people inside the diner, the diner my friend and I fled to after the college.”

  “Your friend. Right.”

  I ignore the jab. “These people, they were part of the team—or maybe they were the team, I can’t really remember—who were tasked with studying the effects of the people in the town once the blast went off. That’s what they told us anyway, but, as you might have guessed, it didn’t happen quite that way.”

  “That’s pretty obvious,” Smalley comments.

  I nod. “It is, but still, they knew about a blast. They just thought it was going to be contained to our little college town. There was going to be a cordon, I guess, and then the army or CIA or whoever these people worked for were going to do the study. Gather the data or whatever. But the blast came a day early, and once that happened, they knew something was wrong.”

  “And you believed them?” Abramowitz asks. “You still believe all of what they told you? You think it was a mistake what happened here? What happened to the people who were out in the snow when it all went down?”

  “I didn’t say it was a mistake.”

  “But you believe they didn’t know?”

  I drop my eyes from Abramowitz and look out the window at the passing landscape. Jones seems to be navigating the road with little problem, which makes sense, since the snow is melting and the interstates should be mostly clear
of traffic. Nobody would have stopped at this point in the highway when the snows came, not in the middle of nowhere. The few cars that we do pass are either smashed against each other or have drifted off to the side of the freeway. I assume this latter category is made up of drivers who left from some place close to the local exits shortly after the storm started and then changed into ghosts somewhere along the way.

  “You got something to say there, Dom?”

  I return my gaze to the soldier. “After we left the diner, on the way back to my house, one of the members of this research team—the man—had me pull off on one of the exits along the interstate. He said he had an emergency—a bathroom thing—but it wasn’t...”

  Abramowitz doesn’t speak, allowing me to gather my thoughts.

  “Against my better judgement, I pulled off, and then we got stuck in a snow bank just at the base of the exit. And then this guy, the research doctor, he starts to walk up to the gas station.”

  “Not a bathroom break though,” Abramowitz says, shaking his head.

  “Not quite. I followed him part of the way up the ramp, and then, at the top of the hill, this huge tank appears out of nowhere.”

  Instinctively, Abramowitz looks toward the two soldiers beside me, and I catch Jones’ glimpse toward the back in the rearview mirror.

  “Did I say something interesting, soldier?” I ask Abramowitz.

  “What else?”

  “It was an experiment the whole time, but not in the way we were told. It had nothing to do with our reaction to a blast.”

  “So what then?”

  “I need to hear more about your story before I go on about what I know,” I demand. “That’s my deal.”

  Abramowitz gives a sideways glance toward the front, but his back is almost completely to Jones and the look never reaches the driver.

  “Did you guys think this was some kind of psych ops thing? Like my friends were told. You must have had some questions about your mission, right? I mean, a whole county and more was being blocked off from the world and you guys never questioned why you were there?”