The Melting

by Christopher Coleman

  I hold the knife to the head of the thing that was Abramowitz only moments ago, and it looks at me, blinking its black eyes, expressionless.

  “Wait,” Jones says, stepping up beside me. “You shouldn’t have to live with this. He’s my...was my friend. I’ll do it.”

  There’s nothing to argue about, so I nod and hand Jones the knife. “I’m sorry,” I say, and then walk to the threshold of the receiving room. “I’ll be out front in the RV. We should get going as soon as we can. I don’t know how long they’ll stay gone.”

  Jones nods and says, “You go to, Smalley. You don’t need to be here for this.”

  I expect Smalley to protest, to say she’ll stay and see Jones through the moment, but I can see now that the fact of her leader’s transition to this monster has begun to take its toll on her. There are tears in her eyes, tears that she’s trying desperately to keep at bay. “Thanks, Jonesy. I’ll see you in a bit.”

  Smalley gives a final look towards the body of Abramowitz and then walks away, rushing past me out the receiving door and into the main grocery. Before I turn to follow, I see a new energy coming from the ghost body of Abramowitz; it’s begun to struggle now, its head is twisting on its neck as if trying to free itself from some invisible trap. The crab then opens its mouth and makes a sound like an angry snake, its teeth bared.

  Jones closes his eyes and holds the knife to the crab’s neck, steadying it by placing his hand on the top of the crab’s head. “I’m sorry,” I whisper again and then walk out the door.

  Chapter 9

  In the light of the morning sun, the D&W hangar/warehouse looks even bigger than it did yesterday at dusk, and despite the fact that there is not a single car or truck parked in the front lot, I have a biting feeling that something is happening inside. It’s not a noise, per se, but some other sense, one that I can’t quite explain.

  After Jones finished his duty in the back of Gray’s Grocery, before we left for the night, he convinced Smalley and me to come back in and loot the store for all we could. It was a good plan, since we all three knew that no matter what, we wouldn’t be coming back. We took what non-perishables we could carry, as well as several dozen pounds of chicken and fish and steak. It may not all get eaten before it spoils, but we’ll give it a shot, and it doesn’t do any good to turn rotten in the store. Last night we ate like lions, devouring half the steak, delicious porterhouses that Smalley cooked like a pro over the small kerosene grill.

  Also, we took every source of fire that remained in the store.

  “Tell me again why you think this is worthwhile,” Smalley asks. We’re still sitting in the RV, debating the tactics we’ll use once we enter the building.

  “This is the company. This is the only thing I know. And unless you two want to come entirely clean about what you know, then we should start here.”

  I’ve opened a gap for either Smalley or Jones to lay all the cards down, but neither speaks up.

  “I told you, two of the people from the diner, one of whom is with the group I’m trying to find, knew this event was coming. And they worked here.”

  “Well, look around, Dom, there’s no one here. Do you see any signs of anything?”

  I keep my intuition to myself. “No, I don’t, but that might be a good thing. If we can get inside, maybe we can find some clues about what happened. About why it happened.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know, Smalley...and for Christ’s sake, do we still have to talk like we’re in goddamn boot camp or something? What is your name, Smalley? Your first name.”

  If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I saw Soldier Smalley blush. She forces her eyes to stay on mine, and a trace of a smile forms at the corners of her mouth. “Stephanie.”

  I smile back and nod. “Stephanie’s a pretty name. How about we go with that from here on out?”

  She drops her gaze now and shrugs. “Fine by me.”

  “And how about you, Mr. Jones—if that is your real name.” It’s a joke, but Jones doesn’t crack a grin. “What did your mother call you when you were a wee lad?”

  I can see the resistance in Jones’ posture, not wanting to get roped into my line of questioning. But it’s quickly followed by the gestures of someone who deems it pointless to make a thing out of not telling me. “Stewart,” he says finally, giving me an are-you-happy-now? look.

  “Ooh, yeah, ‘Stewart.’ Well, how about we just stick with Jones?”

  With that he laughs and then shakes his head slowly. “I don’t really give a crap what you call me, but I do want to know that if we’re going to risk our lives to go in this place, that we’re doing it for a purpose.”

  “You got a bad feeling, Mr. Jones?”

  “Look, I’m not expecting to live forever, or even through today, if I’m being honest, but I don’t want to be stupid either.” He leans forward, peering through the windshield, doing a wide scan of the building. “It looks like a daunting place to be wandering around. And yes, I do have a bad feeling. Usually do.”

  “I don’t know any more than you do, but I think we have to do this. Even more than look for...” I pause, suddenly feeling overwhelmed by the memory of my missing group, feeling like I’ve betrayed friends, cost them their lives. “We’ll just start at the front and work our way through the building.”

  “You think the place is unlocked?”

  “I think the whole damn front of the place is made of glass. And I see enough rocks to build Stonehenge. That makes it unlocked.”

  We’ve double-parked the RV directly next to the building’s entrance, in front of the huge doors, making sure it’s as close as possible if we need to escape quickly, not wanting to make the same errors we did at the grocery store, if and when it comes time to escape.

  I exit the vehicle first and walk to the front door; Stephanie and Jones follow.

  The doors are locked of course, but before I simply fire a boulder through the center, I walk around the side of the building, checking if any of the emergency doors have been opened, perhaps in the blast’s aftermath. They’re locked as well, and I walk back to the front.

  Smalley is standing with her face nearly on the glass, and she slaps a few knocks on it, and then looks over to Jones who’s staring at her, bemused.

  “What?” she asks, splaying her fingers. “Might as well start out polite.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll just feel better about myself.”

  “I’m not sure that’s going to work,” I say, frowning. “I think we’ll need to use a little bit more rugged method.” I dip my head toward a large rock garden that buttresses against the building, lining the sidewalk of the entrance. I walk over and Smalley follows. I pick up one of a hundred meatloaf-sized rocks.

  “That’s not fair. Why do you get all the fun?”

  “I agree. It wouldn’t be fair. Have at it, Stephanie.”

  I get the mayhem started, walking back about ten paces and then turning back toward the building. I dip my right shoulder, allowing gravity to pull the miniature boulder low, stretching my arm fully while fingering the rock to achieve the perfect grip. I take a deep breath and then I hop forward once and step in the direction of the door, swinging my arm forward and releasing the large stone.

  The rock sails through the air and catches the glass dead center, shredding that section of the pane with ease, as if it was made of a thin glaze of ice. It enters the building like a dying bird, leaving a hole in the glass almost identical to the size of the stone itself.

  I see Smalley position herself now, turning left towards me, a southpaw. She takes her hop step and sends her projectile low, taking out a large section of the glass at knee level.

  We both stand still, staring at the destruction, and the first thing I notice is that the sights and sounds seem out of place. This is the wrong reaction to vandalism; there’s no alarm blaring or emergency lights flashing to signal the intrusion.

  But those basic security systems have al
l been dead for weeks now. It’s a new world. A world without power. I’ve known and accepted this reality since several weeks back, but it seems like every day there’s something new to remind me.

  Two more stones fly, then two more, and in less than a minute, the large door of the fancy building is disintegrated. The final throws are largely unnecessary—clearly we’re done now; the entrance is gaping, wide enough that we’ll barely need to turn our bodies to enter—but we threw them anyway, trying to hit any final shards we could find. It’s an act of catharsis, of course, perhaps with a dusting of juvenility.

  Stephanie Smalley turns and looks at me, a smile on her face, her breathing labored. “Goddamn that was fun.”

  I smile back. “Yes it was, Stephanie.”

  We both look at Jones, equal looks of sympathy on both of our faces. He can’t understand what we feel at this moment, not yet, not until he finds his own outlet, his own small way to vent his frustrations over the new world he lives in. The demonstration Smalley and I just gave was small in the big scheme of things, but we both fully understand the necessity of what just took place.

  With the glass now eliminated, there is a clear line of sight into the building, but there is only a blank white wall visible from the front doorway. Once we enter, however, and follow the wall about twenty yards down the hallway to the right, the whole place opens up into a massive room, more in line with the enormity of the place from the outside.

  This front room looks like some kind of lobby—albeit a lobby one might find in an airport or the rotunda of a large museum—and it’s austerely decorated, containing only four or five separate islands of couches and chairs evenly spaced throughout the room. Further into the lobby, across a wide expanse of nothingness, is a long, high desk that seems clearly to have been used as the reception desk during D&W’s days of operation.

  Behind the desk, stretching the entire width of the room, a room that can’t be less than a hundred yards wide, is a metal wall that rises floor to ceiling like the gate to a medieval castle. For all the formality and refinement of the room—sterility is probably the more apt description—there is no play at keeping that image up when it comes to security. Whoever approved the design of this building was not taking any shortcuts on security, and if that meant screwing with the interior architecture, so be it.

  It’s also obvious that the shape of the room matches the shape of the building on the outside—Smalley, Jones, and I are standing at the beginning of a long tube, and if we could tear down the wall in front of us and look straight ahead, the building would go on forever. So it’s great that we got this far into the building, but behind the metal wall, that’s where the business goes down. That’s where we need to get.

  “Jesus Christmas,” Smalley says. “This place is freaking weird. Look at that wall, man. What kind of maniac wouldn’t at least put some drywall over that thing? Give it a coat of paint. I feel like I’m in a science-fiction movie.”

  “You are in one,” I say, not even trying to be funny. “You’ve been in one for a couple of months now.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s right, but still, what kind of person makes a place like this?”

  Jones nods his head as he studies the room, and then answers, as if he knows exactly what he’s talking about. “The kind of person who wants everyone who enters this place to know that the only way they’re getting past this room and to the meat of the building is if they’re invited.”

  He walks forward toward the desk, continuing to study the room. Smalley and I follow.

  “You coming in for a job interview?” he continues. “Got a delivery of flowers. Or pizza or Chinese or the new business cards that just finished printing? You better just plan on parking your ass in one of these chairs until you’re called.” He runs his hand across the back of a stiff, red chair. “No exploring allowed. Ever.”

  We reach the front of the desk and stop. “Well then,” I say, “I guess that raises the obvious question: how are we supposed to get through?” I’m looking intensely at Jones. My question is sincere, challenging the man for an answer.

  Jones frowns and twitches his head, never taking his eyes from the thick metal door, which looks twice as imposing from the distance we are now. He says nothing.

  “There’s got to be a key, right? Maybe here behind the desk or something?” I walk around the front of the desk and assume the position behind it, the position of the receptionist. I pull on the drawers that line the behemoth piece of mahogany furniture. They’re locked.

  Jones continues to stare at the door for a few more seconds and then turns to me, as if the question has broken him from a spell. He scoffs and shakes his head. “This isn’t some Podunk restaurant on the South River. This is a billion-dollar building. Maybe several billion. This place is serious. It may not look like much from the freeway, but look at this place. And who knows what kind of technology is back there.

  “Yeah, it’s impressive,” I agree. My voice containing a so what? tone.

  “My point is, with a place like this, there’s no key to the door. Not to that door.” Jones raises his eyebrows and dips his head toward the back wall. “Not to the door that leads to the kingdom.”

  “So we need a badge? That’s what I told Stella.”

  “Who’s Stella again?” Smalley asks.

  “Not even a badge,” Jones says, not allowing us to digress. “Look at the door. There’s no badge reader for that door. There’s a key pad. Only a code will open that door. Probably no less than eight digits, and probably changed frequently. So unless you know what that number is—or have a thousand years to figure it out—you’re not getting through.”

  “Why can’t we just break it down?” Smalley asks. It’s the question of a child, but it needed to be asked.

  Jones hesitates, blinking quickly several times, processing the question, and then he busts into a full laugh.

  “What?”

  “Break it down? With what? More of your rocks? You think that will work?”

  “No, I didn’t mean with ro—”

  “No!” Jones snaps, and then softens his eyes almost immediately, putting his hands up in a silent apology, shaking his head as if to strike the outburst from the record. “No, we don’t have what we need to get through that door. Not even close. We need a code. Without it we’ll need dynamite. Maybe. A grenade launcher, perhaps. And I’m not even sure those would work. It’s over. This was a good idea, we needed to investigate this place, but it’s a dead end. Let’s just head to the river and see if we can find Dominic’s friends. That was the original plan anyway. If we find—”

  And then we hear it, a sound exploding from the middle section of the door, reverberating through the air with the tenor and danger of electricity. The sound buzzes again, and this time I theorize it’s the work of some magnetic device, releasing the thick latches that secure the door. The metallic noises resonate like the pop of a pistol, inciting in me a similar level of terror.

  A second later, three voices begin to ring through the cavernous room as two women and a man step out into the lobby. They’re in mid-conversation, obviously not expecting to see anything resembling the mayhem that has taken place in the lobby area.

  The door swings wide towards the desk, only a few steps from where I’m standing. If the door had been hinged on the other side, and opened away from the reception desk, the people exiting would have seen us instantly. Jones and Smalley sprint silently around to the far side of the desk, moving away from the door, crouching down as they turn the corner. They glide in like paratroopers and stop on a dime as they sidle up beside me. No one is making eye contact. No one is breathing.

  “I don’t understand why we have to come all the way out here for a bag of pretzels and a soda,” one of the female voices complains. “A billion-dollar company, you’d think they would be able to afford a vending machine in more than one location.”

  “It has nothing to with being able to afford,” the male voice instructs. “It’s a secu
rity issue.”

  “Potato chips and candy bars?”

  “Yes, actually. How would the vendor get back in the crypt to stock the machines? Can you imagine the process for something so trivial? It’s too much of a hassle. The powers that be certainly aren’t going to allow it just so as not to inconvenience low-level employees like you two.”

  “Listen to you now,” the other woman says. “Gets a promotion and suddenly he’s no longer a member of the same class.”

  “Damn right.”

  “You and Colonel Badass and Ms. Wyeth are—”

  “What the f...?”

  I can hear the awe in the voice of the first woman as she cuts off her profanity mid-word, and I know instantly it’s her reaction to the shattered front windows. These three employees—I can’t know their positions at this point, but there seems to be a level of hierarchy separating the man from the women—obviously didn’t hear the shattering from behind the thick steel door; but they sure as hell can see the damage now, the entire first story of the building’s glass front has detonated across the floor of the lobby.

  “What?” the other woman asks. “What is it?” And then, almost immediately, she cries, “Oh my god!”

  “Who’s here?” the male voice shouts, his voice suddenly masculine and alert. I can almost see his head on a swivel, whipping his eyes around the room, searching for the danger.

  I’ve yet to take a breath, my eyes wide, animated, trying to catch the looks of my companions, both of whom have maneuvered themselves in front of me now, facing me. But their eyes are still averted, up and to the side, listening.

  “Maybe it’s just vandals, Spence? You think? Maybe they just busted the door and left.”

  “It’s not vandals. Anyone still in the cordon who took the time to do this would have ripped the place apart. Look at the furniture. It’s all untouched.”

  I can hear the man—Spence—take a step in our direction, toward the desk, the tight rubber soles of his shoes clicking out past the doorway and around to the front of the reception area.