by JJ Pike
SINK
The MELT Series
Book 2
By
JJ Pike
Mike Kraus
© 2019 Muonic Press Inc
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Table of Contents
Last Time, on MELT…
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
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MELT – Book 3
Available Here!
Last Time, on MELT…
Alice Everlee, Senior Vice President and Head of Marketing at Klean & Pure Industries (K&P), is in charge of the ad campaign to launch MELT, a synthetic enzyme designed to “eat” plastic. MELT malfunctions, gnawing its way through the floor at K&P’s headquarters and injuring the young actress, Angelina, who was to appear in the ad.
Dr. Christine Baxter, Chief Scientist at K&P, gives Alice a thumb drive which she says proves MELT was sabotaged. Determined to find out what happened, Alice embarks on an investigation, but not before alerting her husband Bill to the crisis. In a coded phone call, Alice urges Bill to decamp from their New Paltz home to their cabin in the Adirondacks and remove all plastic from their lives.
Because of Alice’s tragic past—her parents were murdered and her sister abducted during Guatemala’s civil war—she’s made sure her family is always prepared for the worst. Their cabin in the Adirondacks is stocked, as is their root-cellar/shelter-in-place bunker. She knows Bill will ensure the family is safe.
Alice visits Angelina in the hospital. Angelina’s burns have morphed, causing extensive damage to her epidermis. Even more alarming: MELT burns Angelina’s caregivers on contact, so no one is able to touch her without fear of extreme injury. Alice has Angelina medivacked to a hospital closer to K&P, where her burns are dressed with a state of the art application of tilapia skins. The medical team is unable to administer painkillers to Angelina because the syringes have a plastic hood at the tip of the needle which causes Angelina excruciating pain. Alice instructs her assistant Fran to get in touch with an old flame, Stephen McKan, who has access to turn of the century medical equipment which contain no plastics. Angelina cannot be handled (because she’s contagious), nor treated with anything that contains plastic.
Alice returns to K&P’s headquarters to find that MELT has been eating its way through the structure, essentially gutting the building from the inside out. Professor Baxter theorizes that MELT may do more than merely eat plastic, it may also do damage to materials that have been coated in plastic. Electrical wires, for example, once coated in plastic might become bearers of MELT once the compound has driven the plastic into the wire. This theory is untested because no one can get near enough to the pit MELT has made of K&P’s headquarters in order to retrieve a sample.
The New York Fire Department is called in to handle the crisis surrounding K&P. Alice is afraid they’re going about their job in the wrong way. She and Professor Baxter convince the Chief that the only way to contain MELT is to isolate the building, secure the basement (from the ground up), and bury the entire mess in a custom-made sarcophagus.
Relieved to finally be making some headway, Alice dines with Stephen McKan. Alice and Stephen had an as-yet undefined (but brief) relationship in college. Before dinner is served, Alice is called back to K&P by her assistant Fran. The fire department has determined that a sarcophagus would be too expensive and take too long to contain the “leak” and are placing charges around the building for a controlled take down. Alice argues vehemently against this approach, but is unable to convince the fire chief to change direction. Desperate to understand what the fire department has done to contain MELT, she takes to the subway to investigate the underside of K&P’s headquarters. If MELT has already made it to the subway, taking the building down in a controlled explosion will do nothing to contain its spread.
Alice discovers a train stalled on the tracks in a tunnel. Passengers are waiting for instructions. She tells them no help is coming and they should exit the train in an orderly fashion. Barb, one of the passengers, gloms on to Alice insisting she can help. Alice would rather go it alone, but when she discovers the train cars have been locked, Barb’s derringer comes in handy. Eventually the two women exit the train and make their way towards the underside of K&P.
Alice determines K&P has not been secured from underneath, which likely means MELT will make its way into the subway. She’s about to exit when the roof begins to cave in.
While Alice is battling MELT in Manhattan, her family faces their own set of crises.
The Everlees have prepped for disaster—their cupboards are stocked, they have bug-out and bug-in bags ready, they even have a root cellar at the cabin that they’ve converted to a “shelter in place” bunker—but nothing could have prepared them for this. Life without plastic is a modern nightmare.
Bill, a former structural engineer and stay at home dad, removes his children—Aggie (15), Midge (8), from their New Paltz, NY home; while simultaneously recalling the twins Paul (19) and Petra (19) from their respective universities—to their cabin in the Adirondacks, where they begin the painstaking task of carrying out Alice’s instructions to remove every shred of plastic from their upstate cabin.
Bill and Alice’s eldest daughter, Petra, has brought her boyfriend Sean to the cabin. Sean is a noob when it comes to surviving in the woods. He’s drowning in his own cologne. Bill asks that he shower. While Sean’s attempting to make himself “odor neutral,” a bear and her cubs infiltrate the compound. Bill, Paul, Petra, and Aggie are dealing with the incursion when Sean stomps out of the house, complaining about his cold shower. The bear charges Bill, ripping a jagged wound in the back of his hand, but is eventually subdued by the kids and transported off the property.
When Bill wakes, he discovers that the family’s supply of pemmican has been destroyed by the bear cubs. Bill elects not to banish Sean from the cabin, but instead teach him some of the rudimentary skills required to survive in the wild. Though Sean is a vegetarian, he agrees to go hunting with Bill so they can bag a deer and begin the arduous task of restocking the supply of pemmican.
The family does its best to remove all plastic, but the task seems almost insurmountable. Bill, exhausted and disheartened, takes an axe to his much-loved hydroponic farm.
When the situation in Manhattan reaches a crisis point, Bill’s neighbor Jo insists Bill come to her house, where there’s both Wi
-Fi and a TV (neither of which are available in the Everlee’s cabin). Buildings around K&P are falling; the crisis is escalating. Bill insists he has to leave immediately to save his wife. Paul demands to go with his father.
Chapter 1
Paul hunkered down beside the fire engine as Manhattan exploded all around him. After his dad had taken off like some kind of deranged loony on a mad mission to find his mom, it was just him and the firefighter crouched by the hulking wheel of the engine.
Battered drywall, shards of glass, and misshapen chunks of building rained down on the street, bouncing off car hoods, thunking into the asphalt. Car horns blared into the glowering grey, but there were no human sounds, no screams of pain or cries for help. Cabbies and customers—anyone with half a brain—had taken off running, as soon as the first blast shook the ground. Everyone except for him and his dad. They’d run towards the percussive nightmare rather than away. Now he was trapped at the west end of 38th Street just a few blocks from his mom’s work, abandoned and afraid and smeared in his dad’s blood.
This was not what he had bargained for. He thought they would drive into the city, find Mom outside her offices or at least on her block. He wasn’t stupid. Her building collapse had even made it to the local news, so she wouldn’t be in any of the usual places. But he thought she’d at least be nearby, they’d find her, and they'd all get the hell out of town. Instead, they’d met nothing but resistance and diversions.
He covered his mouth as best he could. The ash was getting thicker, more pungent, scorching his lungs. He pulled his hoodie up over his nose, anything to keep the chemical stench at bay.
He should have known it was all going to go wrong from the moment they driven into Manhattan. Grandma Margaret had refused to come with them when Dad said she needed to evacuate her Morningside Heights apartment, which seemed stupid now that he was in the middle of a veritable war zone. Then there’d been a police blockade at 59th Street, right at the entrance to Central Park. They had to ditch the car and walk twenty whole blocks to make it to the west side where his mom’s firm—Klean & Pure Industries—had their headquarters. Then the bombs had started going off and the sky had turned to fire and ash and falling concrete.
Having to take shelter from bombs was bad enough, but it had gotten worse. His dad had been hit by a piece of falling masonry and totally lost his mind. He’d gone from being the calm, gentle, mostly rational member of the family to a babbling idiot who took off into the thick, acrid smoke to find Mom.
Paul made himself into a small ball, crunching in as tight as possible, his head tucked into his chin, his jacket yanked up over his head, his arms nestled underneath his armpits. He didn’t want to get hit by any debris while he came up with a plan of action. It wasn’t working. The onslaught of bits of building hadn’t let up and, when he snuck a look, miniscule burning particles were still wafting to the ground.
Mom had told stories of being in Manhattan on 9/11—how no one thought about the fact that the ash was partly the remains of the people who’d been in the Towers when they fell, not until much later—and now here he was, the grit from the sky sticking to the sticky mess all over his hands. It grossed him out. He didn’t want to be smothered in the ash of dead people. Or his dad’s blood. He wanted to be back at the cabin with his sisters Petra, Aggie, and Midge, taking care of the animals, sorting their supplies, helping with the ridiculous “get rid of all plastics” project they’d been working on when he left. He’d never wanted anything so much in his whole life, which was ironic because he’d been pissed when his dad had told him to get up there. Was that really only two days ago? It felt like a different era. So much had happened since then and none of it made sense. Manhattan was burning and he was in the middle of the raging conflagration.
His eyes burned and itched behind his dad’s goggles. They weren’t keeping the grit or fumes or whatever was coming down on them off his corneas. He wrenched them off and stuffed them in his pocket. The stinging was a hundred times worse. He put them back on again.
“Focus,” he said. “You’re in the heart of New York City. Remember their emergency guidelines.”
Shooter, biological, or chemical threat? Go. Leave. Don’t remain in place.
Radiological threat? Stay. Shelter in place. Get yourself out of the way of the fallout.
He knew all about sheltering in place. They had a root cellar back home that they could use as a bunker in the event of a nuclear attack. He was pretty sure this wasn’t a radiological event. No one in Manhattan had a nuke. And if they had, the news would have said something about it. And, anyways, if it had been, he’d have been vaporized already. No, this was either the world’s most amazingly unlucky building collapse—though that seemed like a remote possibility now that there were actual bomb blasts—or it was some kind of terrorist act.
The firefighter who’d tried to get them to safety had said something about Klean & Pure’s headquarters being rigged with their ordnance. The fire department had been planning on taking the building down in a “controlled implosion.” They didn’t want the building to collapse onto its neighbors. But the dynamite charges had gone off too soon or not in the right order or in a way that made things worse. The firefighter had been gabbing, spouting theories, panicked. Not what Paul wanted to hear from one of New York’s Bravest. So, there was a slight possibility that the explosions still rocking Midtown were an unlucky series of events, a kind of disaster domino effect. That was the “good” interpretation. He didn’t want to think about the “bad” interpretation. If he did, he’d fold in on himself and he couldn’t afford to do that. He needed to get into action, come up with a plan, go find his mom.
The official emergency protocols had you assess what you were facing, but he had no way of knowing who or what the enemy was or which way danger lay. It was a monumental mess. Should he go north and loop back down 11th Avenue to get as close to Klean & Pure as possible, or go south? Either way, he needed to wait until the explosions stopped. So, shelter in place for now, then move when the coast was clear.
He wasn’t going to make it anywhere if he didn’t seek better cover. The wheels began to turn in his brain. It was his analytic self firing up. Finally. He had to weigh his options in a clinical, detached way; let go of the emotions this chaotic mess had stirred up; look this thing straight in the eyes and make some tough decisions. His two options were: get the hell out, get hard data on what was going on, then assess and come back when it was safer or, alternatively, stand his ground, wait till the burning slowed, then charge in and find his mom and dad. One was sensible, the other brave. There was no choice. He had to stay.
The firefighter’s walkie was blaring instructions, though Paul could only hear one word in five. He’d definitely heard the phrase “safe haven” which sounded good to him. He waited. Surely they were going to get information about the attack and then instructions about where to go and what to do and how to avoid getting pummeled by falling buildings. The firefighter wasn’t sharing. He probably already knew where they were supposed to go. The fact that they hadn’t moved meant it wasn’t possible to get from here to there safely.
A massive slab of concrete crashed down beside them. The road shuddered and shook, splintering into an ugly cracked mess. They had to move. They were too close to the epicenter of the unfolding tragedy. Safety was a relative term. This for reals wasn’t safe.
“Dude,” he whispered. Dang, why had he whispered? It wasn’t like there were snipers or enemy combatants or bands of military squads rushing the streets. And there was no one around to hear him. It had been a reflex. “Dude,” he said, louder this time.
The firefighter didn’t respond.
“No way.” He was back to whispering. “No, no, no, no, no.” He reached a tentative hand towards the firefighter and placed it gently on his shoulder. The guy didn’t move. “Damn it,” said Paul. He was out cold. Or worse. Paul needed to find out which because if he was just concussed like Dad had been, he’d pull him under the e
ngine and go get help. But if it was worse…what then?
Decide that when I know, he thought.
He inched forward, still covering as much of his body as he could from the never-ending onslaught of terror from the sky, and pulled the man towards him. The firefighter tipped backwards, landing in his lap. Paul did his best not to freak. That wouldn’t help either of them. But he only had half a face, or at least his entire left cheek and jaw was a bloody, caved-in mess which, on any normal day, was something to freak out about.
“Today is not a normal day,” he muttered. “Today is the day you bring it.” It was something his mother said to them when they were in training. It hadn’t made sense to him before now, but with a dead firefighter balanced on his knees, all the whackadoo advice she’d ever given them was starting to line up.
The man hacked and coughed, spraying blood over Paul’s jacket and shirt.
“Holy cow,” he shouted. “You have got to be kidding me. No way you’re still alive, bro.”
But he was. Alive and suffering. They couldn’t stay where they were. Paul banged his elbow on the side of the Engine as hard as he could. The metal clanged and echoed good and loud. If there was someone inside, they could get down here and save them. That’s what firefighters did; they helped people on the worst day of their lives. He didn’t hear any answer. Perhaps he was positioned too far down the rig. The guys would be up front.
