by Pike, JJ
Petra solicits the help of a nurse, Cassie, to sit with Midge and Betsy then she and Jim take off for home. Cassie’s hand is bandaged. She was the nurse Petra saw entering the hospital when the burn victims were admitted.
Back at the compound, there’s a gun battle. Mimi is hit but Jim and Petra kill the intruders.
Cassie calls to say the hospital is going into lockdown. Petra tells her to leave the parking lot immediately and drive back to the house slowly so Midge isn’t injured.
Aggie, who has been MIA since she killed Arthur Foss, returns home. She has visited the salt mines their father, Bill, had marked on his maps and believes she has found a place for them to hide out until the crisis has passed.
Realizing just how sick Midge is, and worried that the job may prove too much for Nurse Betsy, Petra solicits another nurse to come and help them.
Sean, whose folks are rich, agrees to foot the bill.
When Cassie, Midge, and Betsy arrive home, Petra kills Nurse Cassie. There’s an infectious agent out there; they don’t know how it’s spreading; the hospital is on full quarantine; she believes Cassie was infected. Unlike Aggie, who was plagued with misgivings when she shot Arthur, Petra has no such qualms. She has been transformed from a nervous Nellie to a “shoot first, ask questions later” warrior.
BOOK FIVE: RAZE
Alice Everlee is evacuated to Charles Sullivan III’s Red Hook, NY mansion, where her husband Bill is being treated for his life-threatening wounds.
When Pete, who’d made it through the collapse of the New York Subway system, dies of his MELT-related infection, Charles and his entourage decamp to yet another mansion further north. Charles’ fear of germs is so profound that when they depart Red Hook, they blow the mansion and everything in it to smithereens.
As soon as she has access to a working phone, Alice calls everyone she knows. None of her children respond. She decides they must have rid themselves of all plastics, per her instructions, which would mean they no longer have their phones. She eventually reaches her assistant, Fran, who’s thrilled to hear from Alice. Fran and Professor Baxter urge Alice to return to help them with the effort to halt MELT. Alice demurs. Bill and the kids need her more than K&P.
Now at a “safe” distance from Manhattan, Alice nurses Bill. When he wakes, he asks Alice where their son Paul is. Alice is furious that Bill left their upstate cabin and put their son in danger.
Charles Sullivan, while extremely rich, is developmentally delayed. He insists his staff cater to his every whim. When Alice refuses, he puts her under house arrest. She reveals that their pilot has a lesion on his hand; MELT might have followed them to the new house. Charles and his retinue decamp once again, leaving Alice and Bill to their fate. The next morning, Alice watches as another of Charles’ houses explodes, loads Bill into a van, and heads for home.
Klean & Pure’s Manhattan complex has been decimated. The remaining K&P team have relocated to a New Jersey laboratory. Convinced Michael Rayton is the saboteur who meddled with MELT, Professor Baxter has banned him from all meetings.
Michael, who in addition to his duties at K&P is a CIA operative, recruits FBI Agent, Jo Morgan, to be his eyes and ears during K&P briefings. Over time he comes to suspect that Jo isn’t keeping him in the loop. He charges his lover, Fran (Alice’s assistant) to find out all she can about the professor’s movements. If fully briefed, Michael believes he’ll be able to solve the highly-technical puzzle that this new version of MELT poses.
The K&P team have samples of MELT-infected fish, rats, and human cadavers on site for investigation. Professor Baxter wants to assess the action of MELT on the body. It is, after all, eating human flesh as well as the buildings across the water.
The lab that houses the specimens goes into meltdown and the team are evacuated. Michael returns to the lab to conduct some ad hoc experiments, hoping that his show of bravado will yield answers, return him to Professor Baxter’s good graces, and secure him a place on K&P’s science team.
During the course of Michael’s experiments, he discovers an unmanned computer terminal and is able to reach out to his colleague Xiao-peng Zhang of Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, to brainstorm possible reasons MELT has gone off the rails. Zhang suggests there’s been a structural change made to MELT, but their conversation is interrupted by a soldier who attempts to make a citizen’s arrest. Michael reveals that MELT is a biological weapon that was created overseas, but at the behest of the United States government. Fran disables the soldier and she and Michael race to catch Professor Baxter before she leaves K&P’s New Jersey compound.
Jim Asher, Alice’s elderly neighbor, and his wife Betsy have taken the Everlee children—Midge (who’s in a coma), Petra, and Aggie—into their home, following the destruction of the Everlee’s cabin. Petra’s boyfriend, Sean, is still in the picture.
Sean, whose parents are richer than rich, has offered a team of local doctors and nurses double their annual salary to come to the Asher home to nurse Midge. Furthermore, Sean claims he knows how to procure large quantities prescription counter drugs, which will be useful once New York has gone into a post-SHTF freefall.
Jim and Sean go to a drug buy. They score a massive duffel bag of opioids. On the way back home they’re stopped at a police checkpoint. The authorities are looking for anyone who might have been infected with MELT. There’s a state-wide quarantine being enforced. Sean’s stiches have opened and bleed onto the road during the police stop. Jim covers for Sean, claiming the blood is his. Sean takes off. Jim’s arrested and removed to a “health camp.”
The health camp is a rustic affair: nothing more than a few wooden huts and several thousand feet of razor wire. The main gate is manned by soldiers, the perimeter is patrolled, and there are snipers in the surrounding trees. Food—in the form of expired MREs—is airdropped in, daily. There’s no running water or latrines.
In the health camp, patients are divided into three groups. There are the “Healthies” (name says it all), the “Sickies” (those with frank signs of infection from MELT), and the “Specters” (a group that is neither healthy nor sick. They are “(ex)-s’pected” to fall ill and are in partial quarantine). Jim is adjudged healthy and joins the Legion of Protection, a group of men who maintain order in the camp.
Jim’s duties include burying the Sickies who’ve died overnight. He’s rewarded with real food, served in the Army’s private galley, which is housed in a sanitary encampment a few thousand feet west of the health camp.
While collecting the dead, Jim spots Paul Everlee in the Specter’s zone. He promises he’ll find a way to get Paul upgraded to the Healthies’ end of the camp.
Jim’s supervisor, Eddie the Enforcer, is a brutal man who maintains order by bullying and beating the inmates. Jim gradually comes to learn that the Legion isn’t only maintaining order but starving the Sickies and hastening their end. When Jim witnesses a guard removing a Sickie before their death and wheeling them to a nearby grave, he quits the Legion, claiming that his time in Vietnam has left him with an aversion to violence and gore.
Wanting to make himself useful and ingratiate himself with the head of the Legion of Protection so he can spring Paul from his limbo-like prison, Jim decides to create working latrines. He pulls together some reluctant volunteers and begins digging.
When he turns in for the night, he overhears a brutal assault on a young woman, Hedwig, whom he met when first being transported into the camp.
Unable to stand by while Hedwig is assaulted, Jim sets Eddie’s hut on fire, grabs Hedwig, finds Paul and races to the camp perimeter.
Hedwig is in deep shock and unable to fend for herself. Between them, Paul and Jim get her under the fence to freedom.
A guard spots the commotion by the fence but rather than allow his friends to be recaptured, Jim lies in the dirt and feigns sleep. Paul and Hedwig are freed, but Jim remains a prisoner of the camp.
BOOK SIX: PURGE
Radio personalities Widget and Goobz host a show called The Raw Truth. T
he show is a mix of prepper tips, conspiracy theories, interviews, and reports on MELT’s progress. During the show, Widget interviews people who’ve been trapped behind the newly-created “line” which prevents those infected with MELT from moving out of the hot zone. The line is held by armed soldiers who’ve been given the order to shoot to kill.
Widget recruits some of his listeners to take their drones and film what’s going on inside the line. As a result of his efforts, at least one couple are freed, and we learn that Barb—who helped Alice and Bill escape the subway and Manhattan—has made it out of the zone with a pack of 37 dogs. Barb remains convinced she’s been called by God to save the animals who’ve been left behind.
During the show a caller, who identifies herself as “Ella,” claims to have the inside scoop on the release of MELT. She says the release was no accident. Goobz, Widget’s technician, analyzes Ella’s voice, and finds she’s using voice-masking software so they’re unable to determine whether their insider is a man or a woman.
Widget breaks the news that the Indian Point Nuclear Power Station is on fire.
Aggie Everlee hears Widget’s broadcast claiming that Indian Point is compromised. She urges the family to move from Jim and Betsy’s cabin to the salt mines, which Bill had marked on the maps he was studying before he left home. No one listens to her.
She beats a retreat to her hideout in the horse loft, along with Jo’s golden Labrador, Reggie. She struggles with her conscience. She’s convinced her older sister, Petra, should not have killed Nurse Cassie, even though Cassie was infected with a disease Petra believes would have killed them all.
While in her loft, Aggie spots a couple of invaders on the property. The two girls, who are in camo, dig up a couple of Jim’s gun stashes.
Aggie rushes to their root cellar to find it has been ransacked; as has Jim and Betsy’s.
Aggie tracks the girls, unseen, but Jo’s dog Reggie is apparently their BFF. The thieves have been coming to their property for long enough to befriend the dog. The girls allow Reggie to tag along with them for a while, but eventually leave him tied to a tree, frantic and howling. Aggie can’t abandon Reggie like the girls did, so she allows him to come with her on her reconnaissance mission but he eventually blows her cover and Aggie is captured, thrown into the trunk of a car, and driven to Wolfjaw Ridge’s secessionist compound.
Aggie’s held prisoner. Reggie’s given free run of the compound. Aggie is tried for trespass and possible spying by the compounds’ elders during which time she discovers her mother is known to them. She doesn’t understand what this means or when it might be useful, but she holds on to the hope that they at least won’t kill her.
When the compound is invaded by a rival group, who claim that Wolfjaw have been ransacking businesses and homes throughout the area, Aggie makes her escape.
When she returns home her moral qualms have been all but banished. She knows she has to defend her family and their remaining possessions with deadly force if they’re to survive in this cruel new world. She leaves Petra at the front of the house with a bag of Jim’s guns and orders her to keep them safe.
Paul Everlee lies outside the health camp where he and Jim were held as prisoners. Having freed a young woman, Hedwig, with Jim’s help, Paul is determined not to let her be captured by the approaching guards. Hedwig—hysterical and unmoving—does nothing to protect herself, so Paul has no choice but to remove her to safety by force.
Paul knows he has to return to the camp to free Jim. When they’re surprised by a stalker, Hedwig kills him and dumps his body in the undergrowth.
Eventually Hedwig takes the navigational lead and takes them to the south end of the health camp where the sickest of the sick are housed. Though guards patrol the perimeter, Hedwig claims they have created a blind spot where they step away from their designated patrol route because they’re afraid of contracting the flesh-eating disease that’s ravaging those in the south of the camp.
Hedwig leaves Paul to survey the lay of the land.
Travon, the head of the Sickies, spots Paul lying in the underbrush and tells him to enter the camp via the escape tunnel they’ve been digging.
Travon has a plan to overthrow the guards and liberate the health camp. He sends the preschooler, Bryony, towards the guards followed by the sickest of their members. His theory is the guards will be too terrified to touch any of the Sickies and will abandon their posts.
Paul, so hungry and thirsty he’s now hallucinating, is barely able to tell fact from fiction. Eventually he accepts a drink from a Sickie and is partially restored to his senses.
The battle does not go as planned and when Bryony is beaten by a guard, Paul rushes to her rescue. He and Bryony hide in one of the guard’s small huts by the gate. Hedwig eventually finds them, binds Bryony’s broken arm, and the three leave the camp with a battered and bruised Jim.
Hedwig steals a Humvee and takes Paul back to the Army camp to collect supplies. While they’re loading up their vehicle, Paul passes soldiers who are trussed and held captive. Hedwig challenges him to imagine what their crimes might have been and Paul finally has to face the horrific reality that war makes monsters and rapists of some men.
Paul, Jim, Bryony, and Hedwig drive through the woods and towards Paul’s home. When they reach the highway, it’s impassible. People have abandoned their cars. Paul and Hedwig agree to walk the last few miles back to the house.
As they approach, Paul is shot.
On to Book 7 in the MELT Series: FLEE
CHAPTER ONE
Josephine Morgan: known to her friends as a widow, neighbor, and all-round reliable gal was tagged by her colleagues as a field agent with an impeccable track record and a nose for trouble. It was no surprise that she was at the center of a complicated intelligence web that spanned the entire service.
With news that MELT might have been incubated in a foreign laboratory, the investigation into the origins and composition of what Professor Baxter had dubbed “Melt-plus” included agents from Counterintelligence, Counterterrorism, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation unit, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate…The list went on.
They’d patched Jo into a video conference call, even though she was bouncing around in the back of a military transport vehicle, to discuss next steps. She had her laptop on her knees which meant she had to hold onto it with one hand, but with the other she grasped a leather strap that hung from the vehicle’s roof. The truck was a no-frills affair, but someone had put a little thought into how not to have them all die on the way to Fort Monmouth where they’d create a “no-plastics allowed here” laboratory and continue their investigation into—she sighed—were they honestly going to find a way to halt MELT?
Jo had stopped listening halfway through the roll call. What it meant, practically speaking, was a lot of ego and testosterone had been added into the mix. She knew most of the players personally. Alexander Acron from Counterintelligence was solid. She trusted everything that came out of his mouth. They’d worked together twice and both times he’d been the guy she went to when she needed a sounding board and his counsel had been rock solid. Compare and contrast Sam “Come at Me, Bro” Larson from Organized Crime. He’d gotten his nickname in a particularly stupid bar fight in New Jersey when he was supposed to be undercover. RICO cases were notoriously long and complicated and required agents with spine and good sense, neither of which Sam appeared to possess. She greeted both men as their faces popped up on her screen, keeping her smile in place, but made a note to tell her boss they needed to work around Sam as much as possible.
“Where are you now? Not in Klean & Pure’s New Jersey plant, right?” The line was secure. Alex believed he could speak relatively freely. No one with any intelligence training truly believed in a “totally secure line,”—you never knew who was skulking on the other end and/or whether you could trust them not to be recording; hackers got younger and better by the second; AI was always listening in, even if humans weren’t, etc., etc., etc.
,—but they did the best they could. He and Jo knew how to talk around a subject and still communicate effectively.
“Let me introduce you guys to everyone on my end.” What remained of K&P’s MELT team was in a military convoy heading out of their contaminated labs in New Jersey. Not everyone in her immediate vicinity had security clearance and Jo had no clue what might come next. “Professor Christine Baxter, Head of K&P’s science division. She’s leading the charge with regards to combating MELT’s advance.”
Christine didn’t smile for the camera or the new humans who’d barged into her sphere electronically. She was agitated and annoyed. Losing yet another lab had her worked up into a lather.
“Professor Baxter’s assistant Fran…” She didn’t know Fran’s last name. She left a space which Fran would fill. If you knew how it was easy enough to get people to talk. Especially women who wanted to be polite. Fran was precisely the kind of young woman who’d be easy to press for answers. She wanted to excel and she wanted to please; the kind of combination that made for an easy interrogation.
