Melt (Book 7): Flee

by Pike, JJ

  No one had heard of K&P. At least no one Bill had ever talked to. How was the army man suddenly an expert?

  “It was an accident,” said Alice. “A terrible accident.”

  The sergeant and his minions laughed.

  “No one could have foreseen this,” said Alice.

  “Seems like a couple of hundred geniuses working around the clock to rid the world of plastic should have had their eye on that particular ball. How could you not have seen this coming?”

  Alice didn’t answer. Good move. The way this guy was challenging her suggested a fight was brewing. She’d know how to handle him. Alice was a pro when it came to reading people. All he needed to do was look vaguely respectable, mostly awake and alert, but not add fuel to the fire.

  “They say it’s the biggest industrial accident in history. That miles and miles of the eastern seaboard are polluted because of you clowns. That it’s going to take longer to repair itself than Fukushima or Chernobyl.”

  Seemed K&P had been in the news. Not in any way they ever wanted to be. They were infamous now rather than famous.

  “Sarge?” One of the minions had made his way around their van and was peering through Bill’s window. “This one’s bleeding.”

  Bill held one hand up. “I’m fine. All fine. Not bleeding anymore.”

  The kid flicked off the safety on his gun. “Out of the vehicle, please.”

  “He doesn’t have it,” said Alice, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “How do you know?” The sargent had joined his man on Bill’s side of the van. “Out of the car, sir. This won’t take long.”

  Alice opened her door.

  “Don’t move, Ma’am. Like I said, this won’t take more than a minute or two.”

  “It was an industrial accident.” Alice had her hands back on the wheel where the sergeant could see them. “He was caught in a house collapse…”

  “In Manhattan?”

  “No.” She was too quick to answer, too eager. They’d know that was a lie. Bill flinched as his door swung open. “In Connecticut. We were guests of Charles Sullivan III. Do you know him?”

  “Never heard of him. Come towards me with your hands in the air, sir.”

  Bill did his best, but his legs were Jell-O and he only had one hand and couldn’t stabilize himself. He stumbled out of the van, landing on his knees.

  Maggie-loo whined as he hit the ground. When he turned back to check on Alice he could see the pitbull leaning over the back of the seat, eager to understand what was going on.

  “Hands behind your head.”

  “I can’t.” Bill sank down on his haunches.

  “He lost an arm,” said Alice. “It was crushed. We had to amputate.”

  “There’s a statewide curfew for everyone who’s infected. He needs to go to a specially designated hospital. You know that, right?”

  Alice didn’t answer. Again, smart move.

  Bill was sweating even more profusely, moisture pooling under his armpits and down his back.

  “I’m going to ask you to undress slowly, sir.”

  Bill laughed. “I can’t. I have one hand and it’s barely any use. If my wife can come and help me…”

  The sargent and his trigger-happy corporal didn’t get any closer.

  “Ma’am. If you could step out of the car, hands on your head, and walk towards me. No sudden moves. No monkey business.”

  What kind of monkey business was he imagining they might get up to, out here in the back end of beyond?

  Alice got out of the car. Maggie-loo followed, then Mouse. They didn’t want to let Alice out of their sight. She had three shadows now; one human-shaped and two dog-shaped. If he hadn’t been in blinding pain, Bill might have found it funny. His wife, with dogs. Who’d have thunk it?

  “Keep your left hand on your head and use your right hand to unbutton your husband’s shirt.”

  “I know what you’re looking for,” said Alice, “and he’s clear. We just left Charles Sullivan’s house at dawn and we’ve been on the road ever since. If he’d been bleeding it would show.”

  The sergeant pointed at Bill’s stump. The bandages were a nasty, dark brown.

  “If you’re unwilling to undress and show that you’re unmarked we’ll have no choice. We’ll have to escort you to the nearest camp.”

  “Fine,” said Alice. “But it’s going to take some time. I’m going to get supplies out of the car so I can dress his wound.” She didn’t ask permission. Instead she went to it.

  Bill didn’t know what the soldiers were looking for. Alice seemed to be clued in. He’d slept through something important. She’d tell him later. Now was no time for questions.

  The first thing Alice did was to remove the gummed-up, semi-peeled fentanyl patch. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  Bill was swamped with relief, his chest tingling and his breath coming faster and easier. He hadn’t realized he was clutching, internally, until he stopped doing it. She was on his side. He should have remembered that. There was nothing they wouldn’t do for each other and no power known to man that could come between them.

  In a field somewhere in Massachusetts, Alice Everlee undressed her husband and allowed a couple of soldiers to examine his skin from crown to sole.

  It was clumsy. Hurt like hell. Could have been humiliating. But none of those things mattered. Alice kept her eyes on his at every turn, sometimes smiling, sometimes blushing. Bill was moved that she managed to undertake this task as if they were alone in the comfort of their own home with no one looking on. It was sweet and intimate.

  No one spoke. No one else existed. It was just the two of them. Well, the two of them, three soldiers, two dogs, a tank, and several semi-automatic weapons.

  And a raging stump.

  Bill had to have seen his mangled arm before now, but he didn’t remember this swollen monstrosity with its patches of blackened skin and a bulbous, deformed lump of crimson hanging off the end of his humerus. He was hallucinating or imagining things, he knew that, but his stump pulsed and echoed, like a mangled heart beating out of sync with the rest of his body. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  The soldiers kept him at a distance but checked his troll’s club, which lived where his arm had once lived, with great care.

  “You can see where the wound was cauterized,” said Alice. She didn’t touch him either, but her “no touching the patient” came from a place of love rather than fear. “The swelling is a byproduct, not a symptom of the disease. There are no open lesions, no suppurating sores. He’s clean.”

  Bill searched her face for clues. What did they expect to find? What kind of sores made people this afraid?

  The inspection didn’t take “a couple of minutes,” like they said it would. It took at least 20, most of that time spent looking at his stump and talking about whether he passed or not.

  “She’s right,” said the sergeant, “it’s God-awful and ugly, but there are no open wounds. He’s clear.”

  The soldiers stepped back a few feet which was Alice’s cue to dress him.

  She pulled a clean t-shirt over his head. Bill gasped. She’d barely grazed the raw stump where his arm had once lived, but it brought back the knives and pokers and fire he’d been experiencing earlier.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll do better.” She pulled a can of Dermoband out of her bag. “This is going to sting a little.” She sprayed the antibacterial solution up and down his arm.

  Bill sweated and swore but stayed on the ground where he was no threat to the soldiers. It was like sawing his arm off all over again. Alice was saying sweet things in a low voice but he couldn’t hear any of them. His head was full of wasps; his arm a bloated poem to their vicious, stinging attack. They didn’t stop buzzing until he was bandaged and fully dressed. And even then they zzzzzd and bzzzzd and jabbed him with their stingers. He longed for the fentanyl patch.

  Alice helped him to his feet. “Like I said, we’re not infected. I’m on my way to meet my
team. If you don’t mind, we’d like to get back on the road.”

  For some reason undressing and inspecting him counted as undressing and inspecting both of them. It made no sense, but Bill was willing to embrace any breaks that came their way.

  “Your team?”

  Bill staggered towards the van, leaning on Alice and trying not to step on the dogs that wound under her feet. The sausage dog in particular was hard not to squish.

  “I was separated from my team when Manhattan went into lockdown, but we’re rendezvousing in Springfield.” Alice let him lean on her as he forced himself back into his seat, then closed his door as gently as she could and turned to the man in charge.

  “Springfield, Mass?”

  “Yes. We have a laboratory there.”

  They didn’t.

  She was a good liar. Bill hadn’t imagined she’d take to it with such alacrity.

  “We’re working on a solution.”

  Were they? He hadn’t heard anything about that. Then again, he’d been in a drug-laden sleep for days.

  “You’re headed in the wrong direction. Most people are headed north and west.”

  “Springfield is west of here.”

  The sergeant ignored her. “The roads around the exclusion zone have checks and blocks. If the exclusion zone expands you’re not going to be able to get through.”

  His corporal snorted. “Why would anyone want to get through?”

  Bill struggled to follow the conversation. Alice repeatedly claimed she was meeting Professor Christine Baxter to come up with a way to halt MELT. The military guys cautioned her against meeting in Springfield. He thought he heard the word “nuclear” but that was nutso-crazy. Who would attack at a time like this? Slowly he came to understand that they meant there was a leak. At Indian Point. Like, now. Happening in real time. On American soil. He grappled with the door handle but couldn’t get it to budge. He was drained dry. Alice had her hand on Maggie-loo’s head. Shoot, when did she turn into a dog lover?

  “I understand,” she said. “And we’re in touch. If the wind turns we’ll relocate.”

  That was a genuine misstep. Only an idiot would believe her.

  Fortunately for them, they’d run into a hive of idiots. They were buying her story, offering her an escort, telling her they wanted to see this thing through with her. When had that happened? Had he zoned out? They were being all friendly and stuff with his wife. She was the hero of the hour, the one who was going to solve the problems that MELT posed, a champion of the common man. Or something like that. The wires in his brain were crossed and he was hearing more than one thread of information.

  Alice slid back into the van.

  “Are we really going to Springfield?” Bill’s nails dug into his thigh. He was fighting sleep again. It came in massive waves, threatening to wipe him out.

  “We are now,” she said.

  She had a cell phone in one hand and a green box in the other. The khaki box had an antenna. Right. A military radio. They’d equipped her with a couple of ways to contact her team. The grizzled sergeant was at the window, telling her to make the call.

  His manner wasn’t as friendly as it had seemed just a few seconds earlier.

  Alice dialed a number. She had it on speaker. Following orders? Must be. The phone rang but went to voicemail. She dialed another number, same outcome. She dialed a third number and Fran, her assistant, picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Fran, it’s Alice. I’ve got Billy with me.”

  Everyone who was anyone in Alice’s life had some kind of alert code built into their relationship, “just in case.”

  “In case I get kidnapped,” she’d say, “or am on a flight that is hijacked. Or need to talk to you from a prison cell. Or am detained against my will by a foreign power. Or any reason you can think of where I am not able to talk freely. I will always let you know how I am and, in as far as it’s possible, where I am, who has me, and what they want.” All without alerting them to the fact that she was relaying important information right under their noses.

  Everyone knew he was “Bill” not “Billy.” Fran was especially attuned to Alice’s code-speak.

  “How’s he doing? Is he healing?”

  Wow. So, Fran knew he’d been injured? They must have talked before now. Good. Right? That was good? He kept his face as blank and impassive as he could, though he was nowhere near as good as Alice at this spy shit.

  “Not too bad. I just dressed Billyboy’s wounds. I can’t moan about it too much, even though he’s in pain. Charles left us with a good supply of bandages and…” She laughed. Bill knew it was a fake, but it sounded pretty convincing. “…a variety of cocktails.” Alice curled a lock of hair around her index finger as if this was an ordinary opening conversation with a friend who liked to get caught up with personal details before they got down to business. She couldn’t let it go on for too long before she aroused suspicion, but she’d already signaled that they were in trouble (“moan” was code for “lamentations”, “cocktails” meant they had a lot of drugs, which would tell Fran they were on the move. The mention of Charles’ name told Fran where they’d been, assuming she’d known where they were from an earlier conversation). Bill knew he was coming to this late in the game. There was information in play that he was not privy to.

  “We’re no longer in New Jersey,” said Fran.

  “Perfect. I’m glad you guys made it out of there. We were worried about you. We’re several hours from Springfield, but we ought to make it by nightfall. That’s still the goal, right, meet up at the lab on the southside?” It all sounded perfectly natural if you weren’t on the lookout for someone who was feeding information to their colleague.

  “Yup. We’ll be there,” said Fran. She hadn’t given much away. In fact as Bill picked through what she’d said, she’d given nothing away. Was that part of their plan? Did it tell Alice what she needed to know?

  “There’s someone here who wants to talk to you,” said Alice. She held her hand over the mouthpiece. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

  “Sergeant Pottinger.”

  “Would you tell Sergeant Pottinger who I am and where we’re meeting, Fran? I need some special travel permit or something. I’m not sure what it’s about. I think he just wants to make sure I am who I say I am before he lets us pass.”

  Pottinger took the phone from Alice. “Who am I speaking to?”

  “Fran Loomaye.

  “Rank? Sorry, title? What do you do at Klean & Pure?”

  “I’m a Senior Vice President, like Alice.”

  She wasn’t.

  “Don’t they give titles out like candy in the private sector.” He laughed. “What do you do? What authority do you have? How can you act as a referee for this woman?”

  “I’ve worked with Alice on the development of MELT for several years. If you’d like me to describe what we’ve done, I can, though time is running short.”

  “Madam, I’m conducting sweeps to keep this corridor clear of infection and the spread of the compound you call MELT. I need you to answer my questions fully and completely.”

  Nothing like a man in uniform with a little power and a massive gun to overstep their authority. Bill lay his head back on the rest. Half an hour of interacting with strangers and he was ready for a three-year nap. There was an “infection” out there. Was that why they’d made him get naked? So they could inspect him for sores brought on by this infection?

  Fran was every bit as accomplished as Alice when it came to the lies department. If she was to be believed, she’d been involved in marketing this wonder-compound, had overseen the evacuation of their headquarters when MELT got loose, almost single-handedly made sure the team was safe, worked with the fire department to secure the building. When they overrode her orders she fought to make them understand that this was an error.

  “If they’d only listened to me,” she said. “We wouldn’t be in this mess. Bringing that building down was what set this
all in motion. They were doing their jobs, but they got that bit wrong. We told them, didn’t we Alice? We warned them. But they wouldn’t listen. They had to do it their way.”

  Alice turned and raised her eyebrows at Bill. What had she heard? Something? In that pile of self-aggrandizing lies was something that had caught Alice’s attention. Good. The more Fran told them about what was going on down at K&P the better.

  Eventually the conversation wound to a close. Pottinger was satisfied that Alice, rather than being a threat to national security, should be allowed to continue her journey.

  “Corporal Jank will escort you.”