by JJ Pike
“What’s your name?” she said. Establish a rapport. Pretend you’re interested in them personally, even if they’ve said nothing of interest yet.
The woman looked up at her, then swiveled in place and made direct eye-contact with her husband. He shrugged. Christine had no idea what that might mean. Was she being dismissed, or had he given his wife permission to talk to the stranger?
The woman shuffled away from her husband, unlacing her fingers from his. “I’m Naomi Stone. And this is my husband, Frank. We’re from Illinois. We came here on a second honeymoon. So much for a fresh start. It’s ruined. My daughter paid for this trip. She’ll be so upset when she hears it was a bust. We didn’t even get to see the Empire State Building.”
Christine knew she was supposed to say something comforting, but what? What do you say when someone is complaining about their vacation, but you’re trying to save thousands of lives? Keep it simple. If you try too hard they can tell. Learn these key phrases and use them as often as you can. Her guidance counselor at college had been a true lifesaver. He was the one who recognized she was having trouble relating to her peers and helped her build a framework to navigate the world. She forced another smile. “That’s terrible.”
Naomi nodded. That meant she was satisfied with Christine’s response. They could move on to phase two: convincing Naomi from Illinois to help her retrieve Angelina. She sat on the bench next to Naomi. Close, but not too close. Remember the rule. People don’t want you to touch them before you know them. Keep your distance.
She continued her punishing regimen of smiling, never mind that her face was aching from all the grinning she’d been doing over the last few minutes. “Naomi, I need your help. I need you to work with me to convince the people on this boat to make a short stop.”
Naomi looked at Frank again. Married people did a lot of silent communication. It was baffling. Christine waited. It was impossible to know what passed between them, but they both relaxed their shoulders and Naomi scooted along the bench, closer to Christine. She knew better than to startle or move away. She needed this woman. Lives depended on it. Finding Angelina was her top priority. Nothing could get in the way of that goal.
“You mentioned you’d be willing to pay?”
Christine kept her lips parted, her teeth showing, the corners of her mouth upturned, though she knew the smile couldn’t look authentic any more. It had been locked in one shape for too long. “Sure.”
“I’m in public relations. I can get anyone to do anything. I can get this lot to sit quietly while you do what you need to do.” Naomi was whispering, suggesting she didn’t want the other passengers to hear their exchange. “All we need to do is agree on the price.”
Christine nodded. People often didn’t want to discuss money publicly. It would have made life a great deal easier if they’d been willing to do so. Perhaps it would be best to let Naomi lead the way on this one.
“Eighty-thousand dollars.”
Christine couldn’t keep the shock from registering on her face.
“The captain said he’d only go if you could convince the passengers. You offered him forty. I reckon I’m worth double.”
Christine nodded. She’d have to take a second mortgage out on her condo, but it was worth it. She held out her hand. “Deal. You convince all of them and I’ll pay you in full.”
“Half up front,” said Naomi. She had her purse open and her phone out in seconds. “PayPal, Venmo, or Squarecash?”
Christine fished inside her jacket for her wallet. Naomi took it from her hands, flipped it open, and retrieved all three of her credit cards. Christine looked towards Manhattan while Naomi from Illinois charged all her credit cards through some app on her phone. She tried to gauge how far they’d traveled and how far they had to go before they hit open water. Once they cleared the flotilla of boats that wove around one another in the turbulent waters in their effort to get as many people as possible off the island, there’d be no chance of convincing the captain that they should stop.
“Tell me everything.” Naomi handed her last credit card back with a smile.
Christine didn’t trust smiles. They were too easily faked. Then again, the human face was so malleable and changeable, who knew what anyone was thinking? In this case, she had no idea what Naomi meant by “everything.” That was a wide mandate. Where to start?
“Tell me why we need to find this girl.”
That was a far more manageable question. She took a deep breath and began. “There are hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, still trapped on Manhattan.” She knew the statistics. People from all five boroughs and the surrounding counties came to Manhattan to work, more than doubling its occupancy each day. On an ordinary weekday, there would be upwards of 3.9 million humans bustling about their business. That was one hundred and seventy thousand people per square mile. The MTA had warned people to stay home when K&P first collapsed, but there were always those idiots who insisted they knew better than the experts. There weren’t going to be as many people in the city as there would have been had the circumstances been different, but even taking into consideration what had transpired over the last few days the count was still going to be high. Once she factored in who’d managed to evacuate before they closed the bridges and tunnels, the numbers would still be staggering. She began the calculations, graphing probabilities, but halted.
Her guidance counselor, once again, emerged from who-knows-where, into her current thoughts. “Is that data relevant to the story?” he would ask.
Perhaps not.
She needed to skip ahead to explain what MELT was, what it was intended to do, what it had in fact done, why that was a bad thing; how Angelina had been burned, how those burns had been treated, why her reaction to the treatment was such an intriguing puzzle, and how she believed solving that puzzle would help her reverse-engineer what was happening in Manhattan.
Naomi was staring at her. Christine was familiar with the look. In all her 32 years on the planet, she’d never worked out what it meant. The meaning seemed to vary. Sometimes it meant the listener was curious, but more often than not it meant they were irritated. In rare cases, when she needed to think things through to come to an accurate answer, they were downright agitated. Hostile even. People wanted accuracy but weren’t willing to pay the time price. She threw in a smile in hopes that it would mollify Naomi.
“Keep going. Tell me why this girl is important.”
Christine relaxed. Naomi was the understanding sort. She wasn’t going to get angry. That was good. Angry people made her circuits fritz out and her programs freeze. That’s how she liked to think of it when her brain shut down, like a program malfunction. It was easier than trying to navigate the “feeling” part of the equation. Unplug and reboot. Start over.
“We already know lives are at stake. We get that part,” said Naomi. “We need to know why this girl makes a difference.”
Christine wanted to reduce the facts down to their basics. It was a complex data matrix, but she was used to briefing the businessmen who funded her research, so she’d had plenty of practice talking to idiots. Or, as her friend and colleague Alice Everlee liked to remind her, “people who don’t have a science background.”
“Tell her to hurry up,” said Frank. “We need to get to the part where we convince these people to make a pit stop.”
He wanted the rest of the money. That made sense. People always wanted money. It was a fantastic shortcut to getting what she wanted. She barely used any of her salary on herself, so there was plenty left over to buy her way through sticky situations.
What was the fundamental truth that drove her in this instance? Tell Naomi that. “If I don’t find a way to stop MELT, they’re all going to die.”
Naomi nodded. “What’s MELT?”
She couldn’t tell them the whole story: that she’d created a Frankensteinian enzyme. Something that was beyond her control. Something that Michael Rayton had tampered with. Something so powerful tha
t Manhattan was caving in on itself. They’d throw her overboard if they knew she was the one who was responsible. “It’s an enzyme.”
“Great. What does this enzyme do?”
“Eats plastic.”
Naomi frowned. Perhaps that indicated understanding.
“Eats plastic?”
Christine nodded.
“And that’s why Manhattan is crumbling?”
This woman was good. She got it. This was going to be easy. “MELT has been altered.” Christine chose her words with care. She didn’t need them to freak out and do foolish things. She only needed them to stop and find Angelina. “It damaged Angelina’s skin. She was treated with tilapia skins and has survived.”
Naomi continued to nod. That meant she was supposed to keep talking. She knew that one. “It’s an anomaly. She shouldn’t be alive. The burns were extensive. There’s something about her that’s different. I need to find out what.”
“Don’t you need to halt MELT first?” Naomi was leaning in close. She appeared to be genuinely interested in the problem.
“We can’t. It’s insatiable. We’re not sure why, but it’s munching its way through entire buildings. I hypothesized this was caused by a kind of ‘infection’ brought on by the plastic being driven into, for example, iron pilings.”
Naomi drew back. She’d said something wrong. Christine ran through her mini-presentation. It was usually a single word or phrase that triggered them. She would have said something accurate but alarming. There it was. What an idiot. It was practically on her list of forbidden words. Don’t use “infection” unless you’re talking to medical personnel who are less likely to take it the wrong way.
“MELT eats its way through plastic so fast—and remember this is only a theory, I haven’t been able to test it yet—MELT eats through the plastic so fast that it fuses the aforementioned plastic with the material below, thereby making it irresistible to MELT. Take plastic-covered wires for example…” She paused. Had she told Naomi this before? She’d told someone this theory. It couldn’t have been Naomi. They’d just met. She was on safe ground. She could continue. She wasn’t going to annoy this new acquaintance by repeating something she’d already said. “My example is simple. MELT attacks the plastic on plastic-covered wires. The mechanism of MELT is so rapid, the plastic is driven into the wire below at the molecular level, which means MELT has more material to devour. Does that make sense?”
“Maybe,” said Naomi. “But we still haven’t gotten to the part where we understand why this girl is at the center of your puzzle.”
“Right.” Christine wanted to muster her most convincing argument. What would make them all turn towards the shore? What was the most self-interested thing she could think of? Could she bend the truth to her own ends? It was difficult. The truth was always so much easier to handle. It wasn’t slippery and slidey, like lies or opinions. The truth didn’t change on you. It was always there. Whole. Itself. Pure.
Frank sighed.
Christine was immediately on high alert. Sighs were never good. Especially not when they came from men. Men weren’t big sighers. That was a communication style preferred by women. That he’d sighed meant there were bad things on the horizon. Soon he’d be swearing or storming away or reneging on their deal. “I believe the combination of tilapia and something that resides on Angelina’s epidermis might be able to fight MELT. Her burns were severe, but she has survived several days. Many of those days in harsh conditions.” Jiggling up and down on Paul Everlee’s shoulder counted as a harsh condition in anyone’s book.
Naomi pursed her lips. “What you’re telling me is this girl is the key to defeating MELT?”
That was such a bold leap Christine had a hard time finding the right words to answer. It wasn’t what she believed. Her interest in the girl was more academic, albeit “academic with a practical application,” as was all her work. There’d been a chain reaction: MELT --> Angelina’s skin --> doctors and nurses treating Angelina --> infections and burns for said medical staff --> Angelina not getting demonstrably worse or at least not at a rate that explained how she had come to infect so many people and not die of the infection herself. She was a host of some kind. A carrier. That meant she had some kind of built-in immunity to the worst ravages of MELT. Christine had no clue what might be at the heart of that immunity. She knew she couldn’t say any of that. Must not say it. She did not want them to know that Angelina was contagious. That would make them run the other way.
The part they needed to understand was that Angelina was an anomaly. Naomi’s version of that half-truth was as good as anything she could come up with. She nodded, her lips pressed tight.
Naomi stood and shouted over the sound of the motor. “Listen up. I need you to be strong and sensible. In fact, I need you to be extraordinary.”
Even Christine was moved to listen. Who didn’t want to be extraordinary?
“We’ve been through hell and back over the past few days. Some of us have seen things we’d rather not remember. I know I have. Buildings being swallowed by giant manholes, people dying in the street, the Brooklyn Bridge collapsing.” She didn’t look over her shoulder at the bridge. None of them wanted to know what was happening back there. Later they would, but not now when their own lives were in danger.
Naomi took a deep breath. “We can end this.”
Christine watched the passengers’ faces. They were trained on Naomi. Everyone was listening, apart from the three-year old and that was to be expected. He probably didn’t have much in the way of comprehension yet.
“If you give me half an hour of your time…” Naomi checked in with the captain who shrugged. “Perhaps a little longer, but certainly no more than an hour…we will be hailed as heroes.”
“What are you talking about?” It was the woman who’d thrown her heels off before getting onto the boat. She looked as tired and irritated as Christine felt.
“It would take too long to explain in full,” said Naomi, “but the short version is that Manhattan has been under attack for some days.”
Christine opened her mouth to protest. That wasn’t accurate. Nor was it going to help matters. She’d already muddied the facts terribly. What Naomi was doing was flat-out lying.
Frank had his hand on Christine’s arm. He squeezed, shaking his head. That meant be quiet, right? He wanted her to “hold her tongue” as Mother used to say.
“There was a terrorist attack,” said Naomi. She knew how to deliver a speech. She varied her pitch and went in for the kill. The passengers were in her thrall. “This woman beside me works for a government agency and she’s been telling us the inside story of what’s really been going on.”
Even the woman without her heels, who’d been so irritable and resistant just a moment earlier, was leaning forward to hear better.
“Terrorists took down several buildings as a cover for their main agenda.”
The boat hit a swell and they were tossed violently to one side. The timing couldn’t have been better. They were literally off balance. Christine knew these things added up when you were trying to convince a Normal to see things your way. Alice had helped her with that when they were preparing for meetings with their boss, Jake. Alice understood her. She missed Alice. It wasn’t what she’d expected; to have a feeling that strong about a colleague, but it remained true. She missed the person who’d helped her navigate her way through the impossible maze of corporate biotech.
“The terrorists released a virus.”
Even Christine gasped. People in public relations were made of such strange stuff. How had Naomi come up with such a fabrication so fast?
“But there’s an antidote. There’s a girl, a young girl, a complete innocent who’s stuck on Manhattan. She’s immune to the virus. We find her and we find the cure.”
There was a lull, then several people spoke at once. What was the name of the virus? Had they all been exposed? What were the symptoms? When would they appear? Why would we go back if there’s a virus
? Do you think we’re stupid?
Naomi held up her hand. “If you weren’t in Midtown during the explosions, chances are you’re going to be fine. But you see what they’re doing? They’re blowing up more and more buildings to spread this virus as far and fast as they can…”
No one was going to fall for this. Naomi had taken it too far.
The protests grew louder. If the terrorists were trying to spread the virus, why go back? They could get us. We’re sitting ducks. We need to get out of here. Go the other way. Don’t stop. Don’t go back. Don’t head towards terrorists or burning buildings or a damned virus, for crying out loud.
The panic was rising. Naomi had planted a seed that had gone berserk. No way she’d calm them down now.
“Like I said, this woman beside me works for the government. She’s a scientist, but you already knew that. She has funds. I’m talking serious money. You won’t just be heroes if you agree to do this, you’ll be rich heroes.”
