Melt

by JJ Pike

  The studio where they had been shooting the infomercial for MELT was on the fifth floor. The elevators were out of commission. She stopped for a second to take a mental inventory. They’d turned the power off on the east side of the building. That was good and bad. Good because they didn’t want live electrical cables; bad because it meant she was going to be operating in the dark.

  “You don’t have a flashlight, do you Jerry?”

  Jerry smiled. “For you, Mrs. E. I have the perfect solution.” He pulled a miniature headlamp from his desk drawer. “Always be prepared for the unlikely.”

  Alice smiled and thanked him.

  “Don’t you worry about me, mind. I have another right here.” He waved his lamp-on-a-headband at her. “Hands free, see?”

  Alice tucked the pigeon under her arm while she secured the lamp to her forehead then jogged towards the stairwell. She took the stairs two at a time, pausing at the garbage chute. As she opened the swiveling door to the chute, she thought about what Midge would want her to do.

  Midge would want her to honor the pigeon’s life. Alice straightened herself up. "Dear pigeon…" she paused for a second. What did she have to say to a pigeon? Thank you for being a flying rat? Thank you for carrying diseases? Thank you for annoying New Yorkers for 100+ years? Midge wouldn't like any of that. “Dear pigeon, thank you for being a pigeon.” That's all she had. She needed to get going. She released the pigeon to its final resting place and moved on.

  When she reached the fifth floor, she was met with a barricade, guards with enormous flashlights, and Jake. She hadn't been expecting him but she was glad. She wanted to get this over with. She knew Christine was wrong about him, but she had to chase down every suspicion.

  The trick was to get him talking, see how nervous he was, be on the lookout for unusual speech patterns or modes of behavior. The guy was a businessman not a world-class liar or an industrial spy. If the competition had gotten to him—promising wealth beyond compare or agreeing to hide some dirty little secret in exchange for him throwing K&P under the bus—he’d be showing signs of stress. He was Jake, not James Freaking Bond.

  “I hear the situation is critical,” she said.

  “It's in hand.: He was glib. That didn’t make him a saboteur. “I hear you’ve been tending to our patient.”

  “She’s not in good shape, Jake.”

  “I'm sorry to hear that,” said Jake. “If worse comes to worst we will, of course, pay the family. Full damages.”

  It took all of her self-control not to smack him full on right across his smug chops. Where she came from, no one would think of trying to put a dollar value on a human life. No matter what number they came up with, it was going to be an insult. Even if the bean counters calculated for lost earnings of a child actor who could have gone on to become a star, there was no way her parents would ever be satisfied with anything they got from Klean & Pure Industries.

  He was a weasel and a cad, but at least he’d shown his true colors. He was worried about litigation, not some grand conspiracy to take the firm down. She was right and Christine Baxter was wrong. Jake was guilty of being a corporate suit, nothing more. She needed to move on. She could return to the Professor’s suspicions once they had the situation under control.

  “Have you moved the nurses?”

  “Sorry?” Jake held a hand up to shield his eyes from her lamplight.

  Alice didn’t take the light off her forehead. She kept the beam trained right at him. “Have you moved the nurses who became infected when they touched Angelina's skin?”

  Jake's face did that thing it did when he was furious. Even in the demi-light, she could see the uneven, ugly spread of red blotches. Alice had come to recognize it as the ultimate tell that his patience had run out. She didn't care. “I'm going to requisition a hospital ward at St. Joseph's and move them there. They need the best care possible. From what I understand, they don’t have serious burns. ‘Superficial lacerations to the skin,’ is what I heard, but I don’t want to take any chances…”

  Jake turned and walked away from her.

  “And I want to tour the spill site and talk to the science team, now.”

  He waved his hand over his head but didn’t turn back to look at her. He would send someone and she would be given a carefully guided tour designed not to show her what she needed to know. She hoped he would send his senior assistant, Frank. Frank liked her. And he was tractable. With just a few kind words, Frank would allow her to slip away and find what needed to be found.

  Chapter Twelve

  Bill held up his good hand, commanding silence from the circle. They were gathered in the back yard near the goat pen where Bill was sure Paul and Petra’s smart devices couldn’t listen in. “We are not going to second-guess your mother.”

  Aggie held up her hand. “What does it mean, get rid of all plastic?”

  Bill shook his head. He didn’t know much more than they did. He only knew Alice meant every word she said. Always. She was a “say what you mean, mean what you say” kind of gal. “It means ‘get rid of all plastics.’”

  There were groans from around the circle. It was unimaginable to them, the thought of getting rid of everything that connected them to modern life. They might not have been hot-wired to the beating heart of their peer-group’s world every second of every day like most teenagers, but they at least managed to get online when they went into town, or to snag free Wi-Fi at a gas station or diner. Paul and Petra getting smartphones had changed all of their lives. Even Aggie and Midge had gotten in on the “get connected” action. Alice had held firm, forbidding them to add a “data plan” to their simple flip phones, but that didn’t stop them from borrowing their siblings’ phones whenever they came home.

  Bill had quickly learned that his children thought of the cabin as temporary get-away, something they did on the weekends and in the summer because their parents were survivalist weirdos. They were gutted and appalled—it was written plainly on their faces in deep lines of shock and disgust—that they would have to give up their new-found freedom.

  He would let them keep their phones for a while longer. Just until they’d stocked up. It couldn’t hurt to wait that long. He’d make sure they threw them away after they were done with the rest of the plastic-dumping project.

  “I know,” said Bill. “It's going to be hard. Let's break this up into manageable, bite-size sections and work our way through the property methodically. We’re going to tackle this...” He didn’t want to use the word “problem” even though it was a huge dang problem. “I want to tackle this challenge in increments. Our first stop has to be the food supplies. I don’t know what the danger is exactly, but we’re going to err on the side of caution and assume your mother has discovered there is something toxic in plastic. So, for starters, we’re going to get it off our food.”

  No one spoke for a few seconds. They were doing the calculations he’d done in the car right after he got the call from Alice. There was a boatload of foodstuffs wrapped or stored in plastic.

  “So, the canned stuff is safe, right?” asked Paul.

  “Sure thing,” said Bill. “Cans, jars, dried goods, they’re all safe. We’re talking about a tiny fraction of our supplies.”

  “The modern fraction,” Paul grumbled. “And I know you always want to look on the bright side of everything, Dad, but it’s not that tiny. In fact, that’ll require at least a full day’s work.”

  Bill nodded. He didn’t correct his son. By his estimation, it was going to take all of them, working flat out for as many hours as they could stay upright, a good three days. Perhaps longer.

  “Good thing the bear took care of unwrapping the pemmican,” said Sean.

  Everyone turned to look at him. He blushed down to his roots. Petra rolled her eyes and turned away. He scurried after her, no more confident than he had been when he’d first arrived.

  By the time the front door had slammed behind them, Bill’s plan had come into focus. He had already weighed
whether they were in “immediate” or “future” danger. Alice had sounded adamant. No, more than that, she had sounded freaked out. He needed to treat it as present danger, even though the chemical spill—or whatever horror she was dealing with—was in the City and they were hundreds of miles and a couple of mountain ranges away. Not that he thought of the Catskills as real mountains. He was a Rocky Mountain boy, born and bred. The eastern “mountain ranges” looked like foothills to him. Still, geography was their friend. Poison doesn’t run uphill and it can’t cross a mountain, no matter how tiny that mountain might be.

  “We are going to repack the entire root cellar, pantry, and barn…”

  Paul and Aggie didn’t hide their annoyance. Aggie had her arms folded across her chest and Paul was leaned up against a tree, his head down and his shoulders slumped. Only Midge seemed excited.

  “You mean we get to unwrap literally every single thing?” she said.

  “Yep,” said Bill. As soon as the word was out of his mouth, he knew he’d made a mistake. Midge was grinning like the proverbial cat.

  “There will be no snacking,” he said. “We unwrap anything that’s in plastic, then we repack it right away.”

  “In what?” said Aggie. “We can’t pickle the granola bars or can them in syrup.”

  “We’re going to need to take inventory,” said Bill. “Some things aren’t going to last long. Those, we can give away…”

  “Give them away?” Aggie was indignant. “Do you have any idea how much food we have in the pantry that’s wrapped in plastic? We can’t do this, Dad. It’s just…” she threw up her hands, “…too big. The job is too big for five people.”

  Paul let out a sarcastic laugh. “Sean’s not that bad. He’s learning.”

  Aggie gave him a look. She didn’t have the psychic connection Petra had with him, but her eyes—darting to and from her little sister—gave it away. She’d meant that Midge wouldn’t be much help, but none of them would ever say such a thing in front of her.

  “I guess Sean’s getting better,” she said, without much conviction. “But we’re still going to have to carry the majority of the work weight.”

  “I trust you, Aggie.” Bill looked his daughter in the eye, trying to wash away her irritation. He never did well when his kids were mad at him. “And you, Paul. I trust you, too. This is the kind of thing you’re really good at. You’ll work it out.”

  Midge tugged at his hand. “And me, Daddy. You can count on me.”

  He smiled and nodded. “I always count on you, punkin.”

  Paul sighed. “We can dial back the clock, Dad, and pretend it’s 1900. We can live on roots and tubers and things we grow in our own raised beds, eventually. But we’re not ready to do that now. We need at least another season to get things planted, harvested, ground, and stored. We’ve got a million things in plastic. All of our staples, for example: flour, salt, sugar, spices…the list goes on and on. It’s not going to be that easy to repack them…”

  Bill felt his temper unfurling in his stomach. He didn’t have time to argue with them. Repacking the food was only the tip of the iceberg. If, in fact, Alice was right and they needed to get rid of every last shred of plastic in their lives, he was going to have to dismantle just about everything on the property. Food was the least of their problems, but he wanted to start with something relatively easy and work his way up to the big stuff. That way, he could buy himself some time. If it turned out to be a false alarm and Alice called to say there were no more freaking Mutant Pineapples in the world, then he wouldn’t have wasted precious man hours and their hard-earned money undoing all the work they’d put into their little slice of paradise.

  “Earth to Dad, come in please.” Paul was standing straight now, ready to challenge his father head on. “How are we going to repack this stuff? In what?”

  “You have a wad of cash in your pocket. Head on out and buy as many canning jars as you can.”

  Aggie sighed and punched Paul lightly in the arm. It was a playful gesture designed to get him to refocus and remember they were all on the same team. Somehow, she’d turned herself around and gotten herself on track. She was a trooper. Bill beamed his gratitude from his brain to hers. He couldn’t do this alone. He needed them all to pull their weight. He could see he was going to lean on Aggie in the coming days and she wasn’t going to let him down. That one thought gave him some solace.

  “We can use wax paper, aluminum foil, cheesecloth,” said Aggie. “Come on, we know the drill. We can repack everything. It will be boring, but we can do it.”

  Paul nodded, resigned finally to his fate.

  There was no way Bill could share the extent of the panic in his gut. Hearing Alice talk pure code for the first time in their life had hit him hard. Before, it had been a game, practice, sometimes even a tease.

  “You’re a can of baked Alaska,”—a phrase Bill had never decoded—led to a perfect night under the stars, just them and a sleeping bag and the heat between them. That was nine months before Midge made an appearance, so happy memories all ’round.

  “Just get to it, guys.” He pointed towards the house. “And get Petra and Sean on board. We can’t be having squabbles when we all need to pull together.” Bill turned and strode towards the barn.

  Midge was at his side. She snuck her hand into his, a gesture that would never get old. This time it was tinged with that little bit of sadness. He knew her conversation with Alice had confused her. She’d been a “surprise” but one that they hadn’t regretted for a single second. They’d been so young when they got pregnant with the twins: Alice 18 and him 19. They’d had to juggle college and new jobs and diapers. When Midge came along, they were better prepared, more settled, and—he hated to admit it even though it was true—much better parents. They’d had their challenges and rough patches, like any married couple, but they’d pulled together and made it through. “Pulled together” was a bit of a misnomer, but they’d certainly “made it” through the hard times and were stronger than ever.

  He was tuned in to Midge’s frequency in a way he hadn’t been with Paul and Petra. Aggie was different. He’d given up working when Aggie was eight and learned how to be a hands-on dad, rather than an absentee parent. He’d had the time and attention to lavish on Midge and knew the shifts in her emotional weather as well as his own. She was hurting.

  “Mommy’s not mad at you, you know that, right?” he said.

  Midge looked away.

  “Did you hear me, Midgelette?”

  She nodded. “I know. She’s just busy. She has an important job. She’s making the world a safer place for all of us. But, Daddy…” she looked at him, earnestly, “…I want you to call me Margaret now.”

  Bill did his best to hide his shock. She’d never even mentioned them using her given name before. Where in tarnation had that come from? Better not ask too many questions, though. If she wanted to tell him, she would.

  “Mommy said I’ll have more responsibility and that I have to take care of you now.”

  It stabbed him clean through the heart, deflating the sense he’d had just seconds ago that they were doing such a stellar job with their youngest. Alice would never have shortened their children’s golden years. It was a Japanese concept. The “golden years” described the early years of a kid’s life when they had no responsibilities and were waited on and cossetted and protected from the hard things in the world. Midge still had some of that due her. He made a promise to himself that she wouldn’t lose out. No matter what came at them, she would remain their baby and get the childhood they believed she deserved.

  He opened the barn doors and made his way inside. It took a little longer than usual because there was no way he could use his left hand. It throbbed and ached at the same time, making it functionally useless.

  On the south side of the wall, there was a huge sliding door. When the bear had been doing her thing, scratching away at the entrance to the root cellar, he’d been grateful she hadn’t opened it. He yanked
on it and rolled it wide open. Didn’t matter now. That Momma Bear might as well have waltzed right in there and chowed down on all their fresh veggies. The hydroponic system, which he’d worked hard to perfect, was going to have to go.

  Bill picked up an axe with his good hand and let it dangle at his side. Would it matter if the water that fed their lettuce had come through PVC piping? Should he harvest what he could first? Alice hadn’t given him enough clues to work it out. He slumped against the water filter and covered his face with his hands.

  “Are you okay, Daddy?” Midge sounded tinier than ever. She needed him to be strong. But the emotion bubbled up and he had to force back a sob.