Melt

by JJ Pike

  Alice held back a sigh. “The answer is always the same, Barbara. If you want to go back, you can at any time. I am glad of your help and I am a woman of my word. If you like, I can even give you my home address so you can come and find me. I am not going to run out on my debt. Do I look like the kind of person who would do that?”

  “You look like a complete freak,” said Barb. “You climbed into the back of a train, which was stationary and had been for hours, with your jacket tied over your head. You proceeded to boss everyone around as if you owned the place, then you took off in the wrong direction. You’ve been talking nonstop about some contaminant, but I don’t see you covering your mouth and you’re bleeding from a cut on your elbow, but you don’t seem to have noticed.”

  She hadn’t noticed. Alice checked. It wasn’t a cut. It was more of a scrape. So, she was right. It had begun. MELT had made its way into the subway system. Her mind raced on ahead. Perhaps her best course of action would be to get topside, find Baxter, alert her, then jointly make their way to the Governor. Because this had gone way, way past what the Fire Department could fix. She stopped. Of course, the abrasion on her elbow could have happened at any time. She’d run right towards the debris when the building had first gone down. Best stick to the plan and adjust once she had established what the bottom of the building looked like.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?” said Barb.

  “I need to see what the Teamsters did.”

  “Well, Hoffa for starters.”

  Alice tried to tune Barb out as she counted her steps down the tunnel. It was going to be a lecture on Jimmy Hoffa and the Mob. She’d only known the woman for an hour, but she was beginning to get the measure of her. Barb was lonely. She’d gotten used to talking about nothing because she was missing that brain receptor that alerted her to the fact that no one was listening. She was just a bad reader of people. Alice felt for her. It was a kindness, really, to let her rattle on. There probably weren’t many people who would allow her to talk, without pause, for an hour.

  She continued to count her steps. She was pretty sure she knew where the 7 and the A train parted ways and how far she needed to walk so she’d be directly below K&P. She and Fran had complained incessantly about the rumble of the trains below them, but she was glad in this moment that she knew where they were. The loudest rumble was by the east side of the corporate cafeteria, which meant that was closest to the underground tunnel. Where might that be? She studied the ceiling. It was like looking at the underside of a Persian rug and trying to find the exquisite pattern.

  She cast her mind back to the moment she first saw the pit. Could she piece the geography together? Could she work out where the Teamster crews would have been thwacking concrete? How far would they have gone? There was no indication anyone had been down here for a long time and certainly not a construction detail. Her heart skipped a couple of beats, then plummeted. That meant they had gone in from the top down; just poured cement into the hole to plug it up. They’d put a band aid on a geyser.

  Alice held up her hand. “We’re here.”

  Barb looked around the tunnel. “They all look the same. How would you know?”

  “I know,” said Alice.

  “You don’t seem very excited.”

  “I think they got it wrong.”

  “Who? Who got what wrong?”

  “I’m sorry I let you come with me. We’ve almost certainly been breathing in aerosolized MELT.” She had no clue whether the enzyme could be aerosolized or not, but she feared the worst. The tunnels were dripping wet, enclosed, the perfect breeding ground for mold and mildew, rats and roaches, death and destruction. If MELT had made its way this far they were dead women walking. It was only a matter of time until they succumbed. Alice turned to Barb. “I let you down, I…” She reached a hand out to comfort the young woman, but Barb shrugged her off.

  “Did you feel that?”

  Alice concentrated all her energy on her feet. Had she felt something? She couldn’t tell. She was exhausted and drained. She’d come all this way only to find she’d been ignored. There was every chance MELT was already eating the cables and wiring above their heads.

  The tunnel shook.

  “Are the trains running again?” said Barb.

  Alice stared at the roof above them. They were showered with dust. The pile that had once been K&P’s Headquarters was shifting.

  “Give me your phone,” said Alice. “I need to document this. They’ll need to know what happened.”

  Barb handed over her phone without a peep.

  “Now run,” she said. “As fast as you can. Get back to the station and get out of here.”

  Barb was frozen.

  Alice pushed her. “Run.”

  The rumble grew closer, louder, the dirt coming down on them in faster and thicker showers.

  Then she saw the crack in the ceiling and knew it was all over.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Bill turned left onto the avenue from his mom’s street. “What did Mimi give you?”

  Paul unfurled the note Margaret had pressed into his hand. “I love you.” He turned it over. “Be kind to your mother. She can’t help herself.”

  Bill nodded. He knew what she meant. Alice would make sure everyone else was safe before she gave her own life a single thought. That’s why he needed to get down there. He pressed down on the gas. No point following the speed limit when there was no one on the road.

  “What does she mean?” said Paul.

  Bill shrugged. “Your mom is a hero.”

  “That’s not what this says. It says, ‘she can’t help herself.’”

  Bill hung his head. He was exhausted. He didn’t have time to explain PTSD to his eldest boy. He needed to find Alice.

  “Why all the secrecy? Why can’t we just talk about it? We all know she was in some war and it messed with her head. Why is it so terrible if we say it out loud?”

  Bill hit the brakes. “There are things you don’t know, Paul, so you’d be wise to can it now.”

  “Fine, whatever,” Paul opened the car door. “I’ll go back and stay with Grandma and you can pick me up on the way back.”

  “Get in, Paul.”

  “I’m not doing it, Dad. I am not going to carry on as if this is normal. I love you guys, you know that. But I don’t want this secrecy, this silence. It’s not good. And it runs counter to everything you’ve ever taught us. Where’s the transparency? The fearlessness? Where’s the TRUTH?” He banged on the roof of the car, years of anger leaking out of him at last.

  Bill could barely contain himself. What right had this kid—yes, he was still a kid at 18—what right did he have to question their parenting? They had always done what they believed was right. They’d done their best. And Alice was heaps better. She’d embraced the talking cure and overcome her troubles. They’d beaten it together. She didn’t have the night terrors anymore and she was able to laugh at her own compulsions. He wasn’t afraid she might slip back into the darkness and harm herself or anyone else. Bill skirted around the memory of the “big trouble.” It was too painful. He recentered himself around his outrage that his son would question their decision to keep some things private. Paul knew nothing about what it took Alice Everlee to become the woman she was. Nothing.

  He swallowed his anger and patted the passenger-side seat. “Get in. We’ll talk.”

  “For real?” Paul hung back outside the car. “Because it’s not cool if you’re going to try to shut me down with some half-baked story about what a hard time she had as an orphan. I know all that. It was terrible. I get it. What I want to know is what happened before.”

  Bill sighed and nodded. “Just get in.”

  He pulled back into the road. Traffic was still light going towards the city. They’d be to Midtown in less than 20 minutes if this kept up. There was part of the story he could tell their eldest son. As long as he didn’t break the seal on the thing that haunted Alice most, he’d be okay.

 
“Your mother lived in a small village…” They’d never been there. Alice didn’t want to. She visited it enough in her dreams. She would wake screaming and shaking and sobbing, and it would spill out of her in hot, angry globs of pain and memory.

  It was the same every night. She would cling to him and tell him the story that changed her world. The story that made her the woman she was.

  “It was so quiet,” she said, “that night. The moon was hidden. I wouldn’t have noticed, except that later I needed that light.” Each night she started the story in the same place. And each time Bill held her close while she reeled through the horrors.

  “They came from nowhere. We didn’t know that much about the war. We didn’t know anything. My parents weren’t political. We just lived, you know. We just lived our life. And our neighbors were the same: quiet people living quiet lives, growing vegetables, trading with each other, selling our surplus at the big market on Wednesdays. It was good. We had chickens. They didn’t belong to anyone. They just ran where they wanted. Like the dogs. They belonged to none of us and all of us. We fed them and the chickens gave us their eggs and the dogs gave us their protection.” This was where she broke down. Bill tried not to anticipate it by bracing, but it was hard, he had heard it so many times.

  She clutched his shirt, desperate for the images to leave her. But she rewound them and played them over because she didn’t know how to do anything different. Neither of them did. They were young and in love and thought that would make it all better. Alice clung to him and he clung to her and together they weathered the seas of her despair.

  “Papa went out because of the noise.” She would stop. The noise was in her head. He could imagine, though he never asked and she never offered to tell him. It was the sound of their friends and neighbors being slaughtered. “Papa went out, telling Mama to stay with us. But she could not. She was fierce like him.”

  Alice looked up at Bill, her eyes pleading. “I didn’t know, amore. I didn’t know.” Little snippets of Spanish crept back into her vocabulary when she was inside the terror. In her day to day life, she had shed her accent, aggressive about not sounding like she came from Guatemala and adamant that they never speak Spanish. That was behind her. This was her new life. But when she woke in the night, she was that little girl again and the voice; the voice, with its rhythms and intonation, was of a different world.

  He stroked her hair and told her it would be alright, but it never was. They were always headed to the same awful moment.

  “I heard the sound of that blade hitting my father’s neck. Such a sound, Bill. A sound you will never forget. And then my mother in the dirt, holding him and screaming his name. The machete came down on her next, swift and without mercy.”

  Bill did his best to tell Paul the story with as little drama or embellishment as he could. He reported Alice’s words because it was Alice’s experience.

  “Damn,” said Paul. “She watched her parents get murdered? I mean, I knew it was bad and I knew they were dead and something awful had happened to them, but I guess I never put all the pieces together.”

  Nor would he. Bill hadn’t told him the crucial piece. The piece of history that made Alice Everlee, nee Marroquin, tick.

  He could no more forget her story than she could.

  Her nails cut into his chest. She wanted absolution. She wanted to forget. Neither were possible because what happened next could not be undone.

  “The soldiers, they were behind me and in front of me. And they were so big. And their guns and their knives, everything so big. I had never seen such things. But it was the blood, Bill. The blood that pooled around Mama and Papa and was without end. My mother’s eyes were open. As if she had been taken by surprise, when of course she knew, as soon as she stepped from the house, that they would cut her down just as they had cut her best beloved down.”

  Bill had skipped all that, just as he had skipped the part where Alice saw the soldier pick her sister up and throw her over his shoulder; the part where she ran into the forest; the part where she hid high in the trees, hoping to go back but not daring to come down, her sister’s screams getting fainter and fainter; the part where she found the dead dogs all along the trail leading towards the village; the part where she could not forgive herself, not ever, even though she had been eight. Two years older than Midge was now. She had been eight and she had been unable to save her little sister who mama had left in her care. That was her secret, her burden, her torture.

  At least one of her burdens. The other was one they shared. Bill would never tell any of the kids about that time. They hadn’t remembered and he wanted to keep it that way. He was as much to blame as Alice. He shook his head. They’d all come through it. They were fine now. That would have to be enough.

  “Poor Mom,” said Paul. “Seeing that has got to mess with your head.”

  Bill’s eyes were on the road. “Rats,” he said.

  “What?” said Paul.

  “There’s a blockade. They’re not letting people past 59th Street.”

  “What do we do now? Go home?”

  “No,” said Bill. “Now we walk.” Bill checked his bug-out vest for all his equipment. Compass, Swiss Army Knife, mini first aid kit, water bottle, hunting knife, etc. It took him five whole minutes, but he was certain everything was in its place.

  He collected his vintage goggles from the glove compartment. They were very “steampunk” according to Petra, but he loved them and he wasn’t going to be parted from them. Didn’t matter that they weren’t state of the art. They’d been a gift from Aggie and he was proud to look like a World War 1 pilot.

  The streets weren’t empty, but neither were they like a normal morning in Manhattan. Far too many people had tried to come into work. Why didn’t they listen? It was clear that Grand Central was down, the subways a tangled mess. No one was going anywhere.

  Still, people had to prove that they were serious about their jobs. No one could afford to get fired. The economy was tight, the stock market had taken a beating, the NASDAQ was already down 500 points. Didn’t they know they had to look at the big picture not the small picture? It baffled him that they were so small minded.

  “Dad? Where are we going?”

  “To the epicenter,” said Bill. “She will always be at the epicenter of the disaster.”

  “Great,” muttered Paul.

  Even with the streets cleared of cars, the sidewalks were busy. They fought against the tide of people in their suits and ties and business shoes. Absurd as it seemed, there were coffee shops and bagel stores plying their wares, street vendors hawking hot dogs even at this hour; and the tired, sad horses of Central Park plodding along with anxious tourists who’d paid too much for their Manhattan hotel to pack up and go home just because there had been a building collapse.

  “You hungry, Dad?” Paul had looked at every food vendor they’d passed.

  “Get something quick,” said Bill. “Catch up with me as fast as you can.” He gave his eldest son a ten-dollar bill and kept pressing down the sidewalk towards K&P.

  It wasn’t that far from the south end of Central Park to the industrial district west of Penn Station, but every step felt like a million miles. Bill kept replaying all the things he hadn’t said, what he wished he’d done, how he’d let Alice down. She’d lived in terror of that one night her whole life. And though he had loved her as well as he could, that night was what drove her. There was every chance it could cost her life, and if that happened he would never forgive himself. They needed to go faster.

  He looked back, hoping Paul wasn’t too far behind him. There he was, shoving Doritos into his mouth, grinning. Why had he let him come? His life was just beginning. He should be back at the cabin, safe with the others.

  He could see a police barrier up ahead. “We’re going to need to give them the slip.”

  Paul laughed. “Us? Give the police the slip? Dad, this isn’t Grand Theft Auto. We’re going to get caught.”

  “There’s a cour
tyard—a place your mother and I sometimes have lunch when I come into the City—between 38th and 39th. “If we can make it there we will be able to walk out the other side without anyone seeing us.”

  Paul shrugged.

  Bill walked confidently towards the office block on the corner. He waved at the security guard who paid them no attention, then the two of them slipped into the café, through its patio doors, and into little courtyard the other side of the café.

  “Brilliant, Dad.”

  The gate on the other side of the courtyard was locked. The fence, though, was low. Easy enough for the two of them to clamber over it and onto 11th Avenue. They were so close.

  There was a tang in the air. Not just the usual dirt and grime and exhaust that filled your nostrils whenever you ventured into the City, but something tart and acrid. More than burning but less than smelting. It was the smell of devastation.