Melt (Book 8): Hold

by Pike, JJ

  HOLD

  The MELT Series

  Book 8

  By

  JJ Pike

  Mike Kraus

  © 2019 Muonic Press Inc

  www.muonic.com

  www.MikeKrausBooks.com

  hello@mikeKrausBooks.com

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  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, without the permission in writing from the author.

  Table of Contents

  Last Time, on MELT…

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  POSTSCRIPT

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  Special Thanks

  Many thanks to my awesome Beta Team, without whom none of my books would be possible. -Mike

  Though writing is usually a solitary act, we're lucky enough to have two brains to bash together to keep us on story-telling track. Beyond the names on the cover, there's a team of professionals behind the paper curtain who make us look like we know what we're doing. I'd like to thank my editor, Erin McCabe, who's wit, wisdom, and brilliance keeps me from sailing into obscurity; the talented Christian Bentulan for his beautiful covers; and our dedicated team of Beta-readers, who give their time, talent, and opinions freely. Any errors that have slipped through the net are mine and mine alone. – JJ Pike

  MELT – Book 9

  Available Here!

  Last Time, on MELT…

  BOOK ONE: MELT

  Alice Everlee, Senior Vice President and Head of Marketing at Klean & Pure Industries (K&P), is in charge of the campaign to launch MELT, a synthetic compound designed to eat plastic. MELT malfunctions, gnawing through the floor and burning the young actress, Angelina, who was to appear in the ad. MELT has obviously been sabotaged, but by whom?

  In a coded phone call, Alice urges her husband, Bill, to take the children to their cabin in the Adirondacks and destroy all plastic.

  Angelina’s burns morph and spread. Her injuries are treated with tilapia skins, but the mutated compound on her skin infects her caregivers and demolishes plastic on contact.

  MELT continues its rampage through K&P’s infrastructure. Alice argues that K&P’s collapsing headquarters should be buried in a cement sarcophagus. The NYFD determines that would be too expensive and elects instead to demolish the building in a controlled takedown.

  Alice takes to the subway to investigate the underside of K&P’s basement for signs that the NYFD has shored up the building from the ground up. She discovers a stalled train filled with panicking passengers. Barb, one of the passengers, gloms on to Alice insisting she can help. The women make their way to K&P to discover the Fire Department hasn’t secured the company’s headquarters, which means MELT could leak into the subway system when they detonate their charges. Alice has to stop them. She and Barb are about to exit when the roof caves in.

  While Alice is battling MELT in Manhattan, her family faces their own set of crises. The Everlees have prepped for disaster—their cupboards are stocked, they have bug-out and bug-in bags ready, they even have a root cellar at the cabin that they’ve converted to a “shelter in place” bunker—but all that’s thrown into chaos as they attempt to get rid of all plastics.

  Bill removes his children [Aggie (15), Midge (8)], from their New Paltz, NY home; while simultaneously recalling the twins [Paul (19) and Petra (19)] from their respective universities.

  Petra brings her boyfriend Sean to the cabin. Sean is drowning in cologne. Bill demands he shower. While Sean’s attempting to make himself odor-neutral, a bear and her cubs infiltrate the compound. The family is dealing with the incursion when Sean stomps out of the house, complaining loudly. The bear charges Bill, ripping a jagged wound in the back of his hand, but is eventually subdued by the kids and transported off the property.

  When Bill regains consciousness, he discovers the family’s supply of pemmican has been destroyed by the bears. He elects not to banish Sean, but instead teach him some rudimentary survival skills.

  The family does its best to remove all plastics, but the task seems almost insurmountable. Bill, exhausted and disheartened, takes an axe to his much-loved hydroponic farm.

  When the situation in Manhattan reaches a crisis point, Bill insists he has to leave to save his wife. Paul demands to go with his father.

  BOOK 2: SINK

  Bill and Paul make it to Manhattan just as the NYFD takes Klean & Pure’s headquarters down. Bill is hit by falling masonry and concussed. He charges into the billowing smoke, leaving Paul with a dying firefighter. Paul crawls into the fire engine cab. His radio calls for help are unanswered.

  Michael Rayton, a colleague of Paul’s mother, joins him in the cab, hunting for supplies. Michael claims MELT needs to be fed, not starved, then precipitously leaves Paul to his own fate. The firefighter dies. Paul trudges through the decimated streets, eventually stumbling into a triage zone. The intake nurse discovers a lesion inside his mouth and admits him.

  When the woman in the hospital bed beside Paul dies, panic erupts and Paul makes his escape. He meets Stephen McKan, a colleague of his mother’s who flirted with her at a family BBQ earlier that summer. Paul punches McKan, attempts to flee, but passes out from fatigue and dehydration.

  Paul wakes to an evacuation order. Professor Christine Baxter, Chief Scientist at Klean & Pure, wishes to take Angelina with them. Fran, Alice’s assistant, argues they should leave the highly contagious girl behind. No one wants to touch Angelina, who’s wrapped in nothing more than tilapia skins and a cotton sheet. Paul steps up and carries her out of the ward. As they exit the building, the hospital collapses. Professor Baxter hypothesizes that MELT is eating all plastics, including PVC piping, insulation, and sewer pipes.

  Paul witnesses looting and deaths during his trek to safety. Stephen McKan re-joins Paul. He claims he’s Paul’s biological father. Paul refutes the claim absolutely and forbids McKan to come close to his family.

  The South Street Seaport, home to New York’s ferries, is a zoo. Paul assists Professor Baxter and his mom’s assistant, Fran, in their desperate search for a way off Manhattan. Fran dives into the East River in an attempt to snag a ride on a boat, while the professor races uptown in hopes of doing the same. As Paul waits, the Brooklyn Bridge crumbles, sending cars and trucks and humans tumbling into the river.

  Aggie, the Everlee’s middle daughter, is up at th
e cabin in the Adirondacks inspecting her father’s topographical maps. Petra, an Earth Sciences major, tells her that Bill (their father) was mapping abandoned mines.

  The kids and their neighbor, Jo, attempt to remove all plastic-coated wiring and PVC pipes from the cabin. Sean falls through a hole in the floor, gashing his leg. They rush him to the hospital.

  Jo calls her contacts at the State Department and learns that no terrorist organizations have claimed responsibility for the disaster. She also learns there’s a working list of potential industrial saboteurs. Michael Rayton’s name is on that list.

  News comes of a secondary building collapse in Manhattan. Jo convinces the girls they must leave the hospital, taking Sean with them, but first they have to rob the pharmacy for medical supplies.

  Back at the cabin, the Everlee’s elderly neighbor, Betsy, who was a nurse during the Vietnam War, takes care of Sean.

  The Everlee’s cabin mysteriously burns to the ground.

  Aggie and Jo head downstate to collect the Everlee’s alpaca. They find Michael Rayton in the Everlee’s house. It appears he’s attempted to open the safe. He denies it. Jo wants to interrogate this “person of interest,” so Michael is permitted to accompany them back to the cabin.

  Arthur Foss, who claims to be an old friend of Bill’s, arrives, asking if he and his family can camp out on the Everlee’s property. They refuse him permission. Disappointed, Arthur leaves.

  Aggie agrees to teach Michael Rayton how to handle a gun. While they’re at the shooting range, she hears gunfire. She sneaks back to the house. Arthur and his wife are shooting up the place. Jo returns fire. Betsy and Midge drive into the gunfight and are hit.

  Enraged, Aggie kills Arthur.

  BOOK 3: BURY

  Alice is trapped in a pile of rubble under K&P’s crumbling headquarters. She slips in and out of consciousness, remembering the civil war that ravaged her home country (Guatemala) when she was a child. Her parents and sister were murdered in front of her and she was abducted and assaulted.

  Beset by rats and roaches as well as the demons from her past, Alice tries to scratch her way out of her living tomb but is unable to budge a single slab of concrete.

  Barb (whom she met on the stalled subway car) digs her out. The women struggle through the rising water to the train. They find cadavers and survivors, including a dog (Maggie-loo) who never left her master’s side, and pull them to safety.

  Bill meanwhile searches Manhattan’s decimated streets for Alice. He slips, tumbling into a chasm in the sidewalk. Concussed and confused, he remembers years of Alice’s nightmares and PTSD-related behaviors.

  When Aggie was eight, Alice locked her in the garden shed, refused her food, and whipped her legs. Frantic to understand why, Bill sought out a therapist. Eventually he discovered the awful truth of Alice’s past. He secretly traveled to Guatemala to find the man who tortured his wife; then he killed Alice’s abuser.

  When Bill wakes, he discovers his hand is wedge tight in a cleft. The waters around him are rising. Rather than surrender, he cuts off his own hand.

  Barb and Alice find a devastated Bill inside the subway car. They cauterize his wounds and carry him and the other lone survivor (Pete) to Manhattan’s streets.

  Upstate, the Everlee’s friend and neighbor, Jo, needs to get rid of Arthur Foss’ body. (Arthur was the friend who went to Guatemala as Bill’s translator. He subsequently blackmailed Bill.) Jo does not want the authorities involved. She also doesn’t want to lose sight of Michael Rayton, who’s on the FBI’s “persons of interest” list. She suspects (as Alice and Professor Baxter have before her) that he’s somehow involved with the contamination (or manipulation) of MELT.

  Together, Jo and Michael bury Arthur’s body. When Michael’s SUV slides into the lake, he slides in with it. Jo pulls him out of the wreck and resuscitates him. When he comes around, he blurts out his “safe” phrase (“Fluffy Angus”), which alerts Jo to the fact that he’s an intelligence agent, just like her. The next day she reports to the FBI’s temporary headquarters in New Jersey, where she finds Michael Rayton already talking to her boss. Rayton is CIA and was recruited, years earlier, to investigate Klean & Pure Industries. Together they determine that the final name on the list of “persons of interest” must be an anagram and set out to find who sabotaged MELT.

  BOOK 4: BURN

  Manhattan burns. The bridges fall. People scramble for any way off the island.

  Professor Christine Baxter, Chief Science Officer at Klean & Pure Industries, snags a berth on a boat. The East River is awash with dead rats and fish. For a hefty fee, Christine convinces the captain of the boat to return to the South Street Seaport to rescue Angelina, whom she believes may hold vital clues that will allow her to formulate a plan to halt MELT’s relentless progress.

  The captain is only willing to return to Manhattan if Christine is able to get the consent of all passengers on board. A passenger, Naomi, offers to help her, again for a staggering fee.

  Paul Everlee is waiting just where Christine left him and Angelina. He hands the sick girl over to the professor, but says he’s going to remain in Manhattan to look for his mother, Alice.

  When the boat finally reaches New Jersey, Naomi and Frank hold Christine at gunpoint, forcing her to take them to Klean & Pure’s industrial compound so they can collect the rest of their fee.

  Christine is able to send a coded message to the guard outside K&P and have her kidnappers arrested.

  Christine lodges Angelina in the sick bay and joins Alice’s assistant, Fran, to take a tour of their temporary lab. The science team—cobbled together from a mix of remaining K&P personnel and Army chemists, biochemists, and molecular biologists—have begun studying the effects of MELT on the dead fish, rats, and humans.

  Michael Rayton and Jo Morgan approach Christine, but she resolutely refuses to talk to Rayton, claiming he’s the saboteur who meddled with MELT and demands he be arrested.

  Christine examines Angelina’s wounds which have been dressed with fresh tilapia skins. The professor hypothesizes that the farmed fish have a higher concentration of plastic in their skin than Angelina has on hers and, as a result, the fish skins are attracting MELT “out” of Angelina.

  As she’s explaining her theory to Fran and the general, news comes that the fish and rats which were brought to K&P’s New Jersey lab from Manhattan have burst out of their plastic pouches.

  MELT is inside the building.

  Meanwhile Alice Everlee, her husband Bill, and a stranger named Pete have been rescued from a collapsed New York Subway tunnel by the young woman Alice met on the train. Barb, who carried a plastic baby in order to secure a seat on her morning commute, is determined to find provisions for her new friends.

  Barb leaves Alice, Bill, and Pete on the sidewalk outside the subway station and tromps up a decimated and crumbling Manhattan. She discovers that the stores have already been looted and lets herself into a high-rise building with plans to search people’s cupboards. She finds two abandoned dogs and then a baby in a crib, the mother dead on the floor. Barb washes, changes, and feeds Baby Charlotte, promising her dead mother that no harm will come to her child.

  Barb meets a double-amputee, Neal, who is evacuating the last residents: those left behind because they were too infirm to evacuate themselves. Neal is friends with the eccentric billionaire, Charles Sullivan III, who lives in the penthouse. Charles has a chopper and is leaving Manhattan as soon as it lands.

  Barb begs Neal to take her, Charlotte, and her friends with him when he leaves, but Neal says it’s impossible. The fires are getting worse and there’s no way they can make more than two trips off the island.

  Barb takes Neal’s van from the parking lot beneath the skyscraper and battles the blazing streets of Manhattan in search of her friends.

  Alice and Pete are pulling Bill along the faltering sidewalks on a makeshift stretcher. Bill is unconscious. Barb loads the beleaguered band into the van and takes them back to the high-rise. P
ete’s condition worsens. Everything he touches turns to goo. Barb and Alice carry Pete and Bill to the roof of the building where Neal concedes defeat and agrees to fly the sick men to safety.

  Barb wants Neal to take Baby Charlotte. When he refuses Alice steps in only to discover Charlotte has been dead for days.

  Brokenhearted, but certain she’s doing God’s work, Barb urges Alice to take the last flight off Manhattan while she and the dog she has befriended search for shut-ins and survivors.

  In a hospital in upstate New York the Everlee’s eldest daughter, Petra, is a wreck. Her baby sister, Midge, was hit by a bullet during the ambush (by Bill’s alleged friend, Arthur Foss, when he stormed their compound) and has brain swelling. The doctors insist she needs surgery immediately. Though she is horrified to be acting in loco parentis, Petra agrees to the procedure.

  Neighbors Jim and Betsy are in a nearby ward. Betsy, whose lung was nicked in the attack, is making a miraculous recovery.

  Petra goes to the vending machines to buy snacks and witnesses the arrival of three critically injured burn victims who’ve been medivacked up from Manhattan. One of the nurses bringing the victims into the hospital has a gash in her palm. The blood that drips from that cut eats a hole into the linoleum in the lobby.

  When Petra returns to Betsy’s bedside they discover the hospital is low on essential medications. Petra is flooded with guilt. She stole those meds just days earlier. Jim and Betsy convince Petra that they should take Midge home, where they have all the required medications and where Betsy, a retired army field nurse, can nurse her back to health. Petra agrees.

  The trio steal a car large enough to transport Midge home. As they’re leaving, Petra gets a text from her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Sean. The house is under attack and he and Petra’s grandmother, Mimi, are pinned down.