Melt (Book 8): Hold

by Pike, JJ

  “Not the kind of plastic that can be applied to the body. I am attempting to draw MELT out of human tissue. I thought you understood that?” Christine was back, attracted by the science as well as her general.

  “Yes. Sorry. I did. I only thought…”

  “But I might be able to put that to some use. Thank you.”

  She had her attention. Best ask the question she’d been dying to ask since Christine had returned. “So, DNA and natural resistance?”

  Christine stopped and turned to face her friend. “You’re not being logical.”

  Alice flushed.

  “I’ve told you several times now. I have no way of profiling anyone without a lab. We’re in my least favorite land: watch and see. I’ve told you all I know and most of that’s conjecture. Some people seem to have been plunged neck-deep into MELT and come out unscathed. Others were exposed to the compound and died instantly. You’d be better off talking to the traitor to see what else he hasn’t told us. The longer I’m around him the more certain I am he’s our man. It has been a lot like peeling an onion. One layer comes off but there’s another right there. We haven’t gotten to the heart of the matter. I’m sure of it. He’s been leaking information piecemeal. Talk about trash? Well, he’s the epitome…”

  “Christine?” Alice held up her hand. “You’re shouting, now. Could you dial it back just a little so we can stay on track? If he’s responsible he’ll be brought to justice. For now I’d like us to work together. I’m not going to be around much longer…”

  Christine broke in. “You don’t have it, do you? Oh, tell me you’re not infected, Alice.”

  The last time Alice had inspected her back she’d seen no signs of infection. She’d had that cut since she fell into a crack under K&P in Manhattan. If anyone was going to be infected, it was her. She smiled at her impossibly literal friend. Christine wouldn’t understand her silence. She had to say the words so there was no shadow left hanging between them. “I’m fine. No signs of infection.” The same was true for Bill. He had appalling wounds, but none of them had led to necrosis or melting flesh. If there was a link between DNA and resistance, there was a good chance they’d passed it on to Aggie and Midge.

  Paul and Petra were another matter.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Alistair had hoped Josephine would pick ice. It was a test of his own invention. The isolation tank had a double wall, which allowed for heating or cooling. It wouldn’t take long for the water temperature within to plummet. The longest anyone had ever remained in the frigid waters was three hours. That hadn’t ended well. It had been back in the early days before Alistair had refined his technique. What he’d discovered, over many years of experimentation, was that it didn’t take long to reduce someone to their elements.

  The isolation tank could hold three or four people at a time, so they were going to have to stagger the inductees, but it could still be done.

  Four men were stripped of all but their underwear and marched towards the tank.

  “You touch anyone else, you’re disqualified,” he said. “You talk, you’re out. You bail before I blow the whistle and you leave the compound. Am I making myself clear?”

  All four men nodded. A young man he’d never noticed before already had his foot on the lowest rung of the steps. Why was it so many of them were so indistinct? There was nothing memorable about them. It was as if the Army took them and stamped them with its cookie cutter and then—regardless of race or age or height or weight—they had that same, sad blandness about them.

  When he looked closely he could see that the young man had a harelip, but other than that there was nothing to distinguish him from his comrades.

  “What’s your name?” Alistair needed that connection. That’s how you broke the will, which was necessary before you built it back up again.

  “Hewitt, sir.”

  “No, your name. Not your family name. I want to know about you, not them.”

  “Sid, sir.”

  “No need for ‘sir’ around here. We’re all equal.” He made eye contact with each of the inductees. Before too long their lives would be in his hands. He needed them to trust him. “What do you want from the world, Sid? What do you hope to accomplish?”

  “I want to survive this, sir, like you said. I want to ride it out and make it back home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Hawaii. We were stationed there as kids and my folks went back when my dad retired.”

  Better and better. A military kid. They were already half broken. They had no sense of community, no real homes. They’d moved about so much they were desperate to belong.

  “Once you’re home, what do you want to achieve?” This one was going to be a cinch. He had no clue what his life was about or what he was capable of.

  “See my kid sister, I guess.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Sienna.”

  “Sid wants to see his kid sister, Sienna. Does that sound like a life goal to you?” Alistair addressed the next near-naked man waiting to get into the sensory deprivation tank.

  “No.”

  “What do you want, soldier?”

  “I want to own my own house. Grow my own vegetables. Like you said. I want to be free.”

  Sheesh, they had no imagination. Sid hadn’t left home, mentally at least; and this one was parroting back what he’d heard on the road.

  Alistair moved down the line. “What about you, son? What do you want to achieve with your life?”

  “I want to be you.”

  This was always a moment Alistair relished: when he met someone who thought they could be him, though they didn’t come around that often. “What does that entail? Being me? What does it take? Why is it appealing?”

  “You make the decisions. You call the shots. Everyone looks to you. When you’re not here, they want to know where you are and what you’re thinking and whether you’re going to approve of what they’ve done.”

  That wasn’t an answer he’d heard before. It flagged a real conversation. Who’d been worrying? And what had they been worrying about? He didn’t need to ask, he only needed to wait.

  The kid held his silence. Okay. That meant it was someone he didn’t want to snitch on. Someone powerful or senior. It couldn’t be Herb. Though Alistair had been seen talking to his lawyer, no one could mistake Herb for a real player. That meant Jacinta. Well, well, well. What had she been saying out loud that she shouldn’t have?

  He turned to his 2IC.

  She blanched. She’d told him, more than once, that his ability to read people looked like witchcraft to her. “Let’s step away,” she said.

  Alistair and Jacinta took a few steps from the isolation tank and turned their backs on the over-attentive crowd, while she whispered her confession into his waiting ear.

  “The infected. I got them out to the trees, but no one would touch them, as I feared.”

  Alistair nodded. He didn’t allow the scowl to rise up to the surface. That would be useful later, when they were alone. It didn’t do to punish your senior people in public. Not in front of inductees. Or Josephine. He and Jacinta had an image to maintain: A united front, all the way.

  “I managed to get them to throw nooses into the trees, but no inducements I could think of would get them to string each other up. I left them tied up, though. They’re secured. They won’t escape.”

  Alistair laughed. What had she been thinking? Of course soldiers wouldn’t hang each other. They were bonded. You’d need to find a strange fish if you were looking for someone who’d hang their comrades. Alternately you would have to be willing to offer all and any inducements, which clearly she had failed to do.

  She should have shot them. He understood why she hadn’t. Bullets were a privilege at Wolfjaw, not a right. Who got to use them and how many they were permitted to fire was strictly regulated. Jacinta wouldn’t have wasted her stash for a gaggle of plastic-wrapped soldiers who were already on the brink of death. If nature coul
d take care of the problem for them, why waste the resource?

  He would have signed off on the use of those bullets. But she couldn’t have known that and it was better that she had remained loyal and followed orders—even though it left him with this conundrum—rather than striking out on her own and expending all that ammo.

  He massaged her shoulder, nodding. She’d know he was displeased. She had already admitted it. The kid who wanted to be him had betrayed that fact.

  He continued to smile and knead her shoulders.

  She continued to smile and let him.

  No one else in their immediate vicinity would think them anything other than buddies.

  “You will leave after these children are led into the tank,” he whispered. “And you will not come back until the job is done.”

  Jacinta’s face was a mask of impassivity. Not a crease in it. She knew the penalty for failure. That, for her at least, was not an option.

  He ambled back to the cold tank, careful to keep his body loose and fluid. “You’re wrong. Jacinta has no such worries. You misunderstood what she was saying. She was eager to tell me what you were doing and whether you’re going to make the cut. Sounds like you’re a sorry bunch. I’m not hopeful.”

  He stepped back and let Jacinta take the lead, ushering the four boys into the tank.

  Josephine wished them well, told them she was rooting for them, generally interfered with the procedure.

  The lid closed with a resounding clang. Nothing like metal on metal to cool the blood.

  “How frigid does it get?” Josephine was back at his side, asking the wrong questions again.

  Alistair smiled in spite of his irritation. “It’s safe. You can trust me. I made sure no one was going to be in danger of their lives.”

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “Cold enough to sort the men from the boys.”

  When the lid was securely bolted, and Jacinta had skulked away to take care of Operation Birch Tree, Alistair moved to the control room around the back of the tank. He needed to see their eyes, know what they were thinking, reach into their brains and alter the course of their lives. The video feed was grainy. Seeing humans outlined in green always touched him in a vital, humming place, deep in his solar plexus. He’d weathered far worse than this—his father watching, his mother fussing—in a well on their property when he was seven years old. He’d remained, up to his armpits in freezing water, for three days after he’d fallen in. He learned three essential things in that time:

  1) Big boys might cry, but that doesn’t mean squat if your daddy’s holding the rope and won’t haul you out if you’re going to be a sissy about it.

  2) Your mama can’t save you, no matter how hard she begs, but it helps if someone cares about you enough to cry.

  3) The only thing standing between you and victory is your own will. He’d climbed out of that well—fingernails ripped and bloody, feet wrinkled and sliced open, guts rumbling and complaining—under his own steam and was rewarded with a bowl of venison stew and a belt to his legs for taking so long.

  Everyone who made it into Wolfjaw Ridge went through the same test of will. He’d boiled his own test of endurance down to a series of games which now needed to be completed in a few hours. No one had days to waste anymore.

  Being in the pitch dark, in cold water, with no hope of getting out, showed you what you were made of. The Ridgers who’d thanked him numbered in the hundreds. In fact, he couldn’t think of a single person who didn’t say their time in the isolation tank had made them a better person. When you meet yourself, in your hour of desperation, then and only then do you know who you are.

  He invited Josephine into the control room, patting the seat beside him. She hadn’t pressed her case—to remove the sick soldiers to her property—again. She was enraptured by his process as so many before her had been.

  “You’re wondering how it works,” he said. “It’s simple. The isolation and the cold is disorienting. We don’t allow it to progress to hypothermia, but we do let them stay in there until at least one of them breaks.”

  Josephine didn’t comment. Why was she determined to be so irritating today? Normally she was full of questions and ideas. Here he was, inviting her into their innermost workings and she’d chosen this time to give him the silent treatment.

  He could wait her out. He wouldn’t show weakness by being the first to speak.

  “What’s this?” She’d read the array of buttons in front of her. Who wouldn’t? They were wonderful. She’d gone right for the button labeled Spiders. It was as if she was proving his point for him. She’d picked out one of mankind’s most primitive phobias.

  “Our fears,” he said, “are hard wired. There are five categories recognized by psychologists. But, I don’t need to tell you. You’ve studied this. You know how humans behave in the wild and how snakes and spiders and things that go bump in the night make fools of us all.” He was teasing, referencing her training like that. If she was a Forest Ranger she’d have been out there, searching for missing hikers, bringing idiots in from the cold. Would she bite?

  “Not really. My training was all for grade schoolers.”

  She was going to stick to her story. Why? Why not say who she was and what she did? Was Herb right? Was she hiding something? If she was, she was damned good. In all the time he’d known her she’d never said anything that made him believe she was, as Herb had it, “an officer of the law.” She was just Josephine Morgan, schoolmarm.

  Alistair turned back to the video feed while he talked. Watching their eyes was crucial. He’d know soon enough who was going to make it and who would flake out. “The five basic fears are extinction, mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, and ego death.”

  She was nodding and smiling. It almost felt like old times. He had deep knowledge on the subject of human psychology. Only a fool wouldn’t be intrigued.

  “We begin with the ‘loss of autonomy’. This manifests as a fear of being immobilized, paralyzed, restricted, enveloped, overwhelmed, entrapped, imprisoned, smothered, or otherwise controlled by circumstances beyond our control. The fear is spatial in origin—which is why we use the sensory deprivation tank—but it extends to our social interactions and relationships. We start with a physical challenge, because it’s much easier to create a state of panic in a short space of time. But later we test our prospective inductees with mental puzzles, too.”

  “So, spiders?” she said. “Do they drop from the ceiling if I press this button?”

  “Not real spiders, but something that feels like it could be spiders or snakes. This speaks to the fear of mutilation. We’re deathly afraid of anything that might invade the body. We use wispy filaments, but they’re very effective. It’s a bit soon to use that function, but if you want to, be my guest.”

  Josephine didn’t hit the button. What a milquetoast. Most people went for it when offered a seat at the table.

  “And this?” She’d gone all the way to the Drop button.

  “That’s when we’re down to the real hard nuts. I’m guessing three out of four of them will have begged to be let out before we get close to using the drop.”

  She was staring at him, her face blank.

  “The bottom of the tank falls out. The initiate falls about thirty feet. There’s a soft landing, of course. We don’t want to lose anyone who makes it to the drop. They’re leader-quality individuals.”

  “What’s the point?” said Josephine.

  “You asked that already and I answered. It’s to separate the men from the boys.”

  “But why? What’s the end game?”

  “Wolfjaw is a way of life, Josephine. You are allowed to come and go because you provide a service to our young people. There are only a tiny handful of people who have been granted this privilege.”

  “Alice…”

  “Well, yes. But that was different.”

  “Different how?”

  He considered telling her about his accord with
Alice Everlee, but the stakes were too high. If she knew what he and Alice had discussed—and Josephine ultimately elected not to stay at Wolfjaw—there might be repercussions down the line. He needed to hold that one close. “She wasn’t a teacher, like you,” he said, “but she educated us.”

  “All of us,” said Josephine. “I only wish I’d listened more closely.”

  Alistair slid the rocker switch up the mixing board to introduce sound into the unit. “Do you want to hear what they’re hearing?”

  Josephine nodded, her eyes glued to the screen. She wasn’t seeing what he was seeing. Already the boy with the harelip was fidgety. He’d be the first out. He handed her a pair of headphones and watched while his blend of the creepy and macabre—heavy on the bass, no discernible tempo or rhythm, all minor discordant sounds—filled her brain. She hadn’t been prepared for that. She removed the headphones and rubbed her arms.

  “We leave them for about an hour. The temperature is dropping, the darkness unrelenting, the sounds unearthly. Whoever makes it through this round is excused the fire.”

  “Fire?”

  “Follow me,” he said. The walk from the tank to the fire pit was two minutes, max, but they were accompanied by a crowd of chattering Ridgers who lifted Alistair’s spirits. Josephine knew some, if not all, of these people. She’d taught their children. But she didn’t have the first clue as to what they’d done in order to secure a spot inside these fine walls. The underground city might have not snagged her imagination, but no one—no one ever—hadn’t been wowed by the fire walk.

  He could already smell the burning coals and with that odor came the memories: campfires and barbecues and people huddled around, telling stories.

  They rounded the corner and were met with an avenue of blinking orange and black chunks of one of man’s greatest inventions and most basic fears. Fire definitely showed you what you were made of and how far you’d go to meet your own goals. He loved this induction test.

  The remaining inductees were waiting nearby—eager, compliant, anxious—but separate from the Ridgers who gathered to one side of the lane of burning coals, ready to see Alistair work his magic once again.