Melt (Book 8): Hold

by Pike, JJ

  Before she left, she bent over Paul and kissed his forehead.

  Aggie stared. Well, duh!, but she hadn’t seen that one coming.

  “You did good, Agathon.” Dad had made his way into the caves. It was too soon. The oxy couldn’t have kicked in yet. He wrapped his arm around her and drew her to his left side and gave her a nice, long squeeze.

  “How are you doing, Dad? You seemed a bit…” Could she tell her dad he’d been cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs for a while there?

  “Yeah, sorry,” he said. “I had a shock. I saw her do it. Fran. I saw her kill herself.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s right. You found me. Man, I’m sorry. I couldn’t believe it.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the doll that had made him so frantic earlier in the day. “She gave me this, you know.”

  “You said.”

  Bill sighed. “I need to talk to your mother.”

  “I’m on it. We’re just headed back now. I’ll have her here in an hour. Ninety minutes, tops.”

  “She’s not going to like what I have to say.” Bill looked downcast, but he wasn’t raving and he wasn’t in agony. She’d take it.

  “I’m sure she’ll be fine. She’s always fine. You guys always work things out.”

  “I don’t know,” said Bill. “This one’s different. I messed up. Because of me, the world is ending.”

  Aggie steered Bill back to a small salt room and found him a blanket. She gave him a bottle of oxy and three bottles of water.

  Then she and Hedwig checked on Indie, refilled her water, and hit the gas.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The world was imploding. Not just Manhattan or New York or the eastern seaboard: THE WORLD.

  Alice could hardly believe how much had been achieved in such a short space of time.

  The general had set up a communications center in Betsy’s front room. The furniture had been moved to the edges of the room, the knickknacks and personal items that made the place look and feel like Jim and Betsy’s home boxed and stacked in a corner and topped with Betsy’s creepy doll collection. In less than an hour, a home had become a place of work, bristling with soldiers and their equipment. There was no electricity, but Jim—being Jim and always ready for anything—had two generators, both of which had been set up just outside the front door.

  The room was three parts body odor, two parts anxiety, and one part exhaust. They were going to need to keep the windows open and the house well-ventilated if they didn’t want to pass out from the fumes.

  The news was uniformly bad. MELT was surfing the ocean currents. Indian Point was in full meltdown, other nuclear power stations were primed for disaster, and no end in sight. Dead fish had been seen less than 200 miles from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The west coasts of Europe and Africa, as well as the northeast coast of South America, were being evacuated. There were no visuals, but Alice had a pretty good idea what that meant: absolute pandemonium. As far as she could discern, there was no think tank, no forward guard, no solution forthcoming. The entire world had been plunged into panic and the leaders were running around like a bunch of headless chickens.

  She was filled with a billion stinging wasps, jabbing her with taunts and accusations, all of which were true. Her team had ushered this in. MELT had been their invention. It was theirs to harness and halt. She knew Christine Baxter well enough to know she could veer off course at any minute. Someone had to keep her on track. But Alice had given Bill her word. She was going to stay with her family, no matter who told her she was “desperately needed” and “the only one who could do this job” both of which Michael and Christine had hinted at, if not outright said.

  She couldn’t let Bill down. Not this time. He’d sacrificed everything for her. She had to show him that she understood and felt the same way.

  Did that include telling him the truth about the twins?

  What difference would it make now?

  They’d made it all this way without that mattering. And they might be his, biologically, she just didn’t know. It had been one night. ONE STUPID NIGHT. They’d been at some college party. Too much alcohol, not enough sense. They’d had an argument. She didn’t remember what it had been about, but Bill had stormed off (so unlike him) and danced with Katherine Joape who was smart and kind and funny and had her life together. She was the last person on the planet Alice wanted Bill to dance with. So when Steven McKan turned up and told her she was gorgeous and he’d do anything for her she’d ended up going back to his room. One night. One stupid, stupid night. She hadn’t meant to do it. Literally, alcohol and jealousy had made her do something she’d never intended to do.

  Bill was back the next day, ready to kiss and make up. Then they found out she was pregnant and decided to get married. She didn’t have those feelings for McKan. She’d never wanted to make a life with him. It was one night. One ridiculous night. She was in love with Bill and no one else. Why ruin something that was perfect, then or now? He had been a wonderful father from the get-go. Simply the best. No one could have loved the twins more than he had. That made them his, right? In any way that meant anything, they were his. Except now that might mean they had a death sentence written into their DNA. And it was all her fault.

  Now that she’d let the thought bloom and grow there was no room for doubt.

  She had to tell Bill. Then, together, they’d tell the twins.

  She hung her head. The end of the world mattered. Of course it mattered. But she was facing the very real possibility that her marriage might end, her children might hate her, and—worst of all—her night of stupidity could cost the twins their lives.

  “I need you, Alice.” Professor Baxter jolted Alice out of her pit of shame and back to the present. Christine had examined Betsy’s hands, cleaned the wounds with vodka, and bound them in plastic wrap. “We can’t be sure she has contracted MELT, but we should assume the worst based on what she has touched and the lacerations on her hands. Still, I have hopes we can slow the infection while I work.”

  Betsy was a mess. She kept her hands far away from her body, as if not touching herself might prevent further spread. Oh, no. It was the alcohol. Poor Betsy. She’d broken her foot, broken her vow not to take narcotics, and now she’d been doused in spirits. She had to be in agony. She and Alice, both. They wanted to do their best but the world kept throwing crap at them to see if that “best” was really all they had. They had to keep going. There was no other choice. Alice would bear her shame and Betsy would battle her demons.

  Betsy showed her anguish in the same manner as Alice, which is to say, not at all. At least, not to anyone who didn’t know her well. “I’m going to see where I can make myself useful.” They hadn’t bound her foot. She had to still be taking oxy in large quantities because she was barely hobbling.

  “Let’s talk.” If Christine knew that Betsy was in distress she hadn’t allowed it to derail her. “I’ve been giving Michael Rayton’s proposal some thought.”

  Miracles did happen.

  “It’s radical. It’s going to change the world. But we, and by ‘we’ I mean mankind, might survive.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “MELT has been tampered with. We agree on this?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Rayton seems to believe there’s a competitor who’s manufacturing a compound that can turn plastic into water.”

  “He said.”

  “But, as you and I both know, that’s nascent technology. They’re years away from production. And, in any case, we have no idea how their compound might interact with MELT.”

  Alice nodded.

  “But it got me to thinking. Why not fight fire with fire?” A metaphorical utterance from Christine Baxter. The general was rubbing off on her in the best way possible.

  Perhaps he could “manage” her, once I head to the mines?

  “We use MELT. Not MELT-plus, but MELT. I don’t know how. The logistics aren’t my strong suit, but you’d know who to talk to and
what to tell them. We want to produce MELT on a mass scale and obliterate all the plastic everywhere. It would need to be applied aerially, if we’re to really get to the root of the matter…”

  The smile faded from Alice’s face as fast as it had appeared. “How is that any different from what we’re doing now?”

  “We have a compound we don’t understand. It hasn’t merely been accelerated—that part’s not the heart of the matter, though it certainly hasn’t made things any easier for us—it has been tampered with so that it attacks the human body. Our version of MELT would never have been capable of that. It didn’t have the mechanism. So what I’m suggesting…”

  “No,” Alice butted in. “I understand your theory, but if we release MELT-the-original aerially, we still end up with power stations going nuclear. Plastic is in everything, Christine. There isn’t a place on Earth that doesn’t have plastic in it or on it.”

  Christine chewed her cuticle. The woman was thinking. Alice waved the general away. No one could interrupt this.

  “Here’s what we do. We work from the interior to the exterior. We put a barrier—I don’t know what kind, we’ll need to brainstorm that for a while—but we block off those places we don’t want to dissolve. As you say, nuclear power plants and such.” Christine grabbed Alice and raced indoors. “I need paper. Now.”

  The order was brisk and to the point, but she’d directed it at a whole roomful of soldiers and no one budged. Alice knew where Betsy would have had paper, but everything had been shifted around so it took them a while to locate a notepad in a kitchen drawer. The salvation of mankind was about to be drawn on a notepad that had been decorated with pictures of Kewpie dolls.

  “This dot in the middle of the page is your nuclear power station, your water supply, your electricity hub. Whatever. It’s the place you want to protect. Are you with me so far?”

  Kind of Christine to check in, but Alice had made it through rudimentary dot training. There was no point saying anything to Christine. She didn’t track sarcasm and it would only slow them down.

  Christine drew three circles around the dot and put her pen on the edge of the first circle. “This is your barrier. It has to be made of wholly non-plastic material. It needs to be thick and wide. We will need to go underground and overground. There can be no half-measures.”

  “You’re not hearing me, Christine. There is nothing on the planet that doesn’t have plastic in it or on it. It has been raining down on us for decades without us knowing. We’re covered in it. There is no ‘non-plastic’ anywhere.”

  “Then we make it.” One of the great things about Christine Baxter was her stubbornness. She didn’t think like other people and she didn’t allow paltry things like “the facts as we know them” get in the way of her coming to a solution. “Let’s take cement. Because we know how to produce it. In bulk. It need not be the only material we consider.” She waited for Alice to acknowledge that she was tracking her meaning. When she got her nod, she powered on. “We treat the cement.”

  “With MELT.” Alice began to see how Christine’s plan might work. “We create something new. We strip the plastic from the cement, build a wall around the power station, then treat the surrounding area with MELT so there’s no way for MELT-plus to eat its way inside this second barrier. Am I right? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  Christine nodded.

  “There’s a problem.” Michael stood in the back doorway, dirt under his nails, face smeared with mud.

  “Tell us, Traitor. What have you done that makes this unworkable?”

  “Alice already alluded to it. Plastic is in the ocean. It’s so small it’s drawn up into the clouds and rains down on your plastic-free wall. MELT-plus still has all the material it needs to move forward.”

  “This is the first brainstorming session of many.” Christine wasn’t shouting and she was engaging with Michael. Things were going well. “We’re going to have to think this through carefully.”

  “MELT-plus is a beast.” Michael stepped inside the kitchen.

  Alice held her breath. Would World War III break out again if he got any closer to the professor?

  “As long as there are plastics, MELT-plus will persist.”

  “I know that.” Christine was still holding steady. They might manage to kick this around some and come up with a workable solution.

  Alice drew the professor’s attention back to the notepad with the dot and three circles. “We treat the cement. It’s plastic free…” She shot a look at Rayton. “For now. It’s going to get rained on, but we can deal with that later. The reason it’s not a problem is because this area…” She drew her finger in the zone between the cement circle and the next circle. “…This area has been treated with the original version of MELT. Nothing in this zone has any plastic anywhere. It’s like a moat. MELT-plus cannot pass because it has nothing to feed on.”

  Michael took another step into the kitchen. “And we keep treating it? Each time it rains we treat it?”

  “Correct.” Christine was drawing on the notepad again. Water over here, land over there, people down in this corner.

  Michael watched her doodle for a second. “There will be nothing left. Modern life will be over.”

  “There’ll be us. We will make it. If we can protect ourselves from a nuclear catastrophe in this way, we might make it.” Christine handed her notepad to Alice. “Work out how we can mass-produce MELT in the shortest time possible.”

  Alice handed the notepad back. “I want to help, but I made a promise.” She headed for the door.

  “What do you mean? There’s nothing more important than this. We’re the only ones who can solve this problem. And I don’t like to say these things, because we must each follow the dictates of our own conscience, but we have a moral responsibility to see this through. If we don’t do it, who will?”

  Christine was right. Not only that, Alice had argued as much when she and Bill were in the van coming home. If not us, who?

  “Sorry,” she said. “I have to be with Bill and the kids. I can’t let them down. I’ve abandoned them so many times. I don’t expect you to understand, Christine, but I do expect you to honor my decision.”

  The noise out front of the house gave her an excuse to leave Christine, gawping and huffing and sputtering, in Betsy’s kitchen.

  Sandrino and company had returned with Angelina. The girl was hooked up to a drip, covered in plastic film, skinny as a rake, but alive. Nothing had prepared Alice for the joy that washed over her. Angelina, the child actress who’d suffered so abominably, was still alive.

  They took her into the room where Midge had been housed and lay her stretcher on the bed. No one wanted to touch the girl.

  “Excellent.” Christine was behind her in the doorway to the guest bedroom. “General Hoyt might be my favorite canary, but she’s my first. I believe she had no natural resistance. She’s the opposite of you, Alice. She was both filled with plastic—bad diet, modern food, all that packaging—and had no way of fighting it off.”

  The soldiers left the room, careful not to touch Alice or Christine on their way out. This was what their new world was going to look like: No touching. Maximum fear. Isolation for the sick and dying. And no cure. They couldn’t very well spray the Angelinas of the world with original-MELT and get the same result.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” It was so unlikely that Christine Baxter would know what anyone was thinking that Alice smiled.

  “Hit me. What am I thinking?”

  “I have no desire to hit you, but you’re wondering how we treat those humans who have already been infected with MELT-plus.”

  Second miracle of the day. Christine had been willing to talk to Michael and now she’d successfully guessed what Alice had been thinking. The idea that she might be able to leave with a not-totally-besmirched conscience gathered a little head of steam. She nodded. “That’s exactly what I was thinking about. We can’t treat them with MELT. So, what do we do?”

>   “We treat them with tilapia skins, just as we did Angelina.”

  “Is that what saved her?”

  Christine shrugged. “I can’t think of anything else. MELT-plus ran down her face and dug holes in her cheeks. It was relentless.”

  “You only want us to mass-produce MELT and tilapia skins and supply them to the whole world?”

  “No.” Christine smiled. “Only America—well, perhaps Canada by now—but only this continent has infected people. If we can act fast enough, we will save most of humanity from contracting this disease. But time is of the essence. Tell me you’re not going to abandon us, Alice. I know how much you love your children—as do they; Paul was the very model of devotion when he went back to Manhattan and refused a berth on my boat—but we need you for something bigger than that which rules your heart.”

  Betsy pushed her way into the room, hands over her head. “Is this the patient?”

  “This is more than just a patient, Betsy. This is Patient Zero.” Christine was right to be proud of the fact that Angelina had survived. “She may still be contagious. We don’t know. Treat her as if she is.” Christine turned to Alice and though Betsy was only a few feet away, the professor dropped her voice to her terrible stage whisper which everyone could hear. “If people like Betsy are willing, we can have the sick tend to the sick, thereby minimizing the rate at which MELT-the-Disease can spread.”

  “I’ll take care of her whether I’m sick or not,” said Betsy. “I’m a nurse. It’s what we do. I wouldn’t expect a bench scientist to understand.”

  “Alice?” It was the general shouting for her from outside. “Get out here. Now.”

  The soldiers they’d left at Jo’s place had swarmed the front yard. So much for quarantine and separation. They looked far worse. Their wounds had spread. Goodness sakes, they’d all removed their plastic wrap. She’d seen at least three men—men, women, who could tell when they were wrapped like mummies—wrapped in plastic before they went into Jo’s barn.