Melt (Book 8): Hold

by Pike, JJ

  Alice let herself be hugged.

  Aggie watched, wishing she knew what to say or do. It was all gross and disgusting and made her want to spit bullets.

  “It wasn’t your fault.” Hedwig wasn’t whispering, but she wasn’t shouting either. “I was raped by pigs and it wasn’t my fault. You were raped by a pig and it wasn’t your fault. It was their fault. Repeat after me, it wasn’t my fault.”

  Aggie knew her mom. It wasn’t her fault, Hedwig was right about that, but she’d still need to go. If she didn’t go and save the world from MELT she’d never be able to look herself in the face. She’d been this way forever. Now Aggie knew why, but that didn’t change the facts. Her mother, Alice Everlee, had turned her pain into a crusade of kinds. It was for all the wrong reasons: guilt, it sounded like, and shame. But she’d still done everything in her power to make the world a safer place.

  She tapped Hedwig on the shoulder. “Could you give us a minute?”

  Hedwig backed off immediately.

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  Alice shrugged. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about.”

  “Sorry you had to go through that. Sorry I didn’t get it. Sorry you believed it was your fault. Sorry it made your life such hell…”

  “My life’s not hell,” said Alice. “My life is wonderful. I have a husband who loves me and loves our children. I have four of the most amazing kids anyone could possibly hope to meet. I have my work, my health, and most of my marbles. I mean…” She laughed. “…They’re a bit loose and rattle around in there when I get overwhelmed, but…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know that I should say this.”

  “Try me.”

  “It made me who I am, for good or ill. In spite of all the horror and havoc it has wrought in my life, it has made me stronger. I’ve been able to withstand things no normal human being could withstand. I can’t change it so I have to make my peace with it. Your father may never forgive me, but I believe I have to go. Because, if I don’t, who will?”

  “Then I’m coming with you,” said Aggie.

  “No.” Alice put her hand on Aggie’s shoulder. “Please don’t. Stay with your father and help him with Margaret. He’s a one-armed bandit now. He needs another set of hands.”

  Herb was shouting from the other side of the compound.

  Aggie turned. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he was excited.

  He grabbed Jo as he was passing and powered them both back to where Aggie and Alice were standing. “Where is everyone?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Interesting turn of events. Talked to the Ridgers. Told them the score. They want to banish Alistair and invite us to stay.” He was panting and beaming.

  “Here? They want us to stay here?” said Jo. She spun around and raised her eyebrows at Alice. “What do you say?”

  “They stole all our provisions, apparently. It’s the least they can do. If you want to stay, I say go for it. You’re going to need some place to hunker down for a while.”

  “I don’t want to stay here,” said Aggie. “I’d rather be with Dad in the salt mines. We’re safer on our own.”

  Alice stroked her hair. “I know, my precious, but this is an interesting option. We should seriously consider it.”

  “That’s it?” said Hedwig. “He ruins all these lives and gets off with a tap on the nose?”

  “There’s radioactive fallout headed our way. Unless he has a jet or a motorbike or a root cellar he can hide out in, he’s not going to outrun this storm.” Jo wasn’t lecturing Hedwig, but she obviously believed justice had been served. “Keep in mind you can only prosecute people for crimes they’ve committed, not crimes they wanted to commit.”

  “False imprisonment,” said Hedwig. “Blackmail, bribery, extortion. I’m sure he’s guilty of them all.”

  “You’d have made a good Ridger,” said Herb. “And you’re in luck. The invitation extends to you.”

  “No thanks,” said Hedwig. “I’ve got someone waiting for me.”

  Aggie laughed. If Mom was going to tackle MELT by herself she might want to know her eldest son was practically engaged, even if he didn’t know it.

  “Shall we?” said Hedwig.

  “Shall we what?” Aggie wasn’t sure what she was inviting her to do.

  “He mentioned motorbikes. This dude has at least ten. I saw them on the way in. We can grab a couple and head back to the salt mines, see what Paul wants to do. Come here if we run out of supplies. I mean, we have options.” She was headed for the gates. “What do you say? Want to outrun a hurricane with me?”

  Aggie turned to her mother. “I’ll stop by Betsy’s place and let them know. They might want to come here.”

  Alice nodded. “Don’t forget what I said about the silver. Dad knows, but you’ll need to remind him. He’s been through hell. You’re going to be his brain for a while.”

  “Okay.” Aggie didn’t want it to end on that note. There was something else that had to be said. This might be goodbye. Her guts were in knots. She wanted it to count, but she didn’t want it to be too heavy or make things worse. “Hedwig was right. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Alice coughed. It was a sob-gulp, really, but she was trying to hold it together in front of all these people.

  “Also, I love you. Remember that.” She stepped up and wrapped her arms around her mother. “We love you. You’re a weirdo, but you’re our weirdo.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Alice watched her daughter walk out Wolfjaw’s gates, Hedwig one side of her, Sean the other.

  The wind was high, whipping the treetops into a frenzy. They didn’t have too long before Hurricane Erin made landfall and the eastern United States changed forever.

  Could she really go through with it? Head the opposite direction? Leave her family for what might be the last time?

  “We have requisitioned a helicopter,” said General Hoyt. He wasn’t talking to Alice. She was out of the loop. He was directing his comments at Baxter. “If there are other supplies you need, other people we can contact, individuals you need us to root out for you, you only have to say so. The chopper will make a stop at Betsy’s before it comes here.”

  “Production schedule?” said Baxter. They’d gotten their speech down to the essentials, the way she liked it.

  “Meiying’s on it, though she insists we call her Lucy.” Hoyt turned to Alice. “It’s the Chinese way, you know. Take on a western name for westerners…”

  Chinese? Production schedule? How much had she missed?

  “Good, good. First band states?” The professor was all business.

  “Well…” The general curled his lip. “That’s not going as well as we’d hoped.”

  “I figured. I’ll get Alice on that.”

  A lot. That’s how much she had missed. A lot. While she’d been off seeing to her domestic drama, the professor and the general had been pressing ahead with their plans to halt MELT.

  “Alice?” Christine Baxter invited her to walk with them. “I’m told there’s a communications center on site. We can pick up where we left off.”

  “Where did we leave off?” Alice let herself be led away from her heart, though it fell out of her sleeves in bloody chunks. Hedwig had said it wasn’t her fault. Aggie had echoed that. Could they be right? Could it be someone else’s fault?

  “We put out the call.” Professor Baxter strode across the compound, ignoring Jo and Herb and their futzing with the prisoners.

  Alistair was yelling something about justice and “the Wolfjaw way” but no one was listening.

  “We’re going with Michael’s donut approach.” Christine searched Alice’s face for clues she was listening though Alice knew the professor wouldn’t be able to map what she was feeling. She nodded to reassure Christine that she was on board, even if half of her was still walking out that gate with Aggie and heading back to Bill and Paul and Petra and Midge.

  “We want people massing i
n what we call the ‘first band’ states. Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama. This is where we’re going to eliminate plastic so that once MELT-plus reaches those states it will have nothing to eat.”

  If by “people” she meant civilians they’d be waiting a long time until “people” stepped up to the plate. “People” were too busy saving their own asses to act collectively. Alice shook herself mentally. They had a plan. She’d signed on to help. She needed to get with the program.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to hand over the logistics to you. It’s your forte. If anyone can herd thousands of people into an oncoming storm, it’s you.”

  “You’re going to have to back up.” Alice turned her attention away from the hulking wooden gates and the world beyond. She’d made her choice. Now she had to make it count. She was in charge of helping Professor Christine Baxter and, it seemed, Michael Rayton halt MELT and save the rest of the world. “You’ve lost me already. Talk to me as if I’m you. Leave out no details.”

  Christine laughed. “I don’t believe you want all the details, Alice. You’ve been gone for hours and we’ve covered much intellectual territory in that time.”

  “Fine. Highlights?”

  “We’re going to create an exclusion zone, wipe plastic off the map, give MELT-plus nowhere to go.”

  Alice cast her mind back. If they were drawing a line down the entire country from Indiana to Alabama, there were a handful of states inside the zone. “What about Ohio, Kentucky…”

  Christine was already shaking her head. “Collateral damage. The nuclear power stations we’ve been tracking since we were in New Jersey are in MELT-plus’ path. We can’t be sure we’ll isolate them in time. We have to plan for at least one more nuclear meltdown, perhaps two. There’s nothing we can do for the states adjacent and adjoining New York. It’s a terrible admission of failure and it galls me to do it, but we don’t have a choice. We have to assume everything west of the line from Cleveland, Ohio down to Jacksonville, Florida will be contaminated either from nuclear fallout or MELT or both.”

  “That far?”

  “Conservatively, yes. If we’re lucky MELT won’t spread through the Great Lakes, but that’s going to take a lot of luck and, if I may be myself for a moment…?”

  “Who else could you be, Christine? You’re the one person I know who’s always congruent. What’s on the outside is what’s on the inside. It’s one of the things I love about you.”

  Christine snorted. “I’m not quite as simplistic as all that, but I take it you mean to pay me a compliment so I’ll accept and move on. Frankly, Alice, we need you to step it up.”

  No pressure, then.

  “Michael has a good brain. This donut idea of his is more than adequate, but it requires someone who has what you call ‘people skills’ to implement it. We’ll work on the science—we already have our plant in China cranking out Original-MELT—while you work on the logistics.”

  “Logistics?” Out of the corner of her eye, Alice saw Jo march Alistair from the main square to the gate. She and the professor were headed in the opposite direction, towards Alistair’s communication center. He had to be madder than a badger. She hoped they’d drive him many miles from Wolfjaw. If they didn’t, he’d find a way back in or pollute their water or block off their air supply. She wanted to run after Jo and tell her to be careful, that he was a rat-fink, double-crossing, no-good, Machiavellian plotter, and that he’d find a way to make her pay. But she had her own work to do. Jo was more than capable. She’d know how to handle Alistair.

  Christine waved her hands in the air as if the concept of logistics was bothering her and needed to be batted away like a fly. “You know. People. Doing project-y things. You’re going to need to talk to Senators and Congressmen and Mayors and CEO’s. We need to mobilize people to move all visible plastics out of the way. That way, when we spray the area with Original-MELT we’re not going to be releasing thousands of gallons of plastic derivatives into the soil and groundwater.”

  “They’re going to be collecting plastics from this exclusion zone and taking them back to the places they live or, if not their own homes, towards people who won’t want plastics close to them?”

  Christine nodded. “It’s the only way, I fear. We can deal with those stockpiles once we’ve created the primary exclusion zone, but not before.”

  “How am I supposed to do that? Convince them to take what amounts to a loaded gun back to their cities and towns and homes?”

  “I don’t know. That’s your area of expertise, not mine, but I’d suggest you concentrate on the long-term benefits of a short-term hardship.”

  It was a very “Baxter” way of looking at the problem and not one Alice had seen work in the world. She was going to need to think hard about how to get people to walk plastics back with them so her team could spray the ground with Original-MELT, as Baxter was calling it. Her stomach twisted. What an enormous gamble. Could they possibly succeed? She had no idea.

  A soldier shot out from the row of houses in front of them, screaming and ranting about ice floes and darkness and Alistair. He had a small disfigurement above his lip, though Alice was relatively certain it wasn’t infected. It didn’t look like an open sore. More like an old wound. No, not a wound, a childhood abnormality, a cleft palate that had been corrected with surgery.

  Neither Alice nor Christine tried to stop him. Even the general stepped back to let him pass. He looked rabid. He raised his arm. The metal in his hand caught the sun and relayed his intention to everyone who had eyes on him. Alistair was almost at the gate when the soldier took him down. Jo leapt in, then Michael tried to wrestle the guy off his target, but both of them were a second too late. He plunged his knife into Alistair’s back as deep as it would go and sent up a battle cry.

  Alice closed her eyes. Too much death. She was tired of death. She wanted life.

  “Do we have a medic with us?” said Christine.

  Hoyt shook his head.

  Jo and Michael were on the ground with Alistair. Whether he lived or died was in their hands.

  Christine turned away, took a deep breath, and continued with her briefing. “MELT is in the Atlantic. We’re going to work on preventing its spread, though I have no clue how.”

  Christine Baxter, delivering hope and light to the peoples of the Earth 24/7, while a man bled to death under the archway of Wolfjaw’s gates. Actually, no. It was best to tell the truth and concentrate on the task at hand. Alice turned her back on Alistair, just as Christine and the general had done, and handed the care of his soul off to his Maker.

  “We have three plans: Operation Major Donut…” Christine smiled.

  Alice couldn’t help herself, a nervous cackle escaped.

  “Don’t laugh. I don’t have the time or the energy to come up with fancy names. Operation Major Donut is the push to secure any facility that contains a toxin.”

  Alice tamped down her laugh. How appalling to be giggling as a man died. She couldn’t help it. The harder she tried, the more her exhaustion took control.

  Christine waited while Alice got herself in order then went right back to business. “We’re throwing seventy percent of our resources at the Major Donut offensive. Indian Point is a disaster, but there are ten or twelve more nuclear power stations that could lose their primary reactor coolant which will lead to multiple meltdowns. The CDC has stockpiles of infectious diseases, zoonotic diseases, pathogens none of us have heard of. We’ve requested that they evacuate, but where are they going to go? Fiji?” She stopped abruptly. “Not a bad idea. I’ll ask Corporal Sandrino to develop a list of islands for me when he gets here. Good job, Christine, though I say so myself.”

  “We’re creating our ‘MELT-free’ donut around each high-risk site. Got it. What else?”

  “Operation Minor Donut.” Christine laughed ahead of Alice. “You saw that one coming, didn’t you! Minor Donut is where we try to cut the eastern seaboard off from the rest of the world.”

  “I can
see why you called it ‘minor’,” said Alice.

  “This is your sarcasm. I’ve told you before. It’s not useful to me.” Christine checked over her shoulder to make sure her general was still close by.

  Alice took a moment to pet Maggie-loo. The dog had never left her side.

  “Minor donut is about isolating the spread. It will need a great deal of thought and planning. A bureaucrat somewhere thought it was a good idea to create exclusion zones by shooting people on sight, which is a radical…” Stage whisper, coming up, she was utilizing her ‘too loud, inside voice’ a lot these days. “If rather practical…” She did her impersonation of the grimace emoji; too many teeth and whites of her eyes, but very effective. “We’re not going to shoot people, but we do need a protocol that doesn’t allow the infected to roam free and spread the disease.”

  Alice was still rubbing Maggie-loo’s head and thinking about what she’d have done if any of her children had been infected: She’d have hidden them away and never let anyone close ever. She wouldn’t give them up to the authorities. No mother would. Or father. Oh, Bill. I’m so sorry. Forgive me.

  “Alice? Alice, are you listening?”

  “I’m listening. Hit me with your genius donuts, Professor.”

  Christine took that one at face value. “Your obsession with the question of genetic resistance has paid off.”

  “It has?” They were already at the doors to the building that housed their connection to the outside world. If anyone was going to be able to secure a connection, it was General Hoyt. They’d found themselves in a compound with generators, computers, and ham radios. It was like falling into a geek’s heaven and discovering they’d laid out the red carpet.

  The general marched ahead, flicking switches and muttering to himself.

  Christine tracked him with her eyes. The woman was smitten. Trust her to find a dead man walking and fall for him. “Think of MELT’s action on the human body—or, as in our case, lack thereof—as a reaction to blood types. We’re all easily categorized by blood type. It’s absolute. There’s no guess work involved. You are what you are. A, B, AB, or O, plus or minus, of course.”