BURN - Melt Book 4: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series) Read online
BURN
The MELT Series
Book 4
By
JJ Pike
Mike Kraus
© 2019 Muonic Press Inc
www.muonic.com
www.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
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MELT – Book 5
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 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 the 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 suppl
ies.
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 Root, 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 and 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. 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 Root’s 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, 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.
On to Book 4 in the MELT Series: BURN.
CHAPTER ONE
The dead rats slapped up against the side of the boat, their tails curling in the water, their heads bobbing each time they bumped into the hull. Christine turned away in disgust. She’d made it onto a boat. That was all that mattered. She couldn’t allow herself to get sidetracked, though it was hard given the strident stimuli in her immediate environment. Normal people were troubling enough on any given day, but today they were especially bothersome as thousands of them panicked in tandem, giving off alarming chemicals that rocked her in ways that were neither pleasant nor pleasing. Then there was the matter of Manhattan’s infrastructure crumbling that snagged her synapses and wouldn’t budge. It was as if someone had poured Elmer’s Glue into her brain and made all the wrong things stick.
She took a deep breath and tallied up the facts. The Brooklyn Bridge had undergone a partial collapse when she was running north. She had stopped stock still, momentarily blanking on her goal, and watched in horror as chunks of concrete fell into the East River, but that was nothing compared to the slide of cars and trucks and vans and cartoonish people, flailing as they fell. They were so tiny they didn’t seem real. She wanted it to stay that way. They were cut out silhouettes on a make-believe sky and she’d be able to sweep them all up when it was over and deposit them in the garbage disposal when the sun went down.
As soon as she’d convinced herself that the pinwheel people who were careening into the East River weren’t real, she blocked them out of her mind and did what she—Professor Christine Baxter, head of the science division at Klean & Pure Industries, lead scientist in the development of MELT, and currently “woman on a mission”—was known for: she fixated on her primary objective to the exclusion of all else. Hitching a ride on a boat so that she could rescue Angelina was her primary objective. Angelina was an anomaly. Against all odds, she’d survived the mishap at the firm’s headquarters. The child actor was the key to understanding how MELT had malfunctioned and, as a direct result, how to turn the tide in their favor.
Once she found Angelina, her goals would shift. But Christine had observed that in life, just as in science, success comes from breaking your goals into manageable pieces and tackling them one by one, treating each as the most important project you’ve ever tackled. That way lay victory. She was sure of it.
She had turned—slowly and deliberately, her heart hardened to the carnage—away from the horror unfolding on the bridge and headed back towards the place where she’d left Paul and Angelina. She didn’t want to join them, only be close enough that she could reach them once she’d secured a berth on a boat. It had proven impossible when there were three of them vying for attention and one of the three an invalid wrapped in a cotton sheet. No, she would remain a little further north of her target and put her plan into play.
There had been a million sweaty, strident, annoying pedestrians jostling at the river’s edge. Their anger was matched only by their collective stupidity. Throwing yourself in the water was no way to secure a seat on a boat. That was illogical in the extreme. No sensible captain would take the time to stop for swimmers; they’d line up in the heaving mass of swells and troughs and do their best to secure passengers from the relative safety of the land. At least that’s what she would have done had she been a sea captain.
She needed to stand out. Shouting and swearing was pointless. It raised the blood pressure of both the shouter and those around them. It was the opposite of what she needed to do. As usual, she needed to be unlike anyone else. She would be stationary. Like a statue. She’d be the perfectly still woman in a suit while the world went ballistic. The stoic in her liked this plan, as did the logician. The only part of the equation she wasn’t quite sure of was the end user: what would the captain of a small vessel, now approaching the east side of Manhattan as it flooded and burned and fell apart, want in a passenger? How could she be sure to be the one who was chosen?
She hiked her skirt and folded the waistband over a few times to show off her legs. She’d been told they were an asset and she had to trust that data was accurate. It was not her fault if shapely calves were something that might win her favor and get her what she wanted.
It hadn’t taken long. She’d won her passage out of the immediate vicinity of the cataclysm within 15 minutes. The rats in the water were revolting, but not her concern. She needed to hone her plan, “pivot” as the business people liked to say, and move forward. No dist
ractions.
Calm yourself, Christine. Allow the flotsam and jetsam to wash out to sea. You have a mission. No, more than that. You have a life-saving, world-altering mission. Your job is to stop MELT. Rack focus and get back to the things that only you can do. Nothing else counts. You’re here for a reason. Meet those expectations and goals and all will be well.
Her re-centering self-talk wasn’t in her own voice, but it was a voice that she trusted. It calmed her. She was herself again.
Next up: convince the captain to help her on her mission. He was busy filling the heaving, swaying boat with evacuees so she knew to hold her peace for a moment. It gave her time to come up with a viable strategy.
The East River was alive with boats of all sizes. Ferries, sailboats, kayaks, even catamarans. The smaller craft were jostling for position, eager to collect frantic people from the concrete bulkheads that lined Manhattan’s east side, while the ferries chugged and wheezed their way to and from the southern tip of the island. There was no sense or order to the evacuation, just a mad scramble to get as many people away from the disaster zone as possible.