BURY - Melt Book 3: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series) Read online

  BURY

  The MELT Series

  Book 3

  By

  JJ Pike

  Mike Kraus

  © 2019 Muonic Press Inc

  www.muonic.com

  www.MikeKrausBooks.com

  [email protected]

  www.facebook.com/MikeKrausBooks

  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

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  MELT – Book 4

  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 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 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 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.

  AND NOW, ON TO BOOK 3: BURY

  Chapter One

  “We’re not getting a dog,” said Alice. It was the same argument every year. Paul and Petra found the oogliest, googliest, wide-eyed dog they could find on the internet and begged and begged and begged that they be allowed to bring it home. Her answer was always the same. “They grow up. They shed. They cost a lot of money. They don’t do anything to help the family. The answer is no.”

  Petra was right there hanging off her left leg, even though she was seven and three-quarters, too old to be pulling that stunt. “But mommmmmmm, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?” She was good. She managed to find that balance between wheedling and being cute. One note higher and it would be annoying; one lower and it would feel insincere. As it was, it was perfect. Children’s voices were biologically designed to get your attention and your own children’s voices, well…how could she even begin to describe what they did to her heart?

  Alice kept her eyes on the cutting board. She knew better than to glance down at her daughter. Petra would be in earnest, with a half-smile and a half-frown; her eyes wider than wide and heart-stoppingly innocent. Mother Nature was clever that way. She made kids super cute, borderline irresistible, which was a good thing because with all the crying that had gone on when they were colicky babies, it was a surprise that they weren’t all sent right back where they came from.

  “We will always love this dog.” Paul had remembered the argument from the year before. He’d been preparing his answers. Not bad for a seven-year-old. Sorry, she thought, seven and three quarters. The twins were adamant about those extra months. They’d be eight soon. The same age she’d been when she lost her parents. Don’t think about that. Stay here, in the kitchen. Look at all the sunshine. Look at the fresh vegetables. Look at the well-stocked fridge. Look at your marvelous life. Bill will be right back. He’s only in the garage. You’re doing fine. Better than fine. You’re doing great. Don’t think about being eight. Think about now.

  She smiled at the twins. She loved them so much she thought her heart might explode. No one had prepared her for that love. Sure, she’d read about it in the parenting books: the mama bear, the tiger, the whatever new phrase they had to say mother-love was a primal impulse, but none of those descriptions did it justice. In Alice’s not so humble opinion, the word “mother” should carry the meaning in its entirety. Harm my children and I will rip you limb from limb. Trust me, I’ve given birth. I’m stronger than I look. Perhaps if her own mother had lived they’d have talked about it and she would have been better prepared for the ferocity of her feelings. As it was, she’d been orphaned at eight.

  “Mom, you need to listen.” Paul broke her concentration. Funny how thinking about being a mother gave her the warm-fuzzies, but actually being a mother in this precise moment was irritating. “We’re serious this time. We want this dog.”

  She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and tousled his hair. She didn’t want the twins to hate her for this. She’d let them have hamsters and gerbils, even a chinchilla, but dogs were off limits. She made sure her tone was gentle, and went with the standard arguments against having a dog. “I’m telling you Paul, you’ll stop feeding this creature in six weeks and then it’ll be my responsibility to feed him, walk him, take him to the vet…” She wasn’t going to tell them the real reason the answer was always going to be no.

  “He’s a she,” said Paul, balancing her laptop in his arms, holding it up for her review. “She’s already house-trained. She won’t pee inside, I promise, Mom.”

  “That’s not a promise you can keep. You can only control your own behavior, Paul, not that of a dog.” Petra’s grip on her leg loosened. Not much, but enough that Alice knew she was making headway. “They’re only a couple of generations away from being feral. They can turn back at the drop of a hat.” The twins were young. No point telling them how she knew how fast dogs became feral again. Or what she’d thrown at the dogs when they’d chased her up a tree. She could tell them later. When they were older and could cope with that kind of ugliness.

  Paul hadn’t given up. He still had the computer open at the Ruff Rescue for Magnificent Mutts page. “But if you just look, Mommy, you’ll see. She’s a good girl. She’s never been loved, she’s been chained outside her whole life but she already loves people.”

  Alice turned away. Dogs made no sense. How could they trust when they’d been so horribly used? She closed her heart to the conversation. She didn’t need this. She needed to get the squash in the oven. She was hosting Thanksgiving and Bill’s mother was coming, so everything had to be perfect.

  “If you let us have this dog, we will clean our rooms and take out the trash and do our homework and never complain about anything ever again.”

  Alice shook her head.

  “Please Mom.” They said it together, in perfect unison and with perfect pitch even though they both had their sing-song voices on. “We’ll love her and pet her and cuddle her and feed her and take her for walks and pick up her poop and we will never, never, never not want to do all those things. Just read about her…please, Mom?”

  Alice didn’t need to. They would have selected a dog with a sob story to go along with its droopy eyes and floppy ears and never-ending waggly tail. “Found in a box off the interstate,” it would say. Or “dumped on the shelter’s doorstep with a note scrawled in purple crayon…” Those “abandoned dog” stories told her what she knew deep in her bones: human beings were for the most part rotten. But that was beside the point. The point was there were going to be no dogs in her house.

  Paul was still talking. “…She’s good with kids, other dogs, she even likes cats. Mom! It says here she likes cats. Just look at her, please?”

  “Petra, be a good girl and get me some milk.” Petra let go of her leg and rushed to the fridge. “Mind you don’t drop it.” Alice ran her finger down the recipe list, even though she knew it by heart. “Paul, I need…cinnamon, sugar and raisins.” He was off to the pantry, twice as fast as his sister, but no less serious.

  It made Alice’s chest contract and her breath shorten. It was terrible that her children honestly thought they could bend her in this regard. She wasn’t negotiating. This wasn’t “chores for chihuahuas” or “raisins for Rotties.” This was her doing her job and them doing theirs. She wasn’t Bill. There was no quid pro quo.

  Hubby Dearest knew to steer clear of the kitchen when the kids started pleading for a dog. She and Bill had had one fight, just one, when he’d sided with the kids and he’d stayed out of it ever since. Of course, he knew why she would never allow a dog in the house and they didn’t. She’d told him part of her story. Not all of it. All of it didn’t deserve to be aired. Some stories are better off left buried. Bill didn’t press her and she didn’t share. It worked for them. They had a delicate peace around her past. He told her she had nightmares, but she never remembered her dreams. All she could do was put one foot in front of the other and carry on. What other choice was there? People didn’t up and quit because they had a lousy childhood. No, she would keep on doing her job—being a wife and a mom and finishing up her Master’s degree—and l
et the bad dreams take care of themselves. She’d made it this far. All would be well.

  Alice slit the squash down the middle and scooped out the seeds. Petra delivered the milk unspilled; miracle. Paul brought the sugar, then the cinnamon sticks, then a bag of raisins, all with great ceremony—bowing and scraping and making his sister laugh—which was par for the course.

  The two of them hung around the kitchen island, sneaking glances at each other and grinning. Their sideways happy looks said it all. Perhaps this would be the year she’d give in. Perhaps. Maybe. If we find the right dog or catch her at the right moment or come up with an airtight argument. They thought they were going to win her over. They managed to be silent for an entire minute before they set in again, hoping to wear her down with their pleas. But there was nothing they could say that would change her mind.

  She tuned them out and tried to concentrate on the squash. Bad move. When she didn’t listen to her kids, the wild dogs came, low to the ground like the ratfink scroungers they were, crowding her thoughts. Why were there so many of them? There hadn’t been that many before. They were padding around the base of the tree, their eyes bright, their hackles up, their mouths open, tongues lolling, spit dripping. She had nothing. She’d been up that tree for ten hours. She’d watched her parents get killed, her sister get kidnapped, her home set on fire, and she’d run into the woods. When the dogs started to chase her, she did what any sensible eight-year-old would do. She climbed a tree.