SINK - Melt Book 2: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series) Read online

  Her mouth fell open. It couldn’t be real. Flames licked the windows, tearing up the curtains and blossoming across the ceiling.

  Reggie was inside, his tone and pitch ticking up. “Come get me, get me, get me,” the barks said. “Trapped, trapped, trapped.” And, of course, “Terrified. Don’t leave me. I’m alone here. Help, help, help.” His barks couldn’t have been clearer if they’d been in plain English.

  She careened around to the front door, but it was already a tower of blazing light. She was going to have to get him out another way. She raced around to the side entrance, pulling her sweater up over her mouth, and rammed the door with her shoulder. It didn’t give. She dropped to her knees, searching the ground for a rock. There was nothing. She needed to get to the axe.

  Reggie’s barks urged her on. The pup was beside himself. She grabbed the axe and made it back to the door in record time. She pummeled a panel a couple of times until it gave way, reached in and unlocked the door from the inside.

  The smoke was thick, winding its way into her lungs in spite of her sweater being over her mouth. Her eyes stung, her nose ran, her throat was screaming for her to get out.

  The heat was incredible. It wanted to beat her back, punish her, make her suffer. It came at her without mercy. She tried to see where Reggie might be, but the smoke was impenetrable.

  The fire extinguisher was under the sink, but she didn’t think it would do much good even if she’d been able to get past the fridge and over to the cabinets.

  She needed water. If she could just douse herself in water, she could get in there, find him, and get out.

  There was a sand bucket by the back door, but one bucket of sand couldn’t do much. She grabbed it and aimed it at the doorway making a small hillock of sand but more importantly providing her with an empty bucket. She sprinted to the side of the house and threw three buckets of water over her head.

  She didn’t hesitate. She was in that door and dodging flames in search of Jo’s beloved dog.

  He was in the floor not far from where Sean had fallen. She prayed he wasn’t snagged on something. Just afraid to move.

  He barked when he saw her, his tail wagging too close to the flames. She dove at him and wrapped him in her arms, lifting him from the floor and through the kitchen to the garden beyond.

  Her sweater was on fire. She rolled back and forth, back and forth until she was sure she was extinguished. Reggie hadn’t moved from her side. Together they sat watching the fire lick at the walls, the stairs, the ceilings, until the entire house was a single tongue of flames reaching into the gorgeous night sky.

  Chapter 19

  The sun had set, but Paul was lit up with rage.

  “Get away from me.” Paul didn’t want to hear another word come out of that man’s mouth. He was vile, foul, a liar. What he said couldn’t be true. Paul was glad he had punched him when he saw him in the hospital. He wished he’d done more to mess him up and shut him down and get him far, far away from everything he cared about.

  “Sorry,” said Stephen. “I thought she would have told you by now.”

  Paul shrieked. He’d read cases of defendants who had claimed “diminished responsibility” by virtue of their rage, but he’d never thought he could experience the molten outpouring of bile and vitriol that spewed out of him in the seconds following Stephen McKan’s ridiculous assertion that he was his biological father.

  Stephen had his hands up and was backing away. “I get it. I hear you. I only want you to know I’ll be here when…”

  Paul didn’t let him finish. He screamed again, louder than before. There was a hole the size of the Holland Tunnel running through his chest, like a kind of manic hunger that would never be satiated. The rage washed him in acid and ground grit into the newly-opened sores. He was hollowed out, but filled with bilious rage, then emptied again, the eddying rush of grief and anger as relentless as a tsunami. “Go and never come back. I don’t care where you go in the world, but I want it to be not near me. Or my…” He wanted to say “mother” but he couldn’t wrap his head around that. The idea that she’d ever been intimate with this excuse for a human being made his head spin. “Stay away from my family.”

  Stephen was still backing up, hands in the “surrender” position when Paul walked away.

  His heart was doing triple time. The world was pressed up against him with her sights and sounds and smells. She was rancid at the core. The meaningless destruction he’d already witnessed and the harrowing revelation Stephen had foisted on him was proof of that. Manhattan was built on the promise of infinite possibility, but it was a lie. The island was nothing but broken dreams and empty promises. He needed off the island, if not the planet.

  Then he remembered Phillip.

  He tore down the streets, Angelina’s head bouncing on his back. Her groans broke into screams, but he didn’t slow his pace. He couldn’t save Phillip if he stopped to dose her up. She would have to wait. It wasn’t like she was going to remember anything anyway. He raced across the avenues, screaming at people to let him by, but all it took was one look and he knew it was too late. A middle-aged woman had pulled Phillip into her lap and was stroking his hair. His pallor, the slack-jaw and formless mouth, the eyes that were open but unseeing all added up to a dead man. Paul had left him there alone and let him bleed out.

  The woman closed Phillip’s eyes. “The lacerations to his torso weren’t that severe, but he probably had an internal injury. Could have hit his head or bruised his kidneys or damaged his liver. Without an autopsy, we’ll never know.”

  Paul slid to the ground, Angelina falling in his arms like a practiced dancer, finishing in his lap with her head on his shoulder, still crying. He found another syringe and jabbed it into her leg, willing her to shut up and go back inside the drugged cocoon the Professor had created for her. He rocked and she murmured lower and lower, until she was back asleep, safe and oblivious.

  One was safe, for now at least, but the other was lost. How many people had he seen die? How many had he failed to save? His batting average was bad and falling. “Concentrate on what’s in front of you.” It was his dad’s voice for once. Bill would tell him to look at what he could control, not what he couldn’t. He still had things he had to do. He had a plan. He held onto that with both hands.

  “He asked me to tell his mother that he loved her.” He couldn’t think about mothers. Not Phillip’s and not his own.

  Alice Everlee wasn’t who he’d thought she was. His brain was bubbling with new-found knowledge. What did it say about Bill? Did he know? Had she at least told him? He dredged the sewers of his mind for signs that he wasn’t theirs. Didn’t Aggie always say he and Petra didn’t look like her or Midge? They were kinder to Midge than they’d ever been to the twins. Heck, even Aggie got more breaks than he and Petra had gotten. They got more screen time, more candy, more cash. He’d always put it down to them being the oldest—the trailblazers, the pioneers, the ones who hacked their way through their parents’ random rules and made it easier for their younger siblings—but perhaps that wasn’t the case. Perhaps there was a subtle resentment that made them push the twins away. Every memory, good and not-so-good, was up for review. It was agony and he couldn’t find the “off” switch.

  And there they sat, the dead and the living and the in-between, strangers all, and mourned the passing of an ideal. The right ones might die. The wrong ones might live. And there were those that might never be forgiven. Could he forgive her? Ever? She who’d been his North Star? It didn’t bear thinking about. Could he be like Phillip and keep only his best memories or was he going to tie her to the stake of her betrayal and roast her?

  He slumped, his head resting on Angelina’s, and let the tears fall. If she was dead he would never get to ask her. McKan had launched a poison dart into his heart, but what if he was wrong? Mom had never said a thing. She would have told him something like that. Or not. She hadn’t told them about her childhood in Guatemala. What was one more secret, even th
ough it turned his life inside out and upside down? He needed her to be alive so they could talk. He wanted her back. The real mom, not this new creature McKan had suggested.

  A decision blobbed to the surface of his consciousness. It felt so natural; as if he’d known all along that he’d never leave Manhattan without her. First, he needed to hand Angelina off to a medic, then he’d go back to the edge of the fall-in and find a way to search the rubble. MELT had to have dispersed by now. He’d find a way. It wasn’t up for debate. It wasn’t even a hard choice. It was what had to be done. “Never shirk your duties,” she would say, “never short-change your best self. He is always ready for you to show up. So, show up.”

  Paul pushed Stephen McKan into his mental shredder and vowed never to think of that Judas again. He was good at compartmentalizing. Petra said it was what differentiated them. He had the emotional metabolism of a leopard on speed, while she held on to every last detail, turning them in her brain until the edges were smooth and round and easier to digest. He would call her just as soon as he’d handed Angelina off. Oh, and after he’d called Phillip’s mom. He wouldn’t tell Petra this awful news because what was there to tell? A claim, nothing more. They were Alice and Bill Everlee’s children and it was going to stay that way. If he could just exorcise McKan from his brain. Go away, go away, go away. He’d never had to stare down a conundrum this big. It had an emotional heft and stickiness. He needed the mental equivalent of an ear worm to rout the man. He started reciting Pi. He managed three whole minutes before he lost his place. What else? What would rinse his brain and occupy the space McKan was crowding. Fukushima and his old hero, Yoshida-san. Ten minutes of nuclear meltdown memories and McKan was a ghost of his former self. He needed to keep it that way if he was going to survive the night.

  He looked at Phillip’s feet. Would it be so terrible if he borrowed his shoes? His soles were a mess from running barefoot all this way. They’d still hurt if he put the shoes on, but at least he’d be spared more injury.

  “Take them.” The woman had seen him looking. “And anything else that might be useful. Borrow his clothes. Take his phone. Take everything.”

  There was no way he could undress a dead man in the street and step into his clothes. That would be uncool.

  “At least borrow his jacket,” she said. “You don’t need to stay in those scrubs.”

  But he did. He couldn’t expose Angelina to polyester or cotton-poly blends. He’d almost forgotten that crucial detail. He peeled back a corner of the sheet that covered his charge. How was she still alive? They’d had a rough ride and she’d been jostled and bumped, but she looked better than she had when she was in the hospital. She was a mystery. The fish skins had changed color. What happened when they dried out? Yet another thing he couldn’t waste time thinking about. He had his mandate. He needed to go on.

  “Could I ask you a favor,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “I can’t put her down. She’s very ill. I need to hold on to her. Would you take his shoes off and help me get them on?”

  She laid Phillip’s head, gently, on the street and set about unlacing his shoes. She had the practiced air of a woman who’d done this many times before. Did she have children? Paul looked away. He didn’t want to know. Perhaps she had an elderly relative who lived with her. That would explain how she could undress a dead man and hand over his belongings. Phillip’s shoes were still soggy and smelled of three-day old socks and foot grunge.

  “Take this.” She held Phillip’s phone out.

  He would have to take it if he was going to honor the man’s dying wish and call his mother, but where to put it? The scrubs had no reliable, deep pockets.

  She loosened his laces, made a pouch of the tongue, and re-laced him.

  “Do we head for the East River or the Hudson?” he said.

  “You go on.” She sat beside Phillip, pulled him back into her lap, and continued stroking his hair. “I’ll catch up with you.”

  She’d given up. She wasn’t going to budge. Paul didn’t have it in him to argue and even if he had, he wasn’t sure it was his place. What did he know about her life? Nothing. She could be another Grandma Margaret and want to go out on her own terms.

  “Thanks,” he said, struggling to his feet. “I’ll tell his mom that he wasn’t alone.”

  She nodded, her hands still on Phillip’s head. “Tell her it was peaceful. He wasn’t in pain at the end. And be sure to let her know that he said her name. He loved her. She was a lucky woman to have such a son.”

  The phrase reverberated in his mind, “A lucky woman to have such a son. A lucky woman to have such a son. A lucky woman to have such a son.”

  Paul walked away, his throat packed tight with all those unspoken words, and didn’t look back. No looking back. Everything that mattered was ahead. If he was to find Alice and prove himself the son he longed to be in her eyes, there was no looking back.

  Chapter 20

  The cabin had been flattened overnight. Aggie picked through the charred beams. Nothing remained. She didn’t try to hold back the tears. This was legit something to cry about.

  “It can’t be helped,” said Jim. “There could have been faulty wiring. It could have predated you by years. Your folks never updated the place…”

  Aggie swung around. “Leave them out of it.”

  Jo was there at her side, trying to placate her. Why did they always do that? Grown-ups? Why couldn’t they just let her be sad and mad and frustrated? She didn’t want to cheer up and she sure didn’t want to “get through this.”

  “Good thing you were all down at our place,” said Betsy.

  Reggie nuzzled Aggie’s hand. He hadn’t left her side since they’d watched the place burn to the ground. He had needed her and now she needed him. She’d always known having a dog would be the best thing ever and it was. Reggie was doing a better of cheering her up than all the adults put together. He at least knew not to talk.

  “I want to continue the bucket chain,” said Jim. “It kills me that I can’t get down from my ATV and help, but we gotta make sure this fire is out. We can’t have it living underground and jumping up at us somewhere we’re not expecting it.”

  They’d been at it since Aggie had alerted them to the fire, passing buckets down a line from the pump. It hadn’t stopped the fire from taking down the house, but it had stopped it from spreading.

  Aggie’s arms ached, but they didn’t hurt half as much as her heart. What was she going to say to Dad when he got back? She missed him so hard she could barely breathe. These people were trying, but they’d never be Bill Everlee. Had she told him he was her best friend? She didn’t remember saying the words and that forced her sadness to burrow a level deeper. She vowed to tell Petra and Midge how much they meant to her whenever she got the chance. They could get sick of her saying it, she didn’t care. It only mattered that they knew.

  The sound was unmistakable. Tires on leaves and gravel, coming from the road.

  “Keep at what you’re doing,” said Jim. “Could be anyone.”

  Midge was at the edge of the driveway with her need to know who was coming hanging off the side of her like a jangly bracelet. She didn’t need to say what she was hoping and praying and longing for. They all wanted the same thing: they wanted Mom and Dad and Paul to come back.

  Aggie put down her water pail and joined her sister, lacing her arms around her shoulders and kissing her on the top of her head.

  The car was a non-descript beat up Four Runner. She didn’t recognize the license plate. The driver’s side door opened. The driver waved, smiling. He looked kind of familiar, but she couldn’t place him. No one else got out of the car, but she counted four passengers: one in the front and three in the back.

  “Whoa.” He surveyed the burn site. “Sorry.”

  No one spoke. He was their first “intruder” or simply a regular old visitor. Aggie still couldn’t place him.

  “I was going to ask if you could put us up for the
night, but I see you’ve got your own challenge going on.”

  “Who are you?” said Jo. She wasn’t polite. Polite was for before Manhattan had started to crumble. This was after. Niceties were out the window.

  He held out his hand. “Arthur. Arthur Foss. I’m a buddy of Bill’s.”

  Jo looked to Aggie for confirmation. Aggie shrugged. She didn’t recognize the name and she was fairly sure she knew all her dad’s friends.

  “We haven’t seen each other in a while.” He laughed. It was a nervous, self-conscious sound. “In fact, not since my wedding.” He stepped around Jo and headed towards Aggie. Jim fired up the ATV and edged closer. Arthur took a step back, both hands in the air in surrender. “I get it. We’re all tired and on edge. Hello there, Agatha. You remember me, don’t you?”