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

  He shuffled forward onto his knees, swallowing a cough, and looped his hands under the firefighter’s armpits. He knew how to do a fireman’s lift, but did he really want to stand up in all this mayhem? As far as he could tell, the attack hadn’t let up. He hadn’t heard an explosion in a while, but there was still unidentified stuff burning all around them and the skies had not cleared.

  He lay flat, the firefighter still in his grip, and pulled him under the rig. It was the best he could do. If the building beside them collapsed and the rig on top of them, well that would be a major bummer, but for now it kept them out of the molten rain.

  “Assess your surroundings dispassionately.” It was his mother’s voice inside his head. She always came to him in moments of extreme stress. He’d only just found out the whys and wherefores that shaped her mania for preparedness, and he felt bad for ever having doubted her because if this was anything like what she’d gone through back in Guatemala, she’d gone easy on them. But he couldn’t think about her past right now, he had to think about his current situation. And assess dispassionately. He did his best to clear his head.

  “Right,” he said. “Urban setting. Possible terrorists. Multiple explosions. Falling masonry, drywall, and unidentified objects; hot ash, maybe laced with human remains.”

  The guy lying beside him groaned. It was a terrible, guttural noise which changed at the very end. He gurgled. Ugh. That meant he could aspirate. Didn’t matter if it was blood or sputum, either one of them could suffocate him. Paul needed to get him into the rescue position. It took a couple of minutes to roll him over because Paul had to bunch the man’s massive, firefighting jacket up behind his head, to make a kind of pillow so his half-sheared-off face wasn’t in the gravel. “On your stomach, knee up, arm over your head.” It was so easy when he’d practiced with his sister Petra, but she hadn’t been a deadweight. This guy wasn’t helping at all. He was stiff and awkward, wordlessly complaining at every turn.

  “Bear with me,” said Paul. “You’ll feel better once I get you sorted.” He didn’t know that for a fact. All he knew was he didn’t want the guy to choke to death while they lay under a fire engine.

  The firefighter’s mouth moved. Seriously? Was he trying to talk? The wound covering the entire left side of his face looked worse—bigger, redder, bloodier. Paul had nothing to clean it with and no way to bandage it. They were just going to have to wait it out.

  The guy’s jaw was definitely moving. Paul leaned in close. But the words, if they’d been words in the firefighter’s brain and this wasn’t merely an automatic reaction to shock, didn’t make it to his mouth. It was just a garbled series of vowels with no shape or meaning.

  Paul banged his foot as hard as he could on the underside of the rig. He was now close enough to the front that someone might hear him. He waited. Nothing.

  The guy opened his jaw as wide as he could in a facsimile of a scream. The sound was pathetic, muffled, burbly; not a real scream at all. More like a cough-bark-gargle. It was worse than a scream because it didn’t let the fear and anger and frustration out. It served to underline the fact that the situation was helpless and hopeless and he, Paul Everlee, son of the indefatigable and ever-ready Alice Everlee, was failing.

  Paul pulled him close, cradling him in his arms. Did firefighters carry meds? He rummaged through the pockets as best he could from his lying down position, but found nothing. Each movement made the firefighter moan louder. It was unbearable. He didn’t want the guy to die. If they’d been near the car—the one the cops had made him and his dad abandon up at Central Park—he could have snapped open their kit and given him a massive dose of morphine. At least that would have knocked him out.

  Instead he lay, a bleeding firefighter wrapped in his arms, watching the ash fall onto the road beside them.

  He’d never asked his name. There hadn’t been time. He looked down at his jacket. “Robeson” was stitched in neat letters on his top pocket.

  “I am going to get us out of here, Robeson. I’m going to find an ambulance and the medics are going to know what to do. This is not how it ends.”

  Robeson coughed, his body jerking and spasming and thrashing against Paul’s grip.

  “Bro, please…” Paul had nothing else. All he could think was, “Please. Please don’t die. Please don’t leave me here. Please don’t let this be the beginning of the end. Please let my dad come back and get me. Please let me find Mom. But most of all, please don’t die.”

  Robeson’s episode lasted two whole minutes. Two minutes of head banging, tongue biting, body slamming tonic-clonic seizure madness before he shuddered to a stop.

  Paul waited. He had blood up and down his jacket, along with bits of flesh from Robeson’s face. His epidermis had peeled onto Paul’s clothes when he was seizing. Paul put two fingers to Robeson’s neck. No pulse.

  How was any of this fair? Robeson had trained to save lives. He was one of the good guys. And with a single act—whether it was deliberate violence or mindless stupidity didn’t matter right now—some jerk had ripped that all away from him. Paul wanted to swear and yell and punch things.

  Instead, he lay Robeson gently on the ground, swiveled around so he was facing the front of the rig, and crawled, elbow over elbow, until he was directly under the driver’s seat. He could see no people. No one was coming. It was up to him to fight his way out of this mess. Alone.

  A red drop landed on his sleeve from above. Robeson had bled so much, but not at this end of the rig. Was there someone else up there bleeding out? He needed to go help them. No more deaths today. Please, no more deaths today.

  He rolled out from under the rig and looked up, but there was no bleeding human. At least not one he could see. He squinted as hard as he could through the impossibly bleary goggles. It was the paint dripping off the rig. Bright red paint.

  He frowned. Had the blasts been hot enough to melt paint? If they were, he’d have been toast.

  He stared down at his sleeve. The paint bubbled, eating its way through his jacket.

  “What in the…” He clambered out from under the rig and up into the front seat of the fire engine, ripping off his jacket and throwing it as far as he could. He needed to be out of that ash. Whatever was coming down on them was massively corrosive and he was not in the mood to die by corrosion.

  Chapter 2

  Aggie tried to shut out all the noise. Midge was complaining about not getting her “special” pancakes for breakfast. Petra was insisting that they tasted exactly the same whether they were shaped like blobbies or Mickey Mouse. Jo from next door—who had agreed to stay with them while their parents were away, even though they didn’t need so-called “adult supervision”—was sautéing a rainbow trout for her dog, Reggie. And Sean, Petra’s former boyfriend, was outside chopping wood. At least one of them was doing what she’d asked them to.

  No matter what they were doing, she needed all of them to stop. Or go away. Or at least keep their racket to themselves. Because she needed to plan. The family’s emergency response was going to come down to her. She was the most organized and, in any case, she didn’t trust anyone else to think everything through to the end.

  Mother had said they needed to get rid of all plastics in the house, but she hadn’t told them why. Dad had taken off with Paul to find her when her office building had collapsed. The order to remove all plastics and the subsequent building collapse couldn’t be related, could they? Or could they? She didn’t want to rule anything out, though she had no clue what to rule in. She closed her eyes and thought back through everything she had ever heard her mother say about work. There had to be a clue. She wouldn’t leave them out here, hanging.

  “Aggie, tell her.” Petra had a spatula in her hand and a stack of uneaten pancakes at her elbow.

  “You volunteered for breakfast duty. You make it right,” said Aggie. She sometimes wondered if her older sister wasn’t a little soft in the wrong places. If Petra told Midge to eat the pancakes and didn’t argue or barter
or try to make some kind of “agreement,” Midge would eat them. Nothing came of negotiating with a seven-year-old. Well, it did, but nothing good.

  “I’ve made them already.” Petra was almost as whiney as Midge. “How do I make it right? I can’t just waste all these ingredients and start over. She insists she needs her Mickey pancakes.”

  Aggie strode from her place at the dining room table, grabbed a pancake from the stack and a can of whipped cream from the fridge, plopped the pancake on Midge’s plate and drew a rough facsimile of Mickey’s face in cream, topping it off with blueberry eyes and nose and a strawberry mouth. “Like that,” she said. “That’s how you make it right.”

  Midge smiled up at her. “Thanks, Aggie. You’re the best.”

  Petra huffed. “But I made you breakfast.”

  Midge nodded. “Aggie made it nice. I need Mickey, so Mom and Dad will be safe.”

  The room stopped. They’d all been there, making bargains with the universe in the early morning hours, hoping that there was some way of wishing their parents to safety, but Midge’s version of magical thinking was by far the most bald and sad. Truth was, there was nothing they could do from up here and Aggie knew it. Mom and Dad and Paul were in Manhattan, they were in the cabin hundreds of miles away. Their job was to keep themselves safe and ready the cabin for their parents’ return.

  Petra gave Midge a squeeze. “They’ll be alright, Midgiepie. Just you see. They’ll be home before dinner.”

  It was stupid of her to promise that. They didn’t know what was going on down in the city now. Jo had been back to her place to collect some clothes and a toothbrush just a couple of hours earlier. She had a TV so she got caught up while she was there. According to the latest reports there were massive backups on all the bridges and tunnels out of the city. It could take them hours to get back.

  “Reggie! Come and get it, boy.” Jo put her dog’s breakfast on the floor and he was there in a nanosecond. What had taken her half an hour to filet and five minutes to toss with green beans and carrots was gone in three gulps. “Good boy,” she said, “now, let’s go outside and run some of that off.”

  “Aggie, will you make me another Mickey pancake?”

  Aggie shook her head. “Petra can do it.”

  “But I want you to…”

  Aggie leaned over the counter and swiped Petra’s smartphone. “I’m going to need this.”

  Petra nodded.

  Aggie grabbed up the maps and hightailed it out to the barn. She couldn’t fake being calm, couldn’t do the “domestic routine as normal,” though that seemed to be what was holding the rest of them together. They were going to carry on rabbiting away, saying things that didn’t need to be said, just to fill the air between them so that the dread and fear and doomsday scenario loops that inevitably spooled up and gripped the brain whenever disaster struck too close to home didn’t get a toehold. There was no way they were going to give her a moment’s peace.

  Even though the goats were off down in their pen a few hundred feet from the barn and the horses were in the paddock below the gully that slanted away from the house, the barn smelled of fresh hay and oiled saddles and animals. This was where she belonged: with the natural, wild things of the world, out in nature. Well, nature with a roof and walls and a dry floor. She pulled a couple of bales of hay down from the loft, cut the strings on one then dug a well in its center, laid her maps out on the other, and had the world’s most perfect desk and chair. She settled into the warm, calm space and put her thinking cap on. Dad always said she did best with a metaphorical trilby, though she preferred a more utilitarian baseball cap. Boy, she missed him. Even more now that she was away from the nattering chatterboxes up at the house. In the spaces between the silence, it was his voice she heard. “Hang tight, Aggie. I’m counting on you to keep your sisters safe. Now, look at what I was working on. Look real hard…”

  She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with the maps, but he’d been poring over them before he’d left for the city. Perhaps he had left her a message; some guideline so she’d know what to do next? She could see his color coded “buy it here” stickers. But they’d already done all that. They’d gone to the designated towns, as directed, and bought up all the supplies he’d listed for them so they could restart their off-grid home in the Adirondacks, plastic free. They had enough mason jars to start their own jam factory and it was going to be easy to get the food out of plastic and into the jars. That wasn’t it. The shopping part of the plan was done.

  She peeled the blue stickers off the map, leaving a smattering of orange and purple dots. He was tracking something. He’d done it late at night when they’d been in bed and whatever legend he’d had was in his head not on the page. As far as she could tell, he’d left no key for her to unlock his plan or gain any insights into his thinking. “No fair,” she muttered. “You should have let me in, Dad.” Not the point. The point was only and always what was right in front of her. That’s what Dad would have said. “Concentrate on what’s in front of you. Let the evidence speak to you.” He would have been planning ahead, she knew that. He was an engineer by trade. He always thought three, four, five steps ahead.

  Planning with her dad was fun. He let her get creative but didn’t let her break the fundamental laws of science. If she could think it and it could be done, he would have been the one to tell her how. Without him, what was she going to do? She needed to be careful. She had to think much less like herself and more like him.

  “Practical,” she said, “be practical. That’s what they all expect of you.” Her siblings thought of her as down to earth, when in fact she was a wild dreamer. She didn’t bother sharing her dreams with any of them because they were off in their own worlds. Paul and Petra had gone to college, Midge was too young to understand math and physics and chemistry, Mom was always at work, so there was just her and Dad plugging away at the world’s problems, making it all that little bit safer for their tiny tribe.

  Under his supervision, she’d designed a car that ran on table scraps (on paper, anyway); a self-supporting, off-grid city which produced enough excess “clean power” to sell to their (theoretical) neighbors and keep them in luxury goods throughout the (punishing, ice-bound) winter; and a catch-vaccinate-and-release program that kept the local wildlife rabies and tick-free. She never stopped inventing and he never quashed her creations. They were the best team ever. A bolus of grief—thick and sticky, threatening to choke her—rose in her throat. She swallowed hard. He had to have a reason for not including her in his plans. No time to think about that now. She needed to concentrate.

  So, where had that mind of his gone when he was brainstorming the problem they currently faced? Mom said, “get rid of all plastic in the house.” Dad had set them to work doing just that. What did he see on the maps that she didn’t? How did it relate? It had to be there or he wouldn’t have spent time on it. The maps were crucial. She needed to channel him to understand. Then she could do what he would have done if he’d been there to make sure they made it through this crisis.

  She stared and stared but all she could see were roads and hills and towns. They were just maps, for crying out loud. The dots he’d laid out felt kind of random. She couldn’t see how they were related to one another. It was infuriating. She lay against the wall of hay at her back and closed her eyes. Perhaps if she stepped away from the problem the answers would rise to the surface. She was thinking too hard. She needed to get the overly logical side of her brain out of the way and let her intuition put the pieces together. She didn’t have time to saddle up and pound it out of her brain on horseback. She had to just sit and let it come to her.

  Replay, but with less emotion. Okay, deep breath and try again. Mother said get rid of all plastic. Dad made them go shopping for supplies so they could re-home any foodstuffs that had been stored in plastic. They’d made a start on the food in the pantry. They still had the barn and the root cellar to go. All good. She could put that part of the equation to bed.


  Jo had come over and told them that Mom’s building in Manhattan had collapsed. Dad had left to go look for her, saying he’d be back as soon as he could. They were the plain facts. Not all that helpful. There was nothing tangible to hold on to. Why had Mom’s building collapsed? Did it have something to do with her work? That didn’t seem likely. Mom worked on environmental agents. They couldn’t have brought an entire building down. There had to have been something else in K&P’s labs. Then again, maybe it had nothing to do with K&P. Maybe there had been a plain old gas leak. No, that didn’t make sense. Mom had called two days ago telling them to get rid of all the plastic. Something had already been going on. But what? There were no answers and no way to get any answers. She needed to shelve that for the time being, too.

  So, what could she do with a grab bag of partial facts and nothing much to go on? She could move to the actionable plan. That’s what Dad would do. He’d tackle what he could and let the rest bubble under the surface until it was good and ready to reveal itself. She didn’t know if she had the same kind of mental discipline as her dad, but she didn’t have many options. She stashed her conjecture and switched over to her “to do” list. That’s what he would do if he were here. She needed to be “Dad” until he got home. Or at least the best imitation of him she could manage.