RAZE - Melt Book 5: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series) Read online

  Petra solicits the help of a nurse, Cassie, to sit with Midge and Betsy then she and Jim take off for home. Cassie’s hand is bandaged. She was the nurse Petra saw entering the hospital when the burn victims were admitted.

  Back at the compound, there’s a gun battle. Mimi is hit. But Jim and Petra kill the intruders.

  Cassie calls to say the hospital is going into lockdown. Petra tells her to leave the parking lot immediately and drive back to the house slowly so Midge isn’t injured.

  Aggie, who has been MIA since she killed Arthur Root, returns home. She has visited the salt mines their father, Bill, had marked on his maps and believes she has found a place for them to hide out until the crisis has passed.

  Realizing just how sick Midge is, and worried that the job may prove too much for Nurse Betsy, Petra solicits another nurse to come and help them.

  Sean, whose folks are rich, agrees to foot the bill.

  When Cassie, Midge, and Betsy arrive home, Petra kills Nurse Cassie. There’s an infectious agent out there; they don’t know how it’s spreading; the hospital is on full quarantine; she believes Cassie was infected. Unlike Aggie, who was plagued with misgivings when she shot Arthur, Petra has no such qualms. She has been transformed from a nervous Nellie to a “shoot first, ask questions later” warrior.

  On to Book 5 in the MELT Series: RAZE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The borough formerly known as Manhattan was spread out below Alice, its spine broken and its guts on fire.

  Just days earlier—more than three, less than ten, she’d lost all track of time—Alice had been in a helicopter just like this one, transporting a child actor with chemical burns from one hospital to another in order to secure her the best possible treatment. Alice hated flying. The lack of control made her crazy and the threat of a fiery death was never far from her mind.

  On that first flight, she’d tried to force herself to blend with the back of her seat—so anxious was she about the wocka-wocka of the blades overhead and the very real possibility that she might plunge out of a metal bird with no doors and end up a ketchup sploodge on the pavement below—but this time around she strained at her seat belt, eager to get a better view of the devastation that had been wrought on the city she loved.

  Neal, who had orchestrated this eleventh-hour rescue from the Avalond Towers, tapped her on the knee. “Put this on.” He handed her a filtration mask. It was a 3M. Top of the line. Befriending the friend of a billionaire had its perks. They were in Charles Sullivan III’s helicopter, en-route to his estate. No one had said where exactly. Alice had some vague recollection that Barb had said he had properties in Florida and New England. They could be headed to Vermont or New Hampshire or Massachusetts for all she knew.

  Her beloved Bill—dear, sweet, only Bill—had gone on ahead. Neal said there was a fully-stocked sick bay at Charles’ house, with doctors being flown in as they spoke. Bill would have access to, “a medical staff that is second to none.” Alice had to quash all thoughts of the kinds of doctors who made themselves available to the obscenely rich.

  They’d be there soon enough and she’d be able to judge for herself just how good those doctors-for-hire really were. She’d know as soon as she saw the “sick bay” whether Bill was likely to be safe or not. She’d take no chances with her beloved’s health. He’d lost his hand in a way that defied the imagination, sawing and hacking and slicing it off himself in order to escape the rising waters in the New York subway. Even though her cuckoo-crazy friend, Barb, had cauterized the wound, the chances of sepsis or gangrene were, statistically, astronomically high.

  She strapped her mask to her face and gazed down as a skyscraper only two blocks to their left fell, sending up plumes of toxic dust. The chopper banked and rose. Gerard, the pilot, had warned them that they might be obliged to, “engage in some risky behavior” and that they should, “expect turbulence.”

  Alice hadn’t expected the level of catastrophic destruction she was seeing from her perch in the clouds. She’d been prepared for a “seven out of ten” bad, but this was “fifteen out of ten” awful. She’d lost count of the number of fires that ravaged the tiny island. Major landmarks had disappeared, neighborhoods fallen, and the FDR was crumbling into the East River. She’d been on that very highway when this whole tragedy kicked off. What a difference a day makes. Yesterday—or the day before or the day before that—that highway had been a marvel of engineering; today it was mere rubble, collapsing into the waves.

  They were only a little north of Midtown, but the smoke was too thick for her to see downtown. Closer to their immediate position, there were massive, gaping sinkholes that had swallowed entire buildings. She couldn’t pick out the Empire State Building or the MetLife Building, structures that had dominated the skyline and the imagination of a country young enough to remember the builders and architects.

  America wasn’t anything like Guatemala, the country of her birth, where the ancient ruins were protected by UNESCO. The pyramids of Tikal and Yaxha were so expertly constructed, not even thousands of years of tropical heat and creeping vines and howler monkeys had leveled them. Alice was drawn and repulsed, fascinated and appalled, by all things connected with Mesoamerica. The Mayan pyramids, unlike their more famous Egyptian cousins, were paired with brutal blood sacrifice: beheadings and disembowelments and the extraction of the human heart, which meant the place they occupied in the global imagination was steeped in blood.

  She’d been in that jungle and learned for herself how punishing the terrain and unrelenting the men who’d sacrifice a child on the altar of their desire. Those memories were so close to the surface since her entombment in the subway tunnel. Normally that would bring on a full-blown panic attack, but now all she felt was pity and scorn. The man who’d kidnapped her and kept her as his plaything had to have been sick in his mind. She’d never thought of him that way before. He’d always been larger than life and twice as terrifying. Now he was a broken thing who held no sway over her. She was done with Mateo Hernandez. He’d been replaced by a true nightmare: how to ensure her husband survived so the two of them could return to their life.

  The helicopter was chugging towards Central Park while she did her best to determine what was gone and what remained. She couldn’t pick out the Chrysler Building. Of all the buildings that could be lost to this tragedy, why did that masterpiece of Art Deco have to go?

  She looked back towards the East River and gasped, her hand flying to her throat in an involuntary gesture of panic and pain. “The bridges.” No one could hear her behind her mask, which was just as well because there were no words to express what it was like to expect to see the Brooklyn Bridge, but instead be presented with some hacked up, broken down version of that iconic structure.

  She tried to catalogue and quantify what lay before her, but it was too overwhelming. Manhattan had been smashed and eviscerated, both above and below. She’d been in a subway tunnel when the waters started to rise and had a handle on what was going on down there; the tunnels were flooded, sending rats and roaches and refuse up into the streets. Less than an hour ago, she and Barb had attempted to evacuate by car, but the roads were cracking and melting and the buildings so badly compromised that you took your life into your own hands each time you passed one. Fire above, water below had been supplanted by fire below and water above and then, just when it didn’t seem like it could get any worse, there was fire and water everywhere: above, below, behind her, in front of her, and now as far as the eye could see.

  She tamped down the tears and fought off the nausea.

  As awful as this carnage was, there was something much worse that plagued her brain: this calamity had been brought about by her hand.

  Not her hand alone, but she was as guilty as anyone else at Klean & Pure Industries. She’d known in her gut that they weren’t ready to launch their plastic-eating formula, MELT. Dr. Baxter had said as much.

  She’d thought…

  What had she thought? She couldn’t start
making excuses now, patching up the past to make herself look better. Hindsight was only useful if you looked the horror square in the face, owned up to your errors, and adjusted your course accordingly. She’d allowed some combination of pride in what they’d achieved and cowardice in the face of a boss who was an unchecked bully to allow her to ignore her own misgivings and, worse still, fail to support Baxter when she voiced her very real concerns. Never again. She would never be quiet when there was something that needed to be said.

  Neal tapped her on the knee again and handed her a pair of headphones.

  Alice put them on, grateful to block out the sounds of the literal and figurative fall of a city. Perhaps the fall of an empire, she couldn’t know.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” said Neal. “That was one way to make sure the listener’s blood pressure shot up. “There are going to be some large, noisy planes flying low. They’re no threat to us. We’d ordinarily be flying at different altitudes but these planes are going to be lower than you’re accustomed to seeing them and I didn’t want you to freak out.” How still and sure and kind this man was. He’d made it through a war, though which one she wasn’t sure, and seemed unfazed by this unending avalanche of terror.

  She’d lived through a war and it had left her broken in places that no one could see. Neal’s legs had been amputated below the knee, but he’d bounded up and down the apartment building stairwell on his “blades,” as Barb called them, as if he were in no trouble at all. And here he was cool as an English cucumber. Somehow what he’d seen hadn’t broken him. If only he could syphon some of that off and sell it to her.

  Neal was nodding along to some report that was being fed into his headphones, but not hers. “We’re picking up multiple reports of a coordinated effort to put these fires out from above.”

  “They’re sending in firefighting planes?” That would do no good. These weren’t your ordinary fires. These were MELT-driven conflagrations. Ordinary retardants would be powerless to douse these fires.

  Neal shrugged. “It’s all we know. The news is thin. Most of the intel we’re gathering has nothing to do with the military response. We’re getting repeated lists of which buildings have collapsed, which tunnels out of Manhattan are now confirmed to be entirely flooded, the relative states of the bridges. There aren’t many ways left to get off the island.”

  Alice nodded. It wasn’t just the Brooklyn Bridge that had been smashed. The Manhattan Bridge had been blitzed, too. The Williamsburg and Queensborough Bridges might be standing, but why would anyone go to Brooklyn or Queens when Long Island was undoubtedly a death trap? No, anyone still wanting to flee Manhattan would need to go north to the Throgs Neck Bridge or perhaps as far as Harlem for the Henry Hudson or the Triborough.

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  Alice smiled. “Unlikely.”

  “It’s one hell of a hike to Harlem if she changes her mind.” He’d been thinking about the one they’d left behind, too.

  Poor Barb. She’d insisted that she stay to take care of, in her own words, “God’s creatures.” Alice should have made her come with them. The woman was a certifiable saint: certifiable in the “she perhaps needs medical attention” way and saintly in the tradition of all the martyrs. She’d given her life, so they might leave

  Neal had been the brains of the evacuation from the Avalond Towers where he lived, but Barb was the heart. If Barb hadn’t fought to get them a seat on this flight, she and Bill, as well as Pete and his dog Maggie-loo, would have died on the sinking streets of Manhattan. Alice would always be grateful to Barb; and guilty that she hadn’t pressed her to come with them. She had more innate common sense than that fragmented young woman would ever have. When she’d discovered that Barb had been carrying baby Charlotte around for a whole day, though Charlotte had been dead when Barb found her, she should have put her foot down.

  Poor Barb. Poor, poor, poor deluded Barb.

  There was no point dwelling. Neal would never go back through all that smoke and fire. Even if they had been able to go back, Barb wouldn’t be there. She’d have wandered off to find another poor soul to rescue.

  “Dr. Kaspacrantz has already seen Bill.”

  The muscles in Alice’s neck spasmed all at once and she had to tilt her head back to work the kink out. “And?”

  “He says you saved his life. Though the wound is ugly, you didn’t press too hard into the flesh and…” He paused to listen to the rest of the message. He was talking to the doctor right now. Her darling Bill was getting medical attention as they zipped over Manhattan. “He says not too much of the tissue has been burned.”

  Alice hadn’t seen most of that operation. She’d been passed out on the floor of the subway car while Barb heated Bill’s knife and used it to prevent him from exsanguinating.

  Neal was still talking. She caught something about “antibiotics” and “monitoring,” but it was mostly a blur. “That’s great,” he said. “We’ll be with you shortly. Over and out.”

  Alice waited, every nerve in her body tingling.

  “Good news all around.” Neal grinned. “He’s going to be well enough to move in a day or so.”

  “Move?” The man was close to death. It wasn’t only that he’d lost so much blood, his entire body had been hammered. The dehydration alone could have killed him.

  “Once the antibiotics kick in, he’s going to be a lot better. Dr. K. has him on Charles’ personal pick-me-up formula. He’ll be right as rain. You’ll see.”

  Alice was prepared not to like this Charles fellow, in spite of the fact that he was her ticket off Manhattan. Her experiences with the very rich had confirmed her suspicions: too much money too young was not good for the soul. If anyone from her village had seen her, they’d have called her rich: she had a beautiful house in a comfortable upstate town, a postage-stamp size apartment in Manhattan, and a cabin in the woods. But by Manhattan standards she was merely middle class.

  Her boss, Jake—the one who’d fallen to his death inside K&P’s headquarters—now, he was rich. He had a penthouse apartment, a holiday home in the Hamptons, an estate in the countryside somewhere, and what he referred to as his “tiny house” in the Virgin Islands. He had his own jet, a yacht, and three children he never saw. His wife practically lived on Fifth Avenue, spending away her loneliness. Had Jake told his wife to take their children and run, when MELT began to eat K&P from the inside out? She couldn’t get that image out of her head: Jake landing on the rebar that was jutting up from the basement. He would have died instantly, but his body would have undergone a plethora of post-mortem insults. He was part of the burial ground that was Manhattan now. “God rest his soul,” she said.

  The firefighting plane—which she’d already forgotten was coming to save the day—roared out of the clouds, dipping its fat belly towards the fire. The thundering rumble, accompanied by the blast of wind that broke over the chopper, was an assault on the senses. Then it was gone and all they were left with was the retreating clamor of the machine that might—or might not—end this travesty.

  “Pete just died.” Neal didn’t sugarcoat the news. He held his hand to his ear, pressing the earpiece close. “Complications from his wounds. Progressive chemical burns.”

  “Oh, shoot,” said Alice. “Tell the doctor not to touch the wounds. Tell him to remove all plastics—latex gloves, plastic tubing, modern needles—they all have to go. MELT lives on the body. It’s on Pete and it’s on Bill. You have to make him understand that it’s a living organism and it will spread to whoever touches it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Strip? All the way?” Michael Rayton wasn’t a fan of taking orders. Not least when those orders involved removing his clothes alongside a bunch of strangers and having every orifice probed by an Army medic. He’d been manhandled by enough soldiers for one day.

  The warehouse on the south end of Klean & Pure Industries’ New Jersey compound had been repurposed. A squadron of highly trained, well-organized soldiers had gutted the
place, leaving only the original cement floors and metal siding. Michael had been ordered to strip naked inside a cavernous tin can on a roasting hot August day, with one hundred or more scientists, lab techs, and data analysts. There was no air conditioning, no changing room, no privacy curtain. Ahead of him was a line of men in varying stages of undress.

  “All the way, sir. No exceptions.” The soldier kept his face neutral, his eyes aimed slightly to the right. His name was stitched on his chest with his rank on a tab close by. Sergeant Collins was a stone-faced SOB. If executing his duty gave him pain or pleasure, the urge to let that show had been drilled right out of him.

  No one was going to be admitted to the new laboratory over in Fort Monmouth until they’d been given a clean bill of health. Like the sergeant said, no exceptions. He was going to be inspected just like everyone else.

  On Professor Baxter’s advice, they’d developed a screening protocol. Anyone who’d been in Manhattan since “the incident” and had sustained cuts, scrapes, or scratches—as well as all those who’d been exposed to any person or persons with a confirmed MELT infection—was to be kept away from the general population for a period of no less than 21 days; the same quarantine period required by the CDC for anyone who’d been exposed to the Ebola virus.