Melt Read online

  “It ate through the trash volcano and then went on to eat a hole in the floor? One drop?”

  “Correct.”

  “So, what about the flowers?”

  “The flowers?” Baxter frowned and cocked her head.

  Alice was a master reader of facial tics and tells. The woman wasn’t lying. She didn’t know what had gone wrong with the flowers. “The child was wearing a crown of plastic flowers. They melted.”

  Baxter pursed her lips. She was already lining up her next answer. She wasn’t listening.

  “On her face. The flowers melted onto her face and made grooves in her flesh.”

  Baxter nodded. She’d seen what Alice had seen, what they had all seen; she’d seen a kid being scorched by molten plastic flowers. She shook her head and closed her eyes. Whether that was at the horror of the memory or the horror of her part in creating this disaster, Alice couldn’t tell.

  “How do you explain it, Doctor?” Alice was aware of her tone. She didn’t care. Let them call her whatever it was they called her behind her back. She needed results.

  “Give me a minute, I’m thinking.”

  “Think faster. I have a theory and if I’m right, we’re all going to need to think a lot faster.”

  Baxter opened her eyes. “The kid must have gotten some MELT on her hand and run it through her hair. Our plastic-eating enzyme might have reacted with her oil-based makeup, causing a chain reaction that led to a burn.”

  Alice did a double take. Was Baxter really saying MELT would eat ordinary, everyday makeup? That was insane.

  “Remember,” said Baxter, “MELT was always designed to be used in recycling plants. The plan was to have it in a closed environment, not wafting around a movie studio with an underage actor and a film crew. I warned Jake that we weren’t ready.”

  Alice hung her head. Professor Baxter was either grinding the axe she had with Jake or covering her own tail. Either way, it didn’t help Angelina or get her any closer to the answers she needed. She cast her mind back to the film set and replayed the take that took Angelina down. The little girl had put her hand to her head, but only after she’d started screaming, which meant there was already MELT on the flowers before she reached up to try to get the burning, dripping mess off her face. “Could MELT have been aerosolized? Did it migrate to her head that way?”

  Baxter shook her head. “It needs direct contact. We designed it to eat through the plastic it has been applied to, not fly through the air and destroy anything in its path. We both know that’s precisely the kind of disaster the Company wanted to avoid.”

  Michael Rayton stepped forward. He was a tall man, well built, with a good head of hair and a winning smile. Alice ran through her mental card index trying to remember why she had a mark against him in her mind. They’d been at college together, though they hadn’t run in the same circles and they didn’t have any friends in common. Had he dated someone she knew? Was that why he gave her the creeps? She couldn’t put her finger on it so she made a note to return to it later.

  “Rumor has it,” said Michael, “Blastoplasto has weaponized their anti-plastic.”

  Alice sighed. Just what she didn’t need, a conspiracy theorist. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” But she was already way ahead of them. A single drop of MELT had eaten its way through a small mountain of plastic, burned a massive hole in the studio floor, and possibly disfigured a kid for life.

  Her intercom on the wall beeped. Rayton was right there, finger on the button, blasting Jake’s voice throughout the lab. Never a good sign when the boss makes an appearance. Alice’s gut did summersaults for the second time that day.

  “Out here, now.” Jake never was one for pleasantries, but his tone told her something had gone down. Something not good.

  Alice exited the double set of doors, peeled the bunny suit off as fast as she could, threw it in the decomposer, and stomped to the antechamber where her boss and his entourage stood in a nervous clump. They looked even more guilty and anxious than the scientists. Someone knew something. She clutched Baxter’s thumb drive in her palm. It wasn’t much but it was at least a trail. If she wanted answers, she might well have to dig for them herself. In that split second, she decided not to give the thumb drive to Jake or any of his cronies. It might be disloyal or it might turn out to be the most loyal thing she could do. Only time would tell.

  Jake held his phone out. She turned the phone sideways, then upside down. She frowned. “What am I looking at?” There was a hodge podge of drywall, concrete, wiring, and insulation; like some kid had taken the elements of a building and scrambled them together so they made as little sense as possible.

  “The studio.”

  “My studio? My little film studio?” Alice stuttered, her heart in her mouth. She looked back at the picture. The hole that had appeared beneath the volcano of trash was now a couple of meters wide and several meters deep.

  “It’s on the move,” said Jake. “Eating its way through the concrete. I want to know how this was allowed to happen.”

  Alice spun on her heels, banging on the window to the clean room to get Professor Baxter’s attention. “Tell me we have enough antidote on hand to stop this.”

  Professor Baxter shook her head and shrugged, then pointed at her ears. So, she meant “I can’t hear” rather than “I don’t know if we have enough antidote to stop this disaster.” Alice waved Baxter towards the intercom.

  “Tell me we have enough antidote to halt this,” she said.

  “There is no antidote, Alice. We were charged with solving the world’s plastic problem. We want the plastic to go away, not stay. We had no mandate to create an antidote.”

  Alice hung her head. If one more person passed the buck, she was going to shoot them. Imbeciles, the lot of them. “We need to pull together and come up with a solution. I am not going to let MELT chomp its way through New York City.”

  Her phone buzzed again. A text. From her assistant, Fran. “PD” was all it said. “PD” stood for “plausible deniability.” Fran was a decent sort. She believed in the rule of law, down to her bones. If Fran was urging PD, it wasn’t just the hole in the studio floor or the bubbling gash in Angelina’s hand that had gone wrong. Some other disaster had reared its monstrous head, but she was unwilling to commit it to text. Alice knew she couldn’t call, either. Their smartphones were listening. She needed to get to Fran and lock the two of them in the silent zone—no phones or computers allowed—to be debriefed.

  “I’ll report back in an hour,” she said. “I want you to authorize Professor Baxter and her team to develop an antidote. Now. No budgetary limits.”

  Jake sneered. “Not happening. We’re on target to deliver to the shareholders and I am not going to mess with our bottom line.”

  Alice didn’t hesitate. In the old days, she’d have chosen her moment, waited until they were alone, crafted her message, let him think it was his idea, but there wasn’t time for that. MELT had malfunctioned. They needed a plan to contain it. “Listen to me and listen carefully.”

  The flush rose in Jake’s face, a deep, dangerous red.

  “There will be no Company left if we don’t solve this, now. If you know what’s good for you and your precious bottom line, you’ll do exactly as I say. Get your thumb out of your…” she caught herself. He was still her boss, after all. “Give her the go-ahead, boss. It’s the only way to save the day.”

  Jake’s mouth flapped, but no words came out. He wasn’t used to being ordered about. Tough turnips. He was going to have to take it up with his shrink. She turned and ran, her legs moving down corridor after corridor almost as fast as her brain. She’d always known this day would come—a day when she would be asked to bring all her disaster preparedness to bear—but now that it was here, she dreaded doing what needed to be done.

  She slung her phone into the cubby outside the silent room—a specially adapted Faraday cage with top of the line signal-blocking technology built into the walls—and raced inside. Fr
an was ashen, the blood drained from her face. The bolts on the door clanked shut and the seal hissed. Now no one could listen in. It was safe to talk.

  “The hospital suite where they took Angelina?” said Fran. “It disintegrated.”

  “It what?”

  “Disintegrated. They’ve moved her from St. Joseph’s to Mount Sinai on the Upper West Side.”

  Alice was already headed for the door. “Text me details. Be discrete. Tell the truth, but try not to name names or give details that will implicate the firm.” She turned at the last minute, her face grave. “Not a word to anyone, Fran. Eyes only. And those eyes are to be mine. Understood?”

  Fran nodded, but Alice was already gone.

  Chapter Four

  “Seriously, Dad? I have finals. There’s no Wi-Fi up here and my grades are going to take a major hit if I don’t get this paper in on time.” Paul was ticked off. Bill had pulled him and Petra out of college with little more than a “get up here” explanation and put Paul to work mucking out the trailer as soon as he had landed.

  “This is serious, Paul. I need all hands on deck. We need to get the place ready before Mom gets here and, if I am reading her correctly, we’re going to be here for a long time.” He scanned the yard. They’d been coming up to the cabin pretty much every weekend for four years, keeping the store room and root cellar stocked, working their hydroponic farm, making sure everything was fully operational even if the electricity went down and the gas was turned off. They could hunt and fish, keep themselves warm and fed, even treat wounds and infections; Alice had made sure of that. And when they couldn’t make it up, neighbors Jim and Betsy came over to check on their hydroponically-grown lettuce and tomatoes and herbs. They were close to self-sufficient, in a loose, modern-day kind of way, but there was no way they were “triple Mutant Pineapple” ready.

  What else did he need to do? Double their food stores? Check their emergency generator? Stockpile kerosene and propane and charcoal briquets? He needed to change all the water filters, just to be safe. Then he’d have to check the carbon filters in the root cellar. He’d let those slide. It hadn’t really occurred to him that they would ever use the root cellar to shelter in place. Not in any serious way. He’d gone along with Alice when she insisted they do all this prep, but in his gut he believed SIP protocols were for the die-hard preppers and crazies. He stopped himself. There was no “them” and “us” any more. They were all “us.” He was going to be the prepper of all preppers and be perfectly prepped. He could not let Alice down.

  Paul dragged his rake through the mess in the back of the trailer. “I have to keep a B+ average to keep my scholarship, Dad.”

  Bill shrugged. His nerves were jangled. He was making lists, frantic, frantic lists. This was like nothing they had ever faced, made worse because the threat was faceless. Not knowing what was coming ate at his insides, like a ravenous possum in an overflowing garbage can.

  Petra peeled up in her souped-up Chevy and leaned out of the window. “Is Mom having a paranoid episode?”

  “Don’t talk about your mother that way,” Bill barked.

  Paul and Petra snapped to attention. Bill never barked.

  “It’s serious,” he said. “We need to prepare for the worst.”

  In a sense, Petra was right. Alice was paranoid about disasters. If the kids had had a clue about her childhood in Guatemala, they’d get it. There was a reason the gun cupboard was stocked, the kids trained to use weapons, the cellars and pantries and barn full of provisions most families wouldn’t think to hoard. Alice had seen the worse that humanity had to offer, lost all she loved, lived through a kind of hell no kid should ever have to endure. But Alice never talked about the past. It was her “no go” area. Bill didn’t feel like he had the right to tell them about the horrors she had faced. It was her story, her trauma, her life. If she wanted to tell them, she’d tell them. He didn’t need to open that can of worms. In the meantime, he needed to get the place ready for the worst, whether that was mass evacuation, mass shortages, some kind of pandemic, or all three. He just needed to get them all lined up and ready.

  The passenger door to the car opened and a young man slid out into the yard. He was lean and lanky, with a shy smile and a shock of bleach-blond hair that fell over his eyes. Definitely his eldest daughter’s type. Bill could have done without a stranger in their home. Though he hadn’t directly told Petra she couldn’t bring someone, he was irked she hadn’t thought to ask him.

  “This is Sean,” said Petra. “He’s going to be staying.”

  Great. Someone who would no doubt slow them down, ask questions, mess up their drill practice. Being prepared wasn’t something they shared with outsiders. Still, he didn’t want to rock the boat. He needed Petra on his side, not snarking at him because he had sent her boyfriend back to the city. He calculated the odds: healthy 18- or 19-year-old boy, willing to work, possibly someone they could train to feed the goats and chickens every morning vs. Petra being gloomy and dragging her heels because she didn’t get her own way.

  “Hi, Mr. Everlee.” Sean held out his hand. “I’m pleased to meet you. I hope you don’t mind me tagging along. Petra said your cabin was goat.”

  Bill turned to Petra.

  “Goat. Like, ‘greatest of all time?’ It means ‘cool’, Dad. He just wanted to see a real-life farm. I figured a weekend in the woods would cure him of the urge to go all granola on me.”

  Sean still hung back. He was afraid of his girlfriend’s dad. Not a bad way to start. Bill didn’t want to be a hard ass. He just wanted their emergency prep to go smoothly. He’d put the kid to work. If he turned out to be a slacker, he could always talk to his eldest daughter and get her to see sense. She was an Everlee, after all. She’d get it. Bill held out his hand in welcome.

  Sean leapt forward, overly grateful, and snatched Bill’s hand up.

  Bill regretted his decision to welcome Sean instantly. The kid reeked of cologne. That was not going to fly. Being safe meant being neutral in the forest. Petra should have already told him that, made him have a shower, gotten the message that this was serious business when he’d pulled them out of school. Part of him was genuinely torqued that the twins weren’t taking this seriously. He couldn’t let that show. Overwrought emotions would lead to bad decisions. He needed to make excellent decisions. He was their leader. He needed to present them with a calm, albeit authoritative, façade.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m going to need to ask you to take a shower,” said Bill.

  “Daaaaaaad!” said Petra, pushing Sean towards the house. “You didn’t need to actually say it out loud. I do know the rules.”

  “What did I do?” said Sean. He snuck a sniff under one of his pits.

  Bill softened his tone. It wasn’t the kid’s fault he didn’t know how to lower his profile in the forest. “You’re obviously nose-blind to your aftershave. The animals around here will be able to smell you a mile off. We can’t have that. If you don’t mind, I need you to go inside and wash.”

  Sean hesitated, then threw a look at Petra, as if to say, “Your dad is off his nut.”

  Petra shrugged and raised her eyebrows. She was too deep in family tradition to do anything but send her young man to the showers. “Second floor, bathroom is at the end of the hall. There’s a little egg-timer on the shower wall. Use it to time your water usage.”

  Paul laughed. “He’ll never get all that gel or mousse or whatever it is out of his hair in egg-timer time.”

  Bill ran his hands over his eyes. He was doing his best to keep his calm, but his patience was wearing thin. How did the kids not get it? They were talking as if it was business as usual and it was anything but. He needed to light a fire under them, get them to work.

  Petra sighed. “The trick is to do all your soaping up before you turn the water on.” She gave Sean another good shove towards the door. “Can he do a double-timer, Dad?”

  Bill gave a curt nod. He wanted that Sean fellow out of their circle. He needed to
brief his children.

  “Lather, rinse, wash again but with baking soda, then rinse again. Turn the taps off between rinses.” Petra wasn’t smiling. She wanted Sean to fit in. If he didn’t, she knew her dad would ship him off.

  Sean slunk into the house, his hands jammed into his pockets.

  “And leave your clothes up there,” shouted Bill. “They reek, too.”

  Paul laughed. Petra swatted him. It wasn’t easy joining the Everlee family, even on a normal day; doubly hard once they were under Mutant Pineapple orders.

  “How long are we exiled to the boonies this time?” Petra stood, shoulder to shoulder, with her brother, looking every bit as pissed as him.

  “This is as serious as it has ever been. I know you’ve built a life for yourself, but if you ever want to get back to it, I need you to listen to me, believe me, and follow my instructions to the letter,” said Bill.