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

  “I heard screaming and I thought it was Daddy. I thought the bear had come back.”

  Aggie tried to shift her out of the room, but Midge wouldn’t budge.

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “We’re doing our best, darling. We need to get him out of the floor and to a hospital as quickly as possible. I am going to need you to be very quiet and very still.”

  “This’ll sting a little, but I need to numb the site.” Jo had a syringe and a vial and was ready to give him a sedative.

  Sean didn’t answer. He slumped towards the floorboards. Petra screamed, but Jo was right there to catch him. She lay him down slowly, carefully, with one eye on his leg. He looked like a puppet sitting in a hole in the floor. His lower body “standing” but folded over and useless from the waist up. Once his upper body was prone, Jo jabbed the needle into his thigh, drained the painkiller into him, then rummaged through the med kit one more time.

  “What do you need?” said Aggie.

  “We can’t have him waking up. If he moves, he could kill himself. I need a sedative. I need him to be out for this.”

  Aggie shrugged. “That’s all we’ve got. Is there nothing in there you can use? Mom made sure we had just about everything we might need, just in case…”

  “It’s almost impossible to get the kinds of drugs I’m talking about. I need anesthetics.”

  Aggie racked her brains for what they might use, but she was fritzing. It was the shock. From where she stood, she could see how much blood he’d lost. How many pints in the human body? How many pints could come out before the human was a former-human? She knew she knew the stats. Why couldn’t she remember anything? Her brain was like a live wire, dancing and sparking but going nowhere and doing nothing.

  Petra’s face lit up. “We’ve got the animal med kit.”

  Aggie raced to the far end of the pantry and grabbed the animal meds and thrust the massive case at Jo.

  Jo smiled. “This will do it.” She held up a vial. “Ketalar.”

  “What’s that?” said Midge.

  “Ketamine,” said Jo.

  That wouldn’t help much. Midge wouldn’t know what that meant. “It’s an animal tranquilizer.” Aggie smiled at her baby sister. “It makes Pippy go to sleep if Dr. Connor needs to do an operation on her.” Aggie and Petra exchanged a glance. They both knew people who’d used it for its hallucinogenic effect. “Jo is going to use it to help Sean go to sleep. He’ll sleep for…” She didn’t know how long he’d sleep.

  “Less than half an hour,” said Jo. She emptied a dose into his vein.

  “How do you know all this?” said Petra.

  “Did a stint in the army,” said Jo. “Well, kind of adjacent to the army. You learn a bit of everything if you’ve been in a combat zone. Now, hold that beam as still as you can. I’ve made a tourniquet above the gash but it’s going to move when I start sawing. I’ll be fast, but all it needs is one slip and we’ll lose him.”

  The sound of sharp-toothed metal on wood filled the cabin for a million jillion years, but eventually Sean was unwedged and the three of them carried him out and lay him in the back seat, a chunk of wood sticking out of his leg and his head in Petra’s lap. Aggie and Midge were crammed together in the front seat.

  Sean mumbled, his words thick and slurred and jumbled. Petra cooed above, him, stroking his temples, telling him it was going to be okay, that she loved him, that he was brave. Stuff Aggie would never have thought to say.

  “Buckle up,” said Jo. “We’re going to be testing our luck with the State Police. Here’s hoping they have other things to do.”

  “Is Sean going to die?” asked Midge.

  Sean laughed softly.

  “Not if I have anything to do with it.” Jo gunned the engine. “If anyone is the praying kind,” she said, “now’s the time to pray.”

  Chapter 7

  The scrubbers—booted and suited and sealed against all contaminants—were brutal. They didn’t hold back. There had to have been six or seven, maybe even eight of them, all pummeling him with hard-bristled, long-armed brushes which had been dipped in a pungent, viscous, glowing liquid that Paul guessed was the decontaminant. The sanitizing protocol went on forever. He was scrubbed, rinsed, scrubbed, rinsed, air dried with an industrial blower, then foofed with a white powder that caked up his nose and rimmed his eyelashes.

  He came out the other side raw and shaking. If he’d had any abrasions brought on by the toxin, that would have torn them open and left him a bloody mess. He checked himself over and over. Nothing. His skin was intact.

  He’d had time to think while he was being scoured. If no one was going into the contamination zone—not even Search & Rescue—he was going to have to go in by himself but to do that he was going to need serious equipment. He had no clue what kind of equipment, but the people his mom worked with had to have at the very least created coveralls that could withstand MELT. No one in their right mind could make a compound this powerful without also creating protective gear that their lab geeks could wear when they were handling it.

  He tried to eject thoughts of the so-called “Fukushima 50” who’d stayed inside the nuclear complex in Fukushima, Japan—at great risk to themselves—in order to stabilize the reactors after the catastrophic failure of their emergency system. But the images came flooding back. He snorted. Good pun there, brain, thanks for that. He’d loved those stories as a kid and made his mom repeat the same incredible tales of heroism until he knew the names of all the major players and what they’d done to prevent the catastrophe from going from a “10/10 bad outcome” score to a “50/10 bad outcome.” He personally didn’t believe that Yoshida-san, the plant manager, had died of esophageal cancer like the media reported. Yoshida had stayed at his post, done what was necessary, and disobeyed orders when he had to. He had been in Paul’s Top Ten Heroes of All Time when he was in junior high. Bit grim that his face would bubble up to the surface of his memory right now, but not surprising. He was going to have to pull a Yoshida if he was going to get his mom and dad back.

  A nameless, faceless drone handed him a flimsy one-piece coverall and pointed him towards yet another line.

  “I need to find people from K&P Industries,” he said. “I need a phone. I need to talk to them about getting specialized equipment.”

  “Move along. Phones are available once you’ve been discharged.”

  His mom was who-knew-where and his dad was definitely inside the hot zone. He had to get cracking. All this moving through lines and waiting his turn and letting other people tell him what to do was a crock. He had to take charge. “How long will this take?”

  “How long is a piece of string?” said the drone. He didn’t look up. He was doing his job, trying not to get attached, making the best of a bad situation.

  “String is just string,” said Alice. “Until it’s around your throat.” Paul understood, as he never had before, that she meant you had to use whatever you had to hand to your own ends. This guy was a drone but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be useful.

  Paul took a deep breath. “I know some people at Klean & Pure and I kind of need to get to them.” His plan was simple. If no one was allowed to go to K&P’s headquarters because of the airborne contaminants aboveground, he should go underground like Fyodor said. People who were trying to outrace a death cloud had gone into the subway system. Maybe his mom or dad had done the same. It wasn’t impossible. They were smart people—what had Fyodor called them? Lateral thinkers? His folks were definitely super-sharp lateral thinkers.

  “You need to register. Someone will take a complete medical history along with blood, sputum, and urine. When you clear medical you’ll be debriefed by Emergency Services. They need to know who was where. They don’t want this thing spreading.” He cut himself short. He’d said something he wasn’t supposed to.

  “Spreading?” Paul stepped back to allow people to pass. They didn’t want to wait around and he didn’t want to move forward; not now that so
meone was talking to him. But the drone had pulled back into his shell and was handing out coveralls without making eye contact.

  “We’re out of the dust, right?” Paul tried to sound casual. Nothing like enthusiasm to get people to clam up. He was going to play it cool. “That’s why they set triage up here? You wouldn’t be doing this if it put you in danger. How is it spreading?”

  The drone did his best to keep it together but he was visibly freaking out. His hands shook and his eyes darted left and right. He dropped his voice to a whisper, “87 cases of skin-to-skin transfer and counting. My guess is it’ll be in the thousands by the end of the day. We haven’t even begun to count the people who went directly to the hospitals.” His voice was rising. The guy was clearly in trouble.

  Paul knew how he felt. He’d seen a firefighter’s face come right off in front of him. He patted the guy on his shoulder, nodding gently. They didn’t need words. They both knew what it meant. That brief touch was guy-speak for: we’ve seen horrors we’re never going to unsee. Life isn’t going to be the same from this moment on. But there are people around you who’ve seen those things too. Stay strong. Find us. We’re here for each other.

  The silence between them was heavy with meaning. Paul looked to the left, while his new friend looked to the right. If either of them shed a single tear, they’d done the honorable thing and not witnessed it. Nor would they speak of this moment to anyone else. Ever. It would be a sacred thing, kept far from language and interpretation and other people’s prying eyes. They were brothers now. Paul had never had a brother. He was glad and sad and filled with hope. They would make it. With moments like this in the world, mankind deserved to make it.

  “People aren’t always kind. They think we’re nothing, automatons, that we have no feelings. They don’t know that we take this all home with us. It’s a kind of torture to see all this suffering and know we’re hardly even going to make a dent in it. I went into nursing because I wanted to make a difference, but days like these make me want to…” He stopped. “Anyway…” He tried to smile. “Thanks for not being a jerk. You saved my sanity today.” The drone, who was less and less drone-like the more he talked, took a couple of gulping breaths to calm himself down. “Emergency Services will take your statement. Thank you for letting me vent.”

  “It was nothing,” said Paul.

  The guy looked up at him, grateful and exhausted. It was only 10 a.m. What was he going to look like by the end of the day?

  Paul moved through the agonizingly slow process. At each step, his plan got that bit clearer. He’d find the Professor first. She would have access to top-level gear. He couldn’t remember her name, but he knew that she was kind of short and had a bob haircut. He would recognize her immediately. Mom was always talking about her and made a big fuss when she arrived at the barbecue. She was the one who’d had this breakthrough with the plastic-eating compound they were releasing. He rolled his eyes. They’d given it such a dumb name. “MELT.” Couldn’t they have come up with something more inventive? Like “Dambuster,” except dams were made of concrete not plastic. But, anyway, something exciting.

  “My name is Cathy Omam and I will be your healthcare provider.” There were lines of chairs, no partitions, no privacy. He had to answer a bunch of questions with someone sitting right next to him. Why was it taking so long? He had to fight not to jiggle his knees.

  “Open your mouth.” Cathy had a footlong cotton swab like the ones they used on crime shows when they need to collect a buccal sample. They would probably add him to some genetics database and clone him and populate a parallel universe with Paul Everlees. He was looping. He did that when he got tired. His brain fired up and ran on without him. It was harmless, usually fun, but today wasn’t the day he wanted to think about government conspiracies and how his DNA was going to be hijacked. It was bad enough he couldn’t get Fukushima out of his head.

  Paul did as he was told. He opened his mouth.

  Cathy peered inside, then pulled back. “You have lesions on the inside of your cheek.”

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “I probably bit it when I was running.”

  Cathy pushed her chair away from him and waved a small red flag over her head.

  A doctor was at her side in no time flat. “What have we got?”

  “Possible signs of contaminant.” She flipped through his chart. “Patient claims he was at the blast site, saw multiple deaths, sustained no injuries himself.”

  The doctor met Paul’s gaze. He knew what they were thinking. That he was a liar. That there was no way he could have run through all that chaos—flying concrete, swathes of poisonous clouds, violent explosions—and come out unscathed. But he had been careful. He’d stayed covered. He wasn’t injured. He knew it.

  “I saw what it did,” he said. “It’s fast-acting. If it was in my cheek it would have eaten through my face by now.”

  The doctor nodded. “Maybe, but we still have to take you in.”

  “In where?” Paul stood, ready to run.

  “Just for observation.” The doctor waved at some invisible thugs who were waiting in the wings.

  “You don’t understand,” he said, “my parents are missing.”

  “I understand,” said the doctor. “Someone from Emergency Services will be by to take your statement. I’d recommend you relax and not make this harder than it needs to be.”

  Paul struggled against the men who had him in their grip. They were far stronger than he was and even if he’d been up for a fight, he hadn’t eaten in hours. He couldn’t raise the will to fight them off. He needed to save that for the real struggle. He’d let them take him to the hospital, then escape. He straightened himself and gave the doctor and Nurse Cathy a crooked smile. “Sorry. I’m not sure what came over me. Today has been harsh.”

  “I know,” said Cathy. “I’ll pray for your folks.”

  The saccharine sentiment hit him hard. It made it sound like they were already a lost cause. That’s not what he needed to hear. He wanted her to say, “Wait! Let me get my gas-operated, rotating bolt, fully automatic M16. Let’s go in there together and fight this mofo with all we’ve got.”

  The attendants steered him towards the waiting ambulance.

  “I hope you find them!” she shouted.

  Ugh, that was worse. She meant she didn’t think he had a snowball’s chance in hell of finding them. He hated everyone. Literally, every single person on the planet. Why was everyone so dumb? Why couldn’t they be like Petra and say what he needed them to say. “Bring on mind reading, that’s what I say,” he muttered.

  The ambulance doors slammed shut and the EMT, clad from head to toe in protective gear, gave him a face mask, booties, and gloves. “Put these on,” he said through his mouth protector.

  Paul did as he was told. “Fastest way from A to Z is sometimes via B.” Alice’s sayings had been like brain teasers to him before. They’d made almost no sense. But now that he was in a real war zone—just as she had been when she was a little kid—he was starting to put the puzzle pieces together and get it. Stay calm, do as you’re told, walk the walk they expect you to walk, and when you see your chance, go for it.

  The hospital was even more chaotic than the triage center on the street. There were gurneys everywhere, people bleeding, machines bleeping and flashing and making the medical staff freak out. The floor was littered with face masks and protective booties and bloodied aprons. It told a tale of fast-acting surgeons who were going from one patient to the next, doing what they could to avoid cross-contamination, but losing the fight.

  He was shuffled into a side ward. When the doors swung shut they closed out the mayhem of the ER. It was a far, far different story in here. This ward was more like a waiting area. He couldn’t see any cuts or bruises. Then again, they were all wearing paper coveralls like him, so they could have been hiding lesions the size of oranges and he wouldn’t have known. Still, it was heartening to see people sitting up and chatting.

 
; Most, but not all. Some people were prone, but there was no way of knowing if they were sleeping or…or…or…. he did not want to go there but his brain raced ahead…they could be lying down, napping, or they could be dying. Dying, bloating, bursting, contaminating him. He’d been lucky. So far. No telling how much longer that luck might hold.

  To his left, a woman strapped to a back board made the same sound Firefighter Robeson and Dead Briefcase Guy had made right before they died.

  That’s what happened when you let your brain think about luck. It turned. It was classic “observer effect.” You changed what you focused your attention on at the subatomic level. There was no way not to. It was a proven fact. He’d thought about his good luck and jinxed it, letting the bad luck in. “Hello,” he shouted, “can we get some help over here? She’s dying.”

  A nurse stopped mid stride and checked the woman’s toe tag. “Is she someone you know?” she said.