Melt | Book 10 | Chase Read online
CHARGE
MELT Series
Book 9
By
JJ Pike
Mike Kraus
© 2021 Muonic Press Inc
www.muonic.com
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Table of Contents
Last Time, on MELT…
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
EPILOGUE
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Special Thanks
Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great.
Thank you!
Last Time, on MELT…
MELT, the series, is not a set of standalone novels but a serialized story designed to be read in order.
Here’s a quick recap of the story in BOOK NINE: CHARGE
Alice Everlee, Professor Christine Baxter, and Michael Rayton leave Wolfjaw Ridge with General Hoyt and his soldiers and head toward Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, which is in meltdown. The slog through the wrecked landscape of upstate New York is beset with problems: food shortages, mutineers, and the ever-present threat of MELT.
Alice makes a run for it with her dog, Maggie-loo, but is chased back to camp by an extraction team, which evacuates the Klean & Pure personnel to an undisclosed location where they undergo tests and treatment. They’re shipped to the South Pole under heavy guard, along with a trio of civilians they never clap eyes on.
Once at the South Pole base, Alice, Christine, and Michael are reunited with their colleagues, Jan van Karpel, Jo Morgan, and Stephen McKan. Van Karpel claims Klean & Pure fitted the team with electronic trackers, which Alice believes is a fabrication. The team is mostly consigned to their rooms, where they’re fed a diet of soporifics to keep them docile, until Alice contrives a plan to break out and demand that they be allowed back onto the research team.
Once back on the grid, Alice discovers that she and her colleagues have been infected with various strains of MELT. Michael Rayton is revealed as “the real patient zero.” He was apparently infected with a mutant strain of MELT years before Fran released a more virulent strain on the unsuspecting world. Worse yet, NATO has joined forces with Russia with a threat to bomb the United States off the map unless they halt MELT.
Back in Wolfjaw Ridge, Jacinta Baule has taken command of the “Downers” following Alistair Lewk’s murder. She orders her people to take cover in Wolfjaw Down, their underground city. The doors are locked and welded shut, leaving a contingent of people outside. Tempers run high and Jacinta is paralyzed by the pressure of leadership. One faction wants to open the doors, another wants to keep them shut, and there are rumors of a planned coup.
Jacinta proposes the Downers vote on whether to open the doors or keep them sealed, but makes a sudden, unilateral decision to bypass the vote and secretly unseal the doors. Her best friend, and fellow council member, Abbie Prosser, is against the end run around the will of the people. Jacinta has Abbie forcibly subdued.
Fearing that the forces that seek to overthrow her are gathering strength, Abbie recruits Hunter Hensworth Higgs, aka Triple-H, to help her open the doors to Down. Triple-H secures a blow torch, but by the time Abbie reaches the doors, her enemies are already massing. Triple-H overpowers the rebels, but Jacinta and Triple-H’s fiancé are hit in the crossfire.
When Jacinta wakes, the children of Wolfjaw Down are waiting for her. Tired of the endless bickering of the adults, they vote to take matters in hand and open the doors. Jacinta doesn’t want to expose them to MELT but rather than taking charge, she once again talks her way into a corner. Abbie Prosser breaks the stalemate, leads the children to safety, and orders Jacinta to unseal the doors.
When the huge, metal doors finally open, Alistair Lewk—former leader, supposedly dead—leads the charge back inside Wolfjaw Down.
The Everlee family us safely ensconced in the salt mines, though seriously compromised. Mimi’s cancer has returned. Bill has lost an arm and a wife. Paul has lost a spleen and his immune system. Midge has lost her sight, but not her verve. And Petra is heavily pregnant. Dr. Fred and Nurse Nigel have stuck around on the promise of a big payday from Sean’s ultra-wealthy parents. Aggie has been MIA for months, but has been leaving food baskets outside the mines, so they know she’s alive. Hunting and gathering outside the mines falls to Hedwig (Paul’s girlfriend) and Sean (Petra’s boyfriend).
Hedwig and Paul regularly head out on drug buys to get chemo meds for Mimi, antibiotics for Paul, thyroid blockers for the whole family, and prenatal vitamins for Petra. On their way to a buy, they find Barb has been wounded by one of the marauding vigilantes. While they’re tending her wounds, Stuart—an emissary from their drug suppliers—shows up with news of a new meeting place for the buy.
Hedwig leaves Sean to tend Barb and follows Stuart to the new meeting place. There they meet Dr. Hanzlik from the CDC. He’s conducting blood tests to search for a cure for MELT. Hanzlik takes Stuart and Hedwig on a tour of the barn where the infected soldiers, who General Hoyt left behind, have taken to their cots. They’re nothing but dying husks and Hedwig uses her last bullets to put them out of their misery. When she emerges from the barn, Hanzlik instructs Stuart to round Hedwig up and bring her into the house.
Hedwig is bound, hand and foot, and secured to the couch. Caleb and Rowdy (twin brothers and Hedwig’s drug suppliers) are ushered into the room, similarly tied up. Hanzlik and Stuart threaten to blow Hedwig’s hands off if they don’t tell them where their meds supply is hidden. Desperate to save Hedwig, the twins reveal the location of their stash.
The five of them—Hedwig, Hanzlik, Caleb, Rowdy, and Stuart—head to the quarry where Hedwig, Caleb and Rowdy are put to work, digging up the twins’ drugs. Hanzlik pistol whips one of the twins while the other begs Hedwig to tell them where the famed Everlee silver is located. When she gives u
p the location, the twins give up their act, joining Hanzlik and Stuart. They’ve played her.
On the hike back down the hillside, Stuart’s horsing around leads to the detonation of a bomb he himself buried. Hedwig screams as Aggie pulls her from the dirt and offers her a ride home, confident that both the drugs and the silver are theirs.
And now on to BOOK TEN: CHASE
CHAPTER ONE
ALICE EVERLEE, AMUNDSEN-SCOTT SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH STATION, SOUTH POLE.
Alice Everlee was all that stood between a plastic-eating enzyme which could chomp through the industrial world, taking humanity down with it, and possible nuclear annihilation for everyone from Greenland to Brazil and all points in-between.
She wasn’t shackled and force-fed gruel, but she was a de facto prisoner at the South Pole. She spent her days in an ops room full of military scientists—and maps and heated debate and conflicting theories—and her nights in a blissfully silent locked cell.
The Klean & Pure team, or what was left of it, and their military counterparts never shared space or crossed paths physically. They ate and bathed and slept in separate parts of the base only coming together during working hours. Even then, they were funneled in and out of the ops room via different corridors and, Alice was fairly certain, sucked down different air.
The massive metal tubes that graced the ceiling on her side of the divide told a story of paranoia and preparedness. The amount of work that had gone into keeping the two teams separate set off all kinds of alarm bells, but she couldn’t come up with a reason for being paranoid, other than she was generally speaking distrustful, even when she was trying to be the “more positive” version of herself.
She resisted the temptation to pick at her bandage and, ironically, the plastic wrap that held the tilapia skin in place on her arm. “If you follow the protocol, chances are you’ll beat this infection,” they said. But ‘they’ were the enemy and ‘what they said’ was highly suspect. Ditto what they didn’t say. Josephine Morgan hadn’t made an appearance in the ops room since their mini-heist/rebellion. Alice had to hope her friend and neighbor wasn’t getting sicker. The MELT-related lesions on Jo’s legs had been longer, darker, and more ominous than the egg-shaped bump on her own arm, but the doctors had been clear that ‘each strain of MELT brought on different symptoms and they weren’t to infer anything from the infection sites.’ But she didn’t trust them as far as she could spit; nothing anyone said or did could be taken at face value.
With the ever-changing barrage of instructions, orders, and guidelines that made up her day, Alice was on high alert which, for her, meant vibrating at the most intense frequency known to man. She was a tightrope walker on a galvanized wire strung across a shark tank.
Colonel Livio, who lead the military team the other side of the glass divide, leapt from behind her work station, whooping and cheering. “There is no nuclear threat. I repeat, there is no nuclear threat. They backed down.” She broke with her usual dour persona and smacked her 2IC on the back. “Those Ruskies backed the fuck down.”
The furor that followed was akin to a hot mash of Times Square on New Year’s Eve and the Great Wall of China during the height of the tourist season. Soldiers whipped around the far side of the ops center, hugging and crying and high-fiving each other. The doors on the clean side of the divide smacked into the steel wall heralding Captain Pennrith with the drinks cart. It wasn’t Veuve Clicquot, but it was bubbly-something that they were shaking and spraying over each other.
Alice gawped at the screens on the far wall as they told a tale of de-escalation. The Russians positions blinked out one by one from the Sea of Japan, up through their silos north of Mongolia, inching their way, minute by minute, toward Moscow. Her heartrate hadn’t slowed and her brain had trouble keeping up with the news. A day earlier she’d found out that the “Ruskies” were pointing nuclear warheads at America, today she was supposed to believe they’d given up? Backed down? Come to some kind of accord with the United States?
Of the Klean & Pure team, she was the one to maintain their guard. Prof. Baxter was hunkered in the corner, glued to her own screen talking to… who even knew? Jan van Karpel sat by the doors, hands folded in his lap, feet crossed at the ankles. He was a vision of calm in a sea of turbulent hoorays. On their side of the divide, only Michael Rayton had caught the celebratory spirit. He had one hand in the air, waving frantically. “Over here! Drinks! We’re parched.” Of course he wanted alcohol. How very Michael of him.
“What do we think, Michael? Does this de-escalation add up?”
“Don’t believe a single thing they say, Alice.” He didn’t take his eyes off the champagne doing the rounds. “Look at it this way, the Russians have ICBMs, SLBMs, cruise missiles, torpedoes, and gravity bombs… listed.” He put particular emphasis on the word listed.
“What are we talking about? In practical terms?” She sounded like a rube and she hadn’t meant it quite the way it came out, but the shock of possible peace, of a reprieve, had knocked her off kilter. Old Alice would never have entertained the idea of a happy outcome, but New Alice was trying her best to allow that strange things, possibly even good things, sometimes happened. The Berlin Wall came down, Nelson Mandela was released, and Bill Everlee, her darling, darling husband, had killed her rapist, Mateo Hernandez.
“It wasn’t my jurisdiction. Russia. Nuclear.” Michael snorted. “Then again, what they said I was working on and what I was actually working on were as close as cheese and cheesecloth, which is to say, related only in the production of something that will make a windbag out of you.”
He was right to be angry. They’d played him longer than they’d played anyone else, but that anger wasn’t going to butter her bread or yield any answers. Alice had played the corporate game long enough to know that a smile and a nod brought more executive bloodsuckers to the kill than any amount of table thumping or bleating. Michael was making such a fuss—not just about the champagne, but the project as a whole—that he was on the fast track to being excluded and she needed some distance from him.
“Pennrith! Captain! Over here, three White Russians and a Piña Colada!” Michael thought he was funny. Or charming. Or both. Perhaps in some circles he was, but Alice had had a gutful of him when they were pounding their way toward Indian Point Nuclear Power Station. Then again, he was an intelligence officer, so there was every chance he was playing his own version of the game.
Captain Pennrith, who’d briefed them on the plane when they first arrived, then disappeared from their lives, stopped his drinks delivery fifty feet from the glass barrier. “Can’t share, I’m afraid. Cross-contamination and all that, but I’ll send someone your way. Have no fear. We’re all going to have sore heads in the morning.”
Michael turned his back on the captain. “The New START treaty was about as effective as the original one.” It was only when he was half a sentence in that Alice realized he wasn’t being clandestine, he’d shifted attention to the door on their side of the conference room. “The Russians tell us what they want us to know. ‘We’ve removed 4,400 nuclear weapons to a centralized storage site’ and ‘we have limited capability to deploy.’ What they don’t talk about is the floating nuclear power plants. The first one in Sevmash was ‘decommissioned’ and transferred to the shipyard in St. Petersburg. Look at the geography on that one. What does that tell you?”
The doors opened and a guard, dressed from head to toe in protective gear, wheeled in a bottle of cheap champagne and four glasses. His helmet dulled his voice, but the thumbs up, grinning message was clear enough. ‘For you. Celebrate.’
“Thank you very much.” Michael swiped the bottle. “Don’t know what the rest of you are drinking.”
“Might we have some water?” Alice raised her voice so the man inside the bulky suit might hear her, but the doors clanged shut behind him before she got her answer.
Michael peeled the foil from the cork and eased it from the bottle, careful not to spill a drop. He downed a glass of
bubbly in one go, then poured himself another.
The celebrations on the far side of the room had escalated. Someone had commandeered a few dozen cans of chafing fuel and was heating up something that looked suspiciously like hot dogs. Alice wasn’t a huge fan, but the food was in keeping with a typical American celebration. If it was true, if Colonel Livio wasn’t lying about the Russians, they’d at least bought themselves some time. Why not send up the streamers and make a party of it?
“So, did you calculate the politics of that move? Have you worked out why they moved their shipyards yet?”
“Sorry?” Alice hadn’t thought about Michael’s question. She was too busy wishing herself on the other side of the divide, carefree and healthy and willing to chance something as dodgy as a hot dog.
“How’s your Soviet geography?” He was on his third glass and heading toward his fourth. “Let’s assume it’s as good as most westerner’s, which is to say, appalling. Sevmash is the largest nuclear shipbuilding port in Russia. It’s on the White Sea, in the Barents. That gives them access to all that northern real estate.” He downed his drink and abandoned the glass, drinking straight from the bottle. “St. Petersburg is on the Baltic, just across the water from Finland and a hop, skip, and a nuclear floater from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania then Poland.”
“Your point?”
“Reporting is voluntary. Putin and his generals have no more intention of disarming than I have of stopping drinking.” He used his glass to tap the edge of the champagne bottle. “Over here! Another bottle, if you don’t mind. The guinea pigs need hydration, too.”
“You’re saying the Russians have positioned themselves on the European borders?”
Michael busted out laughing. “Where have you been living, chickadee? Of course they have. It’s not just the missiles pointing directly at us. Think about what has been reported and then extrapolate.” The pause suggested he knew something she didn’t, so Alice waited. Michael liked the sound of his own voice at the best of times, but when he was drinking, he was ten times more likely to talk down to her. In this case it was a useful lecture and she welcomed the fact that he was as vain as he was knowledgeable. “The 2013 report on the large-scale exercises ‘to check the readiness of our strategic forces’ is a case in point. They launched ballistic missiles as well as air defense interceptors. One, a Topol missile from the Plesetsk test site…” He counted them off on his fingers. “Two, an R-36M2 from a silo in Dombarovsky. A K-117 Bryansk sub launched an R-29RM from the Barents Sea to Kamchatka. Four reported launches of Iskander and Tochka-U short-range ballistic missiles and two Tu-160 bombers to Venezuela.”