The Melanin Apocalypse

by Darrell Bain

CHAPTER FIVE

  “Our mission parameters have changed,” Gene Bradley announced to the members of the CDC security detachment who were present, almost all of them. “From now on, we’ll be operating strictly in the United States. There’s still two teams overseas as you know, but they’re on their way home. Ms. Hedgrade has informed the president that no further purpose can be served by sending anyone else. However, we still have a job.” He paused long enough for the chuckles to die down. There weren’t too many of them. Even three days after the arrival of Doug’s squad back at the CDC, the shock of losing so many of their own kept them subdued.

  “From now on, our mission is to consist primarily of providing security to the CDC complex itself. We’re also taking over direction and control of the guards from the private security firm the CDC has been using, as well as the few federal marshals they’ve been employing inside the buildings. You can see how the new chain of command will function by checking the latest download from my office. Be sure and study it, because you’ll notice some reorganization. In particular, study the complete layout of the CDC

  buildings and grounds. Starting two days from now, this all becomes our responsibility. Tomorrow, some of the squad leaders will walk you through your guard posts and show you the rounds you’ll be making.

  “People, if you’ve been following the news, I don’t have to emphasize how serious this thing is. If the CDC, or some of the other places working on this virus don’t find a cure or a vaccine soon, we’re going to see the worst explosion of violence and upheavals in our society since the Civil War. Just to put a figure on it, the statisticians have made a rough approximation based on current data and think that we could lose perhaps as much as 20% of our population if no treatment or cure turns up. Hopefully it won’t be that bad. The 20% is the upper range of the calculations.

  “Now a word to our own people of color. You can dispense with the biohazard suits. It’s been determined that they’re useless. Why, they don’t know yet, but at least you’ll be able to perform your duties in comfort. And I know I speak for everyone in saying we hope you all stay well.

  “Now the next item is for all of us. At present, I’m going to allow those of you with families in Atlanta to commute to and from work, but I’m arranging for the contingency that we may have to keep everyone on the premises, so warn your loved ones of the possibility.” He hesitated, then added “It may even be necessary for us to move to the main CDC complex until our building is ready.

  “And finally, if it will make you feel a bit easier, I’ve been given the authority to call for military assistance should it become necessary. I sincerely hope it won’t come to that point, but it might.

  “All right, now I’m going to want to see all the squad leaders in the smaller conference room. You can all gather here again right after the noon meal and squad leaders will answer questions for you. Thank you.”

  In his usual manner, Bradley turned and left abruptly, not even noticing that the empty sleeve of his fatigue top had come unpinned. Doug had already concluded he would never get over thinking like the military officer he had once been.

  * * *

  “Craddock,” Doug said, answering the phone in his quarters that evening. He was expecting the call to be official; he hardly ever got private calls on this phone.

  “Hi Doug, this is June.”

  “Oh. Hi, June. What are you up to?”

  “Well… I got your number here from Amelia. You’re kind of hard to track down.”

  “Sorry. I should have given you my cell phone number when we parted. I’ve been wondering about you, but we’ve been kind of busy, what with us taking over the security here and me having to visit the families of the people I lost in Nigeria.” He had thought of June despite his duties, but hadn’t quite got up the nerve to call her on purely personal business. And his responsibilities had been pressing. He was just now getting organized and familiar with them.

  “I thought you might have been tied up. Anyway, I was… well, I’m free tonight and tomorrow. I thought maybe…”

  It must be as hard for her as it is for me, Doug thought. “I’d like to see you, June. What do you want to do? We didn’t have much of a chance to talk about our personal life or likes and dislikes in Nigeria.”

  “I’m not much for the night life. How about if we met for dinner someplace?”

  “Sure. You name it.”

  “How about Morgan’s? They have seafood, but there’s other things on the menu, too. And we won’t need reservations on a week night.”

  “Sounds good. What time?”

  “Is seven all right?”

  “That’s fine. See you there. And thanks for calling, June. I need to get away from here for a little while.”

  June Spencer put the phone down slowly. She was scared in a way, but it was time for a change.

  Besides, she knew he needed a soothing hand, some sympathy, someone to care. Visions of his grim countenance had haunted her ever since their arrival in Atlanta, as well as dreams of gunfire and the sounds of swooping jets and clattering helicopters. She hadn’t mentioned that she had asked Amelia to find out when he would be off duty.

  * * *

  Doug dressed casually in slacks and a short sleeved shirt, with a light windbreaker to conceal the little forty caliber automatic he was licensed to carry. Traffic seemed lighter than usual as he drove through the streets near the main CDC complex. Its new additions stood out in contrast to the old architecture; he thought it superior. He picked up the Loop and headed east, while noticing that the people who were out and about were handling their vehicles as though their minds were somewhere else. He listened to an all-news radio station as he drove and thought that many of the drivers might be tuned to the same station. There was only one topic; the Harcourt virus. It hadn’t yet reached epidemic proportions in the Americas but overseas, particularly in Africa and Europe it was rapidly headed in that direction. Nigeria was already devolving into anarchy. Whites took their lives in their hands simply by showing their faces.

  South Africa hadn’t reached that stage yet, but rumors were rife and the number of blacks coming down with the disease was steadily increasing. In America… he turned the radio off. Enough. Tonight he wanted to forget business.

  The parking lot at Morgan’s Seafood and Steakhouse was only a quarter filled, a rarity for the popular middle class restaurant this time of evening. June was already there, seated on one of the little benches in the waiting alcove. She stood up when she saw him come in the door.

  Doug stopped, then came forward the last few steps. With her light brown, almost blond hair washed and fluffy, wearing a simple but attractive spring dress of pale green with a white belt that tucked in the waist, and with makeup that subtly altered her appearance, she was very pretty—and very appealing. He couldn’t help but grin his appreciation.

  “You look great.”

  “Thank you.” June glanced down, as if reassuring herself that it was her he was talking about, then smiled back at him and took his arm.

  The under-worked hostess showed them to a table in the corner. No one else was seated near, which was puzzling to Doug, despite the dearth of customers. He looked around, wondering why that was while he pulled out the chair for June and held it until she was seated.

  June’s laugh tinkled with her explanation. “I tipped the hostess to get us a table away from everyone else in case we talked business. She won’t seat anyone near us unless it gets crowded.”

  “Good thinking. I really wanted to leave the CDC behind for awhile, but I doubt that we’ll be able to avoid it.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.”

  Service was quick. They agreed on a carafe of the house chablis and it appeared a moment later. Doug asked for a little time to examine the menu before they ordered, though he already knew what he wanted.

  A medium seafood platter and baked potato always satisfied.

  “I want the seafood platter and baked potato,” June said, layi
ng the menu down.

  Doug laughed. “Great minds. That’s what I’m having. I’ve only eaten here once and that was a couple of years ago. I hope it’s still as good.”

  “Me, too. Don’t you get out often?”

  He picked up his wine glass and sipped reflectively. “It’s taken me a long time to get over Doris’ death. I more or less buried myself in work for a while and didn’t go anywhere, even though I really didn’t have to work, what with the insurance settlement. I moped around the house for a few weeks, then sold it and took a little apartment. Most of the time I don’t bother with it, though. The quarters at the security building are all right.”

  June could appreciate his actions as well as the faraway look on his face. “We picked different ways to grieve,” she said. “I just went home and stayed with my parents and helped them some with my two little sisters. I’m like you; I don’t really have to work either, but after a while I couldn’t stand the idleness.

  Staying home so much just kept the sadness working.” She grinned as if sharing a guilty secret, then let it out. “Then last year I tried to write a novel, but I guess I don’t have the talent. No matter how much I worked on it, it still didn’t sound readable to me. I finally abandoned it.”

  Doug had to laugh, then quickly explained when he saw the pained expression on her face. “I’ve written a few short stories and tried to sell them. No luck, or probably more accurately, no talent.”

  “I guess anyone who likes to read a lot has thought about writing,” June said.

  “Uh huh. It’s harder than it looks, though, isn’t it?”

  “Tell me about it!”

  Appetizers arrived, a platter of cold crab claws intermingled with small boiled shrimp.

  Doug dipped a shrimp in sauce and looked around the almost empty restaurant. “I wonder what the people in Washington are thinking right now?”

  “Nothing constructive, I’ll warrant,” June said.

  * * *

  Mary Hedgrade’s face was lined with worry. It was never comfortable to be the bearer of bad tidings. In some countries, she thought she might be executed for bringing such news to the head of state, especially with the blunt concluding statement that not only did the CDC not have a cure or vaccine for the Harcourt virus, but there were no prospects for either in the immediate future.

  President Marshall shifted his gaze uneasily around the conference table, trying to find a way to deflect the onus of Mary’s words to someone else. She was telling him things he didn’t want to hear.

  “I didn’t know,” the President of the United States said. “I swear I didn’t know!” His voice came out muffled. He raked his hands through his hair and looked accusingly at Edgar Tomlin, the National Security Director. “Why the hell wasn’t the FBI after those people? God knows they’ve been trying to force blacks back to secondary citizen status for fifty years! How come you let them start a goddamned epidemic before arresting them?”

  “Because the bastards got smart. They took off to South Africa and helped the white supremacists there with money, and took that crazy geneticist from Sweden with them,” Conrad Seigler said. “We’ll get them, though. We’ve tracked them back to America and we still have agents looking for the Swede. We think he stayed in South Africa.” Seigler was the current head of the CIA and for a change this one looked the part, or at least as popular culture depicted spies, with dark hair and eyes that shifted constantly.

  “We believe you, Mr. President. How would you have known? You don’t have any scientific background,” Secretary of State Joshua Brenham said. That was true in a sense, he thought. The capability for creating man-made epidemics had been included in presidential briefings ever since 9/11

  but hardly anyone really believed it would ever happen. Certainly not the president. He barely understood the rudiments of science. He’d even made political hay of his lack until this came up. He probably had forgotten he even had an official science adviser. Now it was coming back to haunt him.

  President Marshall Marshall dropped his hand from his hair to the table and twined the fingers of both hands together. They squirmed there like small animals trying to escape a trap. “How bad is it? Isn’t there anything we can do to stop it? Anything at all?” He looked bleakly around the table with wounded eyes, red-rimmed from lack of sleep.

  Conrad Seigler shook his head, while shifting his gaze around the table. “There’s nothing to do except work on drugs that might help and try to develop a vaccine to prevent future outbreaks. According to Mary, the virus has already infected damn near every one on earth. Isn’t that right, Mary?”

  “Maybe. Probably not. No virus gets everyone. Anyway, it’s too soon to predict exact numbers. I can tell you that it will infect a huge number of people, given enough time, simply by the lack of a vaccine and the fact that it’s been tampered with so that we have no natural immunity to it. Let me run through what we know. The Harcourt virus almost certainly was originally released into the population in Nigeria…”

  “To throw us off the trail,” Edgar Tomlin interjected, wanting to make it clear why none of the homeland security agencies had discovered what was going on until far too late. He couldn’t afford for his agency to be blamed.

  “Yes,” Mary Hedgrade agreed, concealing her irritation at being interrupted behind the new worry lines creasing her face. “Then, from Nigeria they went back to South Africa and made sure it got started there to repay their friends for their help. After that, they traveled to Europe, then to the major hubs of air traffic into and out of the United States and on to other big cities of the world. According to Edgar, this all happened two years ago.”

  “Then why is it just now starting? Why didn’t blacks begin dying then?”

  Mary wanted to roll her eyes and look to heaven for understanding. Unable to do that, and knowing that the president had either not understood the briefing paper or hadn’t even read it, she explained as best she could.

  “The virus masqueraded as a very mild cold, with hardly any symptoms at all. No one paid any attention to it. It was programmed to migrate from the respiratory tract to the Kupffer cells in the liver and lie dormant until a trigger mechanism was activated. We think the triggering factor might have something to do with the number of times mitosis—cell division—occurs in the Kupffer cells, but we’re not sure yet. At any rate, once it becomes active again, the cells release the virus back into the peripheral circulation.

  From there it invades the melanocytes, the pigment producing skin cells, and begins interfering with melanin production. It causes the tyrosine metabolism to malfunction, producing quinol intoxication and—”

  “How many? Will everyone die?” The president interrupted Mary’s discourse, knowing he wouldn’t understand it. What he wanted was figures, something he could grasp. He scanned the room, seeking reassurance. There was none. The five men and one woman present besides him sat in silence, knowing that there was no answer, no solution. Not yet, and maybe never. Although no one mentioned it, the specter of the many difficulties encountered in controlling the HIV virus was present in their minds.

  “How many?” The president asked again, raising his voice. “How many will die?”

  Joshua Brenham knew. As Secretary of State, he was familiar with population distribution by race across the continents. He also knew that he was probably a dead man. To his credit, he repressed the slow, boiling rage he felt inside. It would do neither him nor anyone else any good to vent it here. “The very worst estimates say that unless the virus can be controlled, there may be as many as two to three billion deaths,” he said quietly. “In America, the black population numbers about twelve per cent, roughly 35

  million. Of course some of the ones classified as black won’t have skin color dark enough to be affected, other than perhaps becoming rather sick, but those are more than made up for by other groups with dark skins. Some Hispanics, some from India and some Arabs and Orientals. Mary says that everyone who has naturally dark skin an
d has been exposed to the virus will become ill. The severity will depend upon how dark, but over half the population of the world will presumably display few symptoms, or mild ones at the most.

  “Three billion! My God, how could they do it? How could they?” the president exclaimed, his gaze again roving the table. His facial expression expressed horror and outrage, but inside, he was beginning to feel a guilty hint of dark satisfaction that the blacks of the world would all die. Wouldn’t that solve a lot of problems? He was incapable of imagining all the repercussions that such a pandemic would cause, most of them much worse than such relatively simple problems as discrimination and poverty and failures in education.

  “Mr. President, it doesn’t matter now,” Edgar Tomlin said. “The important thing is that no one must ever know that it was American citizens who let this thing loose on the world. If that gets out, our entire civilization might fall. It may anyway, but if no one knows, we stand a chance of coming through the crisis.”

  You others do, Brenham thought. I have no chance at all.

  “What if we just turned those nuts over to the UN when we catch them, and let them execute the crazy sons of bitches?” suggested General Borland Newman, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “Wouldn’t that do it?” Newman had a guilty secret, too. Already, he was thinking of how much more power he would hold once martial law was imposed.

  Edgar laughed hollowly. “Don’t you know? The UN doesn’t believe in the death penalty.”

  President Marshall wiped at his eyes. “Don’t bring up silly ideas, General. We can’t let this get out.

  Edgar, I don’t care what you do with those white supremacists that started this thing if we catch them, but I don’t want anyone to ever hear about it if we do. Not a word. Understand?”

  Tomlin nodded, wondering if he was hearing the president right. Probably, he thought, which suited him fine—except that he didn’t think it could be kept quiet.

  When no one protested, the president continued. “We have to start preparations now. Get a spin ready that downplays how bad it could get. In the meantime, get the rest of it all worked out. How to control the riots; hospital space and medical supplies; controls on the economy; National Guard units to call up; defense preparations; all the other things we must do to ensure the survival of our country. That takes priority, understand? Our country comes first.”