Darrell Bain - The Melanin Apocalypse

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 and 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?”