The Melanin Apocalypse

by Darrell Bain

  “Doug… thank you. I have to make this quick, because I’ve been holding off taking a shot and I’m going to have surgery soon; I’ve got some internal injuries, they said.” She breathed heavily through a miasma of pain, then found the strength to continue. “I found out just before the attack. Johannsen says… Doug, he says the funding and technical data came from us. It was just funneled through the supremacists… Oh God, I didn’t want to believe it, but he swears it’s… it’s true.”

  “You mean to tell me the CDC gave him a start on the virus?” He simply couldn’t believe that.

  “No, no… it didn’t come from here. It was a private lab, funded by the CIA, he thinks. He… he says Edgar Tomlin was in on it… when he was Director… oh, Doug, please find out if this is true. Please. We have to know.”

  Everything Amelia said was filtered through the distortion of pain from her injuries, but he understood almost every word. It made him feel sick inside just thinking that their own government might have been responsible for the catastrophic result of Johannsen’s actions. He stood, stunned, unable to even speak until someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around to see a tired looking young woman in surgical scrubs. Nearby was an operating room gurney.

  “We’re ready for her. I’m going to give her the pre-op now.”

  Doug came back to reality. “Just one more minute. “Amelia, has he said anything about a cure or a vaccine?”

  “No cure. Jenkins thinks the… the data he got from him may… may make a vaccine. And there’s something else he… I can’t think now. I hurt inside.”

  “Amelia, I’ll have this tracked to the source, be sure of that. Now you get well.” He squeezed her hand and made way for the medical people. He watched as Amelia was administered a shot by the nurse in scrubs, then transferred to the gurney and wheeled away. A moment later he headed toward the basement where he knew Savak Johannsen was being guarded. If he had time after that, then he would talk to Stephen Jenkins, a scientist June had told him about earlier who was doing research on a vaccine for the Harcourt virus. Every bit of information he could gather might be useful in freeing the hostages.

  The thought of hostages brought images of June back into the forefront of his mind. He tried not to think about what Fridge might have found out.

  The last thing Doug did before leaving Amelia was to give his personal phone number to Amelia’s nurse and ask her to have Amelia call him just as soon as she recovered from the surgery and was able to talk.

  He impressed on her the importance of his message by telling her it might mean the difference between freeing the hostages or not.

  * * *

  “One of your thugs took her off,” a woman Fridge was questioning said bitterly.

  “What! Where did he take her? Quick, woman!”

  “So you can get in on the action, goddamn you! This is a… a place of science, not a… find her yourself.

  I won’t tell you.” She bowed her head, expecting to be hit or slapped.

  Fridge didn’t give a damn what she thought right at the moment. Instead of slapping her, he reached out one huge hand and gathered the lapels of her blouse and yanked her toward him. “You fool, I’m trying to save her, not hurt her! Now where is she?”

  “Who are… I don’t know who you are. No.”

  Fridge tightened his grip and put her face inches away from his. His eyes burned with urgency. “Listen to me. I know Doug. He sent me to find her. Now where is she?”

  It was the use of Doug’s first name that convinced her. She searched his face, saw that it showed only a highly impatient concern, not a desire to join his fellow in whatever brutalities were taking place. She pointed toward a door. “In there.”

  Even if she had not shown him the way, Fridge would have found it a second later when a shrill frightened scream rent the air, petrifying in its intensity. Fridge pushed the woman away from him and ran toward the sound, drawing his pistol as he went. The door was locked. He backed off and kicked hard once, twice, and the lock peeled away from its rended frame. The door burst open.

  June had just managed to jerk loose from the man assaulting her and was running toward the door where he leaned his rifle. The edge of the door slapped her in the head as it flew open, knocking her down.

  When she saw the huge black man shove the door closed behind him, she began crying. Not two of them, she thought hysterically. Then she saw the gun he was holding. They’re going to kill me when they’re finished. Oh, Doug. We were so happy. She bowed her head, shedding bitter tears as she waited for them to finish stripping her. She was already bare to the waist. Her breasts had bright streaks fingernail scratches marring their surface.

  “You want some too, Fridge? Hold her for me first. I give her a piece of black meat, maybe she stop fighting.” The guard’s laugh halted abruptly as the flat of Fridge’s calloused palm struck the side of his face with brutal force. He staggered backward and bounced off a wall. His eyes grew wide as Fridge advanced on him.

  Fridge’s mind was harkening back to memories of how nice Doris Craddock had always been, how supportive of her husband’s concern for the troops. “Get your black ass out of here, Teacup. Any man have a need to rape a woman got something wrong in his head. No, wait. You tell the men The Fridge got this one marked for his own. Anybody diss her, they in a world of hurt. You hear?”

  June’s assailant nodded, knowing Fridge never made idle threats. Before he let the man leave, Fridge removed the clip from his rifle and ejected the cartridge in the chamber. “You get your ass out there and pass the word. I done had enough of this shit. It’s one thing to fight a man when you think you got a reason. Raping helpless women not going to help anybody. Now git!”

  Fridge didn’t worry when he turned his back on the man. He had seen the fear on his face. He looked around, spotted June’s bra and blouse. He picked them up. “Here, Mrs. Craddock. Get yourself covered and go back outside. Anybody bother you again, tell them the Fridge got you covered.” He tried to smile at her but it was a caricature.

  June looked at him, dubious of his sincerity, but willing to go along. At the very least, he had saved her from being raped and most likely beaten. She turned her back and started to put on the bra, then saw that it had been wrenched from her body with enough force to bend the hooks before tearing them out of the fabric. She dropped it to the floor and pulled on the blouse. She had to hold it together for now and hope she could find a safety pin or two outside. She turned to face the big man who had saved her.

  “Thank you, whoever you are. What… how…?”

  “Never mind for now. Me and Doug go back a long time. He asked me to look for you.” Finally Fridge did smile, but it was a very small one. “Looks like I found you just in time. Go on out with the others now. I’ll follow you.”

  Suddenly the import of his words hit June like a blow. “Doug! He’s alive!”

  “He’s alive,” Fridge confirmed, urging her gently back through the doorway and out into the lobby.

  June returned to the captives with a freshened heart, despite the path taken to get there. Doug was alive!

  * * *

  Doug wanted to see Johannsen alone. He made his way to the Science Building, limping painfully from his leg wound. The basement was a cavern, divided off into storage rooms, pallets of supplies, vaults and bare machinery that kept the building functioning. Doug had been there only once or twice doing security checks, but he knew the general layout. He waited a few moments on the service elevator but for some reason it seemed to be stuck at the basement level. Maybe the power outages had damaged some of the circuitry, he thought. Impatient, he took the stairs and hurried down them. He didn’t trust Qualluf Taylor to wait on him too long.

  He pushed open the basement door and stopped in his tracks. A short, well muscled white man was dragging a body away that still had a knife hilt protruding from its back. Doug reacted almost immediately, but still almost lost his life. The moment he drew his gun and yelled “Stop!” the
man dropped the body and flung himself sideways. He rolled, drawing a pistol and firing at the same time Doug did. Both of them missed with their first shots, but the other man was moving and Doug wasn’t. He was able to take better aim. His second bullet cratered the man’s forehead.

  Doug knew there had to be someone else around. Assassins coming into a facility like this one wouldn’t be working alone—and he knew intuitively that they must be after Johannsen. He ran for cover as soon as he saw that his shot had gone true. Gunfire rang out from behind an idle forklift as he ran. His quick movement saved him, but he didn’t get away free He took a bullet in his upper left arm and as he fell, another in same leg where he had been wounded before. His assailant made a single mistake; he came out from cover too soon, thinking he had done a complete job.

  Doug had hung on to his pistol as he went down, knowing that if he dropped it, he was dead. He got off a quick snap shot that startled the gunman, then another that thudded into the man’s stomach. He gasped and fell backward, clutching his middle. Doug approached cautiously, his left arm dangling numb and useless and limping from renewed pain in his leg. He looked first at his fallen foe, then around, then back at the sprawled figure of the man he had shot. He lay on his back with his arms outflung, twitching and sucking air as if trying to breathe. His weapon lay nearby, a small automatic. An assassin’s weapon. He knew now why the two bullets hadn’t done him more damage.

  Doug appropriated the other weapon, frisked the man awkwardly but quickly with one hand, then began searching for Johannsen. He found him in the third room he investigated. Doug didn’t know at first which was the prisoner, but one of the men was certainly dead. He hoped it was the federal marshal. He bent over the other man and saw that he was still alive, though he had been shot through the chest. Somehow, it must have missed his heart and lungs for he stared hopefully up at Doug with glassy blue eyes set below long hair as yellow as ripe corn.

  “Are you Savak Johannsen?”

  “Yes. I’m hurt.” He breathed heavily. “Get a doctor.”

  “In a minute. Tell me where the financing for the Harcourt virus came from.”

  “It was your CIA. The director; I saw his name on some… documents.”

  “What documents? Where?”

  “I’ll tell you. A doctor, please.” His voice was weakening.

  Doug needed proof. “Where are the documents? What did you see?”

  “Shane Stevenson. Charleston. House. In…” His eyes rolled up and he lost consciousness. Doug thought of rushing up the stairs to find a doctor to try saving the lives of the men still breathing, but doubted he would make it. He was beginning to feel woozy from his own wounds. He used his phone, but didn’t know the number of the treatment facility where he might find a doctor and had neglected to plug it into his phone’s memory. He called his own battle headquarters. As soon as he got an answer he recognized Teresa’s voice. He said “Teresa. Doug here. There’s been a gun battle in the basement of the Science Center. Someone tried to take Johannsen out. Send a doctor and two—no, make that three gurneys; I’m hit, too. And hurry. If I’m not responding by then, Johannsen is still alive in his room and one of the gunmen is lying out in the open by the forklift that you’ll see as soon as the elevator opens.”

  “Got it, Doug. Hang on; I’ll have someone there in a few minutes if I have to carry them on my back!”

  Thank God Teresa wasn’t making rounds, he thought. She would have help here quickly. He limped back to the elevator and removed the chair that was preventing the door from closing. then sat down nearby. He leaned against the wall and examined his wounds. The upper arm was the worst; blood was still flowing copiously from it. The dizziness began enveloping him again. He unbuttoned his fatigue shirt and pushed the left side lapel over to add another layer of cloth to the wound, then lay down on that side, even though it hurt. He hoped the pressure would slow the bleeding. Then the world began spinning and his awareness faded.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  I want that Johannsen character brought to Washington so we can try him and execute him publicly, like we did those others,” President Marshall said.

  Edgar Tomlin couldn’t agree more; he wanted him dead in the worst way. He had begun feeling relatively safe after the white supremacist gang that helped Johannsen had been executed in such a hurry that there had been little time to question them. Even so, it had been a near thing, with Rafe Smith yelling out an accusation at the last moment. Fortunately, he hadn’t been understood and the firing squad ended any further chance of him talking.

  There’s such a thing as being too damned efficient, Tomlin muttered to himself, thinking of how the president had insisted on Johannsen being taken to the CDC immediately after capture. It had been nothing more than wild political reasoning, thinking that if he were in custody, and working under guard to reverse the effects of the virus he had created, then the government would be absolved of blame. Tomlin thought he had Johannsen taken care of when the porch monkeys in Atlanta responded to the rumor that the CDC was harboring a cure—with his personal agents helping to spread it—but that hadn’t worked either. The blacks reacted like he thought they would, but the army had gotten there too fast, and the thin CDC security force had put up an admittedly heroic resistance. After that failure, he had sent the last two agents he could personally call on in Atlanta to finish off Johannsen for good.

  He looked at his watch. By now, that matter should finally be taken care of. “I’ll see to it, Mr. President.

  And I think executing him is a good idea.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Lurline said. “Wouldn’t he be more valuable alive, so he could be forced to help find a cure or a vaccine? After all, he created it; he should know more about it than anyone else.”

  “If the nation gets out of this with a whole skin, the sonofabitch did the world a favor,” General Newman said, forgetting momentarily that Lurline was in the room with them. Goddamn broads. They got no more business in government than they do in the army, he thought, waiting for the outraged response his remark was sure to evoke.

  Lurline felt more like crying than arguing. How did a man like that get to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs?

  And the president wasn’t rebuking him, either. “You can’t mean, that, General,” she said. Beneath the conference table her fist clenched the hem of her skirt to prevent her nails from digging into the palm of her hand.

  “No, of course not. I was just thinking in military terms, our oil supplies and so forth.”

  Sure you were, Lurline thought. Aloud, she said “Mr. President, Vice President Santes has been in contact with Colonel Christian and Doug Craddock, the security chief at CDC. They’re negotiating with Qualluf Taylor as we speak.”

  Marshall nodded approval, but he had more important things on his mind. Like China, Korea and the Middle East. Which reminded him. “Have you talked to Willingham again?” The president had decided that their meetings could do without his physical presence unless he had something urgent to say. He didn’t like the man’s patronizing air of superiority, as if anyone who hadn’t graduated from Harvard was automatically incapable of understanding how the establishment worked. Of course he had been taken down a peg when the U.N. headquarters was demolished by a mob of blacks, but that wouldn’t last. His kind thought they should be running the world and that everyone else was incompetent.

  “Yes, sir, I spoke to him shortly before arriving here. He’s been in contact with the Russians. They’ll try to restrain China. However, the military advisor to the premier wants to talk to General Newman about aid if China’s invasion of Taiwan keeps going badly for the Chinese and they turn on Russia. Frankly, I think you should talk to Willingham. He seems to be taking hold and I’m not well versed in international affairs.”

  “I’ll see to it. Now let’s talk politics. What about the End-Timers? Are they going to cause us as much trouble as that damned Church of Blacks?”

  Politics was something Lurline did underst
and. “The End Timers are marginally beneficial to the party so long as they don’t get too much wilder. I can’t say they do much good for the nation as a whole. Many of them have quit work, anticipating the arrival of the Rapture before they run out of money.”

  “Crap!” The president exclaimed. They had to keep production and distribution going and food distribution couldn’t stop, not for anything. Hungry people were unpredictable. “Well, what should we do about them, if anything?”

  Lurline considered. The End-Timers were a rapidly expanding faction of Fundamentalist Christianity, taking Biblical predictions to heart. Or rather interpreting Biblical pronouncements, mostly from the book of Revelations, in a way that indicated the End Times were at hand. Personally, she thought many of them were simply combining the Bible and current events into a convenient excuse to quit work. She had seen many people like that, men and women caught in hateful, minimum wage jobs that barely kept food on the table or their kids fed; or husbands and wives making themselves believe the End Times would terminate relationships that had grown unbearably oppressing. But most of them were sincere believers.

  They could be reasoned with.

  “Sir, I think you should go on a nationwide hookup during prime time and explain that while the Rapture may be coming, they’ll miss it if they starve to death or get killed by mobs of hungry people. Urge them to stay with their jobs. Urge them to help keep the cities running. They’ll listen to you; just give them the type of speech you’re famous for, then take questions for fifteen minutes or so.” Lurline knew she was giving good advice. President Marshall, whatever his faults, was a superbly convincing orator.