A man made genetic disease is spreading and killing all the blacks in the world who contact it. The guard detachment at the CDC fights to preserve the institution.
EXCERPT FROM THE MELANIN APOCALYPSE
Melanin: The pigment which produces skin color.
My brother ran across an article and sent it to me. The two excerpts below are the opening words of a novel I decided to write after reading the article. Its title is The Melanin Apocalypse. It has been out some time as an e-book and is now in print. It is available at Amazon. I felt as if I was almost impelled to write this novel, dealing as it does with scientific possibilities that are not too far in the future. My most sincere hope is that they are never used in the manner depicted in The Melanin Apocalypse.
DB
THE MELANIN APOCALYPSE
Prolog
Scientists have declared that in ten years they will succeed in creating a radically new type of biological weapon. This weapon would be capable of infecting people according to a genetically predetermined marker such as skin color or eye shape. Infection could have a delayed effect or only begin once a certain type of medicine was taken. A recent closed seminar held by the CIA.
The most terrifying new possibility is the hypothetical biological weapon that could infect people according to genetic markers. Not only would it allow for genocide; it would be created specifically for that purpose. A recent report by the British Medical Association stated that “the rapid progress in genetics could become the basis for ethnic cleansing on an unheard of scale in the near future.
Excerpts from article in Gateway to Russia, March 2004 by Vasili Sychev.
Chapter One
.On his hospital bed in the city of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Benjamin Imhonde barely had the energy to raise his arm, but that was enough to see that his skin was becoming lighter. Several weeks ago it had been ebony black. Now it was several shades paler. He wouldn’t have minded so much except that as his skin color faded, he became sickerand sicker. Benjamin made an effort and turned his head toward the bed next to him where his wife lay sleeping, exhausted from expending what little energy she had left in the simple act of using the bedpan. She had cried out weakly from the pain caused by her movements, but now she was silent.
Sleeping? No! She looked more likeHe didn’t want to think what she looked like. He tried to raise his head but a wave of pain coursing through his body dropped it back to the pillow. A tear leaked from Benjamin’s right eye, then another, and one from his left. He felt them trickling down his face and tried to rein in his emotions. Even crying hurt now. I’m going to die, he thought. I’ve known ever since they moved us to the isolation ward. But no one would tell him what kind of disease he and his wife had! Just before the transfer, he overheard talk that the sickness was sweeping through the city of Port Harcourt. Then an orderly told him yesterday–or was it the day before?–that only blacks were becoming ill, and even more ominous, that no one was recovering. That bit of information had been bought from the orderly, but Benjamin didn’t mind; he could afford it. He was even willing to pay for more, but the orderly never returned.
Benjamin Imhonde tried one more time to move, to stretch his hand out toward the body of his wife. His arm barely twitched. That was his last conscious movement. An hour later the orderlies came to remove the bodies. They were Catholic nuns. They were white. They showed no symptoms of illness.
Tell your people not to talk about it, especially the part about it affecting only blacks. Good God, what would–wait! Is there any possibility it could spread to here? Is it contagious?”
“Mr. Tomlin, that’s what we’re going to find out. We have no idea yet how it spreads, nor exactly how fast; only that it’s doing it, and doing it very rapidly.” She didn’t finish with the implication. Whether or not Tomlin knew it, Port Harcourt was a metropolitan city, the hub of both air and sea travel into and out of Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa. If it could be spread by human to human contact, as apparently it could in some way, then it was already present in nearly every country in the world. Including the United States of America. Globalization and universal air travel would have seen to that.
Still didn’t know why it was so lethal nor how it spread, and hadn’t even begun to study the possibility of a vaccine. The update also confirmed his fears. The first cases were now being reported in other countries besides Nigeria, among them South Africa, Ethiopia, India and England? Then he remembered, England had a fair percentage of blacks in its population now. Manfred took a deep breath and continued reading. Houston, Texas was reporting several possible cases. And New York and Seattle hospitals thought they had some. Mexico City. He scanned on down.
Manny reached for his phone, intending to punch the number for a direct connection to CDC headquarters in Atlanta and see if any more information was available before requesting an appointment with the president. Instead he paused and stared at the skin of his own dark brown arm. His hand was trembling when he finally managed to look away and make the call.
Copyright 2008 Darrell Bain. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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