The Apocalypse

Chapter 2

Rostov-on-Don, Russia



The second link in the chain of disaster occurred the following day when Yuri met with the North Koreans, who were far more adept at espionage than they were at bio-chemistry. Somehow they knew all about the dreadful creature locked away in the White Room, but knew almost nothing about science—though they did make a great show of it. They had surgical masks and pristine plastic Bio-suits and gloves that ran halfway up their arms, and a single microscope that looked as though it had come from an eighth grade science class, and through which they took turns peering at the virus and jabbering away.

Without notes or images to compare it to, each agreed that this was indeed The Virus, forcing Yuri to hide a look of incredulity, and he had to wonder if he could have passed off a different virus, something far less deadly. Their incompetence gave him a nervous chill, however this was swept aside when they produced a briefcase full of rubles. The sight was so full of promise that his fears for the future left him and he became all smiles as he counted the money.

When he was satisfied he handed over the remaining blood as well as the three vaccine filled pipettes and neither side knew that they were a part of some grand cosmic joke for a few more months. That night as Yuri planned his permanent vacation, the North Koreans, not a one of whom was a scientist, boarded a plane set for Pakistan. And the following day as Yuri began making deposits in the various bank accounts he had opened, the North Koreans set to bargaining with the Pakistanis: shale oil contracts in exchange for a virus of untold potential.

The North Koreans were out of hard assets to purchase fuel with, while the Pakistan scientists were bristling with excitement to get a hold of the fabled Super Soldier virus, confident that they could pare back its negative side effects. If they could, it would give them an edge in their endless armed rivalry with the Indians and perhaps even a super power status.

Their excitement made the bargaining tougher than the Pakistanis had foreseen, but in the end everyone came away with what they were looking for.

General Choe kept his face rigidly impassive as he handed over only a portion of what he had been given: a half-filled tube of blood and a single pipette. He was prepared to hand over the other two pipettes and the rest of the blood, yet no one asked and he didn’t offer. Instead he remained perfectly calm despite that his insides were leaping with excitement.

The following evening, when Yuri was transferring his money to a Swiss account, General Choe was in Cairo meeting with a group of Saudi extremists, ensuring that he too would make a handsome profit from this dirty deal. He had seen too much of the world to go back to the prison that North Korea had become.

“I need proof,” Kahled Marzouq, the chief financier present demanded. They were in a dusty warehouse where the desert ran up against the edge of the city, and Choe, despite that his flat features twitched not at all, was more than a touch nervous. To extremists like these everyone outside their little circle of hate was the enemy. “Twenty million U.S is too much money to hand over without proof that this virus will do what you say it will.”

A dog was called for, and a gun. The gun was the easier of the two to produce, though eventually a little mutt was brought in and tied to a girder. Choe pricked the dog and then came a four hour wait where it gradually turned from healthy to sick—its breath grew labored and its head went back forth with a long string of drool swinging below. Eventually its whining ended and it slumped and ceased to move. There were seven of them in the warehouse and all waited with baited breath, and then just as the Saudis were beginning to grow irritated, it reawakened into a mindless beast with blank staring eyes and barred teeth and whose sole aim was their death.

“It no longer feel pain,” Choe said in his broken English. He had been chosen for the foreign desk due to his ability in languages—he spoke six well enough to be understood. He gestured to the man with assault rifle and said, “Shoot in the back quarter.”

One of the men had an AK47 and he put a well placed bullet into the cur. The little dog didn’t so much as yelp; it only turned on the shooter and pulled at the end of its leash desperate to kill, making a low moaning sound that seemed more human than canine.

“Now shoot in thorax. You know this word?” Choe asked, pointing toward the chest of the dog. The man again aimed his weapon and shot. The bullet staggered the dog, but after a pause it came on just as before, unrelenting despite the gaping wound that went through its body. The Saudis were wide-eyed now. “Next in head,” Choe said. “Is only way is kill.”

This last bullet did the trick. When the dog finally ceased to move, one of the extremists came forward; he stared down at it, lying in a puddle of its black blood and asked, “Ami, how long before you can get that vaccine into mass production?”

“Two years with my current funding,” Ami Khalifa answered. He had the lilting cadence of an Englishman to his voice and the soft hands of a man unaccustomed to manual labor. “Eight months if my budget could be quadrupled. Of course your definition of mass production may be different than mine. If you are talking about millions of doses then I will need fifty times what I have and a hundred more men…and a much better facility.”

“That I cannot do,” the financier said. “However I can begin…” He paused suddenly and would not say more with General Choe present. Instead they made arrangements to pay the North Korean and then when the man went his way, the Saudis began a general discussion concerning the implications of the virus that went on for hours—and the body of the dog was forgotten. As the Saudis made plans to bring the west to its knees, rats began to feast on it. Many of them had open wounds and these became sicker by the hour, snapping at their brothers in a fever driven delirium, further spreading the virus.

It became a slow motion chain reaction that spread across the middle east and before Ami Khalifa reproduced even a single vaccine, infected rodents began to show up on cargo ships heading all over the Red Sea and beyond.

And on October first, as Yuri Petrovich came off the plane in New York City in a dapper suit, he was only three days ahead of a cruise liner that would put into port in Miami carrying a great many sick passengers and a number of dead ones as well. The company tried to keep it hushed up, but very quickly it got out that cannibals had been aboard the ship.

By then the Saudi extremists were well aware that their designs had gone awry and though they had only managed to create two-hundred doses of the vaccine they put their faith in Allah and put their murderous plan into action.