Chuck Grossart
The Gemini Effect
The undersigned Plenipotentiaries, in the name of their respective governments: Whereas the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world; and whereas the prohibition of such use has been declared in Treaties to which the majority of Powers of the world are Parties; and to the end that this prohibition shall be universally accepted as a part of International Law, binding alike the conscience and practice of nations…
The States Parties to this Convention, determined to act with a view to achieving effective progress towards general and complete disarmament, including the prohibition and elimination of all types of weapons of mass destruction, and convinced that the prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of chemical and bacteriological (biological) weapons and their elimination, through effective measures, will facilitate the achievement of general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control…
THE FIRST NIGHT
CHAPTER 1
The extermination of the human race began in a salvage yard.
Under the left rear fender of what remained of a 1962 Chevrolet Nova, to be exact. A rusted shell of what was once called a Chevy II — a “Deuce” to those who loved them — built at the old Kansas City GM Leeds assembly plant during the last week of November 1961. Wagon Train was America’s favorite TV show in the winter of ’61. On the radio, Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John” replaced Dion’s “Runaround Sue” at the top of the Hit Parade. Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and the rest of the New York Yankees had won their nineteenth World Series by beating the Cincinnati Reds 13–5 in game five.
The world turned, counting down.
In the weeks and months before Chevy’s newest grocery getter rolled off the assembly line, the world witnessed Berlin split in two by concrete barricades and concertina wire, and heard news of a 58-megaton Soviet nuclear device — Царь-бомба, the Tsar Bomb — detonated over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Eleven months later, grainy reconnaissance photos of Soviet missile sites in Cuba would take the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Dallas crowds stood dumbstruck less than two years after the Deuce left the showroom floor, as American innocence slipped away in the back of a ’61 Lincoln Continental. A big-eared Texas politician, standing next to a woman in a bloodstained pink Chanel suit, put his hand on a Bible, took the helm of history in his well-washed hands, and slithered full speed ahead toward Southeast Asia to keep all the dominoes from falling.
The Nova was built in a time of war — a cold war. The fear was real then, under the skin, every moment of every day. Like two bullies on the block vying for dominance, a brawl between the opposing forces was a foregone conclusion; it would happen, eventually. Maybe tomorrow. Or even today.
It was an era of calculated risks and strategic brinkmanship by two great powers, each holding a uranium-edged blade to the other’s throat. Missiles sat at the ready in buried coffins and silos, armed bombers lined the ramps, and alert crews awaited the Klaxon’s scream.
MAD was the acronym of the times: mutually assured destruction, the ultimate catch-22 of the twentieth century. They kill us, we kill them. When the missiles launched and the bombers flew, even the most steadfast warriors on either side knew there’d be no victory parades.
Scientists designed the city-killing bombs, but they’d also built smaller weapons, engineered to be just as deadly, and in some ways, even more destructive. Virulence and infectivity supplanted blast and radiation in the killing lexicon. Careful planning and controlled employment of these tiny weapons would render the MAD game obsolete. There’d be a winner, and a loser.
The research had been promising — and productive — until it escaped from a clean room.
In a ’62 Deuce.
CHAPTER 2
The Nova’s trunk, shut for years as the car silently rusted away in the salvage yard, had sprung open when another wrecked car was dropped on its roof. The old Chevy had leaned toward the passenger side for nearly two decades, and now the driver’s side drooped down. Just a few degrees of movement, but it was enough.
It’d been raining steadily since that day, now a week past.
The rain, each drop carrying tiny particles of toxic garbage continuously pumped into the atmosphere, pooled in the low areas of the trunk. In short order, the corrosive filth — a stew of many ingredients — slowly began to eat through the exposed steel.
One particular ingredient, however, made the crucial difference. By itself, the man-made agent was simply horrid. Combined with just the right amount of other things, mixed for just the right amount of time, it became incomprehensively hellish.
Mother Nature was funny that way. Complex. Unpredictable.
And unforgiving as hell if you fucked around with her.
The events of this night had been set in motion years before, with an escape, a bullet, and a mistake. On the Nova’s last trip, its driver had been murdered, his killers following the voices in their heads screaming at them to kill, to run, instead of following their specific instructions to find the car, secure the passenger, and return with him where he could be quarantined… and, of course, studied, for as long as he remained alive.
Contact, and resulting exposure, soon changed their plans.
Their protective suits had been mistakenly equipped with the incorrect filter, allowing the aggressive contagion to enter their bloodstreams and instantly ravage their sanity.
After killing the frenzied driver with a single bullet to the head, and six or seven more to his neck, chest, and legs as their own diseased frenzy began to build, they stuffed the driver’s bullet-riddled body in the Nova’s trunk and left the infected corpse to bake in the New Mexico summer heat. They drove west, escaping whatever threats their fevered minds had fabricated in their quickly twisting consciousnesses, only to meet an abrupt end against a bridge abutment fifteen miles away. Luck — in the form of an exploding gas tank — had been on mankind’s side that day.
Over the next three days, the inside of the abandoned Nova’s trunk became a sauna of stinking rot and bile as dead flesh swelled and burst in the intense heat, the ruined body spilling its macabre contents to congeal on the floor.