Robin Cook-Invasion

Sci-Fi thriller

Robin Cook envisions in this book a strange contact with extraterrestrials. A spaceship arrives to Earth to dump some black and rounded disks to the surface of the planet. Those who handle the disks receive a sting, soon followed by flu-like symptoms and ending in a kind of zombie assimilation into the alien consciousness and began to prepare everything for the real aliens' arrival. Ultimately a mismatched group gathers to combat this invasion including the fiance of the main infected person Beau. They discover that this has been planned for a very long time as the rocks just activate the virus which is in fact in our DNA. After working by themselves for a while and two of the group being killed they hook up with Doctor Harlan McCay who has a Biological Warfare Reasearch Lab at his disposal. He explains that he has a degree in immunology but had a private practice in a nearby town. When the invasion started he headed to the lab which is left over from the Cold War but is still stocked and was at least somewhat staffed (the staff apparently left when they got infected) and although it was a secret the local Native Americans knew about it and had at some point in time informed him of it. The lab had everything they needed to work on a cure for the virus. They find that infecting themselves with another virus will cause the virus to expose itself and oxygen will destroy it (it came here 3 billion years ago when there was little to no oxygen so it's vulnerable to it in a virion state) and after testing this with infected mice (it cures all but the one infected the longest who dies: apparently if its in your system too long the cure kills you) they take a cold virus that has never been encountered before (it was artifically engineered) as it is mild enough to not kill the person infected but will do the job. Also as it is artifically created no one will have encountered it so they will have no immunity to it and everyone will be infected. They then storm the mansion where a machine is being built to bring the aliens to Earth from other planets this virus has taken over. The group smashes the machine with a car and it is destroyed. Beau is too far gone to be cured and tells them to run. He dies and the mansion is destroyed but they are able to spread the cure and the invasion is ended.