"That’s what I asked you, base."

http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html


Stephen King

The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition


Chapter 26


The Los Angeles Times ran only 26,000 copies of their one-page extra before the officers in charge discovered that they were not printing an advertising circular, as they had been told. The reprisal was swift and bloody. The official FBI story was that “radical revolutionaries,” that old bugaboo, had dynamited the L.A. Times ’ presses, causing the death of twenty-eight workers. The FBI didn’t have to explain how the explosion had put bullets in each of the twenty-eight heads, because the bodies were mingled with those of thousands of others, epidemic victims who were being buried at sea.

Yet 10,000 copies got out, and that was enough. The headline, in 36-point-type, screamed:

WEST COAST IN GRIP OF PLAGUE EPIDEMIC

Thousands Flee Deadly Superflu

Government Coverup Certain

LOS ANGELES—Some of the soldiers purporting to be National Guardsmen helping out during the current ongoing tragedy are career soldiers with as many as four ten-year pips on their sleeves. Part of their job is to assure terrified Los Angeles residents that the superflu, known as Captain Trips by the young in most areas, is “only slightly more virulent” than the London or Hong Kong strains… but these assurances are made through portable respirators. The President is scheduled to speak tonight at 6:00 PST and his press secretary, Hubert Ross, has branded reports that the President will speak from a set mocked up to look like the Oval Office but actually deep in the White House bunker “hysterical, vicious, and totally unfounded.” Advance copies of the President’s speech indicate that he will “spank” the American people for overreacting, and compare the current panic to that which followed Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in the early 30s.

The Times has five questions it wishes the President would answer in his speech.

1. Why has the Times been enjoined from printing the news by thugs in army uniforms, in direct violation of its Constitutional right to do so?

2. Why have the following highways—US 5, US 10, and US 15—been blocked off by armored cars and troop carriers?

3. If this is a “minor outbreak of flu,” why has martial law been declared for Los Angeles and surrounding areas?

4. If this is a “minor outbreak of flu,” then why are barge-trains being towed out into the Pacific and dumped? And do these barges contain what we are afraid they contain and what informed sources have assured us they do contain—the dead bodies of plague victims?

5. Finally, if a vaccine really is to be distributed to doctors and area hospitals early next week, why has not one of the forty-six physicians that this newspaper contacted for further details heard of any delivery plans? Why has not one clinic been set up to administer flu shots? Why has not one of the ten pharmaceutical houses we called gotten freight invoices or government fliers on this vaccine?

We call upon the President to answer these questions in his speech, and above all we call upon him to end these police-state tactics and this insane effort to cover up the truth…

In Duluth a man in khaki shorts and sandals walked up and down Piedmont Avenue with a large smear of ash on his forehead and a hand-lettered sandwich board hanging over his scrawny shoulders.

The front read:

THE TIME OF THE DISAPPEARANCE IS HERE

CHRIST THE LORD RETURNETH SOON

PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD!

The back read:

BEHOLD THE HEARTS OF THE SINNERS WERE BROKEN

THE GREAT SHALL BE ABASED AND THE ABASED MADE GREAT

THE EVIL DAYS ARE AT HAND

WOE TO THEE O ZION

Four young men in motorcycle jackets, all of them with bad coughs and runny noses, set upon the man in the khaki shorts and beat him unconscious with his own sandwich board. Then they fled, one of them calling back hysterically over his shoulder: “Teach you to scare people! Teach you to scare people, you half-baked freak!”



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 12:27 AM Pacific Time somewhere near Seattle Washington USA Thursday 02 January 2014