by me, Kerry Burgess, 11/1/2026 4:39 PM
So if this is anything at all
Anything at all is it supposed that we will learn
Anything at all from it.
To prevent
That it cannot be stopped now and for those to understand anything at all of that all that are left with anything
https://www.instagram.com/p/DROLmxRDEJF/
From 5/8/1994 ( premiere USA TV miniseries "Stephen King's The Stand"::miniseries premiere "The Plague" ) To 11/18/2025 ( ) is 11517 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 5/15/1997 ( ) is 11517 days
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-faq
amazon
FAQs
When did Amazon.com go public and at what price?
Amazon.com went public on May 15, 1997
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_vector
Disease vector
From Wikipedia
In epidemiology, a disease vector is any living agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen such as a parasite or microbe, to another living organism.
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King, author
(from internet transcript)
excerpt, Chapter 42
“We’re going to Stovington, Vermont,” Frannie said. “To the plague center there. We—what’s wrong? Mr. Redman?” He had gone pale all of a sudden. The stem of grass he had been chewing fell onto his lap.
“Why there?” Stu asked.
“Because there happens to be an installation there for the studying of communicable diseases,” Harold said loftily. “It was my thought that, if there is any order left in this country, or any persons in authority who escaped the late scourge, they would likely be at Stovington or Atlanta, where there is another such center.”
“That’s right,” Frannie said.
Stu said: “You’re wasting your time.”
Frannie looked stunned. Harold looked indignant; the red began to creep out of his collar again. “I hardly think you’re the best judge of that, my man.”
“I guess I am. I came from there.”
Now they both looked stunned. Stunned and astonished.
“You knew about it?” Frannie asked, shaken. “You checked it out?”
“No, it wasn’t like that. It—”
“You’re a liar!” Harold’s voice had gone high and squeaky.
Fran saw an alarming cold flash of anger in Redman’s eyes, then they were brown and mild again. “No. I ain’t.”
“I say you are! I say you’re nothing but a—”
“Harold, you shut up! ”
Harold looked at her, wounded. “But Frannie, how can you believe—”
“How can you be so rude and antagonistic?” she asked hotly. “Will you at least listen to what he has to say, Harold?”
“I don’t trust him.”
Fair enough, Stu thought, that makes us even.
“How can you not trust a man you just met? Really, Harold, you’re being disgusting!”
“Let me tell you how I know,” Stu said quietly. He told an abridged version of the story that began when Campion had crashed into Hap’s pumps. He sketched his escape from Stovington a week ago. Harold glared dully down at his hands, which were plucking up bits of moss and shredding them. But the girl’s face was like an unfolding map of tragic country, and Stu felt bad for her. She had set off with this boy (who, to give him credit, had had a pretty good idea), hoping against hope that there was something of the old taken-for-granted ways left. Well, she had been disappointed. Bitterly so, from her look.
“Atlanta too? The plague got both of them?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, and she burst into tears.
He wanted to comfort her, but the boy would not take to that. Harold glanced uncomfortably at Fran, then down at the litter of moss on his cuffs. Stu gave her his handkerchief. She thanked him distractedly, without looking up. Harold glared sullenly at him again, the eyes those of a piggy little boy who wants the whole cookie jar to himself. Ain’t he going to be surprised, Stu thought, when he finds out a girl isn’t a jar of cookies.
When her tears had tapered down to sniffles, she said, “I guess Harold and I owe you our thanks. At least you saved us a long trip with disappointment at the end.”
“You mean you believe him? Just like that? He tells you a big story and you just… you buy it?”
“Harold, why would he lie? For what gain?”
“Well, how do I know what he’s got on his mind?” Harold asked truculently. “Murder, could be. Or rape.”
“I don’t believe in rape myself,” Stu said mildly. “Maybe you know something about it I don’t.”
“Stop it,” Fran said. “Harold, won’t you try not to be so awful?”
“Awful? ” Harold shouted. “I’m trying to watch out for you—us—and that’s so bloodydamn awful? ”
“Look,” Stu said, and brushed his sleeve up. On the inside of his elbow were several healing needle marks and the last remains of a discolored bruise. “They injected me with all kinds of stuff.”
“Maybe you’re a junkie,” Harold said.
Stu rolled his sleeve back down without replying. It was the girl, of course. He had gotten used to the idea of owning her. Well, some girls could be owned and some could not. This one looked like the later type. She was tall and pretty and very fresh-looking. Her dark eyes and hair accentuated a look that could be taken for dewy helplessness. It would be easy to miss that faint line (the I-want line, Stu’s mother had called it) between her eyebrows that became so pronounced when she was put out, the swift capability of her hands, even the forthright way she tossed her hair from her forehead.
“So now what do we do?” she asked, ignoring Harold’s last contribution to the discussion entirely.
“Go on anyway,” Harold said, and when she looked over at him with that line furrowing her brow, he added hastily: “Well, we have to go somewhere. Sure, he’s probably telling the truth, but we could double-check. Then decide what’s next.”
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King, author
(from internet transcript)
excerpt, Chapter 8
That night they stayed in a Eustace, Oklahoma, travel court. Ed and Trish infected the clerk. The kids, Marsha, Stanley, and Hector, infected the kids they played with on the tourist court’s playground—kids bound for west Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Trish infected the two women who were washing clothes at the Laundromat two blocks away. Ed, on his way down the motel corridor to get some ice, infected a fellow he passed in the hallway. Everybody got into the act.
Trish woke Ed up in the early morning hours to tell him that Heck, the baby, was sick. He had an ugly, rasping cough and was running a fever. It sounded to her like the croup. Ed Norris groaned and told her to give the kid some aspirin. If the kid’s goddam croup could only have held off another four or five days, he could have had it in his very own house and Ed would have been left with the memory of a perfect vacation (not to mention the anticipation of all that gloating he planned to do). He could hear the poor kid through the connecting door, hacking away like a hound dog.
Trish expected that Hector’s symptoms would abate in the morning—croup was a lying-down sickness—but by noon of the twentieth, she admitted to herself that it wasn’t happening. The aspirin wasn’t controlling the fever; poor Heck was just glass-eyed with it. His cough had taken on a booming note she didn’t like, and his respiration sounded labored and phlegmy. Whatever it was, Marsha seemed to be coming down with it, too, and Trish had a nasty little tickle in the back of her own throat that was making her cough, although so far it was only a light cough she could smother in a small hankie.
“We’ve got to get Heck to a doctor,” she said finally.
Ed pulled into a service station and checked the map paperclipped to the station wagon’s sun-visor. They were in Hammer Crossing, Kansas. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we can at least find a doctor who’ll give us a referral.” He sighed and ran an aggravated hand through his hair. “Hammer Crossing, Kansas! Jesus! Why’d he have to get sick, enough to need a doctor at some goddam nothing place like this?”
Marsha, who was looking at the map over her father’s shoulder, said: “It says Jesse James robbed the bank here, Daddy. Twice.”
“Fuck Jesse James,” Ed grumped. “Ed!” Trish cried. “Sorry,” he said, not feeling sorry in the least. He drove on.
After six calls, during each of which Ed Norris carefully held his temper with both hands, he finally found a doctor in Polliston who would look at Hector if they could get him there by three. Polliston was off their route, twenty miles west of Hammer Crossing, but now the important thing was Hector. Ed was getting very worried about him. He’d never seen the kid with so little oomph in him.
They were waiting in the outer office of Dr. Brenden Sweeney by two in the afternoon. By then Ed was sneezing, too. Sweeney’s waiting room was full; they didn’t get in to see the doctor until nearly four o’clock. Trish couldn’t rouse Heck to more than a sludgy semiconsciousness, and she felt feverish herself. Only Stan Norris, age nine, still felt good enough to fidget.
During their wait in Sweeney’s office they communicated the sickness which would soon be known across the disintegrating country as Captain Trips to more than twenty-five people, including a matronly woman who just came in to pay her bill before going on to pass the disease to her entire bridge club.
This matronly woman was Mrs. Robert Bradford, Sarah Bradford to the bridge club, Cookie to her husband and close friends. Sarah played well that night, possibly because her partner was Angela Dupray, her best friend. They seemed to enjoy a happy kind of telepathy. They won all three rubbers resoundingly, making a grand slam during the last. For Sarah, the only fly in the ointment was that she seemed to be coming down with a slight cold. It wasn’t fair, arriving so soon on the heels of the last one.
She and Angela went out for a quiet drink in a cocktail bar after the party broke up at ten. Angela was in no hurry to get home. It was David’s turn to have the weekly poker game at their house, and she just wouldn’t be able to sleep with all that noise going on… unless she had a little self-prescribed sedative first, which in her case would be two sloe gin fizzes.
Sarah had a Ward 8 and the two women rehashed the bridge game. In the meantime they managed to infect everyone in the Polliston cocktail bar, including two young men drinking beer nearby. They were on their way to California—just as Larry Underwood and his friend Rudy Schwartz had once gone—to seek their fortunes. A friend of theirs had promised them jobs with a moving company. The next day they headed west, spreading the disease as they went.
Chain letters don’t work. It’s a known fact. The million dollars or so you are promised if you’ll just send one single dollar to the name at the top of the list, add yours to the bottom, and then send the letter on to five friends never arrives. This one, the Captain Trips chain letter, worked very well. The pyramid was indeed being built, not from the bottom up but from the tip down—said tip being a deceased army security guard named Charles Campion. All the chickens were coming home to roost. Only instead of the mailman bringing each participant bale after bale of letters, each containing a single dollar bill, Captain Trips brought bales of bedrooms with a body or two in each one, and trenches, and dead-pits, and finally bodies slung into the oceans on each coast and into quarries and into the foundations of unfinished houses. And in the end, of course, the bodies would rot where they fell.
Sarah Bradford and Angela Dupray walked back to their parked cars together (infecting four or five people they met on the street), then pecked cheeks and went their separate ways. Sarah went home to infect her husband and his five poker buddies and her teenaged daughter, Samantha. Unknown to her parents, Samantha was terribly afraid she had caught a dose of the clap from her boyfriend. As a matter of fact, she had. As a further matter of fact, she had nothing to worry about; next to what her mother had given her, a good working dose of the clap was every bit as serious as a little eczema of the eyebrows.
The next day Samantha would go on to infect everybody in the swimming pool at the Polliston YWCA.
And so on.
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 4:46 PM Pacific-timezone USA Sunday 11/01/2026
