The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
Chapter 13
Rage struck him with all the unexpectedness of a sweet surprise. He was up, and then he had hold of Deitz’s lapels, and he was shaking him back and forth. From the corner of his eye he saw startled movement behind the double-paned glass. Dimly, muffled by distance and soundproofed walls, he heard a hooter go off.
“What did you people do?” he shouted. “What did you do? What in Christ’s name did you do?”
“Mr. Redman—”
“Huh? What the fuck did you people do?”
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
Chapter 4
It was an hour past nightfall.
Starkey sat alone at a long table, sifting through sheets of yellow flimsy. Their contents dismayed him.
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
Chapter 17
Starkey was standing in front of monitor 2, keeping a close eye on Tech 2nd Class Frank D. Bruce. When we last saw Bruce, he was facedown in a bowl of Chunky Sirloin Soup. No change except for the positive ID. Situation normal, all fucked up.
Thoughtfully, hands locked behind his back like a general reviewing troops, like General Black Jack Pershing, his boyhood idol, Starkey moved down to monitor 4, where the situation had changed for the better. Dr. Emmanual Ezwick still lay dead on the floor, but the centrifuge had stopped. At 1940 hours last night, the centrifuge had begun to emit fine tendrils of smoke. At 1995 hours the sound pickups in Ezwick’s lab had transmitted a whunga-whunga-whunga sort of sound that deepened into a fuller, richer, and more satisfying ronk! ronk! ronk! At 2107 hours the centrifuge had ronked its last ronk and had slowly come to rest. Was it Newton who had said that somewhere, beyond the farthest star, there may be a body perfectly at rest? Newton had been right about everything but the distance, Starkey thought. You didn’t have to go far at all. Project Blue was perfectly at rest. Starkey was very glad. The centrifuge had been the last illusion of life, and the problem he’d had Steffens run through the main computer bank (Steffens had looked at him as though he were crazy, and yes, Starkey thought he might be) was: How long could that centrifuge be expected to run? The answer, which had come back in 6.6 seconds, was: ± 3 YEARS PROBABLE MALFUNCTION NEXT TWO WEEKS .009% AREAS OF PROBABLE MALFUNCTION BEARINGS 38% MAIN MOTOR 16% ALL OTHER 54%. That was a smart computer. Starkey had gotten Steffens to query it again after the actual burnout of Ezwick’s centrifuge. The computer communed with the Engineering Systems data bank and confirmed that the centrifuge had indeed burned out its bearings.
Remember that, Starkey thought as his caller began to beep urgently behind him. The sound of burning bearings in the final stages of collapse is ronk-ronk-ronk.
He went to the caller and pushed the button that snapped off the beeper. “Yes, Len.”
“Billy, I’ve got an urgent from one of our teams in a town called Sipe Springs, Texas. Almost four hundred miles from Arnette. They say they have to talk to you; it’s a command decision.”
“What is it, Len?” he asked calmly. He had taken over sixteen “downers” in the last ten hours, and was, generally speaking, feeling fine. Not a sign of a ronk.
“Press.”
"Oh Jesus," Starkey said mildly. "Patch them through."
There was a muffled roar of static with a voice talking unintelligibly behind it.
"Wait a minute," Len said.
The static slowly cleared.
" - Lion, Team Lion, do you read, Blue Base? Can you read? One two three four this is Team Lion - "
"I’ve got you, Team Lion," Starkey said. "This is Blue Base One."
"Problem is coded Flowerpot in the Contingency Book," the tinny voice said. "Repeat, Flowerpot."
"I know what the fuck Flowerpot is," Starkey said.
https://kb.oges.info/library/147258/OIL-_-GAS-HISTORY_-The-historic-day-of-March-27_-1
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 22
When Creighton came in on June 24, he found Starkey looking at the monitors, his hands behind his back. He could see the old man’s West Point ring glittering on his right hand, and he felt a wave of pity for him. Starkey had been cruising on pills for ten days, and he was close to the inevitable crash. But, Creighton thought, if his suspicion about the phone call was correct, the real crash had already occurred.
“Len,” Starkey said, as if surprised. “Good of you to come in.”
“De nada,” Creighton said with a slight smile.
“You know who that was on the phone.”
“It was really him, then?”
“The President, yes. I’ve been relieved. The dirty alderman relieved me, Len. Of course I knew it was coming. But it still hurts. Hurts like hell. It hurts coming from that grinning, gladhanding sack of shit.”
Len Creighton nodded.
“Well,” Starkey said, passing a hand over his face. “It’s done. Can’t be undone. You’re in charge now. He wants you in Washington as soon as you can get there. He’ll have you on the carpet and he’ll chew your ass to a bloody rag, but you just stand there and yessir him and take it. We’ve salvaged what we can. It’s enough. I’m convinced it’s enough.”
“If so, this country ought to get down on its knees to you.”
“The throttle burned my hand, but I… I held it as long as I could, Len. I held it.” He spoke with quiet vehemence, but his eyes wandered back to the monitor, and for a moment his mouth quivered infirmly. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Well… we go back a country mile or three, Billy, don’t we?”
“You can say that again, soldier. Now—listen. One thing is top priority. You’ve got to see Jack Cleveland, first chance you get. He knows who we’ve got behind both curtains, iron and bamboo. He knows how to get in touch with them, and he won’t stick at what has to be done. He’ll know it’ll have to be quick.”
“I don’t understand, Billy.”
“We have to assume the worst,” Starkey said, and a queer grin came over his face. It lifted his upper lip and made it wrinkle like the snout of a dog protecting a farmyard. He pointed a finger at the sheets of yellow flimsy on the table. “It’s out of control now. It’s popped up in Oregon, Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida. Tentative cases in Mexico and Chile. When we lost Atlanta, we lost the three men best equipped to deal with the problem. We’re getting exactly nowhere with Mr. Stuart ‘Prince’ Redman. Did you know they actually injected him with the Blue virus? He thought it was a sedative. He killed it, and no one has the slightest idea how. If we had six weeks, we might be able to turn the trick. But, we don’t. The flu story is the best one, but it is imperative—imperative —that the other side never sees this as an artificial situation created in America. It might give them ideas.
“Cleveland has between eight and twenty men and women in the U.S.S.R. and between five and ten in each of the European satellite countries. Not even I know how many he has in Red China.” Starkey’s mouth was trembling again. “When you see Cleveland this afternoon, all you need tell him is Rome falls. You won’t forget?”
“No,” Len said. His lips felt curiously cold. “But do you really expect that they’ll do it? Those men and women?”
“Our people got those vials one week ago. They believe they contain radioactive particles to be charted by our Sky-Cruise satellites. That’s all they need to know, isn’t it, Len?”
“Yes, Billy.”
“And if things do go from bad to… to worse, no one will ever know. Project Blue was uninfiltrated to the very end, we’re sure of that. A new virus, a mutation… our opposite numbers may suspect, but there won’t be time enough. Share and share alike, Len.”
draft ; original work by me, Kerry Burgess, 04/01/2024
From 10/24/1989 ( "The Stand" complete edition, by Stephen King ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 12578 days
12578 = 6289 + 6289
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/21/1983 ( premiere USA film "Independence Day" ) is 6289 days
From 12/17/1962 ( from Wikipedia on the global-internetwork: Richard Allensworth Jewell ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 22386 days
22386 = 11193 + 11193
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 6/25/1996 ( premiere USA film "Independence Day" ) is 11193 days
From 6/16/2005 ( as Kerry Burgess my official records United States of America Veterans Affairs hospital includes: Date of Admission, psychiatric unit ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 6864 days
6864 = 3432 + 3432
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 3/27/1975 ( construction begins of the Alaska oil pipeline ) is 3432 days
From 10/1/1958 ( USA NASA begins operations ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 23924 days
23924 = 11962 + 11962
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 8/3/1998 ( "Rainbow Six" by Tom Clancy ) is 11962 days
From 10/18/1993 ( the launch of the US space shuttle Columbia orbiter vehicle mission STS-58 includes me Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps commissioned-officer and United States STS-58 pilot astronaut and my 2nd official United States of America National Aeronautics Space Administration orbital flight of 4 overall ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 11123 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 4/16/1996 ( from Wikipedia on the global-internetwork: debut by artist Modest Mouse and their first studio album "This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About" ) is 11123 days
From 10/18/1993 ( the launch of the US space shuttle Columbia orbiter vehicle mission STS-58 includes me Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps commissioned-officer and United States STS-58 pilot astronaut and my 2nd official United States of America National Aeronautics Space Administration orbital flight of 4 overall ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 11123 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 4/16/1996 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Nova"::"Bombing of America" ) is 11123 days
From 12/10/2020 ( the FDA approval of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 1208 days
1208 = 604 + 604
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 6/29/1967 ( newspaper Chicago Tribune reports for this day: Lost Person Service at Postoffice ) is 604 days
From 5/12/1994 ( premiere USA TV miniseries episode "Stephen King's The Stand"::miniseries finale "The Stand" ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 10917 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 9/23/1995 ( premiere USA TV series "JAG" AND premiere USA TV series episode "Captain Planet and the Planeteers"::"Whoo Gives a Hoot?" ) is 10917 days
From 12/30/1877 ( from Wikipedia on the global-internetwork: Brahms' Symphony No. 2 premieres in Vienna ) To 10/28/1994 ( premiere USA film "Stargate" ) is 42670 days
42670 = 21335 + 21335
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 21335 days
From 2/14/1969 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Star Trek"::"Requiem for Methuselah" ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 20135 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/18/2020 ( premiere USA internet streaming-video "Greenland" ) is 20135 days
From 8/1/1980 ( premiere USA film "The Final Countdown" ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 15949 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 7/3/2009 ( ***** NO MATCH FOUND ***** ) is 15949 days
From 5/23/1994 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Star Trek: The Next Generation"::series finale episode "All Good Things..." ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 10906 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 9/12/1995 ( biographical - from Wikipedia: Grahame Clark dead ) is 10906 days
From 5/22/2015 ( premiere USA film "Tomorrowland" ) To 4/1/2024 ( ) is 3237 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 9/13/1974 ( premiere USA TV series "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" ) is 3237 days
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 26
Some campus group, probably either Students for a Democratic Society or the Young Maoists, had been busy with a ditto machine during the night of June 25-26. In the morning, these posters were plastered all over the University of Kentucky at Louisville campus:
ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!
YOU ARE BEING LIED TO! THE GOVERNMENT IS LYING TO YOU! THE PRESS, WHICH HAS BEEN CO-OPTED BY THE FORCES OF THE PIG PARAMILITARY, IS LYING TO YOU! THE ADMINISTRATION OF THIS UNIVERSITY IS LYING TO YOU, AS ARE THE INFIRMARY DOCTORS UNDER THE ADMINISTRATION’S ORDERS!
1. THERE IS NO SUPERFLU VACCINE.
2. SUPERFLU IS NOT A SERIOUS DISEASE, IT IS A DEADLY DISEASE.
3. SUSCEPTIBILITY MAY RUN AS HIGH AS 75%.
4. SUPERFLU WAS DEVELOPED BY THE FORCES OF THE U.S. PIG PARAMILITARY AND DISBURSED BY ACCIDENT.
5. THE U.S. PIG PARAMILITARY NOW MEANS TO COVER UP THEIR MURDEROUS BLUNDER EVEN IF IT MEANS 75% OF THE POPULATION WILL DIE!
ALL REVOLUTIONARY PEOPLE, GREETINGS! THE TIME OF OUR STRUGGLE IS NOW! UNITE, STRIVE, CONQUER!
MEETING IN GYM AT 7:00 PM!
STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!
What happened at WBZ-TV in Boston had been planned the night before by three newscasters and six technicians, all operating in Studio 6. Five of these men played poker regularly, and six of the nine were already ill. They felt they had nothing to lose. They collected nearly a dozen handguns. Bob Palmer, who anchored the morning news, brought them upstairs inside a flight bag where he usually carried his notes, pencils, and several legal-sized notepads.
The entire broadcast facility was cordoned off by what they had been told were National Guardsmen, but as Palmer had told George Dickerson the night before, they were the only over-fifty Guardsmen he had ever seen.
At 9:01 A.M., just after Palmer had begun to read the soothing copy he had been handed ten minutes before by an army noncom, a coup took place. The nine of them effectively captured the television station. The soldiers, who hadn’t expected any real trouble from a soft bunch of civilians accustomed to reporting tragedy at long distance, were taken completely by surprise and disarmed. Other station personnel joined the small rebellion, and cleared the sixth floor quickly and locked all the doors. The elevators were brought to six before the soldiers on the lobby level quite knew what was happening. Three soldiers tried to come up the east fire stairs, and a janitor named Charles Yorkin, armed with an army-issue carbine, fired a shot over their heads. It was the only shot fired.
Viewers in the WBZ-TV broadcast area saw Bob Palmer stop his newscast in the middle of a sentence, and heard him say, “Okay, right now!” There were scuffling sounds off-camera. When it was over, thousands of bemused viewers saw that Bob Palmer was now holding a snub-nosed pistol in his hand.
A hoarse, off-mike voice yelled jubilantly: “We got em, Bob! We got the bastards! We got em all!”
“Okay, that’s good work,” Palmer said. He then faced into the camera again. “Fellow citizens of Boston, and Americans in our broadcast area. Something both grave and terribly important has just happened in this studio, and I am very glad it has happened here first, in Boston, the cradle of American independence. For the last seven days, this broadcast facility has been under guard by men purporting to be National Guardsmen. Men in army khaki, armed with guns, have been standing beside our cameramen, in our control rooms, beside our teletypes. Has the news been managed? I am sorry to say that this is the case. I have been given copy and forced to read it, almost literally with gun to my head. The copy I have been reading has to do with the so-called ‘superflu epidemic,’ and all of it is patently false.”
Lights began to flicker on the switchboard. Within fifteen seconds every light was on.
“Our cameramen have taken film that has either been confiscated or deliberately exposed. Our reporters’ stories have disappeared. Yet we do have film, ladies and gentlemen, and we have correspondents right here in the studio-professional reporters, but eyewitnesses to what may be the greatest disaster this country has ever faced… and I do not use those words lightly. We are going to run some of this film for you now. All of it was taken clandestinely, and some of it is of poor quality. Yet we here, who have just liberated our own television station, think you may see enough. More, indeed, than you might have wished.”
He looked up, took a handkerchief from his sport-coat pocket, and blew his nose. Those with good color TVs could see that he looked flushed and feverish.
“If it’s ready, George, go ahead and run it.”
Palmer’s face was replaced with shots of Boston General Hospital. Wards were crammed. Patients lay on the floors. The halls were full; nurses, many of them obviously sick themselves, wove in and out, some of them weeping hysterically. Others looked shocked to the point of coma.
Shots of guards standing on street corners with cradled rifles. Shots of buildings that had been broken into.
Bob Palmer appeared again. “If you have children, ladies and gentlemen,” he said quietly, “we would advise that you ask them to leave the room.”
A grainy shot of a truck backing down a pier jutting out over Boston Harbor, a big olive-colored army truck. Below it, riding uncertainly, was a barge covered with canvas tarps. Two soldiers, rugose and alien in gas masks, jumped down from the truck’s cab. The picture jiggled and joggled, then became steady again as they pulled back the canvas sheet covering the open rear end of the truck. Then they jumped up inside, and bodies began to cascade out onto the barge: women, old men, children, police, nurses; they came in a cartwheeling flood that seemed never to end. At some point during the film-clip it became clear that the soldiers were using pitchforks to get them out.
Palmer went on broadcasting for two hours, his steadily hoarsening voice reading clippings and bulletins, interviewing other members of the crew. It went on until somebody on the ground floor realized that they didn’t have to re-take the sixth floor to stop it. At 11:16, the WBZ transmitter was shut down permanently with twenty pounds of plastique.
Palmer and the others on the sixth floor were summarily executed on charges of treason to their government, the United States of America.
by me, Kerry Burgess: 29 March 2013
I wrote once before in a private email about the question I posed to myself about whether the sudden realization that my life in DeQueen Arkansas would make me also resent my biological relations to the British monarchy and I was thinking again just today that I do not resent them.
I was thinking back today to my life growing up in DeQueen and really the only things I did not like about it was things I could have changed personally. So if I resent anybody then I should resent myself.
I think back to that trailer park we lived and why should I resent anything about that? Sure, we weren't wealthy by any means but so what? Why did I deserve to live a life of luxury?
I think back to that trailer we lived in and I think about the nights I would try to sleep at night and I would hear the rats that infested that place scratching on the walls
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, prologue
Still feeling half-asleep, caught in some awful grinding dream, she followed him out to the driveway where their fifteen-year-old Chevy stood, quietly rusting in the fragrant desert darkness of the California night.
Charlie dumped the suitcases in the trunk and the tote-bag in the back seat. Sally stood for a moment by the passenger door with the baby in her arms, looking at the bungalow where they had spent the last four years. When they had moved in, she reflected, Baby LaVon was still growing inside her body, all her horsey-rides ahead of her.
“Come on!” he said. “Get in, woman!”
She did. He backed out, the Chevy’s headlights momentarily splashing across the house. Their reflection in the windows looked like the eyes of some hunted beast.
He was hunched tensely over the steering wheel, his face drawn in the dim glow of the dashboard instruments. “If the base gates are closed, I’m gonna try to crash through.” And he meant it. She could tell. Suddenly her knees felt watery.
But there was no need for such desperate measures. The base gates were standing open. One guard was nodding over a magazine. She couldn’t see the other; perhaps he was in the head. This was the outer part of the base, a conventional army vehicle depot. What went on at the hub of the base was of no concern to these fellows.
I looked up and saw the clock had gone red.
She shivered and put her hand on his leg. Baby LaVon was sleeping again. Charlie patted her hand briefly and said: “It’s going to be all right, hon.”
By dawn they were running east across Nevada and Charlie was coughing steadily.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116629/releaseinfo
IMDb
Independence Day (1996)
Release Info
USA 25 June 1996 (Westwood, California) (premiere)
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 4
“Arnette has been quarantined. We’ve isolated at least sixteen cases of constantly shifting A-Prime flu there so far. And those are just the overt ones.”
“The news media?”
“So far, no problem. They believe it’s anthrax.”
“What else?”
“One very serious problem. We have a Texas highway patrolman named Joseph Robert Brentwood. His cousin owns the gas station where Campion ended up. He dropped by yesterday morning to tell Hapscomb the health people were coming. We picked him up three hours ago and he’s en route to Atlanta now. In the meantime he’s been patrolling half of East Texas. God knows how many people he’s been in contact with.”
“Oh, shit,” Starkey said, and was appalled by the watery weakness in his voice and the skin-crawl that had started near the base of his testicles sad was now working up into his belly. 99.4% communicability, he thought. It played insanely over and over in his mind. And that meant 99.4% excess mortality, because the human body couldn’t produce the antibodies necessary to stop a constantly shifting antigen virus. Every time the body did produce the right antibody, the virus simply shifted to a slightly new form. For the same reason a vaccine was going to be almost impossible to create.
99.4%.
https://nbcnews.com/health/health-news/pfizer-s-covid-19-vaccine-receives-key-fda-panel-recommendation-n1250692
Dec. 10, 2020, 2:41 PM PST
By Erika Edwards
An independent panel of experts has overwhelmingly voted to recommend that the Food and Drug Administration authorize Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 17
Starkey had never heard anyone talk so well before or since.
Now he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and fumbled out a thin blue folder bound with red tape. The legend written on the cover read: IF TAPE IS BROKEN NOTIFY ALL SECURITY DIVISIONS AT ONCE. Starkey broke the tape.
“Are you there, Blue Base One?” the voice was asking. “We do not copy you. Repeat, do not copy.”
“I’m here, Lion,” Starkey said. He had flipped to the last page of the book and now ran his finger down a column labeled EXTREME COVERT COUNTERMEASURES.
“Lion, do you read?”
“We read five-by, Blue Base One.”
“Troy,” Starkey said deliberately. “I repeat, Lion: Troy. Repeat back, please. Over to you.”
Silence. A faraway mumble of static. Starkey was fleetingly reminded of the walkie-talkies they made as kids, two tin Del Monte cans and twenty yards of waxed string.
“I say again—”
“Oh Jesus!” a very young voice in Sipe Springs gulped.
“Repeat back, son,” Starkey said.
“T-Troy,” the voice said. Then, more strongly: “Troy.”
“Very good,” Starkey said calmly. “God bless you, son. Over and out.”
“And you, sir. Over and out.”
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 17
Starkey let his eyes slip closed. For a moment all the sweet downers deserted him. “God bless you, too, Len,” he said, and his voice was close to breaking. He switched off and went back to stand in front of monitor 2. He put his hands behind his back like a Black Jack Pershing reviewing troops. He regarded Frank D. Bruce and his final resting place. In a little while he felt calm again.
Going southeast out of Sipe Springs, if you get on US 36, you are headed in the general direction of Houston, a day’s drive away. The car burning up the road was a three-year-old Pontiac Bonneville, doing eighty, and when it came over the rise and saw the nondescript Ford blocking the road, there was nearly an accident.
The driver, a thirty-six-year-old stringer for a large Houston daily, tromped on the power brake and the tires began to screech, the Pontiac’s nose first dipping down toward the road and then beginning to break to the left.
“Holy Gawd!” the photographer in the shotgun seat cried. He dropped his camera to the floor and began to scramble his seat belt across his middle.
The driver let up on the brake, skirted the Ford on the shoulder, and then felt his left wheels start to drag in the soft dirt. He matted the gas pedal and the Bonneville responded with more traction, dragging back onto the blacktop. Blue smoke squirted from beneath the tires. The radio blared on and on:
Baby, can you dig your man,
He’s a righteous man,
Baby, can you dig your man?
He tromped the brake again, and the Bonneville slued to a stop in the middle of the hot and deserted afternoon. He drew in a ragged, terrified breath and then coughed it out in a series of bursts. He began to be angry. He threw the Pontiac into reverse and backed toward the Ford and the two men standing behind it.
“Listen,” the photographer said nervously. He was fat and hadn’t been in a fight since the ninth grade. “Listen, maybe we just better—”
He was thrown forward with a grunt as the stringer brought the Pontiac to another screeching halt, threw the transmission lever into park with one hard thrust of his hand, and got out.
He began to walk toward the two young men behind the Ford, his hands doubled into fists.
“All right, motherfuckers!” he shouted. “You almost got us fucking killed and I want—”
He had been in the service, four years in the army. Volunteer. He had just time to identify the rifles as the new M-3A’s when they brought them up from below the rear deck of the Ford. He stood shocked in the hot Texas sunshine and made water in his pants.
He began to scream and in his mind he was turning to run back to the Bonneville but his feet never moved. They opened up on him, and slugs blew out his chest and groin. As he dropped to his knees, holding both hands out mutely for mercy, a slug struck him an inch over his left eye and tore off the top of his head.
The photographer, who had been twisted over the back seat, found it impossible to comprehend exactly what had happened until the two young men stepped over the stringer’s body and began to walk toward him, rifles raised.
He slid across the Pontiac’s seat, warm bubbles of saliva collecting at the corners of his mouth. The keys were still in the ignition. He turned the car on and screamed out just as they began shooting. He felt the car lurch to the right as if a giant had kicked the left rear, and the wheel began to shimmy wildly in his hands. The photographer bounced up and down as the Bonneville pogoed up the road on the flat tire. A second later the giant kicked the other side of the car. The shimmy got worse. Sparks flew off the blacktop. The photographer was whining. The Pontiac’s rear tires shimmied and flapped like black rags. The two young men ran back to their Ford, whose serial number was listed among the multitude in the Army Vehicles division at the Pentagon, and one of them drove it around in a tight, swaying circle. The nose bounced wildly as it came off the shoulder and drove over the body of the stringer. The sergeant in the passenger seat sprayed a startled sneeze onto the windshield.
Ahead of them, the Pontiac washing-machined along on its two flat rear tires, the nose bouncing up and down. Behind the wheel the fat photographer had begun to weep at the sight of the dark Ford growing in the rearview mirror. He had the accelerator pressed to the floor but the Pontiac would do no more than forty and it was all over the road. On the radio Larry Underwood had been replaced by Madonna. Madonna was asserting that she was a material girl.
The Ford swung around the Bonneville and for one second of crystal hope the photographer thought it was going to keep right on going, to just disappear over the desolate horizon and let him alone.
Then it pulled back in, and the Pontiac’s wildly jittering nose caught its mudguard. There was a scream of pulling metal. The photographer’s head flew forward into the wheel and blood sprayed from his nose.
Throwing terrified, creaky-necked glances back over his shoulder, he slid across the warm plastic seat as if it were grease and got out on the passenger’s side. He ran down the shoulder. There was a barbed wire fence and he leaped over it, sailing up and up like a blimp, and he thought: I’m going to make it, I can run forever —
He fell down on the other side with his leg caught in the barbs. Screaming at the sky, he was still trying to free his pants and dimpled white flesh when the two young men came down the shoulder with their guns in their hands.
Why, he tried to ask them, but all that came out of him was a low and helpless squawk and then his brains exited the back of his head.
There was no published report of disease or any other trouble in Sipe Springs, Texas, that day.
Chapter 18
Rainbow Six (1998) - Tom Clancy
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, CHAPTER 11
INFRASTRUCTURE
"This will be a catastrophe if Congress lets it go forward. My God, Carol, the caribou, the birds, all the predators. There are polar bears there, and browns, and barren-ground grizzly, and this environment is as delicate as a newborn infant. We can't allow the oil companies to go in there!"
"I know, Kevin," the President's Science Advisor responded, with an emphatic nod
"The damage might never be repaired. The permafrost-there's nothing more delicate on the face of the planet," the president of the Sierra Club said, with further, repetitive emphasis. "We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our children-we owe it to the planet. This bill has to be killed! I don't care what it takes, this bill must die! You must convince the President to withdraw any semblance of support for it. We cannot allow this environmental rape to take place."
"Kevin, we have to be smart about how we do this. The President sees this as a balance-of-payments issue. Domestic oil doesn't force us to spend our money buying oil from other countries. Worse, he believes the oil companies when they say they drill and transport the oil without doing great environmental damage, and that they can fix what damage they do accidentally. "
"That's horseshit, and you know it, Carol." Kevin Mayflower spat out his contempt for the oil companies. Their goddamned pipeline is a bleeding scar on the face of Alaska, an ugly, jagged steel line crossing the most beautiful land on the face of the earth, an affront to Nature Herself and what for? So that people could drive motor vehicles, which further polluted the planet merely because lazy people didn't want to walk to work or ride bicycles or horses. (Mayflower didn't reflect on the fact that he'd flown to Washington to deliver his plea instead of riding one of his Appaloosa horses across the country, and that his rented car had been parked on West Executive Drive.) Everything the oil companies touched, they ruined, he thought. They made it dirty. They sullied the very earth itself, removing what they thought of as a precious resource here, there, and everywhere, whether it was oil or coal, gashing the earth, or poking holes into it, sometimes spilling their liquid treasure because they didn't know and didn't care about the sanctity of the planet, which belonged to everyone, and which needed proper stewardship. The stewardship, of course, required proper guidance, and that was the job of the Sierra Club and similar groups, to tell the people how important the earth was, and how they must respect and treat it. The good news was that the President's Science Advisor did understand, and that she did workin the White House Compound, and did have access to the President.
"Carol, I want you to walk across the street, go into the Oval Office, and tell him what has to be done."
"Kevin, it's not that easy."
"Why the hell not? He's not that much of a dunce, is he?"
"He occasionally has a different point of view, and the oil companies are being very clever about this. Look at their proposal," she said, tapping the report on the table. "They promise to indemnify the entire operation, to put up a billion dollar bond in case something goes wrong for God's sake, Kevin, they even offer to let the Sierra Club be on the council to oversee their environmental protection programs!"
"And be outnumbered there by their own cronies! Be damned if they'll co-opt us that way!" Mayflower snarled. "I won't let anyone from my office be a part of this rape, and that's final!"
"And if you say that out loud, the oil companies will call you an extremist, and marginalize the whole environmental movement-and you can't afford to let that happen, Kevin!"
"The hell I can't. You have to stand and fight for something, Carol. Here is where we stand and fight. We let those polluting bastards drill oil in Prudhoe Bay, but that's it!"
"What will the rest of your board say about this?" Dr. Brightling asked.
"They'll goddamned well say what I goddamned tell them to say!"
"No, Kevin, they won't." Carol leaned back and rubbed her eyes. She'd read the entire report the previous night, and the sad truth was that the oil companies had gotten pretty damned smart about dealing with environmental issues. It was plain business sense. The Exxon Valdez had cost them a ton of money, in addition to the bad public relations. Three pages had been devoted to the changes in tanker safety procedures. Now, ships leaving the huge oil terminal at Valdez, Alaska, were escorted by tugs all the way to the open sea. A total of twenty pollution-control vessels were on constant standby, with a further number in reserve. The navigation systems on every tanker had been upgraded to beyond what nuclear submarines carried; the navigation officers were compelled to test their skills on simulators every six months. It was all hugely expensive, but far less so than another serious spill. A series of commercials proclaimed all of these facts on television-worst of all, the high-end intellectual cable/satellite channels, History, Learning, Discovery, and A&E, for whom the oil companies were also sponsoring new shows on wildlife in the Arctic, never touched upon what the companies did, but there were plenty of pictures of caribou and other animals traversing under the elevated portions of the pipeline. They were getting their message out very skillfully indeed, even to members of the Sierra Club's board, Brightling thought.
What they didn't say, and what both she and Mayflower knew, was that once the oil was safely out of the ground, safely transported through the monster pipeline, safely conveyed over the sea by the newly double hulled supertankers, then it just became more air pollution, out the tailpipes of cars and trucks and the smokestacks of electric power stations. So it really was all a joke, and that joke included Kevin's bitching about hurting the permafrost. At most, what would be seriously damaged? Ten or twenty acres, probably, and the oil companies would make more commercials about how they cleaned that up, as though the polluting end-use of the oil was not an issue at all!
Because to the ignorant Joe Six-pack, sitting there in front of his TV, watching football games, it wasn't an issue, was it? There were a hundred or so million motor vehicles in the United States, and a larger number across the world, and they all polluted the air, and that was the real issue. How did one stop that from poisoning the planet?
Well, there were ways, weren't there? she reflected.
"Kevin, I'll do my best," she promised. "I will advise the President not to support this bill."
The bill was S-1768, submitted and sponsored by both Alaskan senators, whom the oil companies had bought long before, which would authorize the Department of the Interior to auction off the drilling rights into the AAMP area. The money involved would be huge, both for the federal government and for the state of Alaska. Even the Native American tribes up there would look the other way.
The money they got from the oil would buy them lots of snowmobiles with which to chase and shoot the caribou, and motorboats to fish and kill the odd whale, which was part of their racial and cultural heritage. Snowmobiles weren't needed in the modern age of plastic-wrapped USDA Choice Iowa beef, but the Native Americans clung to the end-result of their traditions, if not the traditional methods. It was a depressing truth that even these people had set aside their history and their very gods in homage to a new age of mechanistic worship to oil and its products. Both the Alaskan senators would bring down tribal elders to testify in favor of S-1768, and they would be listened to, since who more than Native Americans knew what it was like to live in harmony with nature? Only today they did it with Ski-Do snowmobiles, Johnson outboard motors, and Winchester hunting rifles… She sighed at the madness of it all.
"Will he listen?" Mayflower asked, getting back to business. Even environmentalists had to live in the real world of politics.
"Honest answer? Probably not," Carol Brightling admitted quietly.
"You know," Kevin observed in a low voice. "There are times when I understand John Wilkes Booth."
"Kevin, I didn't hear that, and you didn't say it. Not here. Not in this building."
"Damn it, Carol, you know how I feel. And you know I'm right. How the hell are we supposed to protect the planet if the idiots who run the world don't give a fuck about the world we live on?"
"What are you going to say? That Homo sapiens is a parasitic species that hurts the earth and the ecosystem'' That we don't belong here?"
"A lot of us don't, and that's a fact."
"Maybe so, but what do you do about it?"
"I don't know," Mayflower had to admit.
Some of us know, Carol Brightling thought, looking up into his sad eyes. But are you ready for that one, Kevin? She thought he was, but recruitment was always a troublesome step, even for true believers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877
1877
From Wikipedia
December 30 – Brahms' Symphony No. 2 premieres in Vienna.
The Final Countdown (1980)
by me, Kerry Burgess, excerpts from my private journals: 07/03/09 4:54 AM
95 NEW ANGLE - THE SKY (OPTICAL)
Instead of a starfield, the sky is FILLED with the SPATIAL ANOMALY
"All Good Things" [ Star Trek: The Next Generation - the final tv series episode ]
Original Airdate: May 23, 1994
Captain PICARD: Q? What is going on here? Where is the anomaly?
Q: Where's your mommy? Well, I don't know.
From 10/18/1963 ( premiere US TV series episode "The Twilight Zone"::"A Kind of a Stopwatch" ) To 5/7/1992 ( the first launch of the United States space shuttle Endeavour orbiter vehicle mission STS-49 includes me Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps commissioned-officer and United States STS-49 pilot astronaut and my 1st official United States of America National Aeronautics and Space Administration orbital flight of 4 overall ) is 10429 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 5/23/1994 is 10429 days
From 2/9/1952 ( Elizabeth proclaimed Queen of Britain ) To 8/29/1980 ( Thedia remarries {sheesh} again - for the 5th time during my first 14 years since born ) is 10429 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 5/23/1994 is 10429 days
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 2:44 PM Pacific-time USA Monday 04/01/2024
