Read The Stand (Original Edition) for Free Online Page B

come down from Washington and want to look at the dead Nobel Prize winner who was lying four hundred feet under the desert less than a mile away. If we turn off the centrifuge, we turn off the professor. Elementary. What his daughter would have called a “Catch-22.”
    He took another “downer” and looked into monitor 2. This was the one he didn’t like. He didn’t like the man with his face in the soup. Suppose someone walked up to you and said: You will spend eternity with your phiz in a bowl of soup. It’s like the old pie-in-the-face routine, it stops being funny when it starts being you.
    Monitor 2 showed the Project Blue cafeteria. The accident had occurred almost perfectly between shifts, and the cafeteria had been only lightly populated. He supposed it hadn’t mattered much to them, whether they had died in the cafeteria or in their bedrooms or their labs. Still, the man with his face in the soup . . .
    A man and a woman in blue coveralls were crumpled at the foot of the candy machine. A man in a white coverall lay beside the Seeburg jukebox. At the tables themselves were nine men and fourteen women, some of them slumped beside Hostess Twinkies, some with spilled cups of Coke and Bubble-Up still clutched in their stiff hands. And, at the second table, near the end, there was a man who had been identified as Frank D. Bruce with his face in a bowl of what seemed to be Campbell’s Chunky Sirloin soup.
    The first monitor showed only a digital clock. Until June 13, all the numbers on that clock had been green. Now they had turned bright red. They had stopped. The figures read 06:13:80:02:37:16.
    June 13, 1980. Thirty-seven minutes past two o’clock in the morning. And sixteen seconds.
    From behind him came a brief burring noise.
    Starkey turned off the monitors one by one and then turned around. He saw the sheet of flimsy on the floor and put it back on the table.
    “Come.”
    It was Carsleigh. He looked grave and his skin was a slaty color. More bad news, Starkey thought serenely. Someone else has taken a long high dive into a cold bowl of Chunky Sirloin soup.
    “Hi, Len,” he said quietly.
    Len Carsleigh nodded. “Billy. This . . . Christ, I don’t know how to tell you.”
    “I think one word at a time might go best, soldier.”
    “Those men who handled Campion’s body are through their prelims at Atlanta, and the news isn’t good.”
    “All of them?”
    “Five for sure. There’s one—his name is Stuart Redman—who’s negative so far. But as far as we can tell, Campion himself was negative for over fifty hours.”
    “If only Campion hadn’t run,” Starkey said. “That was sloppy security, Len. Very sloppy.”
    Carsleigh nodded.
    “Go on.”
    “Amette 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 touched down. He dropped by yesterday morning to tell Hapscomb the health people were coming. We picked Brentwood 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 and 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. For the same reason a vaccine was going to be almost impossible to