CHAPTER 26 Some campus group, probably either Students for a Democratic Society or the Young Maoists,

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 PARA— MILITARY, IS LYING TO YOU! THE ADMINISTRA— TION 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.

102 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 offcamera. 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 studioprofessional 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.

It was a small-town, once-weekly West Virginia newspaper called the Durbin Call-Clarion, put out by a retired lawyer named James D. Hogliss, and its circulation figures had always been good because Hogliss had been a fiery defender of the miners' right to organize in the late 1940s and m the 1950s, and because his anti-establishment editorials were always filled with hellfire and brimstone missiles aimed at the government hacks at every level, from town to federal. Hogliss had a regular bunch of paperboys, but on this clear summer morning he took the papers around himself in his 1948 Cadillac, the big whitewall tires whispering up and down the streets of Durbin... and the streets were painfully empty. The papers were piled on the Cadillac's seats and in its trunk. It was the wrong day for the Call-Clarion to come out, but the paper was only one page of large type set inside a black border. The word at the top proclaimed EXTRA, the first extra edition Hogliss had put out since 1980, when the Ladybird mine had exploded, entombing forty miners for all time. The headline read: GOVT FORCES TRY TO CONCEAL PLAGUE OUTBREAK! Beneath: "Special to the Call-Clarion by James D. Hogligs." Below that: It has been revealed to this reporter by a reliable source that the flu epidemic (sometimes called Choking Sickness or Tube Neck here in West Virginia) is in reality a deadly

103 mutation of the ordinary flu virus created by this government, for purposes of war-and in direct disregard of the revised Geneva accords concerning germ and chemical warfare, accords which representatives of the United States signed seven years ago. The source, who is an army official now stationed in Wheeling, also said that promises of a soonforthcoming vaccine are `a baldfaced lie. ' No vaccine, according to this source, has yet been developed. "Citizens, this is more than a disaster or a tragedy; it is the end of all hope in our government. If we have indeed done such a thing to ourselves, then..." Hogliss was sick, and very weak. He seemed to have used the last of his strength composing the editorial. It had gone from him into the words and had not been replaced. His chest was full of phlegm, and even normal breathing was like running uphill. Yet he went methodically from house to house, leaving his broadsides, not even knowing if the houses were still occupied, or if they were, if anyone inside had enough strength left to go out and pick up what he had left. Finally he was on the west end of town, Poverty Row, with its shacks and trailers and its rank septic-tank smell. Only the papers in the trunk remained and he left it open, its lid flopping slowly up and down as he went over the washboards in the road. He was trying to cope with a fearsome headache, and his vision kept doubling on him. When the last house, a tumbledown shack near the Rack's Crossing town line, was taken care of, he still had a bundle of perhaps twenty-five papers. He slit the string which bound them with his old pocketknife and then let the wind take them where the wind would, thinking of his source, a major with dark, haunted eyes who had been transferred from something top secret in California called Project Blue only three months before. The major had been charged with outside security there, and he kept fingering the pistol on his hip as he told Hogliss everything he knew. Hogliss thought it would not be long before the major used the gun, if he hadn't used it already. He climbed back behind the wheel of the Cadillac, the only car he had owned since his twenty- seventh birthday, and discovered he was too tired to drive back to town. So he leaned back sleepily, listened to the drowning sounds coming from his chest, and watched the wind blow his extra editions lazily up the road toward Rack's Crossing. Some of them had caught in the overhanging trees, where they hung like strange fruit. Nearby, he could hear the bubbling, racing sound of Durbin Stream, where he had fished as a boy. There were no fish in it now, of course-the coal companies had seen to that-but the sound was still soothing. He closed his eyes, slept, and died an hour and a half later.

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 twentyeight 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-pointtype, 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.

104 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 1–5-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 con— tacted 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 TREE 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 halfbaked freak!"

The highest-rated morning program in Springfield, Missouri, was KLFT's morning phone-in show, "Speak Your Piece," with Ray Flowers. He had six phone lines into his studio booth, and on the morning of June 26, he was the only KLFT employee to show up for work. He was aware of what was going on in the outside world and it scared him. In the last week or so, it seemed to Ray that everyone he knew had come down sick. There were no troops in Springfield, but he had heard that the National Guard had been called into K. C. and St. Louis to "stop the spread of panic" and "prevent looting." Ray Flowers himself felt fine. He looked thoughtfully at his equipment-phones,

105 time-delay device to edit those callers who lapsed into profanity from time to time, racks of commercials on cassettes ("If your toilet overflows/And you don't know just what goes/Call for the man with the big steel hose/Call your Kleen-Owt Man!"), and of course, the mike. He lit a cigarette, went to the studio door, and locked it. Went into his booth and locked that. He turned off the canned music that had been playing from a tape reel, turned on his own theme music, and then settled in at the microphone. "Hi, y'all," he said, "this is Ray Flowers on `Speak Your Piece,' and this morning I guess there's only one thing to call about, isn't there? You can call it Tube Neck or superflu—or Captain Trips, but it all means the same thing. I've heard some horror stories about the army clamping down on everything, and if you want to talk about that, I'm ready to listen. It's still a free country, right? And since I'm here by myself this morning, we're going to do things just a little bit differently. I've got the time-delay turned off, and I think we can dispense with the commercials. If the Springfield you're seeing is anything like the one I'm seeing from the KLFT windows, no one feels much like shopping, anyway. "Okay-if you're spo's to be up and around, as my mother used to say, let's get going. Our toll- free numbers are 555–8600 and 555–8601. If you get a busy, just be patient. Remember, I'm doing it all myself." There was an army unit in Carthage, fifty miles from Springfield, and a twenty-man patrol was dispatched to take care of Ray Flowers. Two men refused the order. They were shot on the spot. In the hour it took them to get to Springfield, Ray Flowers took calls from: a doctor who said people were dying like flies and who thought the government was lying through its teeth about a vaccine; a hospital nurse who confirmed that bodies were being removed from Kansas City hospitals by the truckload; a delirious woman who claimed it was flying saucers from outer space; a farmer who said that an army squad with two payloaders had just finished digging a hell of a long ditch in a field near Route 71 south of Kansas City; half a dozen others with their own stories to tell. Then there was a crashing sound on the outer studio door. "Open up!" a muffled voice cried. "Open up in the name of the United States!" Ray looked at his watch. Quarter of twelve. "Well," he said, "it looks like the Marines have landed. But we'll just keep taking calls, shall w—" There was a rattle of automatic rifle fire, and the knob of the studio door thumped onto the rug. Blue smoke drifted out of the ragged hole. The door was shouldered inward and half a dozen soldiers, wearing respirators and full battledress, burst in. "Several soldiers have just broken into the outer office," Ray said. "They're fully armed... they look like they're ready to start a mopup operation in France fifty years ago. Except for the respirators on their faces..." "Shut it down!" a heavyset man with sergeant's stripes on his sleeves yelled. He loomed outside the broadcast booth's glass walls and gestured with his rifle. "I think not!" Ray called back. He felt very cold, and when he fumbled his cigarette out of his ashtray, he saw that his fingers were trembling. "This station is licensed by the FCC and I'm—" "I'm revokin ya fuckin license! Now shut down!" "I think not," Ray said again, and turned back to his microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, I have been ordered to shut down the KLFT transmitter and I have refused the order, quite properly, I think. These men are acting like Nazis, not American soldiers. I am not—" "Last chance!" The sergeant brought his gun up. "Sergeant," one of the soldiers by the door said, "I don't think you can just—" "If that man says anything else, waste him," the sergeant said. "I think they're going to shoot me," Ray Flowers said, and the next moment the glass of his broadcast booth blew inward and he fell over his control panel. From somewhere there came a terrific feedback whine that spiraled up and up. The sergeant fired his entire clip into the control panel and the feedback cut off. The lights on the switchboard continued to blink. "Okay," the sergeant said, turning around. "I want to get back to Carthage by one o'clock and I don't—" Three of his men opened up on him simultaneously, one of them with a recoilless rifle that fired seventy gas-tipped slugs per second. The sergeant did a jigging, shuffling deathdance and then fell backward through the shattered remains of the broadcast booth's glass wall. One leg spasmed and his combat boot kicked shards of glass from the frame. A PFC, pimples standing out in stark relief on his wheycolored face, burst into tears. The others only stood in stunned disbelief. The smell of cordite was heavy and sickening in the air. "We scragged him!" the PFC cried hysterically. "Holy God, we done scragged Sergeant Peters!" No one replied. Their faces were still dazed and uncomprehending, although later they would only wish they had done it sooner. All of this was some deadly game, but it wasn't their game. The phone, which Ray Flowers had put in the amplifier cradle just before he died, gave out a series of squawks.

106 "Ray? You there, Ray?" The voice was tired, nasal. "I listen to your program all the time, me and my husband both, and we just wanted to say keep up the good work and don't let them bully you. Okay, Ray? Ray?... Ray?..."

COMMUNIQUE 234 ZONE 2 SECRET SCRAMBLE FROM: LANDON ZONE 2 NEW YORK TO: CREIGHTON COMMANDING RE: OPERATION CARNIVAL FOLLOWS: NEW YORK CORDON STILL OPERATIVE DISPOSAL OF BODIES PROCEED- ING CITY RELATIVELY QUIET X COVER STORY UNRAVELING FASTER THAN EXPECTED BUT SO FAR NOTHING WE CAN'T HANDLE FROM CITY POPULATION SUPERFLU IS KEEPING MOST OF THEM INSIDE XX NOW ESTIMATE THAT 50% OF TROOPS MANNING BARRICADES AT POINTS OF EGRESS/ INGRESS [GEORGE WASH BRIDGE TRIBOROUGH BRIDGE BROOKLYN BRID- GE LINCOLN AND HOLLAND TUNNELS PLUS LIM- ITED ACCESS HIGHWAYS IN THE OUTER BOR- OUGHS] NOW ILL W/ SUPERFLU MOST TROOPS STILL CAPABLE OF ACTIVE DUTY AND PER- FORMING WELL XXX THREE FIRES OUT OF CON- TROL IN CITY HARLEM 7TH AVENUE SHEA STADIUM XXXX DESERTION FROM RANKS BE- COMING A GREATER PROBLEM DESERTERS NOW BEING SUMMARILY SHOT XXXXX PER- SONAL SUMMARY IS THAT SITUATION IS STILL VIABLE BUT DETERIORATING SLOWLY XXXXXX COMMUNICATION ENDS LANDON ZONE 2 NEW YORK

In Boulder, Colorado, a rumor that the U. S. Meteorological Air Testing Center was really a biological warfare installation began to spread. The rumor was repeated on the air by a semidelirious Denver FM disc jockey. By 11 P. m. on the night of June 26, a vast, lemminglike exodus from Boulder had begun. A company of soldiers was sent out from DenverArvada to stop them, but it was like sending a man with a whisk-broom to clean out the Augean stables. Better than eleven thousand civilians-sick, scared, and with no other thought but to put as many miles between themselves and the Air Testing Center as possible-rolled over them. Thousands of other Boulderites fled to other points of the compass. At quarter past eleven a shattering explosion lit the night at the Air Testing Center's location on Broadway. A young radical named Desmond Ramage had planted better than sixteen pounds of plastique, originally earmarked for various Midwestern courthouses and state legislatures, in the ATC lobby. The explosive was great; the timer was cruddy. Ramage was vaporized along with all sorts of harmless weather equipment and particle-for-particle pollution-measuring gadgets. Meanwhile, the exodus from Boulder went on.

COMMUNIQUE 771 ZONE 6 SECRET SCRAMBLE FROM: GARETH ZONE 6 LITTLE ROCK TO: CREIGHTON COMMANDING RE: OPERATION CARNIVAL FOLLOWS: BRODSKY NEUTRALIZED REPEAT BRODSKY NEUTRALIZED HE WAS FOUND WORKING IN A STOREFRONT CLINIC HERE TRIED AND SUMMARILY EXECUTED FOR TREASON AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SOME OF THOSE BEING TREATED ATTEMPTED TO INTERFERE 14 CIVILIANS SHOT, 6 KILLED 3 OF MY MEN WOUNDED, NONE SERIOUSLY X ZONE 6 FORCES THIS AREA WORKING AT ONLY 40% CAPACITY ESTIMATE 25% OF THOSE STILL ON ACTIVE DUTY NOW ILL W/ SUPERFLU 15% AWOL XX MOST SE—

107 RIOUS INCIDENT IN REGARD TO CONTINGENCY PLAN F FOR FRANK XXX SERGEANT T. L. PE— TERS STATIONED CARTHAGE MO. ON EMER— GENCY DUTY SPRINGFIELD MO. APPARENTLY ASSASSINATED BY OWN MEN XXXX OTHER INCIDENTS OF SIMILAR NATURE POSSIBLE BUT UNCONFIRMED SITUATION DETERIORATING RAPIDLY XXXXX COMMUNICATION ENDS GARFIELD ZONE 6 LITTLE ROCK

When the evening was spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table, two thousand students attending Kent State University in Ohio went on the warpathbig time. The two thousand rioters consisted of first minisemester summer students, members of a symposium on the future of college journalism, one hundred and twenty attendees of a drama workshop, and two hundred members of the Future Farmers of America, Ohio branch, whose convention happened to coincide with the grassfire spread of the superflu. All of them had been cooped up on the campus since June 22, four days ago. What follows is a transcription of policeband communications in the area, spanning the time period 7:16–7:22 P. m. "Unit 16, unit 16, do you copy? Over." "Ah, copy, unit 20. Over." "Ah, we got a group of kids coming down the mall here, 16. About seventy warm bodies, I'd say, and... ah, check that, unit 16, we got another group coming the other way... Jesus, two hundred or more in that one, looks like. Over." "Unit 20, this is base. Do you copy? Over." "Read you five-by, base. Over." "I'm sending Chumm and Halliday over. Block the road with your car. Take no other action. If they go over you, spread your legs and enjoy it. No resistance, do you copy? Over." . "I copy no resistance, base. What are those soldiers doing over on the eastern side of the mall, base? Over." "What soldiers? Over." "That's what I asked you, base. They're—" "Base, this is Dudley Chumm. Oh shit, this is unit 12. Sorry, base. There's a bunch of kids coming down Burrows Drive. About a hundred and fifty. Headed for the mall. Singing or chanting or some damn thing. But Cap, Jesus Christ, we see soldiers, too. They're wearing gas masks, I think. Ah, they look to be in a skirmish line. That's what it looks like, anyway. Over." "Base to unit 12. Join unit 20 at the foot of the mall. Same instructions. No resistance. Over." "Roger, base. I am rolling. Over." "Base, this is unit 17. This is Halliday, base. Do you copy? Over." "I copy, 17. Over." "I'm behind Chumm. There's another two hundred kids coming west to east toward the mall. They've got signs, just like in the sixties. One says SOLDIERS THROW DOWN YOUR GUNS. I see another one that says THE TRUTH THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. They—" "I don't give a shit what the signs say, unit 17. Get down there with Chumm and Peters and block them off. It sounds like they're headed into a tornado. Over." "Roger. Over and out." "This is Campus Security Chief Richard Burleigh now speaking to the head of the military forces encamped on the south side of this campus. Repeat: this is Campus Security Chief Burleigh. I know you've been monitoring our communications, so please spare me the ducking and fucking and acknowledge. Over." "This is Colonel Albert Philips, U. S. Army. We are listening, Chief Burleigh. Over." "Base, this is unit 16. The kids are coming together at the war memorial. They appear to be turning toward the soldiers. This looks nasty. Over." "This is Burleigh, Colonel Philips. Please state your intentions. Over." "My orders are to contain those present on campus to the campus. My only intention is to follow my orders. If those people are just demonstrating, they are fine. If they intend to try breaking out of quarantine, they are not. Over." "You surely don't mean—" "I mean what I said, Chief Burleigh. Over and out." "Philips! Philips! Answer me, goddam you! Those aren't commie guerrillas out there! They're kids! American kids! They aren't armed! They—" "Unit 13 to base. Ah, those kids are walking right toward the soldiers, Cap. They're waving their signs. Singing that song. The one the Baez crotch used to sing. Oh. Shit, I think some of them are throwing rocks. They... Jesus! Oh Jesus Christ! They can't do that!"

108 "Base to unit 13! What's going on out there? What's happening?" "This is Chumm, Dick. I'll tell you what's happening out here. It's a slaughter. I wish I was blind. Oh, the fuckers! They... ah, they're mowing those kids down. With machineguns, it looks like. As far as I can tell, there wasn't even any warning. The kids that are still on their feet... ah, they are breaking up... running to all points of the compass. Oh Christ! I just saw a girl cut in half by gunfire! Blood... there must be seventy, eighty kids lying out there on the grass. They—" "Chumm! Come in! Come in, unit 12!" "Base, this is unit 17. Do you copy? Over." "I copy you, goddammit, but where's fucking Chumm? Fucking over!" "Chumm and... Halliday, I think... got out of their cars for a better look. We're coming back, Dick. Now it looks like the soldiers are shooting each other. I don't know who's winning, and I don't care. Whoever it is will probably start on us next. When those of us who can get back do get back, I suggest that we all go down in the basement and wait for them to use up their ammo. Over." "Goddammit" "The turkey shoot's still going on, Dick. I'm not kidding. Over. Out." Through most of the running exchange transcribed above, the listener can hear faint popping sounds in the background, not unlike horse chestnuts in a hot fire. One may also hear thin screams... and, in the last forty seconds or so, the heavy, coughing thump of mortar rounds exploding.

Following is a transcription taken from a special highfrequency radio band in Southern California. The transcription was made from 7:17 to 7:20 P. m., PST. "Massingill, Zone 10. Are you there, Blue Base? This message is coded Annie Oakley, Urgent- plus-10. Come in, if you're there. Over." "This is Len, David. We can skip the jargon, I think. Nobody's listening." "It's out of control, Len. Everything. L. A. is going up in flames. Whole fucking city and everything around it. All my men are sick or rioting or AWOL or looting right along with the civilian population. I'm in the Skylight Room of the Bank of America, main branch. There's over six hundred people trying to get in and get at me. Most of them are regular army." "Things fall apart. The center does not hold." "Say again. I didn't copy." "Never mind. Can you get out?" "Hell no. But I'll give the first of the scum something to think about. I've got a recoilless rifle here. Scum. Fucking scum!" "Luck, David." "You too. Hold it together as long as you can." "Will do." "I'm not sure—" Verbal communication ends at this point. There is a splintering, crashing sound, the screech of giving metal, the tinkle of breaking glass. A great many yelling voices. Small-arms fire, and then, very close to the radio transmitter, close enough to distort, the heavy, thudding explosions of what might very well be a recoilless rifle. The yelling, roaring voices draw closer. There is the whining sound of a ricochet, a scream very close to the transmitter, a thud, and silence.

Following is a transcription taken from the regular army band in San Francisco. The transcription was made from 7:28 to 7:30 P. m., PST. "Soldiers and brothers! We have taken the radio station, and the command HQ! Your oppressors are dead! I, Brother Zeno, until moments ago Sergeant First Class Roland Gibbs, proclaim myself first President of the Republic of Northern California! We are in control! We are in control! If your officers in the field try to countermand my orders, shoot them like dogs in the street! Like dogs! Like bitches with shit drying on their rumps! Take down name, rank, and serial numbers of deserters! List those that speak sedition or treason against the Republic of Northern California! A new day is dawning! The day of the oppressor is ended! We are—" A rattle of machine-gun fire. Screams. Thumps and thuds. Pistol shots, more screams, a sustained burst of machine-gun fire. A long, dying moan. Three seconds of dead air. "This is Major Alfred Nunn, United States Army. I am taking provisional and temporary control of United States forces in the San Francisco area. The handful of traitors present in this HQ have been dealt with. I am in command, repeat, in command. The holding operation will go on. Deserters and defectors will be dealt with as before: extreme prejudice, repeat, extreme prejudice. I am now—" More gunfire. A scream. Background: "—them all! Get them all! Death to the war-pigs—" Heavy gunfire. Then silence on the band.

109 At 9:16 P. m., EST, those still well enough to watch television in the Portland, Maine, area tuned in WCSH-TV and watched with numbed horror as a huge black man, naked except for a pink leather loincloth and a Marine officer's cap, obviously ill, performed a series of sixty-two public executions. His colleagues, also black, also nearly naked, all wore loincloths and some badge of rank to show they had once belonged in the military. They were armed with automatic and semi-automatic weapons. In the area where a studio audience had once watched local political debates and "Dialing for Dollars," more members of this black "junta" covered perhaps two hundred khaki-clad soldiers with rifles and handguns. The huge black man, who grinned a lot, showing amazingly even and white teeth in his coal-black face, was holding a . 45 automatic pistol and standing beside a large glass drum. In a time that already seemed long ago, that drum had held scraps of cut-up telephone books for the "Dialing for Dollars" program. Now he spun it, pulled out a driver's license, and called, "PFC Franklin Stern, front and center, puh-leeze." The armed men flanking the audience on all sides bent to look at name tags while a cameraman obviously new to the trade panned the audience in jerky sweeps. At last a young man with light blond hair, no more than nineteen, was jerked to his feet, screaming and protesting, and led up to the set area. Two of the blacks forced him to his knees. The black man grinned, sneezed, spat phlegm, and put the . 45 automatic to PFC Stern's temple. "No!" Stern cried hysterically. "I'll come in with you, honest to God I will! I'll—" "Inthenameofthefathersonandholyghost," the big black man intoned, grinning, and pulled the trigger. There was a large smear of blood and brains behind the spot where PFC Stern was being forced to kneel; and now he added his own contribution. Splat. The black man sneezed again and almost fell over. Another black man, this one in the control room (he was wearing a green long-billed fatigue cap and pristine white jockey shorts), pushed the APPLAUSE button, and in front of the studio audience, the sign flashed on. The blacks guarding the audience/prisoners raised their weapons threateningly, and the captive white soldiers, their faces glistening with perspiration and terror, applauded wildly. "Next!" the black man in the loincloth proclaimed hoarsely, and delved into the drum again. He looked at the slip and announced: "Master Tech Sergeant Roger Petersen, front n center, puh- leeze!" A man in the audience began to howl and made an abortive dive for the back doors. Seconds later he was up on stage. In the confusion, one of the men in the third row tried to remove the name tag pinned to his blouse. One shot banged out and he slumped down in his seat, his eyes glazed as if such a tawdry show had bored him into a deathlike semi-doze. This spectacle went on until almost quarter of eleven, when four squads of regular army, wearing respirators and carrying submachine guns, crashed into the studio. The two dying groups of soldiers immediately went to war. The black man in the loincloth went down almost immediately, cursing, sweating, riddled with bullets, and firing his automatic—pistol crazily into the floor. The renegade who had been operating the #2 camera was shot in the belly, and as he leaned forward to catch his spilling guts, his camera pivoted slowly around, giving the audience a leisurely pan shot of hell. The semi-naked guards were returning fire, and the soldiers in the respirators were spraying the entire audience area. The unarmed soldiers in the middle, instead of being rescued, found that their executions had only been speeded up. A young man with carroty hair and a wild expression of panic on his face climbed over the backs of six rows of seats like a circus performer on stilts before his legs were chewed away by a stream of . 45-caliber bullets. Others crawled up the carpeted aisles between rows, their noses to the floor, the way they had been taught to crawl under live machinegun fire in basic training. An aging sergeant with gray hair stood up, arms spread wide like a TV host, and screamed, "STAWWWWP!" at the top of his lungs. Heavy fire from both sides homed in on him and he began to jig-a-jig like a disintegrating puppet. The roar of the guns and the screams of the dying and wounded made the audio needles in the control room jump over to + 50 dB. The camera operator fell forward over the handle that controlled his camera, and those watching were now given only a merciful view of the studio ceiling for the rest of the exchange. The gunfire diminished over a period of five minutes to isolated explosions, then to nothing. Only the screams went on. At five minutes past eleven, the studio ceiling was replaced on home screens by a picture of a cartoon man who was staring glumly at a cartoon TV. On the cartoon TV was a sign that said: SORRY, WE'RE HAVING PROBLEMS! As the evening wound toward its close, that was true of almost everyone.

110 In Des Moines, at 11:30 P. m., CST, an old Buick covered with religious stickers-HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS, among others-cruised the deserted downtown streets relentlessly. There had been a fire in Des Moines earlier in the day that had burned most of the south side of Hull Avenue and Grandview Junior College; later there had been a riot that gutted most of the downtown area. When the sun went down, these streets had been filled with restlessly circling crowds of people, most of them under twenty-five, many riding choppers. They had broken windows, stolen TV sets, filled their gas tanks at service stations while watching for anyone who might have a gun. Now the streets were empty. Some of them-the bikers, mainly-were kicking out their remaining jams on Interstate 80. But most of them had crept into houses and locked the doors, already suffering with superflu or only terror of it as daylight left this flat green land. Now Des Moines looked like the aftermath of some monster New Year's Eve party after sodden sleep, had claimed the last of the revelers. The Buick's tires whispered and crunched over the broken glass in the street and turned west from Fourteenth onto Euclid Avenue, passing two cars that had crashed head-on and now lay on their sides with their bumpers interlaced like lovers after a successful double homicide. There was a loudspeaker on top of the Buick's roof, and now it began to give off amplified boops and beeps, followed by the scratchy sounds of an old record's opening grooves, and then, blaring up and down the spectral, deserted streets of Des Moines came the sweetly droning voice of Mother Maybelle Carter, singing "Keep on the Sunny Side."

The old Buick cruised on and on, making figure eights, loops, sometimes circling the same block three or four times. When it hit a bump (or rolled over a body), the record would skip. At twenty minutes to midnight, the Buick pulled over to the curb and idled. Then it began to roll again. The loudspeaker blared Elvis Presley singing "The Old Rugged Cross," and a night wind soughed through the trees and stirred a final whiff of smoke from the smoldering ruins of the junior college.

From the President's speech, delivered at 9 P. m., EST, not seen in many areas. "... a great nation such as this must do. We cannot afford to jump at shadows like small children in a dark room; but neither can we afford to take this serious outbreak of influenza lightly. My fellow Americans, I urge you to stay at home. If you feel ill, stay in bed, take aspirin, and drink plenty of clear liquids. Be confident that you will feel better in a week at most. Let me repeat what I said at the beginning of my talk to you this evening: There is no truth—no truth-to the rumor that this strain of flu is fatal. In the greatest majority of cases, the person afflicted can expect to be up and around and feeling fine within a week. Further—" (a spasm of coughing} "Further, there has been a vicious rumor promulgated by certain radical antiestablishment groups that this strain of influenza has been somehow bred by this government for some possible military use. Fellow Americans, this is a flatout falsehood, and I want to brand it as such right here and now. This country signed the revised Geneva Accords on poison gas, nerve gas, and germ warfare in good conscience and in good faith. We have not now nor have we ever—" (a spasm of sneezes) "—have we ever been a party to the clandestine manufacture of substances outlawed by the Geneva Convention. This is a moderately serious outbreak of influenza, no more and no less. We have reports tonight of outbreaks in a score of other countries, including Russia and Red China. Therefore we—" (a spasm of coughs and sneezes) "—we ask you to remain calm and secure in the knowledge that late this week or early next, a flu vaccine will be available for those not already on the mend. National Guardsmen have been called out in some areas to protect the populace against hooligans, vandals, and scare-mongers, but there is absolutely no truth to the rumors that some cities have been `occupied' by regular army forces or that the news has been managed. My fellow Americans, this is a flatout falsehood, and I want to brand it as such right here and..."

Graffito written on the front of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta in red spray paint:

111 "Dear Jesus. I will see you soon. Your friend, America. PS. I hope you will still have some vacancies by the end of the week."