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.
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 in 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: GOV'T FORCES TRY TO CONCEAL PLAGUE OUTBREAK!
Beneath: "Special to the Call-Clarion by James D. Hogliss."
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 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 soon-forthcoming 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..."