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 THEE 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 half-baked 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, 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 mop-up 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 f**kin 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 - "