"The byline says John Corcoran, plus staff and AP reports. That means a lot of different people worked on it, Roland. Okay. Here goes. 'America's greatest crisis - and the world's, perhaps - deepened overnight as the so-called superflu, known as Tube-Neck in the Midwest and Captain Trips in California, continues to spread.
" 'Although the death-toll can only be estimated, medical experts say the total at this point is horrible beyond comprehension: twenty to thirty million dead in the continental U.S. alone is the estimate given by Dr. Morris Hackford of Topeka's St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center. Bodies are being burned from Los Angeles, California, to Boston, Massachusetts, in crematoria, factory furnaces, and at landfill sites.
" 'Here in Topeka, the bereaved who are still well enough and strong enough to do so are urged to take their dead to one of three sites: the disposal plant north of Oakland Billard Park; the pit area at Heartland Park Race Track; the landfill on Southeast Sixty-first Street, east of Forbes Field. Landfill users should approach by Berryton Road; California has been blocked by car wrecks and at least one downed Air Force transport plane, sources tell us.' "
Jake glanced up at his friends with frightened eyes, looked behind him at the silent railway station, then looked back down at the newspaper.
" 'Dr. April Montoya of the Stormont-Vail Regional Medical Center points out that the death-toll, horrifying as it is, constitutes only part of this terrible story. "For every person who has died so far as a result of this new flu-strain," Montoya said, "there are another six who are lying ill in their homes, perhaps as many as a dozen. And, so far as we have been able to determine, the recovery rate is zero." Coughing, she then told this reporter: "Speaking personally, I'm not making any plans for the weekend."
" 'In other local developments:
" 'All commercial flights out of Forbes and Phillip Billard have been cancelled.
" 'All Amtrak rail travel has been suspended, not just in Topeka but across all of Kansas. The Gage Boulevard Amtrak station has been closed until further notice.
" 'All Topeka schools have also been closed until further notice. This includes Districts 437, 345, 450 (Shawnee Heights), 372, and 501 (metro Topeka). Topeka Lutheran and Topeka Technical College are also closed, as is KU at Lawrence.
" 'Topekans must expect brownouts and perhaps blackouts in the days and weeks ahead. Kansas Power and Light has announced a "slow shutdown" of the Kaw River Nuclear Plant in Wamego. Although no one in KawNuke's Office of Public Relations answered this newspaper's calls, a recorded announcement cautions that there is no plant emergency, that this is a safety measure only. KawNuke will return to on-line status, the announcement concludes, "when the current crisis is past." Any comfort afforded by this statement is in large part negated by the recorded statement's final words, which are not "Goodbye" or "Thank you for calling" but "God will help us through our time of trial." ' "
Jake paused, following the story to the next page, where there were more pictures: a burned-out panel truck overturned on the steps of the Kansas Museum of Natural History; traffic on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge stalled bumper to bumper; piles of corpses in Times Square. One body, Susannah saw, had been hung from a lamppost, and that brought back nightmarish memories of the run for the Cradle of Lud she and Eddie had made after parting from the gunslinger; memories of Luster and Winston and Jeeves and Maud. When the god-drums started up this time, it was Spanker's stone what came out of the hat, Maud had said. We set him to dance. Except, of course, what she'd meant was that they had set him to hang. As they had hung some folks, it seemed, back home in little old New York. When things got weird enough, someone always found a lynchrope, it seemed.
Echoes. Everything echoed now. They bounced back and forth from one world to the other, not fading as ordinary echoes did but growing and becoming more terrible. Like the god-drums, Susannah thought, and shuddered.
" 'In national developments,' " Jake read, " 'conviction continues to grow that, after denying the superflu's existence during its early days, when quarantine measures might still have had some effect, national leaders have fled to underground retreats which were created as brain-trust shelters in case of nuclear war. Vice-President Bush and key members of the Reagan cabinet have not been seen during the last forty-eight hours. Reagan himself has not been seen since Sunday morning, when he attended prayer services at Green Valley Methodist Church in San Simeon.
" ' "They have gone to the bunkers like Hitler and the rest of the Nazi sewer-rats at the end of World War II," said Rep. Steve Sloan. When asked if he had any objection to being quoted by name, Kansas's first-term representative, a Republican, laughed and said: "Why should I? I've got a real fine case myself. I'll be so much dust in the wind come this time next week."
" 'Fires, most likely set, continue to ravage Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute.