Ebola as a Stephen King Nightmare

Ebola patient and aid workers

Ebola patient and aid workers

The terrifying news coming out of West Africa has had me thinking of the first Stephen King novel I ever read. The news, of course, is the Ebola epidemic. The novel is The Stand.

So far the deadly disease has hit Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea the hardest. Nigeria also has 20 “laboratory confirmed cases” and Senegal one. The Center for Disease Control has registered 3091 deaths so far  although there may be many more.

Fortunately, according to the New York Times, the epidemic appears to have been halted in Nigeria. The other countries are less fortunate. The U.S. has set up mobile labs in Liberia, and the international community is moving into the other countries as well.

The Stand is about a deadly influenza that escapes from the biological weapons facility where it has been created–it is called “Captain Trips”–and proceeds to kills 99% of the world’s population. But that still leaves 1%, who are immune. They splinter into two campus, with the good guys (at least those in the United States) going to Boulder, Colorado and the bad ones going to Las Vegas. There is an apocalyptic final battle.

I read The Stand after a colleague took me to task for denigrating Stephen King without having read him. She recommended The Stand and, after being transfixed by that novel, I went on to read five or six other novels. I now think much more highly of him.

What stands out about The Stand is how well King captures the different survivors and the landscape through which they move. King has a great eye for detail. Here’s one of the passages that has been haunting me since hearing about the Ebola outbreak. It’s chillingly matter of fact but also resorts to black humor to mask the horror. Humor, after all, allows for some emotional detachment. Charles Campion is the Typhoid Mary who flees the facility and sets the epidemic in motion:

Chain letters don’t work. It’s a known fact. The million dollars or so you are promised if you’ll just send one single dollar to the name at the top of the list, add yours to the bottom, and then send the letter on to five friends, never arrives. This one, the Captain Trips chain letter, worked very well. The pyramid was indeed being built, not from the bottom up but from the top down—said tip being a deceased army security guard named Charles Campion. All the chickens were coming home to roost. Only instead of the mailman bring each participant bale after bale of letters, each containing a single dollar bill, Captain Trips brought bales of bedrooms with a body or two in each one, and trenches, and dead-pits, and finally bodies slung into the ocean on each coast and into quarries and into the foundations of unfinished houses. And in the end, of course, would rot where they fell.

Sarah Bradford and Angela Dupray walked back to their parked cars together (infecting four or five people they met on the street), then pecked cheeks and went their separate ways. Sarah went home to infect her husband and his five poker buddies and her teenaged daughter, Samantha. Unknown to her parents, Samantha was terribly afraid she had caught a dose of the clap from her boyfriend. As a matter of fact, she had. As a further matter of fact, she had nothing to worry about; next to what her mother had given her, a good working dose of the clap was every bit as serious as a little eczema of the eyebrows.

The next day Samantha would to on to infect everybody in the swimming pool at the Polliston YWCA.

And so on.

Fortunately for humanity, Ebola is not quite this infectious. Unlike in the novel, a concerted effort in this instance can make a difference. That concerted effort will take money and many more aid workers. It is imperative that it be made.

 

Reminder not to panic:  Although there is now a reported case of Ebola in the United States, the disease is not spread through the air but through secretions so don’t listen to anyone who tries to turn this into a King novel. Science and public policy, two dimensions of government under incessant attack by our extreme right, can in fact effectively address this issue.

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