I woke up thinking about a scene I’d read years ago. It was in Stephen King’s The Stand. I don’t know if my dreaming brain was remembering it correctly. In it, Nick Andros and Jane Baker (the Sheriff’s wife) were essentially sitting shiva for her husband while he died.

“Mama! Fox is in the henhouse, Mama!” The Sheriff thrashed fretfully and moaned.

Do you remember how awful Captain Trips¹ was? If I am recalling the statistics from the novel, it had a 98% mortality rate. Once you got it, you were almost certainly going to die.

I remember that scene being very powerful. I mean, it was not essential to the story in the grand scheme of things. And yet, it was absolutely crucial to the story in the way it set up the illness as a scythe that reaped through everyone – good and bad alike.

I didn’t…