A/N: I do not own the Percy Jackson series Kane Chronicles or The Stand Cut or Uncut version. I have however posted 'The Tales of...' series. This story takes place after The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Crown of Ptolemy but before the events of Trials of Apollo. Before reading this I suggest to read if you haven't yet:
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Early Adventures
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Lightning Thief
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Sea of Monsters
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Titan's Curse
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Magical Labyrinth
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Stolen Chariot
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Sword of Hades
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Bronze Dragon
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Last Olympian
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Staff of Hermes
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Quest for Buford
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Son of Neptune
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Mark of Athena
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The House of Hades
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Blood of Olympus
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Son of Sobek
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Staff of Serapis
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Crown of Ptolemy
Also I'm going to let this out. On rough decisions based on what I know from The Stand, any mystical creatures Monsters, and automatons that are usually associated which characters from The Tales of and/or Percy Jackson won't be in this story
Also there's no character list for the stand, but if I had too pick two from the book it be Stu Redman and Fran Goldsmith as a pairing, and if I was allowed to add a fifth character to show, it would be of course Mother Abigail.
For the list of pairings which would be spoiler alert for those showing up later:
Percy Jackson/Annabeth Chase
Leo Valdez/Calypso
Jason Grace/Piper McLean
Frank Zhang/Hazel Levesque
Stu Redman/Fran Goldsmith
Larry Underwood (no relations to Grover obviously)/Lucy Swan
Other Important Characters
Mother Abigail
Nick Andros
Tom Collins
Glen
Ralph
Trashcan Man
Susan Stern
a few more demigods as extra characters to help out.
Antagonist but still important
Randal Flagg
Harold Lauder
Nadine Cross
Lloyd
And of course the two main forces that are mention but more of Lead Supporting Roles without actually making a character appearance: God and Devil
How the Virus Came to be Called Captain Trips
On June 18th, five hours after he had talked to his cousin Bill Hapscomb, Joe Bob Brentwood pulled down a speeder on Texas Highway 40 about twenty-five miles east of Arnette. The speeder was Harry Trent of Braintree, an insurance man. He had been doing sixty-five miles per in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. Joe Bob gave him a speeding ticket. Trent accepted it humbly and then amused Joe Bob by trying to sell him insurance on his house and his life. Joe Bob felt fine; dying was the last thing on his mind. Nevertheless, he was already a sick man. He had gotten more than gas at Bill Hapscomb's Texaco. And he gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons.
Harry, a gregarious man who liked his job, passed the sickness to more than forty people during that day and the next. How many those forty passed it to is impossible to say. If you were to make a conservative estimate of five apiece, you'd have two hundred. Using the same conservative formula, one could say two hundred went to infect a thousand, the thousand five thousand, the five thousand twenty-five thousand.
Under the California desert where Campion had originally come from and subsidized by the taxpayers' money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter similar to how the Black Plague spread across Europe in the middle ages but more quickly and more ruthlessly without needing flees and rats to help spread it, and leaving more bodies in its wake.
On June 19, the day Piper and Jason met Larry Underwood, Harry Trent stopped at an East Texas café called Babe's Kwik-Eat for lunch. He had the cheeseburger platter and a piece of Babe's delicious strawberry pie for dessert. He had a slight cold, an allergy cold, maybe, and he kept sneezing and having to spit. In the course of the meal he infected Babe, the dishwasher, two truckers in a corner booth, the man who came in to deliver bread and the man who came in to change the records on the juke. He left the sweet thang that waited his table a dollar tip that was crawling with death.
On his way out, a station wagon pulled in. There was a roofrack on top, and the wagon was piled high with kids and luggage. The wagon had New York plates and the driver, who rolled down his window to ask Harry how to get to US 21 going north, had a New York accent. Harry gave the New York fellow a very clear directions on how to get to Highway 21. He also served him and his entire family their death warrants without even knowing it.
The New Yorker was Edward M. Norris, lieutenant of police, detective squad, in the Big Apple's 87th Precinct. This was his first real vacation in five years. He and his family had had a fine time. The kids had been in seventh heaven at Disney World Orlando, and not knowing the whole family would be dead by the second of July. Norris planned to tell that sour sone of a b- Steve Carella that it was possible to take your wife and kids someplace by car and have a good time. Steve, he would say, you maybe a fine detective, but a man who can't police his own family ain't worth a p- drilled in a snowbank.
The Norris family had a kwik-eat at Babe's then followed Harry Trent's admirable directions to Highway 21. Ed and his wife Trish marveled over southern hospitality while the three kids colored in the back seat. Christ only knew, Ed thought, what Carella's pair of monsters would have been up to.
That night they stayed in a Eustace, Oklahoma, travel court. Ed and Trish infected the clerk. The kids, Marsha, Stanley, and Hector, infect the kids they played with on the tourist court's playground—kids bound for west Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Trish infected the two women who were washing clothes at the Laundromat two blocks away. Ed on his way down to the motel corridor to get some ice, infected a fellow he passed along the way. Everybody got into the act.
Trish woke Ed up in the early morning hours to tell him that Heck, the baby, was sick. He had an ugly, rasping cough and was running a fever. It sounded to her like the croup. Ed Norris groaned and told her to give the kid some aspirin. If the kid's croup could only have held off another four or five days he could have it in his very own house, and Ed would have been left with the memory of a perfect vacation (not to mention the anticipation of all that gloating he planned to do). He could hear the poor kid through the connecting door, hacking away like a hound dog.
Trish expected that Hector's symptoms would abate in the morning—croup was a lying-down sickness—but by noon of the twentieth, she admitted to herself it wasn't happening. The aspirin wasn't controlling the fever; poor Heck was just glass-eyed with it. His cough had taken on a booming note she didn't like, and his respiration sounded labored and phlegmy. Whatever it was, Marsha seemed to be coming down with it, too, and Trish had a nasty tickle in the back of her own throat that was making her cough, although so far it was only a light cough she could smother in a small hankie.
"We've got to get Heck to a doctor," she said finally.
Ed pulled into a service station and checked the map paperclipped to the station wagon's sun-visor. They were in Hammer Crossing, Kansas. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe we can at least find a doctor who'll give us a referral." He sighed and ran an aggravated hand through his hair. "Hammer Crossing, Kansas! Jesus! Why'd he have to get sick enough to need a doctor at some g- nothing place like this?"
Marsha, who was looking at the map over her father's shoulder, said: "It says Jesse James robbed the bank here, Daddy. Twice."
"F- Jesse James." Ed grumped.
"Ed!" Trish cried.
"Sorry," he said, not feeling sorry in the least. He drove on.
After six calls, during each of which Ed Norris carefully-held his temper with both hands, he finally found a doctor in Polliston who would look at Hector if they could get him there by three. Polliston was off their route, twenty miles west of Hammer Crossing, but now the important thing was Hector. Ed was getting worried about him. He'd never seen the kid with so little oomph in him.
They were waiting in the outer office of Dr. Brenden Sweeney by two in the afternoon. By then Ed was sneezing, too. Sweeney's waiting room was full; they didn't get in to see the doctor until nearly four o'clock. Trish couldn't rouse Heck to more than a sludgy semi consciousness, and she felt feverish herself. Only Stan Norris, age nine, still felt good enough to fidget.
During their wait in Sweeney's office they communicated the sickness which would soon be known across the disintegrating country as Captain Trips to more than twenty-five people, including a matronly woman who just came in to pay her bill before going on to pass the disease to her entire bridge club.
This matronly woman was Mrs. Robert Bradford, Sarah Bradford to the bridge club, Cookie to her husband and close friends. Sarah played well that night, possibly because her partner was Angela Dupray, her best friend. They seemed to enjoy a happy kind of telepathy. They won all three rubbers resoundingly, making a grand slam during the last. For Sarah, the only fly in the ointment was that she seemed to be coming down with a slight cold. It wasn't fair, arriving so oon on the heels of the last one.
She and Angela went out for a quiet drink in a cocktail bar after the party broke up at ten. Angela was in no hurry to get home. It was David's turn to have the weekly poker game at their house, and she just wouldn't be able to sleep with all that noise going on…unless she had a little self prescribed sedative first, which in her case would be two sloe gin fizzes.
Sarrah had a Ward 8 and the two women rehashed the bridge game. In the meantime they managed to infect everyone in the Polliston cocktail bar, including two young men drinking beer nearby. They were on their way to California to seek their fortunes. A friend of theirs had promised them jobs with a moving company. The next day they headed west, spreading the disease as they went.
Captain Trips may not be the Black Plague, infact it's a whole lot worse, but like the Black Plague once did to Europe, Captain Trips will fill bedrooms with a body or two in each one, and trenches, and dead-pits, and finally bodies slung into the oceans on each coast and into quarries and into foundations of unfinished houses where they will rot.
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 and infect her husband and his five poker buddies and her teenage 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 go to infect everybody in the swimming pool at the Polliston YWCA.
And so on.
A/N: Originally Stephen King compared the virus to chain letters, but I decided to extend it differently from chainletters to one of the deadliest plague out breaks in History, the Black Plague, or also known as the Bubonic Plague that wiped out 2/3 of Europe's population. Also I picked Bubonic plague over diseases and outbreaks that happen more closer to our time line like Polio, TB, Ebola, etc because I really don't have the concept of the infection and death rates of those diseases like I do with the Bubonic Plague. So I just went with the one I know most to save myself the research since what I know about the Black Death was stuff they teach in school about the end of the Middle Ages.
Anyways, 2/3s death in Europe may seem a lot, especially during the middle ages, but keep in mind in percentage that is about 67%. If you read the summary of this story you know that 67% is less than the death count expected from Captain Trips. So yeah, Captain Trips is deadlier and ruthless. But the Bubonic Plague is still infecting people today and has even spread to the Americas, so let your guard down with it.
For those of you also reading Blue Plague's Nine-Tail Fox's Son, the infection rate of the Blue Plague is one infected can infect 10 people and that can happen before the person infected turns if somehow they were able to spread the virus before they turn, which is twice the number of Captain Trips. That's why in the original Blue Plague series it was able to strike faster.
There's more to understanding an infection or plague than just infection rates: ow long it can last outside the body before infecting? What kind of infection is it: Bacterial, viral, fungi, or parasitic? Can it go dormant inside the body before causing symptoms and if so how long can it stay dormant? How is it spread? What's the chance of someone not getting the virus instead of being immune? Whats the survival chances? Are there treatments that can at least treat the symptoms until a vaccine is made or doctors can cure it? Can it be cured or will you be stuck with symptoms for the rest of your life if you get it?
That's why chapters like this one is important in stories involving plagues and infections. The more you understand the infection the easier it is to understand what's going on.
By the way, I don't work for the CDC or any training in medical stuff. I learn a good portion of this from watching movies and reading books that the genre involving plagues epidemic pandemics etc. Including the Blue Plague series. And yes the questions I mention can be applied to real life cases when you think about it.
By the way, I looked up Cholera, and I don't know what the heck Vic Palfrey was thinking when he compared Campion and his family's bodies to Cholera victims, but I can assure you symptoms of Cholera is nothing like Captain Trips. I think the cold flu and sinus infections before we develope treatments to help fight those diseases off match the early stages especially colds and flus that developed into pneumonia.