Stephen King · 1978 · survival

Stephen King's vast 1978 epic of the end of the world. A weaponized superflu nicknamed Captain Trips escapes a lab and kills almost everyone within weeks. This route follows Stu Redman - from the outbreak in his east Texas town, through the dead plague centers of Atlanta and Vermont - and the society the scattered survivors build together, drawn by dreams to Mother Abagail in Nebraska and the Boulder Free Zone. As Randall Flagg raises his dominion in Las Vegas, a handful walk west for a final stand, before Stu turns for home.

1. 1
   Arnette

   The east Texas town where the novel opens: a fleeing soldier crashes into a gas station carrying the weaponized superflu Captain Trips out of its lab, and the immune Stu Redman is seized by the army as the plague begins its spread.

2. 2
   Atlanta

   The CDC facility where Stu is first taken and studied, the researchers themselves falling sick around him as Captain Trips outruns every attempt to contain it and civilization collapses.

3. 3
   Stovington

   The Vermont plague center where Stu is moved and held prisoner - and from which, marked for death once he is no longer useful, he kills his executioner and escapes into a nearly emptied nation.

4. 4
   Hemingford Home

   Survivors across the ruined country dream of an old woman in a Nebraska cornfield and make their way to Mother Abagail, the frail, saintly focus of everything that stands against the dark man.

5. 5
   Boulder

   The Free Zone, where the survivors gather to rebuild a society from the wreckage - a fragile democracy shadowed by Randall Flagg gathering his own dominion in the west, and by Harold's poisonous jealousy within.

6. 6
   Las Vegas

   Randall Flagg's desert stronghold, toward which four men - Stu, Larry, Glen and Ralph - walk west on foot at Mother Abagail's dying command, where a stolen warhead and the Hand of God bring the final reckoning.

7. 7
   Boulder

   His leg shattered on the road and left behind, Stu is found and nursed through a hard mountain winter by the loyal Tom Cullen, and the two make the long walk back to Boulder and Frannie's newborn child.

8. 8
   Ogunquit

   Unwilling to watch the Free Zone repeat the old world's mistakes, Stu and Frannie leave with their baby to go home to Maine - the story ending where two of its survivors began, asking whether people ever learn.