The Scarlet Plague Page #11

"The Scarlet Plague" by Jack London, published in 1912, is a post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2073, sixty years after a deadly pandemic—called the Scarlet Plague—wiped out most of humanity in 2013.

• Novel

								

had broken all the windows of the Chemistry Building, so that we were
exposed to the germs from the corpses. The sanitary committee was called
upon to act, and it responded nobly. Two men were required to go out and
remove the corpses, and this meant the probable sacrifice of their own
lives, for, having performed the task, they were not to be permitted to
reenter the building. One of the professors, who was a bachelor, and
one of the undergraduates volunteered. They bade good-bye to us and
went forth. They were heroes. They gave up their lives that four hundred
others might live. After they had performed their work, they stood for
a moment, at a distance, looking at us wistfully. Then they waved their
hands in farewell and went away slowly across the campus toward the
burning city.

“And yet it was all useless. The next morning the first one of us was
smitten with the plague--a little nurse-girl in the family of Professor
Stout. It was no time for weak-kneed, sentimental policies. On the
chance that she might be the only one, we thrust her forth from the
building and commanded her to be gone.

[Illustration: We thrust her forth from the building 121]

“She went away slowly across the campus, wringing her hands and crying
pitifully. We felt like brutes, but what were we to do? There were four
hundred of us, and individuals had to be sacrificed.

“In one of the laboratories three families had domiciled themselves, and
that afternoon we found among them no less than four corpses and seven
cases of the plague in all its different stages.

“Then it was that the horror began. Leaving the dead lie, we forced the
living ones to segregate themselves in another room. The plague began to
break out among the rest of us, and as fast as the symptoms appeared, we
sent the stricken ones to these segregated rooms. We compelled them to
walk there by themselves, so as to avoid laying hands on them. It was
heartrending. But still the plague raged among us, and room after
room was filled with the dead and dying. And so we who were yet clean
retreated to the next floor and to the next, before this sea of the
dead, that, room by room and floor by floor, inundated the building.

“The place became a charnel house, and in the middle of the night
the survivors fled forth, taking nothing with them except arms and
ammunition and a heavy store of tinned foods. We camped on the opposite
side of the campus from the prowlers, and, while some stood guard,
others of us volunteered to scout into the city in quest of horses,
motor cars, carts, and wagons, or anything that would carry our
provisions and enable us to emulate the banded workingmen I had seen
fighting their way out to the open country.

“I was one of these scouts; and Doctor Hoyle, remembering that his motor
car had been left behind in his home garage, told me to look for it. We
scouted in pairs, and Dombey, a young undergraduate, accompanied me. We
had to cross half a mile of the residence portion of the city to get
to Doctor Hoyle's home. Here the buildings stood apart, in the midst of
trees and grassy lawns, and here the fires had played freaks, burning
whole blocks, skipping blocks and often skipping a single house in a
block. And here, too, the prowlers were still at their work. We carried
our automatic pistols openly in our hands, and looked desperate enough,
forsooth, to keep them from attacking us. But at Doctor Hoyle's house
the thing happened. Untouched by fire, even as we came to it the smoke
of flames burst forth.

“The miscreant who had set fire to it staggered down the steps and out
along the driveway. Sticking out of his coat pockets were bottles of
whiskey, and he was very drunk. My first impulse was to shoot him, and
I have never ceased regretting that I did not. Staggering and maundering
to himself, with bloodshot eyes, and a raw and bleeding slash down one
side of his bewhiskered face, he was altogether the most nauseating
specimen of degradation and filth I had ever encountered. I did not
shoot him, and he leaned against a tree on the lawn to let us go by.
It was the most absolute, wanton act. Just as we were opposite him,
he suddenly drew a pistol and shot Dombey through the head. The next
instant I shot him. But it was too late. Dombey expired without a groan,
immediately. I doubt if he even knew what had happened to him.

“Leaving the two corpses, I hurried on past the burning house to the
garage, and there found Doctor Hoyle's motor car. The tanks were filled
with gasoline, and it was ready for use. And it was in this car that I
threaded the streets of the ruined city and came back to the survivors
on the campus. The other scouts returned, but none had been so
fortunate. Professor Fairmead had found a Shetland pony, but the poor
creature, tied in a stable and abandoned for days, was so weak from want
of food and water that it could carry no burden at all. Some of the men
were for turning it loose, but I insisted that we should lead it along
with us, so that, if we got out of food, we would have it to eat.

“There were forty-seven of us when we started, many being women and
children. The President of the Faculty, an old man to begin with, and
now hopelessly broken by the awful happenings of the past week, rode
in the motor car with several young children and the aged mother of
Professor Fairmead. Wathope, a young professor of English, who had a
grievous bullet-wound in his leg, drove the car. The rest of us walked,
Professor Fairmead leading the pony.

“It was what should have been a bright summer day, but the smoke from
the burning world filled the sky, through which the sun shone murkily,
a dull and lifeless orb, blood-red and ominous. But we had grown
accustomed to that blood-red sun. With the smoke it was different. It
bit into our nostrils and eyes, and there was not one of us whose eyes
were not bloodshot. We directed our course to the southeast through the
endless miles of suburban residences, travelling along where the first
swells of low hills rose from the flat of the central city. It was by
this way, only, that we could expect to gain the country.

“Our progress was painfully slow. The women and children could not walk
fast. They did not dream of walking, my grandsons, in the way all people
walk to-day. In truth, none of us knew how to walk. It was not until
after the plague that I learned really to walk. So it was that the pace
of the slowest was the pace of all, for we dared not separate on account
of the prowlers. There were not so many now of these human beasts of
prey. The plague had already well diminished their numbers, but enough
still lived to be a constant menace to us. Many of the beautiful
residences were untouched by fire, yet smoking ruins were everywhere.
The prowlers, too, seemed to have got over their insensate desire to

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