The Scarlet Plague

At a street corner, Smith saw a pair of working-class men robbing a couple with two children; Smith recognized the husband as a respected poet. The poet was shot, and his wife was knocked to the ground. When Smith threatened the attackers, they started shooting at him, and he fled. Later, he returned to the scene to find the couple dead and the children gone. At that moment, Smith realized that civilization had bred “a race of barbarians” (77)—the poor and working classes, who were now destroying both civilization and themselves.

Smith witnessed another disturbing scene. A group of working-class people had banded together to escape the city, shooting prowlers in self-defense as they went. When one man in the group suddenly showed symptoms of the plague, he withdrew into a doorway (preventing his wife from following him) and shot himself. 

Finally, Smith succeeded in fighting his way through the fires to the university campus. There, a group was making its way to the chemistry building. Among this group, Smith barely recognized Professor Badminton, looking worn from defending his home against prowlers. Another member of the group, Mrs. Swinton, came down with the plague and died with her husband, a doctor, at her side.

The group, now numbering “over four hundred souls” instead of the 60 originally planned (80), arrived at the chemistry building. Provisions were gathered, with rations issued daily, and various committees were organized. Smith was placed on the committee for defense; groups of prowlers were visible at the far edge of the campus. When no sign of the plague appeared after 24 hours, the group started to dig a well for water. 

On the third day, this orderly existence turned into chaos. The plague made its appearance (the disease incubated over several days), and fights broke out as the healthy members of the group tried to drive out the sick. Meanwhile, the prowlers arrived on campus and threatened the survivors with their pistols. Professor Merryweather was killed, and Smith shot one prowler; several other prowlers died from the plague. Since the survivors were now in danger of contracting the plague from the corpses, the sanitary committee removed the latter. In doing so, they willingly exposed themselves to the plague and sacrificed their own lives.

This was only the beginning of the “horror,” as other members of the group began to catch the disease. The first was a “little nurse-girl,” whom the other members forced from the group. Although they “felt like brutes” for doing so, they realized the hard reality that “individuals had to be sacrificed” (86). As more members died, the healthy were forced to segregate themselves in different rooms, and before long, a “sea of the dead” filled each floor of the building (87). The survivors fled the building and settled on the opposite side of the campus with food and ammunition. 

Smith was one of several who volunteered to go into the city to scout out means of transport. The volunteers made their way to the house of a man named Doctor Hoyle to get his car, only to find that a prowler had just set fire to the house. The prowler shot one of the volunteers, Dombey, through the head, and Smith in turn shot the prowler. The other volunteers found Doctor Hoyle’s car and drove it back to the campus. The 47 survivors began their exodus at a “painfully slow” pace with the car and a Shetland pony in tow. They discovered most vehicles in the city to be gone. 

The group experienced more casualties from the plague, and by the second night, only 11 survivors remained. Scanning the sky the following afternoon, Smith saw an airplane explode in the sky—the last airplane he would ever see again. The next day, arriving at Niles, only three people were left: Smith, Canfield, and Parsons. The day after that, Smith found himself “alone in the world” (95): Canfield and Parsons were dead, and only the pony remained. As Smith explains to his grandsons in the present, he was “immune” to the disease and “merely the one lucky man in a million” (95).