End of the world -- Fiction; Epidemics -- Fiction; Regression (Civilization) -- Fiction; Science fiction
“The situation was critical. The explosions of the powder magazines
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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