The Scarlet Plague

Smith wipes his tears away and continues his story. The plague came in the summer of 2013, when radio reports reached California of a “strange disease” breaking out in New York. Since there were only a few deaths in a city of 17 million, people thought little of it at first. However, in the ensuing days, the disease—one symptom of which was “the turning red of the face and all the body” (56)—spread to Chicago and London. As was soon discovered, the city of London had been censoring the news in an effort to hide the fact that the plague had arrived there. 

The disease was rapid and deadly: Victims typically died within an hour or two of contracting it, with an increase of heartbeat and a fever followed by convulsions and numbness and then finally death. Once dead, the body decomposed rapidly, releasing billions of germs into the air and enabling the disease to spread further. 

Scientists could not keep up with the disease, dying in their laboratories while studying it and being replaced by other scientists, whom—along with the journalists covering the plague—Smith calls heroic. In London, a researcher named Trask isolated the disease. Scientists then tried to find a serum to treat it by putting “into the body of a sick man germs that were the enemies of the plague germs” (60).