The Plague, Pestilence & Apocalypse MEGAPACK™
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cannot know the pleasure it gives me to be with you this morning!
There’s a slight difference, to be sure, between your standing and
mine just now, but you’re big enough to overlook it, aren’t you?
“Well, ladies and gentlemen of the upper crust, I give you—”
There Penderby paused .
THE MAN WHO LIVED, by Raymond F. O’Kelley | 227
“What do I give you?”
He rubbed his forehead with the wet bottle-spout .
“I’ve got it! I give you discontent, disappointment, starvation,
clothes the dogs bark at—and a happy death!”
He drank the toast, sent bottle and glass sliding and spinning
along the waxed floor, and ran down the stairs. He was exhilarated
as never before; he was triumphant .
The Strand, London’s most famous thoroughfare, which leads
from Trafalgar Square to Fleet Street, was strewn with dead . They
had fallen at bus stops, in late-shutting stores (lights in some of these
burned still), on pedestrian crossings, in busses and automobiles that
had crashed against one another and in places formed a barrier from
wall to wall . Here and there, wheels had squeezed blood into oozy
patches .
A bus had shattered a café window, and spilled cakes and pastries
onto the sidewalk . Another had snapped an electric-light post, and
wires lay in curls and tangles for sixty yards .
One wing of a Rolls-Royce, a white-haired woman in the back,
had littered a section of pavement with the plate glass of a clothing-
store .
Penderby climbed in, and in ten minutes was wearing a tweed
jacket, flannel trousers, a gray shirt, light underwear, clean socks,
and a yellow belt . He took a pair of brown shoes from a store nearly
opposite, and then sought the effect in a mirror in the dim rear .
“I don’t look too bad,” he commented, “considering everything .”
He went back to the street .
“And now to see what’s become of the rest of the eight million .”
Penderby had begun to utter his thoughts .
But it was not in fear—so far as he knew, at least . Nor was he
lonely after this inexplicable departure of his fellow creatures .
He picked his way among the dead for about half a mile . The
number decreased as he neared Fleet Street, and he took a bicycle
from the doorway of a store and rode, with little difficulty, into Lon-
don’s Newspaper Row .
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The stare of what had been a policeman at a lamppost near the
court buildings brought him up with a jerk that nearly threw him
off the machine . For a moment, he thought that another had been
spared . But the eyes did not move . Only for a wastepaper-bin, shoul-
der-high, on the pole, and his straddling legs, the policeman would
have fallen as he died .
Penderby was slightly hungry when he came to a corner lunch-
counter; so he climbed over the bar, mixed a milkshake as he had
seen attendants do, and drank it between bites of a stale ham sand-
wich. He rode on, and dismounted at a newspaper office. He walked
in. The front office contained twelve or fourteen bodies, three or
four those of clerks . He climbed the marble-and-concrete stairs two
at a time . He had searched two corridors when he opened a door
marked “News Room .”
There were bodies at nearly half the desks, and one had fallen
beside the half-opened door of a telephone booth, in which the in-
strument hung the full length of the cord . A head pressed the keys of
a typewriter on a desk near, and some of the type-bars were in mid-
air . Penderby pulled a sheet of paper from the machine . The word
“Churchill” and the number “3” were in the top left corner .
He read:
“Mr . Churchill declared that he did not favor any ‘at-
titude, policy, or frame of mind’ that could be construed as
‘containing even the germ of what has been called’ encircle-
ment, but that, he would oppose any atte—”
No more .
“Good God!” murmured Penderby .
He moved to the desk alongside . A young man had begun a story
about loan failure . He had typed a line of hyphens through “said,”
and substituted “asserted .”
Penderby went to all the other desks occupied . No one had been
writing of death .
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“How could they have known, after all?” he reasoned . “It prob-
ably got everyone at the same time . It must have .”
He wandered through the composing room and down a spiral,
metal staircase to the pillared press-room . The remote bulbs still
glared . In the light diluted by mud-spattered, wire-netted windows,
they did little but bring glints to the shiny parts of the machines .
One press had run off an early edition . It had continued to run, it
seemed, long after those who had tended it died . A hill of papers hid
the little gate out of which they had come .
A man in dungarees had been leaning against a steel pillar of
another machine . A face-high metal button shone on the pillar; it
had been handled often . Penderby pressed it, and the machine began
to roll . He retreated to the door as the rush of paper merged with a
thunderous hammering; then returned, and lifted one of the papers
already carried out .
The main story was about Russia and Germany .
“If they could have waited,” he said, “they’d have had a bigger
story than that . But I suppose they couldn’t . They had to go with the
rest .”
The press still ran, and the concrete floor vibrated. The sight and
the sound of it, with the recollection of what he had seen in the
news room, stirred something akin to pity in the man . Brains, hands,
metal here had been working when death had come, and if ever the
product of journalism had been of fleeting value it was now.
Penderby did not know how to stop the press, and the noise ir-
ritated him after awhile . He found the rear exit, a grimy, steel-grilled
door that opened onto a lane . He turned right, the direction in which
a number of tracks had been turned, and found himself on Fleet
Street again .
His throat was parched, and he decided to look for more drink .
Beer would be best, for the forenoon was hot. He filled two big
glasses in a saloon, brought them out, placed them on the curb, and
sat beside them in the sunlight .
This time, he drank slowly . He had slipped a newspaper into a
jacket pocket, and he idly read and drank for half an hour . The day
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was serene, and had brought an air purer than London had breathed
in a century .
The man to whom all London—if not all Britain—had passed
dropped the paper . For he had noted that purity of the air . He won-
dered how long it would last . The street contained enough corpses to
start a plague after another day or so . He could not bury them, not to
mention the rest of the eight million in Greater London .
“I su
ppose,” Penderby decided, “I’ll have to leave . Well, it
wouldn’t take long to get out by car .”
But whither? The countryside, in all likelihood, would be as per-
ilous as the city; no district in Britain was thinly-populated .
“Oh, the hell with it!” was his conclusion . Having dismissed the
problem for the moment, he went into the saloon for more beer .
* * * *
He was tired, and it was nearly noon when he stretched himself
and decided to explore farther; only a little farther, for the heat was
intense . He cycled across Ludgate Circus, at the end of Fleet Street,
and up Ludgate Hill . Dead, as he had expected, everywhere; silence
complete, save for the faint noise of the bicycle .
He was in the financial center. This region of swarming clerks and
dull buildings had interested him little at any other time, and only
the coolness of narrow streets between high, gray walls induced him
to go in now . The bodies he saw were few; life normally had left the
district with the closing of offices at 5 p.m.
Ahead was a bank . He dismounted at the curb in front of it . A
gate stood between sidewalk and door . The windows were high,
deep, and barred .
“If I weren’t so tired,” Penderby reflected, “I’d go in—even if it
took a month .”
The place could tell him nothing, he saw . As he rode back to the
Strand, he pondered the fact—the most illuminating so far as his
new life was concerned—that the district of money was the least
useful in all London .
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Penderby was sleepy now, though it still was early afternoon .
The stimulus of wine and beer had worn off, and the alcohol made
him drowsy . He cycled as far as a luxury hotel before which taxis
and limousines had been busy the night before, left the machine
tilted against one of the glass doors, and walked in .
Some of the well-dressed guests had died in armchairs, others on
divans . More, standing, had fallen in groups that even now, some-
how, told of their easy, unvexed lives of conversation and travel .
Penderby, glancing round, was glad that the bitterness in him had
not died .
The first door he opened after he went upstairs moved only a few
inches; something had fallen against it. On the floor of the next room
was the body of a man . A woman and a little girl had died in another .
The fourth was empty . A door in it led to a bathroom . He turned
the hot water on . It still was at boiling-point, and as he waited till it
had cooled he shaved with a good sharp razor someone had left on
the dressing-table .
Penderby, despite the luxury of steam and soap and water to his
chin, did not linger in the bath . He had begun to hurry . For what? He
did not know . But the cool sheets soothed him . The comfort of the
bed was so exquisite that, to sense it as long as possible, he tried to
stay awake . The sleep into which he soon fell was dreamless, and
lasted till 7 p .m .
* * * *
He made tea in the big kitchen, below street-level, and brought
butter and cold roast chicken from a refrigerator and fine bread
from a chrome-and-white cupboard . When he left the hotel, he was
munching a sandwich made of remnants of the meal .
The Strand was gray and, in corners and gaping store-fronts here
and there, black . Rain had made scattered pools that gave the street
a shabby, defeated look. The only light they reflected was the little
in the sky . All the street-lamps had failed now, and the store-lights
that had outlived the day were few and ineffectual .
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It was as Penderby looked round Trafalgar Square, somber and a
little frightening, that he felt his first bewilderment, apart from the
shocks of surprise, of the day . He sat on a balustrade outside South
Africa House, and tried to plan the suddenly monstrous-appearing
future .
He could not stay in the vast charnelhouse London had become .
A day or two more, as he already had warned himself, and plague
would ride every breath of air . But his food was in London; he could
not turn farmer at short notice, and the supplies in stores and hotels
would last very long .
The Continent? But he hardly could manage a boat even on the
short Dover-Calais voyage, could he? Then, he had not heard nor
seen aircraft since the afternoon before . If air-liners had come from
France and other countries, and landed at a dead airdrome, the pilots,
undoubtedly, would have flown from Croydon on to London. Had
everyone in France, Germany, Spain, Italy died? Was he the only
one spared? Were there French, German, Spanish, Italian Edward
Penderbys?
The Square was cold, lonesome. He left his perch stiffly, and
turned onto the Strand once more . He tumbled over a body now and
then . Clouds that had scudded from the west broke in a short, heavy
shower, and it brought a damp smell from the heaps of wet clothes
on every side .
The hotel was in darkness, and he leaned against a bronze-en-
cased pillar outside and began to smoke a cigar he had found in the
bedroom . The dead he did not fear, but he was uneasy in the midst of
so vast a number of them; besides, the excitement of the day had left
him a little nervous . And hours of wakefulness would be the price of
his evening’s sleep .
Penderby began to wonder about the Thames . What had hap-
pened to the ships on the river, the men who had lived in them? A
street nearby led to the water, and in five minutes he was leaning
over the wall and trying to count the vessels in the dark . Two were
little holiday steamers, heeled over slightly. One of the four or five
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motorboats had rubbed along the wall as the tide ebbed, and was
held in the angle of the nearer bridge .
Warehouses and other buildings beyond the river were forbid-
ding masses that added to the gloom of the water and hid all but a
few mud-gleams, here and there .
Penderby was sorry for having come . The scene was the most
mournful the dead city had shown him . But he would not go back
to the hotel yet . Approach of night seemed to have sharpened his
senses, and the early-afternoon restlessness had returned .
A body lay sixty or seventy yards away, in the direction of Tra-
falgar Square . It was the only one in sight . The spread-eagled sym-
metry of it stirred his curiosity, and he walked quickly toward it . But
something held him back, and his pace became slow, then very slow .
And then he was trembling .
He stooped over the body . Recognition came without a shock .
He was looking at Edward Penderby, lanky, ill-shaven, in ragged
clothes . But the eyes, wide open, were quiet, and the lines beside the
mouth had softened .
The man who had lived dropped on one knee, and touched the
angular forehead with an objective pity .
“So you went, too,” he said .
* * * *
There still were some traces of what had been London when life
came back to the earth; green, creeper-tied heaps of concrete and
steel, for instance, and flooded steel vaults beneath banks, and a few
big guns in arsenals, and presses, now in rust, under Fleet Street
ruins . Rain, wind, heat, and cold had seen to the rest, and the two
bodies—one well-dressed, the other shabbily—on a street beside
the Thames had been dust many a year .
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THE UNPARALLELED
INVASION, by Jack London
Taken from the collection The Strength of the Strong (1910).
It was in the year 1976 that the trouble between the world and
China reached its culmination . It was because of this that the cel-
ebration of the Second Centennial of American Liberty was de-
ferred . Many other plans of the nations of the earth were twisted and
tangled and postponed for the same reason . The world awoke rather
abruptly to its danger; but for over seventy years, unperceived, af-
fairs had been shaping toward this very end .
The year 1904 logically marks the beginning of the development
that, seventy years later, was to bring consternation to the whole
world . The Japanese-Russian War took place in 1904, and the his-
torians of the time gravely noted it down that that event marked
the entrance of Japan into the comity of nations . What it really did
mark was the awakening of China . This awakening, long expected,
had finally been given up. The Western nations had tried to arouse
China, and they had failed . Out of their native optimism and race-
egotism they had therefore concluded that the task was impossible,
that China would never awaken .
What they had failed to take into account was this: that between
them and China was no common psychological speech . Their
thought- processes were radically dissimilar . There was no intimate
vocabulary . The Western mind penetrated the Chinese mind but a
short distance when it found itself in a fathomless maze . The Chi-
nese mind penetrated the Western mind an equally short distance
when it fetched up against a blank, incomprehensible wall . It was
all a matter of language . There was no way to communicate Western
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