Richard Matheson - I Am Legend

She shook her head incredulously.

“Bacteriophages are inanimate proteins that are also created when the system gets no blood. Unlike the spores, though, in this case abnormal metabolism destroys the cells.”

Quickly he told her about the imperfect waste disposal of the lymphatic system, the garlic as allergen causing anaphylaxis, the various vectors of the disease.

“Then why are we immune?” she asked.

For a long moment he looked at her, withholding any answer. Then, with a shrug, he said, “I don’t know about you. As for me, while I was stationed in Panama during the war I was bitten by a vampire bat. And, though I can’t prove it, my theory is that the bat had previously encountered a true vampire and acquired the vampiris germ. The germ caused the bat to seek human rather than animal blood. But, by the time the germ had passed into my system, it had been weakened in some way by the bat’s system. It made me terribly ill, of course, but it didn’t kill me, and as a result, my body built up an immunity to it. That’s my theory, anyway. I can’t find any better reason.”

“But—didn’t the same thing happen to others down there?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I killed the bat.” He shrugged. “Maybe I was the first human it had attacked.”

She looked at him without a word, her surveillance making Neville feel restive. He went on talking even though he didn’t really want to.

Briefly he told her about the major obstacle in his study of the vampires.

“At first I thought the stake had to hit their hearts,” he said. “I believed the legend. I found out that wasn’t so. I put stakes in all parts of their bodies and they died. That made me think it was hemorrhage. But then one day—”

And he told her about the woman who had decomposed before his eyes.

“I knew then it couldn’t be hemorrhage,” he went on, feeling a sort of pleasure in reciting his discoveries. “I didn’t know what to do. Then one day it came to me.”

“What?” she asked.

“I took a dead vampire. I put his arm into an artificial vacuum. I punctured his arm inside that vacuum. Blood spurted out.” He paused. “But that’s all.”

She stared at him.

“You don’t see,” he said.

“I—No,” she admitted.

“When I let air back into the tank, the arm decomposed,” he said.

She still stared.

“You see,” he said, “the bacillus is a facultative saprophyte. It lives with or without oxygen; but with a difference. Inside the system, it is anaerobic and sets up a symbiosis with the system. The vampire feeds it fresh blood, the bacteria provides the energy so the vampire can get more fresh blood. The germ also causes, I might add, the growth of the canine teeth.”

“Yes?” she said.

“When air enters,” he said, “the situation changes instantaneously. The germ becomes aerobic and, instead of being symbiotic, it becomes virulently parasitic.” He paused. “It eats the host,” he said.

“Then the stake—” she started.

“Lets air in. Of course. Lets it in and keeps the flesh open so that the body glue can’t function. So the heart has nothing to do with it. What I do now is cut the wrists deep enough so that the body glue can’t work.” He smiled a little. “When I think of all the time I used to spend making stakes!”

She nodded and, noticing the wineglass in her hand, put it down.

“That’s why the woman I told you about broke down so rapidly,” he said. “She’d been dead so long that as soon as air struck her system the germs caused spontaneous dissolution.”

Her throat moved and a shudder ran down through her.

“It’s horrible,” she said.

He looked at her in surprise. Horrible? Wasn’t that odd? He hadn’t thought that for years. For him the word ‘horror’ had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliche. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives.

“And what about the—the ones who are still alive?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, “when you cut their wrists the germ naturally becomes parasitic. But mostly they die from simple hemorrhage.”

“Simple—”

She turned away quickly and her lips were pressed into a tight, thin line.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“N-nothing. Nothing,” she said.

He smiled. “One gets used to these things,” he said. “One has to.”

Again she shuddered, the smooth column of her throat contracting.

“You can’t abide by Robert’s Rules of Order in the jungle,” he said. “Believe me, it’s the only thing I can do. Is it better to let them die of the disease and return—in a far more terrible way?”

She pressed her hands together.

“But you said a lot of them are—are still living,” she said nervously. “How do you know they’re not going to stay alive?”

“I know,” he said. “I know the germ, know how it multiplies. No matter how long their systems fight it, in the end the germ will win. I’ve made antibiotics, injected dozens of them. But it doesn’t work, it can’t work. You can’t make vaccines work when they’re already deep in the disease. Their bodies can’t fight germs and make antibodies at the same time. It can’t be done, believe me. It’s a trap. If I didn’t kill them, sooner or later they’d die and come after me. I have no choice; no choice at all.”

They were silent then and the only sound in the room was the rasping of the needle on the inner grooves of the record. She wouldn’t look at him, but kept staring at the floor with bleak eyes. It was strange, he thought, to find himself vaguely on the defensive for what yesterday was accepted necessity. In the years that had passed he had never once considered the possibility that he was wrong. It took her presence to bring about such thoughts: And they were strange, alien thoughts.

“Do you actually think I’m wrong?” he asked in an incredulous voice.

She bit into her lower lip.

“Ruth,” he said.

“It’s not for me to say,” she answered.

“Virge!”

The dark form recoiled against the wall as Robert Neville’s hoarse cry ripped open the silent blackness.

He jerked his body up from the couch and stared with sleep-clouded eyes across the room, his chest pulsing with heartbeats like maniac fists on a dungeon wall.

He lurched up to his feet, brain still foggy with sleep; unable to define time or place.

“Virge?” he said again, weakly, shakily. “Virge?’

“It—it’s me,” the faltering voice said in the darkness. He took a trembling step toward the thin stream of light spearing through the open peephole. He blinked dully at the light.

She gasped as he put his hand out and clutched her shoulder.

“It’s Ruth. Ruth,” she said in a terrified whisper. He stood there rocking slowly in the darkness, eyes gazing without comprehension at the dark form before him.

“It’s Ruth,” she said again, more loudly. Waking came like a hose blast of numbing shock. Something twisted cold knots into his chest and stomach. It wasn’t Virge. He shook his head suddenly, rubbed shaking fingers across his eyes.

Then he stood there staring, weighted beneath a sudden depression.

“Oh,” he muttered faintly. “Oh, I—”

He remained there, feeling his body weaving slowly in the dark as the mists cleared from his brain.

He looked at the open peephole, then back at her.

“What are you doing?” he asked, voice still thick with sleep.

“Nothing,” she said nervously. “I—couldn’t sleep.”

He blinked his eyes suddenly at the flaring lamplight. Then his hands dropped down from the lamp switch and he turned around. She was against the wall still, blinking at the light, her hands at her sides drawn into tight fists.