In the year 2013, the Scarlet Plague first appeared in New York City, a relentless epidemic far deadlier than any known. After the manifestation of the first symptoms - the scarlet rash on the face and body - the infected could last just an hour. Humanity was dying like flies in the absence of a cure that could confront it, and the vain exodus of civilization deserted the cities, devastated by looting, fires and violence.

Very few families managed to escape the contagion, and the world population was reduced to small tribes that barely add up to forty individuals. While chaos takes over customs and culture, vegetation spreads over the land covering the vestiges of a civilization with its green mantle and wild beasts roam their wide paths, forests and beaches.

Sixty years after these first events, at the end of his life, an endearing old survivor, James Howard Smith, a former professor of literature at the university, narrates to some ravaged young people the catastrophic consequences of the Scarlet Plague in an attempt to transmit brief memories of the history of a world that nobody remembers anymore. Visions of an idealized past—in a golden age when human beings learned to think in schools and humanity owned all things and ruled over nature—contrast with the pessimistic landscape of little girl's new habits. The population, unfamiliar with soap, hunts to survive and adorns its body with the bones of corpses affected by the plague.

While thirty years ago, the survivors asked old Smith to repeat the story of the cataclysm over and over again, now, his testimony does not seem to interest anyone. The boys, who do not know the meaning of words in disuse —such as “money”, “mayonnaise” or “the free human being”— and barely speak in monosyllables and simple sentences, try to follow the thread of the old man's conjectures, always incredulous. at the idea that small microscopic beings could end the lives of millions of people: «Those things cannot be seen, grandfather,» Cleft Lip protested, «and you talk and talk as if they were something and they are nothing. What you do not see, does not exist. As simple as that".

In this edition of The Scarlet Plague, illustrations by Luis Scafati add a dreamlike dimension to the horrors of a future imagined by Jack London. A post-apocalyptic story, a pioneer in the genre, in which humanity sinks into the primitive night, which leaves its mark in such notable books as The Earth Remains (1949), by George R. Stewart, and The Road (2006), by Cormac McCarthy.