I Am Legend

by Richard Matheson

And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.

surrounded by a battalion of blood-suckers who wish no more than to sip freely of my bonded, 100-proof hemoglobin. Have a drink, men, this one’s really on me.

Bastards! I’ll kill every mother’s son of you before I’ll give in! His right hand closed like a clamp and the glass shattered in his grip.

Sure, sure, he thought, but would you let your sister marry one? He shrugged. You got me there, buddy, you got me there.

Time had more than proved to him that he was immune to their infection.

Again he shook his head. The world’s gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!

No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.

a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming.

‘Robert Neville,’ she said, ‘the last of the old race.’

‘As far as we know,’ she said casually. ‘You’re quite unique, you know. When you’re gone, there won’t be anyone else like you within our particular society.’

They’re terrified of you, Robert, they hate you. And they want your life.’

They all stood looking up at him with their white faces. He stared back. And suddenly he thought, I’m the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.

and he knew that they were afraid of him.

He was an invisible specter who had left for evidence of his existence the bloodless bodies of their loved ones.

new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.