In the year 2072 an old man scrambles along overgrown railway tracks. A savage boy helps him along. Over six decades have passed since a sudden epidemic devastated the population of the planet. The Scarlet Plague was so contagious, its course so swift, that research laboratories were wiped out even as scientists raced to find a cure. As social structures collapsed, the handful of people who had escaped the agonizing death established their own hierarchy in a suddenly barren and hostile world. The old man is one of the original survivors in the San Francisco Bay Area. He tries to relay tales of the lost world-art, science, the beauty of knowledge-as well as the horrors of the plague, to his reluctant grandsons, who place scant value on the wisdom that feeble old "Granser" is so desperate to impart. Can civilization be salvaged or is the crude ruthlessness of the youngsters a glimpse of humanity's barbaric future?