William “Bill” Masen awakens in a London hospital. His eyes are bandaged, and he is surrounded by an eerie quiet. Today is the day his bandages are due to be removed, but his nurse and doctor are late, and he hasn’t been fed yet. With the lack of noise from buses or people outside his window, Bill intuits that pandemonium has broken out not only in the hospital but in the world.

Cautiously, he removes his bandages and investigates. It is confirmed that some sort of chaos unfolded while he was hospitalized, most notably in the form of mass blindness. It is only because of his yet-unexplained accident that he is not blind too: “The way I came to miss the end of the world—well, the end of the world I had known for close to thirty years—was sheer accident” (1).

Bill assumes that the blindness was caused by a passing comet that the entire world watched the previous day. As Bill wanders the hospital, he avoids the blind, groaning patients and manages to escape without being crushed by those fleeing.

Bill wanders into a bar while considering next steps. There, he meets a drunken blind man looking for whiskey.