Survivor

About this book

Survivor by Jr. Irving E. Cox is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It portrays an alien conquest by impersonal “gray men” and the stark, instinctive struggle for survival that strips humans of their comforts, illusions, and moral certainties.

The story follows Vernon Randall Hume, a once-complacent lawyer, as he flees across a devastated landscape toward a mountain pass and a rumored refuge beyond a river. He hides from mechanized patrols, scavenges a ransacked farmhouse, and crosses the desert, where fear and hunger harden into a predatory impulse—he kills small animals for sport, then bludgeons a gray sentry and takes his coat. Intercut scenes reveal a boy and his father tracing Hume’s path: they eat the food he thought he had saved and find the sentry’s gun he left behind. When the wounded Hume, now wearing the gray coat, nears the boy’s cave, the child—following his father’s instructions—mistakes him for the enemy and shoots him. Seeking safety, the boy then discovers his father crushed by treads at the river, and he himself is captured, netted, and caged by the invaders—an ending that mirrors the story’s bitter theme of roles reversed, with humans reduced to the studied creatures they once casually dominated.