The new vampire society attacks Neville's house in January 1979, bringing the social order that Robert Neville has only imagined into direct, violent contact with his refuge. What begins outside as an organized raid against vampires becomes a reversal of Neville's entire position: the watcher at the peephole is identified, surrounded, and removed, while the creatures he once regarded as enemies are treated by the new society as members of a rival population. The attack therefore marks both the physical end of Robert Neville's house as a sanctuary and the political discovery that he has become an obsolete human being in a world now belonging to others.

Causes and Background

The assault follows years in which Robert Neville has defended his house, studied vampirism, and killed vampires during the day. His house has functioned as shelter, laboratory, fortress, and observation post. From the peephole he has watched the night outside while remaining hidden from the figures gathering on the street. Earlier, he stopped looking at the women who posed before the house because they had recognized his presence and attempted to entice him outside; concealment became a form of self-protection, but it also made the house a sealed chamber of surveillance, sound, and dread.

The attack also reverses the direction of observation. Robert Neville has repeatedly watched the vampires approach, including Ben Cortman walking onto the lawn and standing near the house. When the new society arrives, however, its members do not merely appear as individuals at the door. They come in dark cars carrying spotlights, guns, axes, and pikes, with the motors and lights announcing an organized force. The house is no longer an isolated point from which Neville can study the epidemic. It is a marked location in a new social map, and the people who control that map have come to claim it.

The Night Raid

The attackers first sweep the boulevard and Cimarron Street with powerful spotlights. Robert Neville is sitting at the peephole when the beams strike the vampire faces outside. The vampires recoil from the illumination, their eyes fixed on the sudden glare, while Neville jumps back in shock and considers the weapons available to him: pistols in the bureau and a sub-machine gun on the workbench. For a moment, the old logic of defense returns. He could fight from the house, as he has fought before.

He decides not to fight. The decision is deliberate rather than passive: he has considered it over the preceding months and concludes that the new society is doing what it must do, even if its methods are unnecessarily violent. He intends to surrender to its justice because he believes the attackers recognize him as a man like themselves. That expectation is crucial to the event. Robert Neville does not initially mistake the assault for a private vendetta; he interprets it as the enforcement of a new public order and assumes that this order will distinguish between vampires and a human survivor.

Outside, the raid proceeds with military coordination. The dark-suited men surround approximately seven visible vampires, six men and one woman. They seize the vampires by their arms while other men drive sharp pikes into their chests. The victims fall one by one onto the pavement, blood spreading beneath the spotlights. The attackers know exactly what they are doing, and their efficiency is accompanied by expressions of vicious triumph. To Robert Neville, they resemble gangsters rather than reluctant agents compelled by necessity. The slaughter shocks him not only because it is violent, but because the violence appears methodical, confident, and enjoyed.

The Death of Ben Cortman

The extermination becomes personal when Robert Neville remembers Ben Cortman and begins searching for him. He discovers Ben Cortman on the roof of the house across the street, pulling himself toward a chimney. Neville realizes that the chimney has probably been Ben Cortman's hiding place for much of the time, and the knowledge produces an immediate sense of regret: he had not looked carefully enough. More unsettlingly, he discovers that he does not want the new society to kill Ben Cortman. Ben Cortman is not theirs to destroy. Despite their long antagonism, Neville feels more deeply toward the vampire than toward the men carrying out the execution.

The attackers turn their spotlights on Ben Cortman and fire their rifles as he crawls across the roof. Robert Neville experiences the shooting almost physically, his body jerking as though the bullets were entering his own flesh. Ben Cortman continues crawling through the gunfire, reaches the chimney, and struggles upward while Neville watches in helpless concentration. When the machine gun finally strikes him, Ben Cortman briefly remains standing in the glare, his hands raised and his face twisted in defiance. Robert Neville mutters Ben Cortman's name as the body folds, slides down the roof, and falls into the space below, where the men rush forward with their pikes.

Ben Cortman's death changes the emotional alignment of the scene. The vampire who had repeatedly called Robert Neville out of the house is no longer simply a recurring threat. His destruction makes the new society appear more frightening than the old enemy. Robert Neville closes his eyes and digs his nails into his palms, unable to intervene. The relationship between the two former neighbors, founded on hostility and repetition, is revealed at the moment of death as a bond shaped by shared history: Ben Cortman belongs to Neville's lost world, even though he has become one of its monsters.

The Breach of the House

After the street executions, boots approach Robert Neville's house. He retreats into the darkness and repeats his decision not to fight. He tells himself that the attackers have killed their own people and therefore have reason to capture him, and he still imagines that he will be taken before the courts of the new society. The expectation collapses when an ax blade bites into the front door. The men attack the back door as well, then fire at the lock of the front entrance. Their actions reveal that they are not preparing a formal arrest; they are breaking into a defended position.

Robert Neville suddenly understands that the new society intends to exterminate him. The realization is both political and existential. He has assumed that biological humanity gives him membership in the attackers' community, but the assault shows that their definition of normality excludes him. His years of killing vampires have made him an enemy regardless of the fact that he is not infected. The house, once the place from which he judged and destroyed vampires, now becomes the site from which the new society will remove him.

When the front door is crushed inward, Robert Neville retrieves his guns. One falls from his nerveless fingers, but he keeps hold of the remaining pistol and waits in the bedroom as heavy feet enter the living room. He still hesitates because the attackers might, in theory, be taking him prisoner. Yet the uncertainty cannot last. Flashlight beams enter the hall, the room seems to spin, and the intruders advance through the house. The structure that has protected him for more than three years is opened room by room, its barriers reduced to doors, locks, and walls that can be cut or shot apart.

Capture and Aftermath

Robert Neville fires automatically when one of the men shoots into the wall above his head. He does not deliberately aim at any particular attacker, but one man cries out. A violent blow strikes Neville across the chest, and he falls after firing again. When he reaches toward the pistol, a dark boot stamps on his hand and breaks it. The attackers pull him up by the armpits while he waits for another shot and thinks of Virginia Neville, imagining that death will reunite him with her. He wants to die in his own house, but the men drag him through the rooms instead.

The capture ends with Robert Neville's body being taken out into the night and into the world controlled by the new society. The wording of that transition gives the event its decisive consequence: the night and the world are no longer his. His isolation had once seemed to make him the last representative of humanity, but the attack proves that he is instead a remnant enclosed within a society that has already reorganized itself without him.

He survives the initial assault badly wounded. When he awakens, his chest is bound beneath a broad bandage with a widening red stain, and pain makes thought return only gradually. Barred windows across a small cubicle confirm that he is imprisoned. The setting converts the earlier visibility of the house into its opposite: the man who once stood behind a peephole now lies behind bars, unable to see the world except as a confused sound outside. His captivity makes clear that the attack was not merely a raid against a dwelling. It was the transfer of Robert Neville from the position of observer and executioner into that of a confined subject awaiting death.

Significance

The attack is the story's central reversal of social perspective. Robert Neville has spent the plague years treating vampires as the abnormal remainder of a ruined civilization, while the new society has developed institutions, weapons, and collective methods of survival of its own. The raid demonstrates that power belongs not to the person who possesses the most accurate private explanation of the disease, but to the group capable of defining normality and enforcing that definition.

The event also exposes the limits of Robert Neville's earlier categories. He can distinguish infection from immunity, and he can observe vampire behavior through the peephole, but he cannot preserve a stable moral boundary between himself and the beings he has hunted. Watching the new society kill Ben Cortman, he recognizes kinship with the vampire and revulsion toward the human-looking executioners. His response is not a conversion to the vampires' cause; it is the collapse of his confidence that biology, law, and morality still coincide.

Finally, the assault gathers the recurring images of the novel into one sequence: the house, the peephole, the night voices, the spotlights, the pikes, and the barred window. Robert Neville once used hiddenness and controlled visibility to maintain authority over the night. The new society answers with a larger apparatus of illumination, armed surveillance, and forced entry. By the time he wakes in the cell, the observer has become the observed, the defender has become the prisoner, and the solitary survivor has entered the history of a society that regards him as the monster of the old world.