“I must get back home. There’s my father. It’s obviously no good going on to try to find the doctor now-even if he has been one of the lucky ones.”
She seemed about to add something, but hesitated.
“Do you mind if I come too?” I asked. “This doesn’t seem to me the sort of time when anyone like us should be wandering about on his or her own.”
She turned with a grateful look.
“Thank you. I almost asked, but I thought there might be somebody you’d he wanting to look for.”
“There isn’t,” I said. “Not in London, at any rate.”
“Im glad. It’s not so much that I’m afraid of getting caught again-I’ll be much too careful for that. But, to he honest, it’s the loneliness I’m afraid of. I’m beginning to feel so-so cut off and stranded.”
I was beginning to see things in another new light. The sense of release was tempered with a growing realization of the grimness that might lie ahead of us. It had been impossible at first not to feel some superiority, and, therefore, confidence. Our chances of surviving the catastrophe were a million times greater than those of the rest. Where they must fumble, grope, and guess, we had simply to walk in and take. Butt here were going to be a lot of things beyond that.
I said: “I wonder just how many of us have escaped and can still see? I’ve come across one other man, a child, and a baby; you’ve met none. It looks to me as if we are going to find out that sight is very rare indeed. Some of the others have evidently grasped already that their only chance of survival is to get hold of someone who can see. When they all understand that, the outlooks going to he none too good.”
The future seemed to me at that time a choice between a lonely existence, always in fear of capture, or of gathering together a selected group which we could rely on to protect us from other groups. We’d be filling a kind of leadercum-prisoner role-and along with it went a nasty picture of still uncomfortably elaborating these possibilities when Josella bloody gang wars being fought for possession of us. I was recalled me to the present by getting up.
I must go,” she said. “Poor Father. It’s after four o’clock.”
Back in Regent Street again, a thought suddenly struck me.
“Come across,” I said. “I fancy I remember a shop somewhere here
The shop was still there. We equipped ourselves with a couple of useful-looking sheath knives, and belts to carry them.
“Makes me feel like a pirate,” said Josella as she buckled hers on.
“Better, I imagine, to be a pirate than a pirate’s moll,” I told her.
A few yards up the street we came upon a large, shiny saloon car. It looked the kind of craft that should simply have purred. But the noise when I started it up sounded louder in our ears than all the normal traffic of a busy street. We made our way northward, zigzagging to avoid derelicts and wanderers stricken into immobility in the middle of the road by the sound of our approach. All the way heads turned hopefully toward us as we came, and faces fell as we went past. One building on our route was blazing fiercely, and a cloud of smoke rose from another fire somewhere along Oxford Street. There were more people about in Oxford Circus, but we got through them neatly, then passed the B.B.C., and so north to the carriageway in Regent’s Park.
It was a relief to get out of the streets and reach an open space-and one where there were no unfortunate people wandering and groping. The only moving things we could see on the broad stretches of grass were two or three little groups of triffids lurching southward. Somehow or other they had contrived to pull up their stakes and were dragging them along behind them on their chains. I remembered that there were some undocked specimens, a few of them tethered, but most of them double-fenced, in an enclosure beside the zoo, and wondered how they had got out. Josella noticed them too.
“It’s not going to make much difference to them,” she said.
For the rest of the way there was little to delay us. Within a few minutes I was pulling up at the house she showed me, We got out of the car, and I pushed open the gate. A short drive curved round a bed of bushes which hid most of the house front from the road. As we turned the corner, Josella gave a cry and ran forward. A figure was lying on the gravel, chest downward, but with the head turned to show one side of its face. The first glance at it showed me the bright red streak across the cheek.
“Stop!” I shouted at her.
There was enough alarm in my voice to check her.
I had spotted the triffid now. It was lurking among the bushes, well within striking range of the sprawled figure.
“Back! Quick!” I said.
Still looking at the man on the ground, she hesitated.
“But I must-” she began, turning toward me. Then she stopped. Her eyes widened, and she screamed.
I whipped round to find a triffid towering only a few feet behind me.
In one automatic movement I had my hands over my eyes. I heard the sting whistle as it slashed out at me-but there was no knockout, no agonizing burning, even. One’s mind can move like lightning at such a moment; nevertheless, it was more instinct than reason which sent me leaping at it before ii bad time to strike again. I collided with it, overturning it, and even as I went down with it my hands were on the upper part of the stem, trying to pull off the cup and the sting. Triffid stems do not snap-but they can he mangled. This one was mangled thoroughly before I stood up.
Josella was standing in the same spot, transfixed.
“Come here,” I told her. There’s another in the bushes behind you.”
She glanced fearfully over her shoulder and came.
“But it hit you t” she said incredulously. Why aren’t you
“I don’t know. I ought to be,” I said.
I looked down at the fallen triffid. Suddenly remembering the knives that we’d acquired with quite other enemies in mind, I used mine to cut off the sting at its base. I examined it. “That explains it,” I said, pointing to the poison sacs.
“See, they’re collapsed, exhausted. If they’d been full, or even part full I turned a thumb down.
I had that, and my acquired resistance to the poison, to thank. Nevertheless, there were pale red marks across the backs of my hands and my neck that were itching like the devil. I rubbed them while I stood looking at the sting.
“It’s queer,” I murmured, more to myself than to her, but she heard me.
“What’s queer?”
“I’ve never seen one with the poison sacs quite empty like this before. It must have been doing a hell of a lot of stinging.”
But I doubt if she heard me. Her attention had reverted to the man who was lying in the drive, and she was eying the triffid standing by.
“How can we get him away?” she asked.
“I’m afraid we can’t-not till that thing’s been dealt with,” I told her. ‘Besides-well, I don’t think we can help him now.
“You mean he’s dead?”
I nodded. “Yes. There’s not a doubt of it-Eve seen others who have been stung. Who was he” I added.
“Old Pearson. He did gardening for us, and chauffeuring for my father. Such a dear old man-I’ve know him all my life.”
“I’m sorry-” I began, wishing I could think of something more adequate, but she cut me short.
“Look! Oh, look!” She pointed to a path which ran round the side of the house. A black-stockinged leg with a woman’s shoe on it protruded beyond the corner.
We prospected carefully and then moved safely to a spot which gave a better view. A girl in a black dress lay half on the path and half in a flower bed. Her pretty. fresh face was scarred with a bright red line. Josella choked. Tears came into her eyes.
“Oh! Oh, it’s Annie! Poor little Annie,” she said.
I tried to console her a little.
“They can scarcely have known it, either of them,” I told her. “When it is strong enough to kill, it’s mercifully quick.”
We did nor see any other triffid in hiding there. Possibly the same one had attacked them both. Together we crossed the path and got into the house by the side door. Josella called. There was no answer. She called again. We both listened in the complete silence that wrapped the house. She turned to look at me. Neither of us said anything. Quietly she led the way along a passage to a baize-covered door. As she opened it there was a swish, and something slapped across the door and frame, an inch or so above her head. Hurriedly she pulled the door shut again and turned wide-eyed to me.