The first view was of numerous scuffling boots, unpleasantly close and backing toward the trap. I nipped up quickly and got clear before they were on me. I was up just in time to see the plate-glass window in the front give way. Three men from outside fell in with it. A long green lash whipped after them, striking one as he lay. The other two scrambled among the wreckage of the display and came stumbling farther into the shop. The pressed back against the rest, and two more men fell through the open trap door.
It did not need more than a glimpse of that lash to tell what had happened. During the work of the past few days I had all but forgotten the triffids. By standing on a box I could see over the heads of the men. There were three triffids in my field of view: one out in the road, and two closer, on the sidewalk. Four men lay on the ground out there, not moving. I understood right then why these shops had been untouched, and why there had been no one to be seen in the neighborhood of the Heath. At the same time I cursed myself for not having looked at the bodies in the road more closely. One glimpse of a sting mark would have been enough warning.
“Hold it!” I shouted. “Stand where you are.”
I jumped down from the box, pushed back the men who were standing on the folded-back lid of the trap, and got it closed.
“There’s a door hack here,” I told them. “Take it easy now.”
The first two took it easy. Then a triffid sent its sting whistling into the room through the broken window. One man gave a scream as he fell. The rest came on in panic and swept me before them. There was a jam in the doorway. Behind us stings swished twice again before we were clear.
In the back room I looked round, panting. There were seven of us there.
“Hold it,” I said again. “We’re all right in here.”
I went to the door again. The back part of the shop was out of the triffids’ range-so long as they stayed outside. I was able to reach the trap door in safety and raise it. The two men who had fallen down there since I left re-emerged. One nursed a broken arm; the other was merely bruised, and cursing.
Behind the back room lay a small yard, and across that a door in an eight-foot brick wall. I had grown cautious. Instead of going straight to the door, I climbed on the roof of an outhouse to prospect. The door, I could see, gave into a narrow alley running the full length of the block. It was empty. But beyond the wall, on the far side of it, which seemed to terminate the gardens of a row of private houses, I could make out the tops of two triffids motionless among the bushes. There might well be more. The wall on that side was lower, and their height would enable them to strike right across the alley with their stings. I explained to the others.
“Bloody unnatural brutes,” said one. “I always did hate them bastards.”
I investigated further. The building next but one to the north side turned out to be a car-hire service with three of its cars on the premises. It was an awkward job getting the party over the two intervening walls, particularly the man with the broken arm, but we managed it. Somehow, too, I got them all packed into a large Daimler. When we were all set I opened the outer doors of the place and ran back to the car.
The triffids weren’t slow to be interested. That uncanny sensitiveness to sounds told them something was happening. As we drove out, a couple of them were already lurching toward the entrance. Their stings whipped out at us and slapped harmlessly against the closed windows. I swung bard round, bumping one and toppling it over. Then we were away up the road, making for a healthier neighborhood.
The evening that followed was the worst I had spent since the calamity occurred. Freed of the two watchdogs, I took over a small room where I could be alone. I put six lighted candles in a row on the mantleshelf and sat a long while in an armchair, trying to think things out. We had come back to find that one of the men who had been taken sick the night before was dead; the other was obviously dying-and there were four new cases. By the time our evening meal was over, there were two more still. What the complaint was I had no idea. With the lack of services and the way things were going in general, it might have been a number of things. I thought of typhoid, but I’d a hazy idea that the incubation period ruled that out-not that it would have made much difference if I bad known. All I did know about it was that it was something nasty enough to make that red-haired young man use his pistol and change his mind about following my party.
It began to look to me as if I had been doing my group a questionable service from the first. I had succeeded in keeping them alive, placed between a rival gang on one side and triffids encrouching from the Heath on the other. Now there was this sickness, too. And, when all was said and done, I bad achieved only the postponement of starvation for a little while.
As things were now, I did not see my way.
And then there was Josella on my mind. The same sorts of things, maybe worse, were as likely to be happening in her district…….
I found myself thinking of Michael Beadley and his lot again. I had known then that they were logical; now I began to think that maybe they had a truer humanity, too. They had seen that it was hopeless to try to save any but a very few. To give an empty hope to the rest was little better than cruelty.
Besides, there were ourselves. If there were purpose in anything at all, what had we been preserved for? Not simply to waste ourselves on a forlorn task, surely?
I decided that tomorrow I would go in search of Josella and we would settle it together.
The latch of the door moved with a click. The door itself opened slowly.
“Who’s that?” I said.
“Oh, it is you,” said a girl’s voice.
She came in, closing the door behind her.
“What do you want?” I asked.
She was tall and slim. Under twenty, I guessed. Her hair waved slightly. Chestnut-colored, it was. She was quiet, but one had to notice her-it was the texture of her as well as the line. She had placed my position by my movement and voice. Her gold-brown eyes were looking just over my left shoulder, otherwise I’d have been sure she was studying me.
She did not answer at once. It was an uncertainty which did not seem to suit the rest of her. I went on waiting for her to speak. A lump got into my throat somehow. You see, she was young and she was bcautiful. There should have been all life, maybe a wonderful life, before her. And isn’t there something a little sad about youth and beauty in any circumstances?
“You’re going away from here?” she said. It was half question, half statement, in a quiet voice, a little unsteadily.
“I’ve never said that,” I countered.
“No,” she admitted, “but that’s what the others are saying and they’re right, aren’t they?”
I did not say anything to that. She went on:
“You can’t. You can’t leave them like this. They need you.”
“I’m doing no good here,” I told her. “All the hopes are false.”
“But suppose they turned out not to be false?’
“They can’t-not now. We’d have known by this time.”
“But if they did after all-and you had simply walked out?”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that? I’m not doing any good, I tell you. I’ve been like the drugs they inject to keep the patient going a little longer-no curative value, just putting it off.”
She did not reply for some seconds. Then she said unsteadily:
“Life is very precious-even like this.” Her control almost cracked.
I could not say anything. She recovered herself.
“You can keep us going. There’s always a chance-just a chance that something may happen, even now.”
I had already said what I thought about that. I did not repeat it.
“it’s so difficult,” she said, as though to herself. “If I could only see you … But then, of course, if I could . . , Are you young? You sound young.”
“I’m under thirty,” I told her. “And very ordinary.”