TYNSHAM MANOR
TYNSHAM
NR DEVIZES
WILTS.
That was something, at least.
I looked at it, and thought. In another hour or less it would be dusk. Devizes I guessed at a hundred miles distant, probably more. I went outside again and examined the trucks. One of them was the last that I had driven in-the one in which I had stowed my despised anti-triffid gear. I recalled that the rest of its load was a useful assortment of food, supplies, and tools. It would be much better to arrive with that than empty-handed in a car. Nevertheless, if there were no urgent reason for it, I did not fancy driving anything, much less a large, heavily loaded truck, by night along roads which might reasonably be expected to produce a number of hazards. If I were to pile it up, and the odds were that I should, I would lose a lot more time in finding another and transferring the load than I would by spending the night here. An early start in the morning offered much better prospects. I moved my boxes of cartridges from the car to the cab of the truck in readiness. The gun I kept with me.
I found the room from which I had rushed to the fake fire alarm exactly as I had left it: my clothes on a chair, even the cigarette case and lighter where I had placed them beside my improvised bed.
It was still too early to think of sleep. I lit a cigarette, put the case in my pocket, and decided to go out.
Before I went into the Russell Square garden I looked it over carefully. I had already begun to become suspicious of open spaces. Sure enough, I spotted one triffid. It was in the northwest corner, standing perfectly still, but considerably taller than the bushes that surrounded it. I went closer, and blew the top of it to bits with a single shot. The noise in the silent square could scarcely have been more alarming if I had let off a howitzer. When I was sure that there were no others lurking I went into the garden and sat down with my back against a tree.
I stayed there perhaps twenty minutes. The sun was low, end half the square thrown into shadow. Soon I would have to go in. While there was light I could sustain myself; in the dark, things could steal quietly upon me. Already I was on my way back to the primitive. Before long, perhaps, I should be spending the hours of darkness in fear as my remote ancestors must have done, watching, ever distrustfully, the night outside their cave. I delayed to take one more look around the square, as if it were a page of history I would learn before it was turned. And as I stood there I heard the gritting of footsteps on the road-a slight sound but as loud in the silence as a grinding millstone.
I turned, with my gun ready. Crusoe was no more startled at the sight of a footprint than I at the sound of a footfall, for it had not the hesitancy of a blind man’s. I caught a glimpse in the dim light of the moving figure. As it left the road and entered the garden II saw that it was a man. Evidently he had seen me before I heard him, for he was coming straight toward me.
“You don’t need to shoot,” he said, holding empty hands wide apart.
I did not know him until he came within a few yards. Simultaneously, he recognized me.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said. I kept the gun raised.
“Hullo, Coker. What are you after? Wanting me to go on another of your little parties?” I asked him.
“No. You can put that thing down. Makes too much noise, anyway. That’s how I found you. No,” he repeated, “I’ve had enough. I’m getting to hell out of here.”
“So am I,” I said, and lowered the gun.
“What happened to your bunch?” he asked. I told him. He nodded.
“Same with mine. Same with the rest, I expect. Still, we tried
“The wrong way,” I said. He nodded again.
“Yes,” he admitted. “I reckon your lot did have the right idea from the start-only it didn’t look right and it didn’t sound right a week ago.”
“Six days ago,” I corrected him.
“A week,” said he.
“No, I’m sure-Oh well, what the hell’s it matter, anyway?” I said. “In the circumstances,” I went on, “what do you say to declaring an amnesty and starting over again?”
He agreed.
“I’d got it wrong,” he repeated. “I thought I was the one who was taking it seriously-but I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. I couldn’t believe that it would last, or that some kind of help wouldn’t show up. But now look at it! And it must be like this everywhere. Europe, Asia, America-think of America smitten like this! But they must be. If they weren’t, they’d have been over here, helping out and getting the place straight that’s the way it’d take them. No, I reckon your lot understood it better from the start.”
We ruminated for some moments, then I asked:
“This disease, plague-what do you reckon it is?”
“Search me, chum. I thought it must be typhoid, but someone said typhoid takes longer to develop-so I don’t know. I don’t know why I’ve not caught it myself-except that I’ve been able to keep away from those that have and to see that what I was eating was clean. I’ve been keeping to cans I’ve opened myself, and I’ve drunk bottle beer. Anyway, though I’ve been lucky so far, I don’t fancy hanging around here much longer. Where do you go now?”
I told him of the address chalked on the wall. He bad not seen it. He had been on his way to the University Building when the sound of my shot had caused him to scout round with some caution.
“It-” I began, and then stopped abruptly. From one of the streets west of us came the sound of a car starting up. It ran up its gears quickly and then diminished into the distance.
“Well, at least there’s somebody else left,” said Coker. “And whoever wrote up that address. Have you any idea who it was?”
I shrugged my shoulders. It was a justifiable assumption that it was a returned member of the group that Coker had raided-or possibly some sighted person that his party had failed to catch. There was no telling how long it had been there. He thought it over.
“It’ll be better if there’s two of us. I’ll tag along with you and see what’s doing. Okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed. “I’m for turning in flaw, and an early start tomorrow.”
He was still asleep when I awoke. I dressed myself much more comfortably in the ski suit and heavy shoes than in the garments I had been wearing since his party had provided them for me. By the time I returned with a bag of assorted cans, he was up and dressed too. Over breakfast we decided to improve our welcome at Tynsham by taking a loaded truck each rather than travel together in one.
“And see that the cab window closes,” I suggested. ‘There are quite a lot of triffid nurseries around London, particularly to the west.”
“Uh-huh. I’ve seen a few of the ugly brutes about,” he said offhandedly.
“I’ve seen them about-and in action,” I told him.
At the first garage we came to we broke open a pump and filled up. Then, sounding in the silent streets like a convoy of tanks, we set off westward with my truck in the lead.
The going was wearisome. Every few dozen yards one had to weave round some derelict vehicle. Occasionally two or three together would block the road entirely so that it was necessary to go dead slow and nudge one of them out of the way. Very few of them were wrecked. The blindness seemed to have come upon the drivers swiftly, but not too suddenly for them to keep control. Usually they had been able to draw in to the side of the road before they stopped. Had the catastrophe occurred by day, the main reads would have been quite impassable, and to work our way clear from the center by side streets might have taken days-spent mostly in reversing before impenetrable thickets of vehicles and trying to find another way round. As it was, I found that our overall progress was less slow than it seemed in detail, and when, after a few miles, I noticed an overturned car beside the road I realized that we were by this time on a route which others had traveled, and partially cleared, ahead of us.
On the farther outskirts of Staines we could begin to feel that London was behind us at last. I stopped, and went back to Coker. As he switched off, the silence closed, thick and unnatural, with only the click of cooling metal to break it. I realized suddenly that I bad not seen a single living creature other than a few sparrows since we had started. Coker climbed out of his cab. He stood in the middle of the road, listening and looking around him.