On the left, at the far end of the bridge, one house stood slightly aslant from the road so that it faced obliquely toward us. An inn sign hung from a bracket on its wall, and from the window immediately above that something white was being waved. As we came closer I could see the man who was leaning out and frantically flagging us with a towel. I judged that he must be blind, otherwise he would have come out into the road to intercept us. He was waving too vigorously for a sick man.
I signaled back to Coker and pulled up as we cleared the bridge. The man at the window dropped his towel. He shouted something which I could not hear above the noise of the engines and disappeared. We both switched off. It was so quiet that we could hear the clumping of the man’s feet on the wooden stairs inside the house. The door opened, and be stepped out, holding both hands before him. Like lightning something whipped Out of the hedge on his left and struck him. He gave a single high-pitched shout and dropped where he stood.
I picked up my shotgun and climbed out of the cab. I circled a little until I could make Out the triffid skulking in the shadows of a bush. Then I blew the top off it.
Coker was out of his truck, too, and standing close beside me. He looked at the man on the ground and then at the shorn triffid.
“It was-no, damn it, it can’t have been waiting for him?” he said. “It must have just happened. It couldn’t have known he’d come out of that door… I mean, it couldn’t-could it?”
“Or could it? It was a remarkably neat piece of work,” I said.
Coker turned uneasy eyes on me.
“Too damn neat. You don’t really believe
“There’s a kind of conspiracy not to believe things about triffids,” I said, and added: “There might be more around here.”
We looked the adjacent cover over carefully and drew blank.
“I could do with a drink,” suggested Coker.
But for the dust on the counter, the small bar of the inn looked normal. We poured a whisky each. Coker downed his in one. He turned a worried look on me.
“I didn’t like that. Not at all, I didn’t. You ought to know a lot more about these bloody things than most people, Bill. It wasn’t-I mean, it must just have happened to be there, mustn’t it?”
“I think-” I began. Then I stopped, listening to a staccato drumming outside. I walked over and opened the window. I let the already trimmed triffid have the other barrel too; this time just above the bole. The drumming stopped.
“The trouble about triffids,” I said as we poured another drink, “is chiefly the things we don’t know about them,” I told him one or two of Walter’s theories. He stared.
“You don’t seriously suggest that they’re ‘talking’ when they make that rattling noise?”
“I’ve never made up my mind,” I admitted. “I’ll go so far as to say I’m sure it’s a signal of some sort. But Walter considered it to be real ‘talk’-and he did know more about them than anyone else that I’ve ever met.”
I ejected the two spent cartridge cases and reloaded. “And he actually mentioned their advantage over a blind man?”
“A number of years ago, that was,” I pointed out.
“Still-it’s a funny coincidence.”
“Impulsive as ever,” I said. “Pretty nearly any stroke of fate can be made to look like a funny coincidence if you try hard enough and wait long enough.”
We drank up and turned to go. Coker glanced out of the window. Then be caught my arm and pointed. Two triffids had swayed round the corner and were making for the hedge which had been the hiding place of the first. I waited until they paused and then decapitated both of them. We left by the window which was out of range of any triffid cover, and looked about us carefully as we approached the trucks.
“Another coincidence? Or were they coming to see what had happened to their pal?” asked Coker.
With only two more stops, one for food and the other for fuel, we made good time, and ran into Beaminster about half-past four in the afternoon. We had come right into the center of the place without having seen a sign to suggest the presence of the Beadley party.
At first glimpse the town was as void of life as any other we had seen that day. The main shopping street when we entered it was bare and empty save for a couple of trucks drawn up on one side. I had led the way down it for perhaps twenty yards when a man stepped out from behind one of the trucks and leveled a rifle. He fired deliberately over my head and then lowered his aim.
DEAD END
That’s the kind of warning I don’t debate about. I pulled up. The man was large and fair-haired. He handled his rifle with familiarity. Without taking it out of the aim, he jerked his head twice sideways. I accepted that as a sign to climb down. When I had done so, I displayed my empty hands. Another man, accompanied by a girl, emerged from behind the stationary truck as I approached it. Coker’s voice called from behind me:
“Better put up that rifle, chum. You’re all in the open.”
The fair man’s eyes left mine to search for Coker. I could have jumped him then if I’d wanted to, but I said:
“He’s right. Anyway, we’re peaceful.”
The man lowered his rifle, not quite convinced. Coker emerged from the cover of my truck, which had hidden his exit from his own.
‘What’s the big idea? Dog eat dog?” he inquired.
“Only two of you?” the second man asked.
Coker looked at him.
“What would you be expecting? A convention? Yes, just two of us.”
The trio visibly relaxed. The fair man explained:
“We thought you might be a gang from a city. We’ve been expecting them here, raiding for food.”
“Oh,” said Coker. “From which we assume that you’ve not taken a look at any city lately. If that’s your only worry, you might as well forget it. What gangs there are, are more likely to be working the other way round-at present. In fact, doing -if I may say so-just what you are.”
“You don’t think they’ll come?”
“I’m darned sure they won’t.” He regarded the three.
“Do you belong to Beadley’s lot?” he asked.
The response was convincingly blank.
“Pity,” said Coker. “That’d have been our first real stroke of luck in quite a time.”
“What is, or are, Beadley’s lot?” inquired the fair man.
I was feeling wilted and dry after some hours in the driving cab with the sun on it. I suggested that we might remove discussion from the middle of the street to some more congenial spot. We passed round their trucks through a familiar litter of cases of biscuits, chests of tea, sides of bacon, sacks of sugar, blocks of salt, and all the rest of it to a small bar parlor next door. Over pint pots Coker and I gave them a short r&um6 of what we’d done and what we knew.
They were an oddly assorted trio. The fair-haired man turned out to be a member of the Stock Exchange by the name of Stephen Brennell. His companion was a good-looking, well-built girl with an occasional superficial petulance but no real surprise over whatever life might hand her next. She had led one of those fringe careers-modeling dresses, selling them, putting in movie-extra work, missing opportunities of going to Hollywood, hostessing for obscure clubs, and helping out these activities by such other means as offered themselves.
She had an utterly unshakable conviction that nothing serious could have happened to America, and that it was only a matter of holding out for a while until the Americans arrived to put everything in order. She was quite the least troubled person I had encountered since the catastrophe took place. Though just occasionally she pined a little for the bright lights which she hoped the Americans would hurry up and restore.
The third member, the dark young man, nursed a grudge. He had worked hard and saved hard in order to start his small radio store, and he had ambitions. “Look at Ford,” he told us, “and look at Lard Nuffield-he started with a bike shop no bigger than my radio store, and see where he got to! That’s the kind of thing I was going to do. And now look at the damned mess things are in! It ain’t fair!” Fate, as he saw it, didn’t want any more Fords or Nuffields-but he didn’t intend to take that lying down. This was only an interval sent to Lry bim-one day would see him back in his radio store with his foot set firmly on the first rung to millionairedom.