He had the impression that there had been others in the shop before him. Nevertheless, he found a sizable piece of bacon. He dropped it, along with packets of butter or margarine, biscuits and sugar, into a sack and added an assortment of cans which came from a shelf that, to the best of his recollection, was devoted to food-the sardine cans, at any rate, were unmistakable. Then he sought for, and found, a dozen or more balls of string, shouldered his sack, and set off for home.
He had missed his way once, and it had been hard to keep down panic while he retraced his steps and reorientated himself. But at last he knew that he was again in the familiar lane. By groping right across it he managed to locate the twine of his outward journey and join it to the string. From there the rest of the journey back had been comparatively easy.
Twice more in the week that followed he had made the journey to the village shop again, and each time the triffids round the house and on the way had seemed more numerous. There had been nothing for the isolated trio to do but wait in hope. And then, like a miracle, Josella had arrived.
It was clear at once, then, that the notion of an immediate move to Tynsham was out. For one thing, Joyce Taylor was still in an extremely weak state-when I looked at her I was surprised that she was alive at all. Dennis’s promptness had saved her life, but their inability to give her the proper restoratives or even suitable food during the following week had slowed down her recovery. It would be folly to try to move her a long distance in a truck for a week or two yet. And then, too, Mary’s confinement was close enough to make the journey inadvisable for her, so that the only course seemed to be for us all to remain where we were until these crises should have passed.
Once more it became my task to scrounge and forage. This time I had to work on a more elaborate scale, to include not merely food, but gas for the lighting system, hens that were laying, to cows that had recently calved (and still survived, though their ribs were sticking out), medical necessities for Mary, and a surprising list of sundries. The area was more beset with triffids than any other I had yet seen. Almost every morning revealed one or two new ones lurking close to the house, and the first task of the day was to shoot the tops off them, until I had constructed a netting fence to keep them out of the garden. Even then they would come right up and loiter suggestively against it until something was done about them.
I opened some of the cases of gear and taught young Susan how to use a triffid gun. She quite rapidly became an expert at disarming the things, as she continued to call them. It became her department to work daily vengeance on them. From Josella I learned what had happened to her after the fire alarm at the University Building.
She had been shipped off with her party much as I with mine, but her manner of dealing with the two women to whom she was attached had been summary. She had issued a fiat ultimatum: either she became free of all restraints, in which case she would help them as far as she was able; or, if they continued to coerce her, there would likely come a time when they would find themselves drinking prussic acid or eating cyanide of potassium, on her recommendation. They could take their choice. They had chosen sensibly. There was little difference in what we had to tell one another about the days that followed. When her group had in the end dissolved, she had reasoned much as I had. She took a car and went up to Hampstead to look for me. She had not encountered any survivors from my group, or run across that led I by the quick-triggered, redheaded man. She had kept on there until almost sunset and then decided to make for the University Building. Not knowing what to expect, she had cautiously stopped the car a couple of streets away and approached on foot. When she was still some distance from the gates she heard a shot. Wondering what that might indicate, she had taken cover in the garden that had sheltered us before. From there she had observed Coker also making a circumspect advance. Without knowing that I had fired at the triffid in the square, and that the sound of the shot was the cause of Coker’s caution, she suspected some kind of trap. Determined not to fall into one a second time, she had returned to the car. She had no idea where the rest had gone-if they had gone at all. The only place of refuge she could think of that would be known to anyone at all was the one she had mentioned almost casually to me. She had decided to make for it, in the hope that I, if I were still in existence, would remember and try to find it.
“I curled up and slept in the back of the car once I was clear of London,” she said. “It was still quite early when I got here the next morning. The sound of the car brought Dennis to an upstairs window, warning me to look out for triffids. Then I saw that there were half a dozen or more of them close around the house, for all the world as if they were waiting for someone to come out of it. Dennis and I shouted back and forth. The triffids stirred, and one of them began to move toward me, so I nipped back into the car for safety. When it kept on coming, I started up the car and ran it down. But there were still the others, and I had no kind of weapon but my knife. It was Dennis who solved that difficulty.
“‘If you have a can of gas to spare, throw some of it their way, and follow it up with a bit of burning rag,’ he suggested. That ought to shift ‘em.’
“It did. Since then I’ve been using a garden syringe. The wonder is that I’ve not set the place on fire.”
With the aid of a cookbook Josella had managed to produce meals of a kind, and had set about putting the place more or less to rights. Working, learning, and improvising bad kept her too busy to worry about a future which lay beyond the next few weeks. She had seen no one else at all during those days, but, certain that there must be others somewhere, she had scanned the whale valley for signs of smoke by day or lights by night.
She bad seen no smoke, and in all the miles within her view there had not been a gleam of light until the evening I came.
In a way, the worst affected of the original trio was Dennis.
Joyce was still weak and in a semi-invalid state. Mary held herself withdrawn and seemed capable of finding endless mental occupation and compensation in the Contemplation of prospective motherhood. But Dennis was like an animal in a trap. He did not curse in the futile way I had beard so many others do; he resented it with a vicious bitterness, as if it had forced him into a cage where he did not intend to stay. Already, before I arrived, he had prevailed upon Josella to find the Braille system in the encyclopedia and make an indented copy of the alphabet for him to learn. He spent dogged hours each day making notes in it and attempting to read them back. Most of the rest of the time he fretted over his own uselessness, though he scarcely mentioned it. He would keep on trying to do this or that with a grim persistence that was painful to watch, and it required all my self-control to stop me offering him help-one experience of the bitterness which unasked help could arouse in him was quite enough. I began to be astonished at the things he was painfully teaching himself to do, though still the most impressive to me was his construction of an efficient mesh helmet on only the second day of his blindness.
It took him out of himself to accompany me on some of my foraging expeditions, and it pleased him that he could be useful in helping to move the heavier cases. He was anxious for books in Braille, but those, we decided, would have to wait until there was less risk of contamination in towns large enough to be likely sources.
The days began to pass quickly, certainly for the three of us who could see. Josella was kept busy mostly in the house, and Susan was learning to help her. There were plenty of jobs, too, waiting to be done by me. Joyce recovered sufficiently to make a shaky first appearance, and then began to pick up more rapidly. Soon after that Mary’s pains began.