We gave them two hours to get well asleep.
The moon had risen, and the yard was bathed in white light. I had forgotten to oil the shed doors, and gave them a curse for every creak. The rest came in procession toward me. The Brents and Joyce were familiar enough with the place not to need a guiding hand. Behind them followed Josella and Susan, carrying the children. David’s sleepy voice rose once, and was stopped quickly by Josella’s hand over his mouth. She got into the front, still holding him. I saw the others into the back, and closed it.
Then I climbed into the driving seat, kissed Josella, and took a deep breath.
Across the yard, the triffids were clustering closer to the gate, as they always did when they had been undisturbed for some hours.
By the grace of heaven the half-track’s engine started at once. I slammed into low gear, swerved to avoid Torrence’s vehicle, and drove straight at the gate. The heavy fender took it with a crash. We plunged forward in a festoon of wire netting and broken timbers, knocking down a dozen triffids while the rest slashed furiously at us as we passed. Then we were on our way.
Where a turn in the climbing track let us look down on Shirning, we paused, and cut the engine. Lights were on behind some of the windows, and as we watched, those on the vehicle blazed out, floodlighting the house. A starter began to grind.
I had a twinge of uneasiness as the engine fired, though I knew we had several times the speed of that lumbering contraption. The machine began to jerk round on its tracks to face the gate.
Before it completed the turn, the engine sputtered, and stopped.
The starter began to whirr again. It went on whirring, irritably, and without result.
The triffids had discovered that the gate was down. By a blend of moonlight and reflected headlights we could see their dark, slender forms already swaying in ungainly procession into the yard while others came lurching down the banks of the lane to follow them….
I looked at Josella.
She was not crying at all. She looked from me down to David, asleep in her arms.
“I’ve all I really need,” she said, “and someday you’re going to bring us back to the rest, Bill.”
“Wifely confidence is a very nice trait, darling, but-No, damn it, no buts-l am going to bring you back,” I said.
I got Out to clear the debris from the front of the half-track and wipe the poison from the windshield so that I should be able to see to drive, on and away across the tops of the bills, toward the southwest.
And there my personal story joins up with the rest. You will find it in Elspeth Cary’s excellent history of the colony.
Our hopes all Center here, it seems unlikely now that anything will come of Torrence’s neo-feudal plan, though a number of his seigneuries do still exist, with their inhabitants leading, so we hear, a life of squalid wretchedness behind their stockades. But there are not so many of them as there were. Every now and then Ivan reports that another has been overrun, and that the triffids which surrounded it have dispersed to join other sieges.
So we must think of the task ahead as ours alone. We believe now that we can see our way, but there is still a lot of work and research to be done before the day when we, or our children, or their children, will cross the narrow straits on a great crusade to drive the triffids back and back with ceaseless destruction until we have wiped out the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped.
THE END