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 hard 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 mantelshelf 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 had 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 encroaching from the Heath on the other. Now there was this sickness, too. And, when all was said and done, I had 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.