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 had 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 now, 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 roads 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 over-all 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 had 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.
“And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity,”
he murmured.