But the other side of the picture was not as good. There were fields in which cattle lay dead or wandered blindly, and untended cows lowed in pain. Where sheep in their easy discouragement had stood resignedly to die rather than pull themselves free from bramble or barbed wire, and other sheep grazed erratically or starved helplessly with looks of reproach in their blind eyes.
Farms were becoming unpleasant places to pass closely. For safety’s sake I was giving myself only an inch of ventilation at the top of the window, but I closed even that whenever I saw a farm beside the road ahead.
Triffids were at large. Sometimes I saw them crossing fields or noticed them inactive against hedges. In more than one farmyard they had found the middens to their liking and enthroned themselves there while they waited for the dead stock to attain the right stage of putrescence. I saw them now with a disgust that they had never roused in me before. Horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created, and which the rest of us, in our careless greed, had cultured all over the world. One could not even blame nature for them. Somehow they had been bred—just as we had bred for ourselves beautiful flowers or grotesque parodies of dogs… I began to loathe them now on account of more than their carrion-eating habits—for they, more than anything else, seemed able to profit and flourish on our disaster…
As the day went on, my sense of loneliness grew. On any hill or rise I stopped to examine the country as far as field glasses would show me. Once I saw smoke and went to the source to find a small railway train burned out on the line—I still do not know how that could be, for there was no one near it. Another time a flag upon a staff sent me hurrying to a house to find it silent—though not empty. Yet another time a white flutter of movement on a distant hillside caught my eye, but when I turned the glasses on it I found it to be half a dozen sheep milling in panic while a triffid struck continually and ineffectively across their woolly backs. Nowhere could I see a sign of living human beings.
When I stopped for food I did not linger longer than I needed. I ate it quickly, listening to a silence that was beginning to get on my nerves, and anxious to be on my way again with at least the sound of the car for company.
One began to fancy things. Once I saw an arm waving from a window, but when I got there it was only a branch swaying in front of the window. I saw a man stop in the middle of a field and turn to watch me go by; but the glasses showed me that he couldn’t have stopped or turned: he was a scarecrow. I heard voices calling to me, just discernible above the engine noise; I stopped, and switched off. There were no voices, nothing, but far, far away the plaint of an unmilked cow.
It came to me that here and there, dotted about the country, there must be men and women who were believing themselves to be utterly alone, sole survivors. I felt as sorry for them as for anyone else in the disaster.
During the afternoon, with lowered spirits and little hope, I kept doggedly on, quartering my section of the map, because I dared not risk failing to make my inner certainty sure. At last, however, I satisfied myself that if any sizable party did exist in the area I had been allotted, it was deliberately hiding. It had not been possible for me to cover every lane and byroad, but I was willing to swear that the sound of my by no means feeble horn had been heard in every acre of my sector. I finished up and drove back to the place where we had parked the truck in the gloomiest mood I had yet known. I found that none of the others had shown up yet, so to pass the time, and because I needed it to keep out the spiritual cold, I turned into the nearby pub and poured myself a good brandy.
Stephen was the next to return. The expedition seemed to have affected him much as it had me, for he shook his head in answer to my questioning look and made straight for the bottle I had opened. Ten minutes later the radio ambitionist joined us. He brought with him a disheveled, wild-eyed young man who appeared not to have washed or shaved for several weeks. This person had been on the road; it was, it seemed, his only profession. One evening, he could not say for certain of what day, he had found a fine comfortable barn in which to spend the night. Having done somewhat more than his usual quota of miles that day, he had fallen asleep almost as soon as he lay down. The next morning he had awakened in a nightmare, and he still seemed a little uncertain whether it was the world or himself that was crazy. We reckoned he was, a little, anyway, but he still retained a clear knowledge of the use of beer.