Wyndham, John (18 page)

“Another coincidence? Or were they coming to see what had
happened to their pal?” asked Coker.

With only two more stops, one for food and the other for
fuel, we made good time, and ran into Beaminster about half-past four in the
afternoon. We had come right into the center of the place without having seen a
sign to suggest the presence of the Beadley party.

At first glimpse the town was as void of life as any other
we had seen that day. The main shopping street when we entered it was bare and
empty save for a couple of trucks drawn up on one side. I had led the way down
it for perhaps twenty yards when a man stepped out from behind one of the
trucks and leveled a rifle. He fired deliberately over my head and then lowered
his aim.

That’s the kind of warning I don’t
debate about. I pulled up. The man was large and fair-haired. He handled his
rifle with familiarity. Without taking it out of the aim, he jerked his head
twice sideways. I accepted that as a sign to climb down. When I had done so, I
displayed my empty hands. Another man, accompanied by a girl, emerged from
behind the stationary truck as I approached it. Coker’s voice called from
behind me:

“Better put up that rifle, chum. You’re all in the open.”

The fair man’s eyes left mine to search for Coker. I could
have jumped him then if I’d wanted to, but I said:

“He’s right. Anyway, we’re peaceful.”

The man lowered his rifle, not quite convinced. Coker
emerged from the cover of my truck, which had hidden his exit from his own.

‘What’s the big idea? Dog eat dog?” he inquired.

“Only two of you?” the second man asked.
Coker looked at him.
“What would you be expecting? A convention? Yes, just two of us.”
The trio visibly relaxed. The fair man explained:
“We thought you might be a gang from a city. We’ve been expecting them
here, raiding for food.”
“Oh,” said Coker. “From which we assume that you’ve not taken a look at
any city lately. If that’s your only worry, you might as well forget it. What
gangs there are, are more likely to be working the other way round—at present.
In fact, doing —if I may say so—just what you are.”
“You don’t think they’ll come?”
“I’m darned sure they won’t.” He regarded the three.

“Do you belong to Beadley’s lot?” he asked.
The response was convincingly blank.
“Pity,” said Coker. “That’d have been our first real stroke of luck in quite
a time.”
“What is, or are, Beadley’s lot?” inquired the fair man.

I was feeling wilted and dry after some hours in the driving
cab with the sun on it. I suggested that we might remove discussion from the
middle of the street to some more congenial spot. We passed round their trucks
through a familiar litter of cases of biscuits, chests of tea, sides of bacon,
sacks of sugar, blocks of salt, and all the rest of it to a small bar parlor
next door. Over pint pots Coker and I gave them a short r&um6 of what we’d
done and what we knew.

They were an oddly assorted trio. The fair-haired man turned
out to be a member of the Stock Exchange by the name of Stephen Brennell. His
companion was a good-looking, well-built girl with an occasional superficial
petulance but no real surprise over whatever life might hand her next. She had
led one of those fringe careers—modeling dresses, selling them, putting in
movie-extra work, missing opportunities of going to Hollywood, hostessing for
obscure clubs, and helping out these activities by such other means as offered
themselves.

She had an utterly unshakable conviction that nothing
serious could have happened to America, and that it was only a matter of
holding out for a while until the Americans arrived to put everything in order.
She was quite the least troubled person I had encountered since the catastrophe
took place. Though just occasionally she pined a little for the bright lights
which she hoped the Americans would hurry up and restore.

The third member, the dark young man, nursed a grudge. He
had worked hard and saved hard in order to start his small radio store, and he
had ambitions. “Look at Ford,” he told us, “and look at Lard Nuffield—he
started with a bike shop no bigger than my radio store, and see where he got
to! That’s the kind of thing I was going to do. And now look at the damned mess
things are in! It ain’t fair!” Fate, as he saw it, didn’t want any more Fords
or Nuffields—but he didn’t intend to take that lying down. This was only an
interval sent to Lry bim—one day would see him back in his radio store with his
foot set firmly on the first rung to millionairedom.

The most disappointing thing about them was to find that
they knew nothing of the Michael Beadley party. Indeed, the only group they had
encountered was in a village just over the Devon border, where a couple of men with
shotguns had advised them not to come that way again. Those men, they said,
were obviously local. Coker suggested that that meant a small group.

“If they had belonged to a large one they’d have shown less
nervousness and more curiosity,” he maintained. “But if the Beadley lot are
round here, we ought to be able to find them somehow,” He put it to the fair
man: “Look here, suppose we come along with you? We can do our whack, and when
we do find them it will make things easier for all of us.”

The three of them looked questioningly at one another and
then nodded.

“AM right. Give us a hand with the Loading, and we’ll be
getting along,” the man agreed.

By the look of Charcott Old House, it had once been a
for-died manor. Refortification Was now under way. At some time in the
past the encircling moat had been drained. Stephen, however, was of the opinion
tat he had successfully ruined the drainage system so that it would DII up
again by degrees. It was his plan to blow out such parts as bad been filled in,
and thus complete the reencirclement. Our news, suggesting that this might not
be necessary, induced a slight wistfulness in him, and a look of
disappointment. The stone walls of the house were thick. At least three of the
windows in the front displayed machine guns, and he pointed out two more
mounted on the roof. Inside the main door was stacked a smell arsenal of
mortars and bombs, and, as he proudly pointed out, several flame throwers.

“We found an arms depot,” be explained, “and spent a day
getting this lot together.”

As
I looked over the stuff I realized for the first
time that
the
catastrophe, by its very thoroughness, had been more merciful
than the things that would have followed a slightly lesser disaster. Had 10
or
15
per cent of the population remained unharmed,
it
was very
likely that little communities like this would indeed have found themselves
fighting off starving gangs in order to preserve their own lives. As things
were,
however, Stephen had probably made his warlike preparations in vain. But there
was one appliance that could he put to good use. I pointed to the flame
throwers.
“Those might be handy for triffids,” I said.
He grinned.
“You’re right. Very effective. The one thing we’ve used them for.
And,
incidentally, the one thing I
know
that really makes a triffid bear
it. You can go on firing at them until they’re shot to bits, and they don’t
budge. I suppose they don’t know where the destruction’s coming from. But one
warm lick from this and they’re plunging off fit to bust themselves.”
“Have you had a lot of trouble with them?” I asked. It seemed that they had
not. From time to time one, perhaps two or three, would approach, and be
scorched
away.
On their expeditions they had had several lucky escapes,
but usually they were out of their vehicles only in built-up areas where there
was little likelihood of prowling triffids.

That night, after dark, we all went up to the roof. It was
too early for the moon. We looked out upon an utterly black landscape. Search
it as we would, not one of us was able to discover the least pin point of a
telltale light. Nor could any of the party recall ever having seen a trace of
smoke by day. I was feeling depressed when we descended again to the lamp-lit
living room.

“There’s only one thing for it, then,” Coker said. ‘We’ll
have to divide the district up into areas and search them.”

But he did not say it with conviction. I suspected that he
was thinking it likely, as I was, that the Headley party would continue to show
a deliberate light by night and some other sign—probably a smoke column—by day.

However, no one had any better suggestion to make, so we got
down to the business of dividing the map up into sections, doing our best to
contrive that each should include some high ground to give an extensive view
beyond it.

The following day we went into the town in a truck, and from
there dispersed in smaller cars for the search. That was, without a doubt, the
most melancholy day I had spent since I had wandered about Westminster
searching for traces of Josella there.

Just at first it wasn’t too bad. There was the open road in
the sunlight, the fresh green of early summer. There were signposts which
pointed to “Exeter & The West,” and other places, as if they still pursued
their habitual lives. There were sometimes, though rarely, birds to be seen.
And there were wild flowers beside the lanes, looking as they had always
looked.

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 bill
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 need.
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
by-road, 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 bad me, for he shook his head us 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.

Another half hour or so passed, and then Coker arrived. He
had had no better luck than Stephen and I.

Back in Charcott Old House that evening we gathered again
around the map. Coker started to mark out new areas of search. We watched him
without enthusiasm. It was Stephen who said what all of us, including, I think,
Coker himself, were thinking:

“Look here, we’ve been over all the ground for a circle of
some fifteen miles between us. It’s clear they aren’t in the immediate
neighborhood. Either your information is wrong or they decided not to stop here
and went on. In my view it would be a waste of time to go on searching the way
we did today.”