Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Author:John Wyndham [Wyndham, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Speculative
ISBN: 0449237214
Publisher: Penguin Uk
Published: 2008-09-19T14:30:00+00:00

I was woken by Alf coming in early the following morning. He was accompanied by a bigger, shifty-eyed man who fingered a butcher’s knife with unnecessary ostentation. Alf advanced, and dropped an armful of clothes on the bed. His companion shut the door, and leaned against it, watching with a crafty eye, and toying with the knife.

‘Give us yer mitts, mate,’ said Alf.

I held my hands out towards him. He felt for the wires on my wrists, and snipped them with a cutter.

‘Now just you put on that there clobber, chum,’ he said, stepping back.

I got myself dressed while the knife-fancier followed every movement I made, like a hawk. When I’d finished, Alf produced a pair of handcuffs. ‘There’s just these,’ he mentioned.

I hesitated. The man by the door ceased to lean on it, and brought his knife forward a little. For him this was evidently the interesting moment. I decided maybe it was not the time to try anything, and held my wrists out. Alf felt around, and clicked on the cuffs. After that he went and fetched me my breakfast.

Nearly two hours later the other man turned up again, his knife well in evidence. He waved it at the door.

‘C’mon,’ he said. It was the only remark I ever heard him make.

With the consciousness of the knife producing an uncomfortable feeling in my back, we went down a number of flights of stairs, and across a hall. In the street two loaded lorries were waiting. Coker, with two companions, stood by the tailboard of one. He beckoned me over. Without saying anything he passed a chain between my arms. At each end of it was a strap. One was fastened already round the left wrist of a burly blind man beside him; the other he attached to the right wrist of a similar tough case, so that I was between them. They weren’t taking any unavoidable chances.

‘I’d not try any funny business, if I were you,’ Coker advised me. ‘You do right by them, and they’ll do right by you.’

The three of us climbed awkwardly on to the tailboard, and the two lorries drove off.

We stopped somewhere near Swiss Cottage, and piled out. There were perhaps twenty people in sight, prowling with apparent aimlessness along the gutters. At the sound of the engines every one of them had turned towards us with an incredulous expression on his face, and as if they were parts of a single mechanism they began to close hopefully towards us, calling out as they came. The drivers shouted to us to get clear. They backed, turned, and rumbled off by the way we had come. The converging people stopped. One or two of them shouted after the lorries; most turned hopelessly and silently back to their wandering. There was one woman about fifty yards away; she broke into hysterics, and began to bang her head against a wall. I felt sick.

I turned towards my companions.

‘Well, what do you want first?’ I asked them.

‘A billet,’ said one.

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