John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids

I looked at Josella.

She was not crying at all. She looked from me down to David, asleep in her arms.

“I’ve all I really need,” she said, “and someday you’re going to bring us back to the rest, Bill.”

“Wifely confidence is a very nice trait, darling, but— No, damn it, no buts—I am going to bring you back,” I said.

I got Out to clear the debris from the front of the half-track and wipe the poison from the windshield so that I should be able to see to drive, on and away across the tops of the bills, toward the southwest.

And there my personal story joins up with the rest. You will find it in Elspeth Cary’s excellent history of the colony.

Our hopes all Center here, it seems unlikely now that anything will come of Torrence’s neo-feudal plan, though a number of his seigneuries do still exist, with their inhabitants leading, so we hear, a life of squalid wretchedness behind their stockades. But there are not so many of them as there were. Every now and then Ivan reports that another has been overrun, and that the triffids which surrounded it have dispersed to join other sieges.

So we must think of the task ahead as ours alone. We believe now that we can see our way, but there is still a lot of work and research to be done before the day when we, or our children, or their children, will cross the narrow straits on a great crusade to drive the triffids back and back with ceaseless destruction until we have wiped out the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped.