Free The Night of the Triffids by Simon Clark Page B

feet.
        By now I was taking the plane in long, twenty-mile circles around an invisible Isle of Wight below. I continued to soar upward, the engines howling. What little water remained on the canopy was scoured away by the six-hundred-mile-an-hour blast of air.
        Eighteen thousand feet.
        The altimeter raced, higher and higher figures rolling across the counter.
        I heard a small voice in my ear.
        'David… uhm, D-David… we came through it all right?'
        'The storm? Yes, no problems.'
        'We weren't struck by lightning?'
        'We were hit six times.'
        'Six?' His voice suddenly sounded strangled. ' Six ?'
        'Six,' I confirmed calmly. 'Don't worry. It made the instruments a bit lively. But because we weren't earthed there was no damage.'
        'Thank heaven,' he breathed.
        I couldn't see his face when I glanced back because of his helmet, visor and oxygen mask but I could see his head turning from left to right. Evidently he'd now mastered his fear enough to take an interest in his surroundings once more. 'How high are we, exactly?' he asked.
        'Coming up to twenty thousand feet.'
        'We should be nearing the top of the cloud any moment now.'
        'See anything?'
        'Not a dicky bird. And you?'
        'Nothing. I'll continue ascending.'
        'You'll be… uhm, able to find your way back?'
        'Don't worry, I'm in radio contact with the ground and they have us nice and square in their radar screen. We're directly above Winchester now.'
        'Winchester,' Seymour echoed. 'Good grief. My father was sports master at a school there. You know, he escaped the Blinding because he took a dive from a polo pony the day before the lights appeared in the sky. Knocked him cold for forty-eight hours.'
        I found myself warming to Seymour. The little dose of fear inculcated by our taking off in a thunderstorm had humanized him no end.
        'I'm banking to the right now,' I told him. 'That will take us south toward the coast again. How're you feeling?'
        'Fine, thanks. Well… a little queasy around the gills but I think it's passing.'
        A moment later the white numerals clicked past the twenty-five thou mark.
        'Seymour. Twenty-five thousand feet.'
        'I dare say we've found ourselves some record-breaking clouds, David. We should be… wait… just wait a moment.' His voice became hushed. 'I can see cloud shapes - we must be nearly above it.'
        I looked upward, searching for a milky glow of sunlight penetrating the cloud. There was nothing yet. Increasing the thrust of the twin Sapphire turbojets I climbed still higher.
        Twenty-six thousand feet… twenty-seven, twenty-eight.
         Any moment now, I told myself. Any moment we'd erupt into a vista of sunlight cascading onto a cotton-wool cloudscape.
        Thirty thousand feet: I pulled back the stick and piled on the power. Now the plane sat on its tail while hurtling straight up like a skyrocket.
        At thirty-three thousand feet we were free of the cloud.
        'Oh…' Seymour's voice in my earpiece was one of puzzlement, even disappointment.
        We'd left the cloud, but we'd found no light.
        At least, not the kind of light we'd expected.
        A profound transformation had been wrought upon the world.
        'What… I… I don't understand…'
        I was hearing Seymour's voice. But my attention was focused on the light in the sky.
        Imagine a dying ember. Imagine it just moments before the glow goes from the ash. There is a redness, but it is a dull, dull red that promises nothing but the dying of the fire.
        The light I saw reminded me of that kind of dying glow. For all I could see - from the edge of one horizon across the full arc of the sky to the next horizon - was that same musky red. It gave precious little illumination. And it looked cold. Even more deathly cold than