Chapter Text
By the time Layla saw the triffid, it was too late.
Her luck, right up until that moment, had been exceptionally good. The place she’d found was what the British called a garden center and the Americans a nursery. Layla was neither of those nationalities and just called it a good place to get useful stuff. It was located in what had been, before the catastrophe, one of London’s more affluent suburbs. When she’d stumbled across it, she’d been astonished to find that it was locked up securely, with padlocks on the gates of the parking lot and a cheerful sign that read, Plants Don’t Need Sleep But Our Staff Do — Come Back Tomorrow!
She wondered briefly what had happened to the person who had put up that sign. Maybe it had been the owner, closing up alone after allowing the store’s employees to leave early to watch the amazing celestial firework display that had lit up skies across the planet that night. Perhaps that person had looked up at the night sky as he or she turned on the security system and locked the doors, stealing a moment to appreciate the eerie beauty of the green lights that had illuminated the world that night. At what point had they realized something was badly wrong — had they gone home and gone to sleep, and woken to perpetual darkness? Or had they remained awake long enough to be aware of the moment their vision started to blur and fade?
Whatever their fate had been, they’d never returned to open up the next day, and so here it was: a treasure-trove of tools and supplies, untouched two full years after the disaster, ripe for plundering.
Layla got off her motorcycle and pushed it right up against the outside of the fence. She looked up and down the street for either one of the two major sources of danger she was likely to encounter: triffids and other people.
Each presented a different kind of threat. The human population of London was only a tiny fraction of what it had been before the catastrophe, but there were still some people picking out an existence in the ruins of the old world. Supplies of all kinds were harder to come by now. People were steadily growing more desperate as the months passed, and Layla had found the safest approach was to avoid other survivors altogether.
Human beings were a rare sight in London these days, but triffids were unfortunately all too common. The plants were everywhere, dragging themselves along with that distinctive lurching gait on the stubby protuberances that grew from the base of their trunks. Triffids couldn’t move quickly – their top speed was about the same as the average person’s walking pace – but the sting that lashed out from the bulb located at the top of a triffid’s central stem was lightning fast and had a range of at least six feet. Those stings meant that even triffids which weren’t actively moving around were still a danger; they could hunker down and dig their roots into any patch of exposed soil and simply wait until some unfortunate person or animal came within range.
The street was empty, with no humans or triffids anywhere in sight. That was good, but the engine of her bike was noisy, and might have attracted the attention of anyone — or anything — in the area. She would have to work fast.
Layla shouldered her backpack and scaled the gates. The motorcycle helmet she was wearing made that harder than it would have been otherwise, but Layla was used to allowing for the extra bulk and weight of the helmet since she kept it on almost all the time when she was outside. A triffid sting at close range might crack the helmet’s visor but was very unlikely to penetrate it, making it an essential part of her gear. But there was a trade off: the helmet reduced her field of vision and muffled her hearing, making her less likely to perceive another human being sneaking up on her.
She swung her legs over the top of the gates, jumped down on the other side and jogged across the parking lot to the store entrance.
The doors were closed but slid open easily when she pushed them. She stepped inside the building. It was dim but not dark inside — there were large skylights in the roof, and although they were now heavily streaked with dirt and moss, a lot of light was still able to get through. The section nearest the entrance was gifts and fancy goods: scented candles and ornaments and soft toys. They were all sitting on shelves and in baskets, dusty and untouched, waiting for shoppers who would now never come.
She moved on, looking for the tools and equipment section. The back of the building opened out into a large courtyard filled with row upon row of overgrown shrubs as well as bulky pieces of garden furniture and other outdoor garden supplies. Although the courtyard was open to the sky, the overall effect was claustrophobic and maze-like. She walked past a section that was nothing but stacks of different types of fencing, and then a faded poster which advertised three-for-two on petunias, this week only.
At the very edge of the helmet’s visor, she saw something move.
She spun around. She had to twist her whole body to compensate for the blinkering effect of the motorcycle helmet. She didn’t see anything. It could have been a bird, she told herself, or a loose section of tarpaulin flapping in the wind. Then again, maybe it wasn’t.
She started to lift off her helmet to look again but hesitated, debating whether taking it off was worth the risk. The only access to the courtyard appeared to be from the building she’d just come out of, and she already knew the gates at the front were locked. A triffid couldn’t get in here but a person could climb the gates just as she had. That felt like the bigger risk.
She took the helmet off and clipped it to the loop on her belt which was there for exactly that purpose. Then she looked around. Nothing moved. She walked on cautiously, the bulky helmet swinging awkwardly at her hip.
At the back of the yard there was a triffid pen, filled with the desiccated remains of dead triffid plants. These had been mature specimens; each one was somewhere between six and eight feet tall with a woody trunk about as thick as a person’s arm. At the base, each plant had a swollen root ball, out of which protruded the three stubby sticks that gave the triffid its name and its unique ability to pull itself up from the soil where it had grown and drag itself about, swaying and lurching every time the front two sticks pushed forward and the back stick flexed to catch up with them.
At the top of each triffid there was a bulbous growth which looked a little like the giant bud of a flower but which was actually the plant’s sting. Inside the leafy sheath, a whip-like cord was coiled up tightly, the sharp thorns at its tip loaded with venom. When the triffid was ready to attack its victim, the outer leaves pulled back and the sting inside exploded out at astonishing speed. Without its sting, a triffid was a funny novelty, a plant that your children could play with. A triffid with its sting was a different proposition entirely.
The sign next to the triffid pen was faint but still just about legible:
Take a triffid home today!
A fun addition to any garden
Remember triffids must be docked annually to prevent sting regrowth
Not sure how to prune your triffid? Talk to one of our team
There was a display stand next to the triffid pen stacked with secateurs, clippers, triffid-sting pruners and what Layla was here for — blades for triffid guns. A triffid gun was basically a crossbow adapted to fire sharp metal discs rather than bolts; when used expertly they were incredibly effective at slicing through triffids’ stems. But the blades weren’t reusable, and Layla had run out.
Layla lifted all the packs of blades on the stand and put them in her backpack. She looked longingly at the knives but she didn’t have enough space in her bag to take them, too, and the blades were her priority right now. She’d find a place to hide them, she decided, so that she could come back for them later.
One of the withered triffids inside the pen moved.
It lurched toward her, trunk creaking and dry stalks rustling. Layla jumped back automatically, but she was in no danger. The triffid was trapped inside the pen and was almost dead. Even so, she saw the leafy covering around its stinger retract as it tried to attack her. The stinger didn’t lash out so much as unspool droopily, hitting the inside of the cage with a limp thwap. A couple of drops of venom oozed out and fell harmlessly onto the ground.
She breathed out in relief.
Then a noise behind her made her turn and – a fraction of a second too late – she saw the other triffid.
This one must have been wandering loose around the confines of the yard for the last couple of years, feeding on whatever small animals it had managed to sting and kill, and it was a much healthier specimen. Perhaps it had been the store’s own pet, allowed to roam around the aisles to amuse shoppers. Stalks with thick, fleshy leaves grew from its trunk, and the bulb which held its sting was round and fat.
She’d taken her helmet off, shit, shit –
She wasted a valuable half second fumbling with the clip holding the helmet to her belt before realizing she didn’t have time to put it on. The triffid swayed toward her in that ungainly, almost comical way they had of moving. It would have been ridiculous if the thing weren’t so fucking dangerous. She made to drop on to the ground — triffids usually aimed their stings at the heads of their victims, and the best chance of avoiding a sting at close quarters was to get down as fast as possible — but she was already too late. She heard the distinctive whip-crack sound of the plant’s sting lashing out at her. It hit her almost instantly.
Her last clear thought was that she’d survived the last two years, and now she was going to die because of two seconds of inattention.
She felt the impact on her forehead, and then the pain hit. Hot agony exploded across her eyes and face. She hit the ground and heard herself yell out; it felt weirdly remote, as if someone else was screaming in her voice.
She had to get away from the triffid, but she was blind now and had no way of knowing where it was. Triffids, of course, had no eyes – no one really knew how they located their prey, although whatever mechanism they used was effective, because they were somehow able to target their stings with accuracy.
She tried to crawl, but she was in searing agony and it was hard to make her arms and legs move. She was dimly aware that she was probably losing consciousness. That was her death sentence; if she passed out, the triffid would have time to replenish its venom sac and sting her again while she lay stunned, and then she’d be dead and all it would have to do would be to wait until her body had decomposed and it could use its stinger to gradually strip the rotting flesh off her corpse.
She heard another sound – footsteps. Not the scraping sound of a triffid dragging itself along, but human feet.
The footsteps stopped. She heard the snick of someone firing a triffid gun. There was a soft thunk as the top part of the triffid fell to the ground, and then a moment later a heavier thud as the lower section of its trunk toppled over.
“Shit, it got her.” It was a man’s voice; he had an American accent. He sounded as if he was talking to someone else, but Layla was sure she had only heard one set of footsteps. “Right in the face,” he said. “Fuck.”
Layla tried to speak but could only manage a whimper of pain. Her mouth and tongue were going numb; triffid venom was a paralyzing agent.
“No,” the man snapped, as if responding to something someone had said. Then, a second later, “Because it’s a fucking bad idea, that’s why not.”
There was molten lava in Layla’s eyes, she was sure of it. She tried to scream but the noise that came out was closer to a keening wail. She wanted to rip the skin off her face, because that couldn’t hurt any more than what she was already experiencing. She tried to raise her hands to do just that.
Someone caught hold of her wrists and gently but firmly restrained her. “Hey now,” said a different voice. “No tocar, si? You’ll make it worse.” The small and rapidly diminishing part of Layla’s mind that was still able to think rationally noted that there must be two people present, after all. The second man went on, “Now, what am I gonna do with you? Leave you here? Or take you back with me and piss off el jefe?”
Layla had thought that the pain couldn’t get worse, but somehow it was still intensifying, waves of unrelenting agony breaking over her, each one barely receding before the next arrived. She couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. Her entire being had collapsed into a single, white-hot point of pure, distilled pain.
It was unbearable, and then – mercifully – she passed out.
She woke up to pain and darkness.
Her face hurt. The pain was centered around her eyes; it felt to Layla as if her eyeballs had been removed and replaced by lumps of burning coal. She moved her head a fraction, and sharp bolts of hot agony shot out from her eye sockets, radiating through her skull. She gave an involuntary gasp and lifted her hands to her face. Her fingertips brushed against what felt like fabric, and she became aware that her face — most of the top half of her head, in fact — was swaddled in bandages. The pressure was its own kind of pain, but it also felt necessary, as if her head might simply explode without some kind of external binding to hold it together.
“Oh — no, no, don’t do that, please? Best not to touch, yeah?”
It was a man’s voice, a native Londoner by his accent. Layla turned her head automatically toward the speaker, but was rewarded with another burst of pain and nothing else. She couldn’t see anything.
She slowly lowered her hands from her face, and made a quick assessment of her situation, which was not good. She was injured, blinded by a triffid sting, and now entirely dependent on a stranger. If Layla had learned one thing since the world had ended, it was that strangers were not to be trusted.
“Where am I?” she asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.
“You’re safe,” the man said. “This is our flat. We’re up on the top floor, but the whole building’s completely triffid-proof. It’s been months since one of them got into the building, and even then it didn’t get past the traps on the ground floor.” He sounded proud as he told her that.
It was hard to concentrate on anything except the searing pain in her eyes and face, but Layla tried to push it away, at least enough to focus on what the rest of her body was telling her. She was lying down, flat on her back on something soft — so, a bed or a mattress, most likely. She tried to push herself up into a sitting position and found it more of a struggle than it should have been. She was weak; she had taken the full force of a triffid sting and the poison was still in her body.
Her efforts didn’t go unnoticed. “Do you want to sit up?” the man asked. “Would you like a hand?”
She wanted to refuse, but practicality won out over pride. “Yes. Please.”
She heard footsteps, and a moment later became aware of another person leaning over her. He was close enough that she could hear his breath and catch his scent; he smelled musky with male sweat but there were just enough underlying faint notes of soap to indicate that he made an effort to wash regularly. That was no small achievement among the survivors Layla had come across and she found herself feeling slightly reassured for no reason she could completely explain to herself.
“If you lift your arms, I’ll pull you up a bit, okay?” He hesitated. “I’ll try not to be too, um, intimate. I mean, if I am — if I touch you anywhere that’s not okay — you can say and I’ll stop, all right?”
“Okay,” she agreed, and raised her arms. She felt hands hold her firmly on either side of her body and a moment later she was sitting up, and something soft — a cushion or pillow — was being pushed behind her back.
“Here, have some water,” the man said. He pressed something cool and smooth into her hand, and when she lifted it a little, the end of a plastic straw met her lips. She sipped cautiously, and found it was indeed water. She drank more, not stopping until the bottle was empty.
“You saved my life,” she said when she had finished. “Thank you.”
“Oh no,” he said quickly, sounding embarrassed. “It wasn’t me. That was Marc. He brought you back here. I’ll get you some more water, okay?” He took the empty bottle from her hand and she heard footsteps move away from her, his feet tapping lightly against what sounded like a wooden floor. She heard cupboards opening and closing and then the soft glug-glug of water being poured. Either she was in a huge bedroom or – more likely – the bed was in a large open-plan living space. A moment later his footsteps became louder again as he came back. “I’m Steven, by the way. Steven with a V.”
“Nice to meet you, Steven with a V. I’m Layla with a Y.”
The man who had rescued her had been sighted — he must have been, in order to dispatch the triffid which had stung her so easily. She wondered if he had been the one to dress her wound and put on the bandages or if Steven had done it. The footsteps which she had heard crossing the room had sounded unhesitating and sure, but a blind man in a very familiar environment could move about with confidence. If she could just see him, she would know — but of course that was exactly what she couldn’t do.
There was nothing to do except be direct: “Steven, can you see?”
“Oh — yes.” The answer was a relief in one way — she was blind and vulnerable, and her chances of survival were much better if her rescuers were in the tiny minority of living human beings with sight. But, at the same time — she was blind and vulnerable, which meant she was, right now, completely dependent on strangers who had a huge advantage over her. If she couldn’t trust these men, about whom she knew nothing, then she could be in deep, deep trouble.
“Did you put these dressings on me?”
“That was me,” he confirmed. “I learned all my first aid from books, though. The bandages aren’t the neatest job, but they should stay on.”
“How bad is it?” she asked.
“Well, I won’t lie, it was a nasty sting,” Steven told her. “But the good news is, it looked to me like it hit you just above your eyes — you’ve got a vicious welt on your forehead. If it had caught you two inches lower, nothing I could’ve done would have made a difference. But Marc got you back here really fast, and I keep a stock of triffid anti-venom so I was able to get that into you straight away. And then I made sure to bandage you up quickly to keep the light away from your eyes.”
Layla listened and nodded. Steven had done exactly what you were supposed to do to minimize the risk of long term injury from a triffid sting. The venom made mammalian eyes vastly more sensitive to light; once the poison had penetrated the body, the action of natural sunlight would scar a human retina beyond recovery within hours. Once stung, the best chance a victim had of keeping their sight was to take the anti-venom and then avoid all exposure to light for the weeks it took for the poison to entirely break down.
Steven said, “I’m not a doctor or anything, but I think you were lucky, and we got the anti-venom into you fast, so chances are you’ll recover.”
Layla desperately wanted to believe he was right. But — “The anti-venom you gave me must be over two years old. Unless you’re about to tell me you’ve got the resources to make it.”
“I wish I did,” Steven said, “but I’m not a biochemist either.” He sighed. “Yeah, it’s all stuff from before. Marc must’ve cleared out the pharmacy counter in every branch of Boots in a five mile radius. Should still be good, though. You should keep the bandages on for as long as possible, though, to be safe. The longer you protect your eyes from light, the better your chance of not having any permanent damage. Honestly, I’d give it five or six weeks.”
What he was saying made sense, but Layla felt her heart sink. “All right,” she said. “Look, I’m going to be wiped out for a few days, but after that I can manage okay by myself. All I need is somewhere to stay until I’m back on my feet, and then I’ll go.”
“Go where?” Steven asked. “Are you with a group? I mean, we can take you back to them, if you’ve got people who are looking for you?”
Layla hesitated before answering. No one was looking for her — she’d been fending for herself, alone, since the beginning. She wanted to lie and tell Steven that, yes, people were looking for her, with the heavy implication that those same people might come after anyone who harmed her. The problem with that was that it was a lie which would be easily exposed, if he called her bluff by insisting on returning her to her non-existent friends.
“No,” she admitted at last. “There’s just me.”
“Then don’t be daft,” Steven said. “If you start wandering about out there by yourself while you can’t see, you’ll be triffid food in the first half hour. You’ll stay here until you’re all healed up, is what you’ll do.”
Was that what it sounded like – a generous invitation – or was he casually telling her that he wasn’t going to allow her to leave? Carefully, Layla said, “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not asking, I’m offering,” Steven said firmly. “We’ve got more than enough to feed another person.”
There was that plural again, Layla thought, recalling how he had described the place she now was as our flat. “How many of you are there?”
It should have been a straightforward question, but Steven seemed to have to think about the answer for a long time before he answered. Finally he said, “There are three of us. Me and Marc and Jake. Marc can be a moody so-and-so sometimes and Jake mostly keeps to himself, but we rub along together all right.”
It would be a lot harder to get away from three people than from one, if she needed to. “Shouldn’t you check with them before inviting me to stay?”
“Well, Marc shouldn’t have brought you back here if he wasn’t intending to be hospitable, now, should he?” Steven said. “And Jake doesn’t really mind what we do as long as we stay out of his way. I’ll talk to them,” he finished breezily. “It’ll be fine. Now, you should take these.”
Steven’s hand touched hers, and Layla felt her fingers being pulled open and what felt like a couple of tablets being placed in her palm. Then he gave her back the water bottle, which was now heavy and full again.
“What are they?” she asked.
“Just painkillers. Ibuprofen, nothing fancy. It won’t help much – but it’ll take the edge off. Help you rest.”
He fell silent. Layla let the tablets sit in her hand. She hadn’t heard him move away, which meant that he was probably watching her, waiting to see if she took them. What if they weren’t simply over-the-counter painkillers? What if he was drugging her into unconsciousness, or worse? She had no way to know. If she took the pills, she was trusting that he was telling her the truth. If she didn’t take them, she would be demonstrating very clearly that she didn’t trust him. And if that made him angry, right now she had few ways of protecting herself.
She raised her hand to her mouth and let the tablets fall into her mouth, then drank and swallowed.
“Very good,” Steven said approvingly. “Now you should try to get some sleep.”
Layla nodded and let her head fall back on the pillows at her back. She turned her bandaged face to one side and forced her tense limbs to relax, and slowed her breathing down. After a few minutes, she heard Steven’s footsteps moving away from her to some other part of the flat. When she could no longer hear him moving around, she quickly raised her hand to her mouth and spat out the tablets she’d been holding underneath her tongue. Then she slid them underneath the pillow, hiding the evidence.
They were probably just painkillers. But she had no way of knowing for sure.
She thought it would be impossible to sleep. Every time she moved her head even fractionally, hot jolts of pain sparked out from her eyes and along every nerve in her face. There was no doubt about it, without Marc’s intervention she’d be a corpse lying on the ground right now, with a triffid standing over her waiting for her body to decompose sufficiently for it to consume. And without the treatment Steven had given her, she’d be facing permanent blindness with all the implications that would have for her long term survival. As it was, six weeks from now she would be able to unbandage her eyes and see again. Her rescuers had helped her when they had no reason to, and she owed them her gratitude.
But — without her sight, she was trapped and dependent on people she didn’t know. It had been just over two years since the skies had lit up with green lights and the world had ended overnight in a paroxysm of blindness and panic and death. In Layla’s experience, the survivors were universally people who had seen and done terrible, brutal things to stay alive, and that included herself. She had no idea what these men were capable of.
She could hear the soft noises of Steven moving around, opening and closing cupboards and occasionally humming to himself quietly or murmuring indistinctly under his breath. He didn’t sound like anyone’s idea of a threat. Layla shifted on to her side, pulled her legs to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Finally, exhausted, she slept.
The next time Layla woke, it was to the sound of an argument going on somewhere nearby, and the argument was about her.
The voices were close, but not right next to her, which bore out her theory that her bed was in some kind of open-plan living space. She recognized Steven by his accent at once. He was speaking quietly but angrily, in marked contrast to the gentle tone he’d taken with Layla.
“Of course I told her she could stay here while she recovers!” he exclaimed, voice pitched low. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Right, off you go, then, and by the way watch out for that triffid and that triffid and also that one? Ooops, too late, sorry!’”
“You shouldn’t have offered.” The new voice was lower and gruffer than Steven’s, with an American accent. “She’s not our problem.”
“Then why did you help her, Marc?” There was a second of silence; Marc didn’t answer. “I’ll tell you why,” Steven went on: “You couldn’t stand back and watch her get killed. And I can’t just chuck her back out onto the street to be triffid food, either. So I reckon that makes us even. Anyway,” he concluded, “you brought her back here.”
“I didn’t,” Marc said. “I dealt with the triffid. She was alive; she had a chance. I was gonna leave her there. Jake was the one who put her in the van and brought her back.”
Snippily, Steven said, “Then maybe Jake should join us for this pleasant dinner time chat we’re having.”
“I hear my name, compadres?” The third man – Jake – sounded different again. His voice was lighter than Marc’s but lower than Steven’s and he had an accent that sounded Spanish or maybe Latin American to Layla. English was her second language and, although she was fluent in it, she wasn’t familiar with the nuances of every possible accent.
Steven said, “Marc says we have you to thank for bringing our guest back here.”
“What if I did?” Jake answered, and Layla could practically hear the shrug he was surely making as he said it. “La señorita needed help. She wouldn’t have lasted long if I’d left her there.”
“He’s right, Marc,” Steven put in. “She told me she’s not part of a group.”
“What if she’s lying?”
“She’s not lying,” Jake said. “I looked through her stuff. She’s got one bag with everything in it. You don’t travel like that if you’ve got a base to keep things safe. She’s a drifter.”
At that, Layla’s stomach clenched coldly. He had gone through her pack. This man, this stranger, had methodically examined her possessions, evaluating them and her. She felt sick at the thought.
“So you decided on a whim to bring her back here,” Marc said scathingly. “For chrissakes, Jake, could you think five minutes ahead for once in your goddamn life? What are we supposed to tell her when the bandages come off?”
“That’s weeks away,” Jake said. “You’ll figure something out.”
“Why is this my problem?”
“Because you’re the planner, jefe, not me. If you don’t need me for anything else, I’m leaving now. I’m not sticking around to get yelled at. Buenas noches.”
Layla didn’t hear footsteps or any other noises that might have indicated that someone had left the room – she must have missed it, because when Steven next spoke, it was clear that Jake had gone. In a conciliatory tone, he said, “Look, Marc – you saved her, Jake brought her back here and I told her she could stay. Seems to me we’ve all got to shoulder some of the blame. So we just have to deal with it, yeah?”
There was another short silence, and then finally Marc said, “We haven’t given ourselves a lot of choice.” He paused. “All right. She stays for now. But – we can’t trust her, Steven. We don’t know anything about her. She might be a threat.”
“She can’t see right now, Marc,” Steven pointed out. “She’s not that much of a threat, when she’s blind and we’re not.”
“Yeah, and triffids can’t see, either, but they’re still pretty damn dangerous,” Marc said sharply.
“All right,” Steven conceded, “point taken.”
No one spoke for a while. Layla heard the taps and clinks of dishes being cleared off a table. Then, abruptly, Marc said, “She can’t know about us.”
“I know that.”
“I mean it, Steven. She can’t find out. Nothing good ever happens when people find out.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know,” Marc answered, voice sharp with reprimand. “You don’t remember.”
“You always throw that in my face,” Steven replied, angry again. “It’s not my fault I don’t remember.”
“I’m not saying it’s your fault. It’s not. It’s just—“ Marc stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “We look after each other. Me and you and Jake. We’re the only people we can trust. That’s how it’s always been and that’s how it’s always gonna be. I know you’re lonely, stuck up here, never going out, so I’m just saying — don’t try to make this woman into something she can’t be. She can stay until she’s healed up, and then she has to leave, and she has to leave without ever knowing about us. Do you understand?”
There was another long pause. “Yes,” Steven said finally. “I understand.”
“Okay,” Marc said. “Good.”
That seemed to be the end of the conversation. Layla remained still and kept listening, but apart from the small noises Marc and Steven made as they moved around getting ready for bed, she heard nothing else.
Her thoughts were racing. Marc had saved her life but would have left her to fend for herself, blinded by a triffid sting, if Jake hadn’t intervened. And there was something that none of them wanted her to find out about them, Marc least of all.
After a while, the noises stopped and the flat became quiet. Some more time passed and Layla heard the faint snorts and snuffles which meant that one of her three rescuers snored. The other two, apparently, slept silently.
Eventually, so did she.