Just down the road, the University Café (not as popular as Tamani’s) was in better shape and so I cheerfully got into their cupboards and fridge to stock up on essential items. I took mainly stuff that was in tins and cans so that it would last. They had a stock of tinned hams and plum puddings, apparently left over from Christmas. Fine by me – so I took as many as I could carry in the back- pack I retrieved along the way. (Don’t ask me who was wearing it at the time – they weren’t going to need it again, I promise you.) I tried to encourage David to share the load with me – I even found another back-pack for him. But he was having none of it. Apparently, zombies don’t do the beast-of-burden thing. (A fact well worth remembering, I’m sure.) In any event, David was getting twitchy again. At first, I thought it must have been hunger (oh no!) but he was just bored. I offered him an apple that I had just swiped from the University Café. He snatched at it and threw it away in disgust. (What had I been thinking? Fruit? For a zombie?) So, I selected another from a nearby basket and bit into it. It wasn’t that fresh – it had been sitting around for over a week – but it was okay (and, unlike the pancakes, it didn’t make me throw up.) How to avoid going back to Union House – that was the pressing problem. Where would any self-respecting zombie prefer to go – other than a charnel house full of zombies (and one psychopathic cat)? Then it struck me: “Hey, Dave! Wanna go to the cemetery? You know, the big one that’s just near here?” He stopped twitching. That was a good sign. But did he know what I was talking about? Possibly, he did. Zombie intelligence is not an easy thing to understand – and, in David’s case, it was complicated by the fact (as I knew) that he could tap into my own mind to boost whatever wit he had been left with following his death. I was like a poorly connected hard-drive, I suppose (though hard-drives, external or otherwise, were unheard of at that time).
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