Having attended to our ablutions, I felt the need to rest again and to block out the intermittent roar of the ongoing slaughter outside. I was just too stuffed from what had been happening over the last week and more – and, anyway, we had nowhere else to go just at the minute. More than that, if I were to continue on, I couldn’t afford to think about the horror of recent and ongoing events – it was simply too overwhelming and sleep was the place to retreat from all that. David lapsed into a torpor with which I was now becoming familiar. Was it sleep? Was it another form of death? I awoke again in the afternoon, I think. The shooting was now very sporadic and the cries of the zombies were no longer audible. Still, we’d need to be here for at least a few days before it was safe to venture out – or so I guessed – and I would need to keep myself occupied. What to do next? Then I hit upon it: there was a pack of playing cards that Charles and Paul had left behind in their rush to exit. Today, I would try to teach David how to play poker. It was a game he’d once been good at – and had enjoyed. So, why not? Why not indeed? But first, I would catch up on world events. Yes, miraculously, I had managed to hold onto the transistor radio whilst effecting our escape from the battle. True, it was now a little battered – and smelled a lot of gasoline soot – but it still worked. (I hoped that the batteries had been relatively new because I had no replacements at hand.) “This is the BBC World Service,” the announcer intoned. (I was warming to that voice.) News that I wasn’t interested in came first but the ‘Battle of Melbourne Port” was the third item of the broadcast. The item confirmed a couple of things. The first was that the herding of the zombies into the uni campus – and their subsequent destruction there – had been entirely planned and was claimed to have been largely successful in its aim. (There was no mention of the soldiers who had been taken by the zombies during the battle.)
Da yw genev keun ha kathes.langbot langbot