Unperturbed, David shook it off, sidestepped and deftly struck out with the hockey stick. The beast was gone. One blow from David was all it had taken. Now the auditorium was cleared of them. Only their corpses remained, sprawled here and there – and none of them looked like they would be moving about again any time soon. Quickly, he and I summoned one or two of the students who had lingered timorously at the exits – and there really were only one or two. The rest of the students were still running, we supposed. Together, we gathered five of the victims who seemed still to be living and carried their bloodied bodies to the Baillieu Library. It had not been a deep wound, David’s wound. It did not even require a stitch. But it had been enough to pass on the infection. And so, here he lay, a hero whose actions had saved the lives of some of those who now wished to cast him outside before he, too, ‘changed’. Fear trumps gratitude every time. “Not long now, Mate,” I whispered and mopped his brow again. Where had it come from, this infection? Short answer: I don’t know. This is not part of the story that I can tell – but I can tell you what I know and let you puzzle over it yourself. As we sheltered in the dubious protection of the Baillieu Library, we accessed a fairly beaten-up black and white TV that we found in the Head Librarian’s office. (Obviously, the library’s budget didn’t yet run to purchasing one of those expensive, new-fangled colour TV’s.) When we first tuned in, nothing of note. Everything was normal as far as the TV broadcasters were concerned – all the usual programmes: cooking, old movies, chat shows, cartoons – completely uninterrupted. There was no newsflash until over an hour after the creatures had burst in upon us in the French lecture. Then the first newsflash: sketchy and delivered in a jocular fashion by a disbelieving newsreader who concluded: “...Hey! Is this April Fools’ or what?!”
Res o dhymm leverel nebonan.langbot langbot