Two of my senses (sight and hearing) were temporarily knocked out but my sense of smell remained intact. That sense almost immediately was, in turn, overwhelmed by the pungent stench of gasoline-laden soot filling the air. Now the military was using napalm, or jellied gasoline, on us! The jet had screamed low over the zombie-filled oval and dumped a single bomb, filled with napalm. (I didn’t get to see the billowing, black mushroom cloud it must have made.) Many of the undead were destroyed instantly. Others, a bit further from the massive blast, were ablaze, running in all directions like so many ancient torches. Still others, even further away, had been splashed by the jellied petrol and suffered serious burns (and were still smouldering). Was it one of ours – a Mirage – or had the Yanks already arrived with F4 Phantoms? I wasn’t sure if a French-made Mirage could deliver a napalm weapon. Napalm wasn’t much favoured by the Aussies in Vietnam but I knew that a Phantom could do the job. This was, of course, an idle speculation on my part since I’d seen precious little of the plane that had stooped out of the night sky and delivered ‘Hell-in-a-Tincan’ to us. It might as well have been a Tiger Moth or a Spitfire. I’d seen this sort of thing on newsreels from the Vietnam War. I confess that I had been more upset by the incineration of living men, women and children – mostly civilians – than by the horror that was now unfolding before me. Still, the high-pitched wailing of hundreds of incandescent zombies is something I’m unlikely ever to forget. Sight and hearing came back to me by degrees. The afterimage of the flash and the loud ringing in my ears were persistent. However, I soon had enough senses about me to continue to put ‘Plan B’ into effect. Poor Meryl had been a resident of St. Hilda’s college. She and a friend had shown me around the place – and generously invited me to partake of the college dinner with them. (Little wonder, now that I think about it, that I naively thought she might be romantically interested in me. But, no, she was just a nice, country girl being friendly.)
Nyns yw da genev fleghes drog.langbot langbot