Of cause (?) Codswallop had strong feelings that Valiant her daughter was inside the fire somehow and also somehow alive but since she (Codswallop) was not any kind of fire fighter and lacked specialist equipment she could only sit on the charred pavement outside and weep in the soft rain of ash that was falling and softly falling, her tears a weak radio signal, a nothing, a distress flare, a silent metronome, a waterfall, a waterfall, and an emptying out of the grief what probably should have come long before.

*

Inside the burning structure Valiant and Plaster meanwhile found they could not hardly run no further, so bad and thick with tumult was that air, and so dark and hot it was down there where all the safety systems flickered and no backups in place. They had been calling for Broth and Suzette but to no end/no success. And Valiant thought to herself again, for the second time ‘Oh this is surely the place of my death, this must be surely the place of my death, here my body will surely nourish the children of the Ghouls’. And indeed, of all the many possibles it seemed at that moment as if that scenario was the one most likely to prevail.

Finally, too out of breath to run further and too scared to watch the flames advancing toward them, the 2 girls barricaded themselves inside a small building or structure as lay close to where they’d stopped, an inadequate shelter nestled against a mighty pillar that ascended to the Wheel of Misfortune. From without it was just like basic portacabin/prefab and from within it had the appearance of some temporary builders’ office or whatever with coat hooks, store for boots and hard hats, electric heater, shit desktop computer, fluorescent lights that no longer functioned, two filing cabinets, papers here and thereabouts, the latter of which Valiant used to stuff the cracks around doorways and windows as a guard against the toxic smoke. The very air in there was heat, the crashing sound around them from outside already all but unbearable.

Anyway. It was there in the office, doors sealed as best they could be, that Valiant thought to try the phone on the desk, thinking she might speak to someone in Olympia, or just speak to anyone at all, but the phone was not working it was only the sound of the fire on the line, the flames cracking in the earpiece, the burning and turning. And now she thought to herself for the third time and spoke aloud into the phone ‘Oh this. This is surely the place of my death. Here my body will surely nourish the children of the Ghouls’. But the fire gave no answer. Or none in her language. Only the cracking and the burning and the turning and she replaced the receiver.