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BLACKSBURG - The wind was blowing a gale and Nathan Spady had his hands pushed deep into the pockets of jeans as he walked through the near empty campus.
From a distance it was clear he was in a daze.
"One of my friends was killed. We know
in our heads that it has happened," the 18-year-old engineering student said.
"But it's hard to comprehend because it's so surreal. I'm just speechless ... You don't know what to feel."
Speechless or not, Mr Spady summed up the view of many people here yesterday morning as they awoke to confront the new reality that had besieged their university and their town.
Certainly he spoke for most of the students whose academic careers will always be marked by what happened on this beautiful campus; certainly he spoke for the long-term residents of Blacksburg whose town will now be synonymous with horror.
Norris Hall, the science building where Cho Seung-Hui shot and killed 30 people before turning the gun on himself, was still marked off with police tape as forensics experts continued their work inside.
The campus's two flags were flying at half-mast.
On the drill field, the expanse of well-trimmed lawn which Cho must have crossed on his way from the dormitory building where he killed his two first victims, the occasional jogger pounded past.
One wondered whether they, like Mr Spady, were simply trying to clear their heads.
"It's such a quiet little mom-and-pop town," said Tim Wade, 24, a graduate student, who also admitted to not having the words to describe the incongruity of what had taken place, what had been done by a fellow student.
Lucinda Roy, the director of the creative-writing programme in which the killer is thought to have been enrolled, described Blacksburg as a quiet place.
"The town is full of turkeys - statues of our mascot, the Hokie Bird, painted in garish colours - as if being a Hokie were not a sports metaphor but a way of life," she wrote in The New York Times.
"There's a 5ft-tall turkey just outside the bank; one near the police station; another in the parking lot of a Cleaner World, where I take my clothes. We have a sense of humour in Blacksburg - it's part of our charm."
That humour has given way to shock for many residents.
Mike Vaughan, a student originally from Baltimore, said things had only really started to sink in when he took a shower yesterday morning.
Mr Vaughan had been asleep in his room in the West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory when Cho entered and shot dead two people.
He said he had been told that the 23-year-old gunman had been a resident in the neighbouring dormitory.
Mr Vaughan's uncle lived two hours drive away and had offered to come and collect him but for now at least he was staying put.
"I've called my parents to let them know I'm all right," he said. "That was the first thing I did."
At the West End Market, a cafeteria popular with students close to the site of the first shootings, the manager, Becky Reed, was in floods of tears.
The evening before she had learnt that one of the cafeteria's former student workers, Ryan Clark, had been killed and then yesterday morning she awoke to the news that a current employee, Leslie Sherman, a second-year history and international studies student, was also among the dead.
"She was a wonderful person," Ms Reed said.
"When you needed a smile she was there."If anyone had reason to feel stunned yesterday, Derek O'Dell certainly qualified.
He had been in his German class in the Norris Hall building when Cho stormed in and opened fire.
Mr O'Dell estimated that he was fourth or fifth person hit.
As the gunman continued to fire and reload, Mr O'Dell, 20, crawled to the back of the classroom and stayed low.
"It was something surreal," he said, his shoulder bandaged.
"He did not say anything, that was what was strange. He was pretty good at reloading and was very methodical at shooting people. It looked like [he was using] a handgun."
Mr O'Dell, a biology student from Roanoke, said that at one point Cho left the classroom and he and others rushed to force the door shut.
When he returned and found the door jammed closed, Cho started firing through the door.
Mr O'Dell said that somehow he managed to keep the door shut with his foot without getting hit by the bullets.
Justin Bangerter, 20, a second-year student from Lynchburg, Virginia, said he had got up early to take a walk to a nearby pond to think about what had transpired.
"For me it's real, definitely real for me," he said.
"It's hard to deal with and it took me a while to realise just how big a deal it was.
First it was eight dead then it jumped to 22 and I was saying, 'Oh my God, now we're in the history books'."
- INDEPENDENT
