by Peter Tonkin
FORTY
The major broke into a run. Miguel-Angel followed him and Robin brought up the rear. But it was suddenly quite difficult to keep on her feet because the floor was shaking as though they were experiencing a minor earthquake. ‘Too late,’ she called, but realized that the major was unlikely to have heard her above the gathering roar. ‘Major!’ she bellowed. He came to a stand outside the lift. The light was on. The arrow pointing down promised that the lift car was on its way from level ten. They hesitated, all of them watching the stately progress to level nine, then eight, seven … six … five. Level four …
The mudslide hit the front of the hospital. It was travelling at fifty miles an hour. It might not have weighed precisely the million tons Robin had described, but it was carrying within its first tall wave all of the timber and much of the concrete and brickwork from the two streets of houses it had destroyed on its way here. The steps in front of the hospital vanished in an instant. The windows of the lower storage areas exploded inwards and three underground levels filled almost instantaneously. The broken doors were swept aside with no hesitation. The foyer filled in a heartbeat. Semi-solid slurry burst into the flooded rooms and hallways. It smashed open the ground-floor lift doors and poured like molten magma into the shafts as it burst upwards out of the cellar. The whole building reeled like a boxer given a knock-out blow. The light on the lift went out. A massive roar came up the shaft as the air trapped within it became the plaything of the racing mudslide. The floor tilted so that the shuddering lift doors were at the bottom of a slight but decidedly downhill slope. The bed rolled out of the major’s shock-slackened grasp and its foot slammed into the bulging metal.
The noise was enough to shake all of them out of their stasis. ‘You two start helping your father up stairs,’ said Robin. ‘I’ll try to find a stretcher. If I can’t I’ll follow you up.’ She turned and ran along the corridor back to the ward, racking her brain trying to remember if she had seen anything that resembled a stretcher, or anything that could be used as one. She burst into the long, vacant room and started looking around. A tall cupboard by the window looked promising and she ran to that, thinking that even if there was no stretcher inside, the door itself would do if she could get it loose. She tore it open to reveal a pile of bedding. And as she did so she registered that what had appeared to be one six-foot door was two three-foot ones. ‘Useless!’ she shouted, turning. And as she did so, the building shook again. She glanced out of the window and gasped. The mud was piling up and up. The first wave of it had clearly been stopped by the lower floors, but more waves of increasingly massive earth were piling on top of the first one, forming an apparently solid brown storm surge armed with trees and house sections. She froze for a moment, realizing that the mud was going to burst in through the window any minute now. That the hospital was never going to stand against such a massive onslaught. But then she saw something that gave her hope after all. She saw Richard’s plan. For there in the lower sky, close enough for her to see a tall, familiar figure standing behind the two pilots in the nacelle, Dragon Dream was sailing sedately into the maelstrom.
Forgetting all about stretchers, she turned and ran back to the stairwell. The whole building shuddered again. There was a huge crash as the window came in. The stairs in front of her leaned backwards at an even crazier angle. She threw herself up them at a flat run, keeping her right hand sliding up the banister in case the odd angle made her trip and fall. Six levels up she caught up with the Guerreros, who were making ruthlessly good progress with the major in charge. Señor Guerrero was in the middle with his sons under each arm, half carrying him. An innate sense of decency kept Robin a few steps back because there had been no chance to wrap the patient in a sheet and his back-fastening hospital gown was not designed to protect his modesty. ‘Couldn’t find a stretcher,’ she called.
‘Never mind,’ puffed the major. ‘Only level ten to go, then the roof. But we’re slowing you down. You want to squeeze past?’
‘No. I’ll stay here. That way, if anything goes wrong at least your father will have a soft landing.’ Both of his sons laughed breathlessly. The father groaned. The hospital reeled and started screaming. There were two massive rushes of reverberation as the big lift cars broke loose, plunging down to smash into the surface of the mud on level three. The physics of their destruction forced air through the rubber seals on the doors that were still closed. The howling shrieks were unnerving as well as deafening. The stairs reeled, groaning, and the three Guerreros fell backwards.
Robin just had time to grab on to the hand rail as tightly as she could before the bodies crashed into her. She was hit first by the slight Miguel-Angel, the back of whose skull clubbed her forehead with stunning force. Then the father crashed into the pair of them. Robin felt a sharp pain in her left knee. No sooner had it registered than it was made a great deal worse by the major’s arrival. A scream rang out and, for a disorientated moment, Robin thought it must have been her. But no. It was Señor Guerrero, who took the full weight of his solid elder son on his damaged hip. But Robin’s determined stance saved them. The banister groaned. So did Robin, feeling the full weight of them crushing her. The stairwell lurched again, throwing their combined weight forward. The three men somehow linked up once more and stumbled onwards on to level ten. Robin swung upright and stepped up in their wake. This time she did scream. Her knee gave out and she tumbled on to her face, compounding Miguel-Angel’s Glasgow Kiss headbutt with the edge of a tread. But in among the cacophony all around, her cry of agony was lost. The Guerreros vanished round the corner on to the top level. She reached for her walkie-talkie but it was gone – probably while the Guerreros were piled on top of her, she thought.
Robin took a deep breath, shook her reeling head, crawled sideways and pulled herself up on the far-side banister. Using it as a crutch to support her damaged leg, she staggered on upwards once again. She was surrounded by the increasingly overpowering sounds of timbers groaning and shattering, light fittings dropping and smashing, concrete beginning to fracture, marble and tile to shatter. Rain beat against those few windows which had not broken. Water cascaded everywhere. And in the background, reverberating in a bass note so deep it could be felt as well as heard, the relentless mudslide sought to tear the building apart and bury it.
Robin reached level ten and looked around, still dazed. At the far end of a corridor, the major was just pushing his father up into a staircase that was clearly so narrow they needed to take it one at a time. ‘Major!’ Robin bellowed. But as she spoke, the whole level slammed down by more than a metre, as though the top half of level nine had just vanished. The major disappeared. Robin fell forward and just had the presence of mind to land with all of her weight on her undamaged knee. She looked around for something to support her. And there, just within reach, was a portable commode consisting of a chamber pot on a metal frame that made a rudimentary chair. It was about the same height as a Zimmer frame. She grabbed it, pulled herself stiffly and unsteadily on to her feet, put as much of her weight on it as she could and began to shuffle forward. ‘You’re a robin,’ she said bitterly to herself. ‘Pity you can’t bloody fly.’ Suddenly the mudslide which had been trying to kill her decided to help her. The corridor leaned sideways so that she and her makeshift walker were abruptly proceeding downhill. It was a big help, and she arrived at the door through which the major had vanished just in time to see him step out of a doorway at the top of a narrow flight of steps that clearly led to the roof.
Robin let go of the lifesaving commode and pushed herself into the narrow stairwell. Because of the angle of the building, she was able to put most of her weight on her right shoulder and pull herself upwards without having to rely on her damaged knee. But the increasing angle of the stairwell, though it was helping her, also made it brutally obvious that the hospital was falling over increasingly rapidly. Richard’s madcap scheme to get people off the roof was likely to be history now. The hospital’s top, like the stairwell leading
up to it, would be falling sideways increasingly rapidly. Robin simply could not believe that the beautiful dirigible would still be close enough to help the last survivors with the hospital beginning to come apart beneath her.
And yet Robin refused to give up hope; simply would not stop. ‘“The impossible we perform at once,”’ she quoted from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer, saying the words aloud, unable to hear them among the sounds of the dying hospital. ‘“Miracles take a little longer …”’ Icy water dashed into her face, shocking her into full wakefulness. The doorway stood in front of her like a still from a German Expressionist film where everything was shot at odd angles. She pushed herself up through the last few steps and fell out of the doorway on to the roof. The rain that had woken her now tried to knock her senseless again, pounding down on her as forcefully as the back of Miguel-Angel’s skull. She began to pull herself up but her knee gave out. ‘Where’s your commode when you really need it?’ she asked herself dreamily, looking around. The whole rooftop was sloping downhill at an increasing angle. Halfway down the slope, the nose of the massive dirigible Dragon Dream miraculously still nestled against the asphalt roofing. There was even a ramp leading up into an open hold and, as Robin watched, the Guerreros staggered up it into the dry security of the huge airship’s interior. Helping them to safety were the familiar figures of Richard and Dr Potosi.
Robin pulled herself up once more and stood, like Long John Silver, one-legged but lacking a crutch. The fictional pirate – a childhood hero of hers – had been able to move quite easily on one leg, and it occurred to her that she might simply hop to safety. But the slope of the roof fooled her once more and she fell forward on the first attempt, skinning her hands on the rough roofing. Increasingly wildly, she rolled over and sat up, trying to work out whether she could skid down the slope like a child on a playground slide. But the roughness of the asphalt made any hope of it impossible. The roof lurched again. Dragon Dream moved several metres closer, keeping in contact with the increasing incline. ‘Help!’ she screamed at last. ‘Richard! Help!’ But Richard was in close conference with Major Guerrero, not that he could have heard her over the sounds of the rain, the flood, the mudslide and the destruction of the building. It was at this point that she began to understand the bitter truth: she was going to die with the hospital. But still she would not give up. With her bad leg sticking straight out behind her, she began to crawl forward on all threes. But this too was spoiled by the slope. She had moved perhaps two metres before she crashed forward, skinning her already battered forehead. She rolled over and sat up, her mind racing, feeling the roof beginning to tilt more rapidly, like a sinking ship going into its final death-dive.
Then she looked up and saw Richard running across the slope towards her. For an instant, she thought Dragon Dream was at last lifting off behind him. But then she realized that the airship was not lifting. The pilot was holding it hovering exactly in place. The hospital was finally falling. ‘Go back!’ she yelled. ‘It’s too late! Richard, go back!’ But still he pounded towards her, sure-footed in spite of the increasing unsteadiness of the toppling roof. She closed her eyes, feeling hot tears burning on her cheeks amid the numbing chill of the downpour. But what about the twins? She thought numbly. Desperately. What will the twins do if we both die here?
‘Here we go, old girl,’ came Richard’s voice, deep and calm, as always. She opened her eyes and he was standing immediately in front of her, his blue eyes dazzling in the dullness of the stormy afternoon. He must have jumped out of Dragon Dream and dashed across the roof to be with her in extremis, she thought. He stooped and caught her under the arms, pulling her erect and holding her in the tightest bear hug she had ever experienced, and which she returned with interest, for it was the last embrace they would ever share, she realized. He was too late. The roof gave way and they were both falling as the hospital was swept under the countless tons of mud that had once been Nic Greenbaum’s lovely Dahlia Blanca estate. Robin had a moment of dream-like weightlessness, during which she thought that, after all they had been through, it was strangely appropriate that they should die in each other’s arms. She opened her eyes and looked over his shoulder at the huge forepeak of Dragon Dream hanging in the sky seemingly just above them. So close, she thought, and yet so far.
Then their wild tumble was brought up short with a jerk that nearly tore her arms out of their sockets, and she realized that Richard was joined to the massive dirigible by a long line clipped to a safety harness. Wrapped around each other in an unbreakable embrace, they swung safely above the rearing waves of the mudslide as it rolled over the ruin of the hospital and on down the hill. ‘A trick I learned from a bloke named Raoul,’ said Richard. ‘He used to jump out of choppers into stormy seas for a living.’
‘You sod,’ she said tremulously. ‘I thought you were willing to die for me!’
‘And so I am, darling,’ he said sincerely. Then he grinned and added, ‘Just not today! One way or another, we still have far too much to do.’
‘Right!’ she answered. ‘Then let’s get me back into the warm and dry aboard your bloody ark, then do the same for everyone else we can find in this godforsaken place, shall we?’
