They tried to stop her on the staircase. On the fifth level, the fourth. She didn’t bother explaining or arguing. She just pushed past them and ran. Staircase after staircase, holding the banister, her feet flying. The floors below Four deserted, not even staff here now. Because the danger was too great.
Faster. Move.Every few steps took a second. Too many seconds wasted. Tooslow.
At the bottom of the stairs at last, and sprinting for the main doors. Outside, then, waving her arms and shouting.
“Tsunami! Tsunami! Get in the building and up the stairs! Go! Go! Tsunami!”She shouted like she was on the playground and a fight had broken out. She herded them like a sheepdog. Waving her arms, shouting, running.
More people farther ahead, standing on the walkway, still looking out to sea. She couldn’t stop for them. She couldn’t get to them, because there was no time. She was running for the doors again, shouting to the stragglers. “Run!Run!”
An old couple, the woman with a cane, moving much too slowly. She grabbed the biggest man around and said, “Carry her!”
“What?” He was older than she’d thought, probably forty-five, and staring at her like she was insane.
“Carryher!” she demanded. “We have to get up the stairs. You have to carry her!”
“I’ve got her,” another man said. He picked the woman up bodily, then said, “Putting you over my shoulder.” He did it, and Skylar saw the woman’s face, mouth open, eyes wide, upended below her helmet of curling silver hair. She was still holding the cane.
Skylar took the husband’s arm, gasped, “We’ve got to hurry,” and they were inside the glass doors at last. The man slowed, and Skylar said, “Up the stairs.Up.We have to get up.”
“Bad heart,” he said. “I need the elevator.”
“You’re going to have to climb anyway,” she told him. “No choice.”
How long had it been since the quake? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty? She didn’t know, and they weren’t even on Level 2 yet. The ceilings here soared so high, and there must be thirty steps just for this. The old man was faltering, they were falling behind, and Skylar grabbed his elbow more tightly and said, “I can’t carry you. This is for your life.Hurry.”
It happened just after they passed the landing and turned. One minute, the old man was gasping, wheezing. The next, there was a roar like nothing she’d ever heard, and something slammed hard into the building. The sound of glass breaking, and the smell.
Salt air. Mud. The faint scent of rot.
Screams from above, and the little group hurrying faster, Skylar and the old man trailing behind. A surge of people on the stairs above them. The ones who’d been on Four, now climbing higher.
No water reaching up here.We’re above it. We’ve made it.
Tsunamis come in waves.
She didn’t tell the old man to keep going. She had no breath left for that, and no thoughts left, either. She just climbed.
The roar of the tsunami was like nothing Zane had ever heard. A sickening sound. A terrifying sound. For long seconds, he thought it would reach them, that it would pluck them straight off the ground and out to sea.
They were still in the trees, but there was a break up ahead, wasn’t there? It was hard to tell, because it was almost full dark now. He was carrying the man from the car by this point, had him slung over his shoulder like a sack of coal. Around him, other players were doing the same. Kids carried in arms, a heavily pregnant women between two men who’d made a seat for her with their hands. All of them breathing hard, pure anaerobic effort now, their toes digging into the steep bank to let them put one foot in front of the other, pushing up the slope and through the trees.
They came out into the open at last to find a white fence with two rails, bordering a curving road. He set the old man on the other side of it, then climbed over himself, put his hands on his knees, bent from the waist, and breathed.
He had the fitness for this. It wasn’t that. It was the fear.
“Holy Christ.” That was Marko beside him, looking seaward, his eyes wide.
There was another wave out there. A wall of water, and the roaring was back.
“Up here!” somebody shouted. Eddie, being the coach, his arm going like a windmill. “Let’s go! Up here!”
A steep driveway, with a white house at the top. Zane wasgoing to pick up the man again, but he was turning, shouting, “Maribel! Where’s Maribel? My wife!”
Zane shouted, “Somebody else has her. I’m picking you up,” and did it.
He ran up that drive with the old man on his back and that roaring in his ears. He heard the sound lessening, knew the wave was receding, that they were well above it, and still he ran, the hair standing up at the back of his neck, the fear freezing his blood.
Tsunamis come in waves.
