They were depending on her, Morag thought despairingly. So what was new? The entire island depended on her-when often all she wanted to do was wail.
This was an earthquake. This was truly scary. Who did she get to tremble on?
No one. Ever. She swallowed and fought for calm and for sense.
‘Hubert’s right. Mild earth tremors are nothing to worry about.’ She put Robbie gently aside and ruffled his hair. ‘Robbie, you know I need to go.’ She sent him a silent message with her eyes, saying she was depending on him.
And Robbie responded. He’d learned from birth what was expected of him as the doctor’s kid, and he rose to the occasion now.
‘Do you really have to go?’ he asked.
‘You know that I do.’
‘Can I come with you?’
‘It’d better if you stayed here for a bit.’
He took a deep breath. He really was the best kid. ‘OK.’ Elspeth got a hard hug. ‘I’ll look after Elspeth if Mr Hamm looks after me.’
‘Is that OK with you, Mr Hamm?’ she asked, and Hubert flashed her a worried look.
‘It’s fine by me, girl, but you-’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘You know, the first quake is usually the biggest,’ Robbie volunteered. It really hadn’t been a very big shake and it was already starting to recede to adventure rather than trouble. ‘I read about them in my nature book. There’s not likely to be another bigger one. Just little aftershocks.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘Maybe a bigger one’d be cool.’
‘No,’ Morag said definitely. ‘It wouldn’t be cool.’
‘Or maybe this was a ginormous one out to sea and we just got the little sideways shocks a long way away,’ he said, optimism returning minute by minute.
‘Well, that’d be better,’ Morag conceded, thinking about it. ‘With the closest land mass being the mainland three hundred miles away, there’s not much likelihood of any damage at all. Mind, a few dolphins might be feeling pretty seasick.’
Robbie chuckled.
And that was that.
The earthquake was over. Even Elspeth started to wag her tail again.
But she still had to check the village.
Robbie’s chuckle was a good sound, Morag thought as she started down the scree. She’d worked hard on getting that sound back after his mother had died and now she treasured it. It was a major reason she was here, on this island.
Without a life.
Who was she kidding? She had a life. She had a community to care for. She had Robbie’s chuckle. And she had flying teapots to check out.
But it didn’t stop her mind from wandering.
Even though she lived in one of the most isolated places in the world, there was little enough time for her to be alone. She had so many demands made on her. If it wasn’t her patients it was Robbie, and although she loved the little boy to bits, this time scrambling down the scree when she wasn’t much worried about what she’d find below was a time to be treasured.
She liked being alone.
No, she thought. She didn’t. Here she was seldom by herself, but alone was a concept that had little to do with people around her.
She liked being by herself for a while. But she didn’t like alone.
Always at the back of her heart was Grady. The life she’d walked away from.
There was no turning back, but her loss of Grady was still an aching grief, shoved away and never allowed to surface. But it was always there.
He’d written her the loveliest letter when Beth had died, saying how much he missed her, offering to take her away for a holiday, offering to organise things in Sydney so she could return, offering everything but himself.
She’d taken the letter up to the top of the lighthouse. There she’d torn it into a thousand pieces and let it blow out to sea.
Enough. Enough of Grady. She hadn’t heard from him for four years.
Concentrate on need.
Surely an earthquake was worth concentrating on.
Two hundred yards down the path she paused. The closer she came to the village the more it looked as if there was no damage at all.
Hubert really did treasure his isolation. The path up to his cottage was little more than a goat track on the side of a steep incline. She could stand here for a moment with the sun on her face, look out at the breathtaking beauty of the ocean beyond the island and wonder how she could ever dream of leaving such a place. It was just beautiful.
The sea wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
She blinked for a moment, thinking her eyes were playing tricks. The tide’s a long way out, she thought inconsequentially, and then she thought, No, it’s a crazy way out. The beach was normally twenty or thirty yards wide but now…the water seemed to have been sucked…
Sucked.
A jangling, dreadful alarm sounded in her head as her eyes swept the horizon. She was suddenly frantic. Her feet were starting to move even as she searched, hoping desperately not to see…
But she saw.
There was a long line of silver, far out. She thought she was imagining it at first-thought it must be the product of dread. Maybe it was the horizon.
Only it wasn’t. It was a faint line beneath the horizon, moving inexorably closer. If it hadn’t been such a calm, still day she might not have seen it at all, for in deep water it was only marginally above the height of a biggish swell, but she was sure… There was a boat far out and she saw it bucket high-unbelievably high-and then disappear behind a wall of water.
No.
The villagers were out of their cottages. She could see them. They were gathering in the street beyond the harbour. They’d be comparing notes about damage from the tremor, fearing more. They wouldn’t be turned toward the sea.
She was running now, racing up the goat path. She’d never moved so fast in her life.
At least she knew what needed to be done. This place had been the graveyard for scores of ships in the years since the first group of Scottish fishermen had built their homes here, and the islanders were geared for urgent warning. The track she was on overlooked the entire island. There were bells up here, set up to make the villagers aware that there was an urgent, life-threatening need. At every curve in the track-every couple of hundred yards-there was a bell, and every island child knew the way to be sent to Coventry for ever was to ring one needlessly.
Morag knew exactly where the closest one was, and her feet had never moved so fast as they did now. Seconds after she’d first heard her own mental alarm bell, she reached the closest warning place and the sound of the huge bell rang out across the island.
This wasn’t a shipwreck. It was the islanders themselves who were in deadly peril.
They’d have to guess what she was warning of. ‘Guess,’ she pleaded. ‘Guess.’
They heard. The islanders gathered in the street stilled. She saw them turn to face her as they registered the sound of the bell.
She was too far away to signal danger. She was too far away for her scream to be heard.
But there were fishermen among the villagers, old heads whose first thoughts went to the sea. They’d see a lone figure far up on the ridge ringing the bell. Surely they’d guess.
Maybe they’d guess?
She stood on the edge of the rocky outcrop and waved her arms, pointing out to sea, screaming soundlessly into the stillness. Guess. Guess.
And someone responded. She saw rather than heard the yell erupting-a scream of warning and of terror as someone figured out what she might be warning them about. Someone had put together the tremor and her warning and they knew what might happen.
Even from so far away, she heard the collective response.
People were yelling for their children. People were grabbing people. People were running. A mass of bodies was hurling off the main street, scrabbling for the side streets that led steeply out of town.
She could see them but she could do nothing except go back to
uselessly ringing her damned bell.
People were stumbling, stopping to help, to carry…
‘No,’ she was screaming, helpless in the face of the sheer distance between here and the town. ‘Don’t stop. Don’t stop.’
She could see their terror. She felt it with them.
And she could see the smaller and smaller distance between the islanders and the great wash of water bearing down.
‘Run. Run.’
The wall of water was building now as it approached land. It was sucking yet more water up before it. The shore was a barren wasteland of waterless emptiness.
And Morag could do nothing. She could only stand high on the hill and watch the tsunami smash toward the destruction of her people.
There was a soft, growing rumble. Louder…
Then it hit.
She watched in appalled, stupefied fascination as the water reached the shore. There were dull grating sounds as buildings ground together. Sharp reports as power poles snapped. It was a vast front of inrushing water, smashing all before it in a ghastly, slamming tide, the like of which Morag had never begun to imagine.
And there was nothing to do where she stood but watch.
Maybe she could have closed her eyes. She surely didn’t want to see, but for the first awful seconds her eyes stayed open.
She saw the tiny harbour surge, boats pushed up onto the jetty, houses hit, the water almost to their eaves. Dear God, if people were inside…
She saw old Elias Cartwright open his front door just as the water hit-stubborn old Elias who’d consider it beneath his dignity to gather outside with the villagers just because of a mere earth tremor…
The water smashed and that was the last Morag saw of Elias.
It was then that she closed her eyes and she felt herself start to retch.
She kept her eyes closed.
Closed.
This was safe. Here in the dark she could tell herself she was retching for nothing. It was a dream-a nightmare-and soon she’d wake up.
But there was no line separating dream from reality.
The sun was still warm on her face. One of the island goats was nudging her arm in gentle enquiry. The world was just the same.
Only, of course, it wasn’t. When she finally found the courage to open her eyes, the tiny Petrel Island settlement was changed for ever.
The houses nearest the harbour were gone. The harbour itself was a tangle of timber and mud and uprooted trees.
Devastation…
Her first thought flew to Robbie.
She looked upward to Hubert’s place and the old man was staring down at her, her horror reflected in the stock-still stance of the old man. She was two hundred yards away but his yell echoed down the scree with the clarity of a man with twenty-year-old lungs.
‘I’ll take care of the lad. We’ll watch the sea for more. Robbie and I’ll stick with the bell and not leave it.’
She managed to listen. She managed to understand what he’d said.
Hubert and Robbie would watch to warn of another wave, she thought dully. And in offering to take care of Robbie, she knew what Hubert was saying she should do.
She was the island’s only doctor. The islanders looked to her for help. For leadership.
She had to go down.
CHAPTER THREE
‘NOTHING ever happens in this place.’
Dr Grady Reece played with his mug of coffee and stared at the pieces on his chessboard. He’d beaten Dr Jaqui Ford three times and she’d beaten him five.
He was going out of his mind.
The weather was perfect, and that was half the trouble. Enough rain meant no bushfires. No wind meant no dramas at sea. They were out of the holiday season so people weren’t doing damned fool holiday things. Which meant Air-Sea Rescue was having a very quiet time.
‘Aren’t you glad?’ Jaqui enquired.
‘Why should I be glad? I joined the service for excitement.’
‘So you like people killing themselves?’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ he growled. ‘You know very well that I try my damnedest to stop people killing themselves. And you live on adrenaline just as much as I do.’
‘Yes, but I have had a life,’ Jaqui said mildly. ‘Husband, kids, dogs. I come here for some peace. Yeah, I like the adrenaline rush of thinking we might be saving someone, but for the rest…work is my quiet time.’
Grady smiled at that. Jaqui was in her mid-fifties and was a very competent doctor. She’d only just undertaken the additional training to join Air-Sea Rescue, but already the tales of her tribe of hell-raising adult sons were legion. Everyone knew why Jaqui thought rescuing people in high drama was a quiet life.
‘No, but you,’ Jaqui said insistently. ‘You can’t depend on this for your excitement. Maybe you need kids of your own.’
‘To provide me with drama? I don’t think so.’
‘So you’re not into families?’ Jaqui was probing past the point of politeness, but Grady’s associate was no respecter of boundaries.
‘Not interested,’ Grady growled, hoping to shut her up.
It didn’t.
‘You’re not gay?’
That got a grin. ‘What do you think?’
‘You never know these days,’ Jaqui said, moving her bishop with a nonchalance that told Grady she was hoping he might not notice she was threatening his queen. ‘Someone once told me you can detect gayness if a man wears one earring, but my sons wear one, two or sixteen, depending on how the mood takes them. As they also seem to have one, two or sixteen girlfriends, depending on how the mood takes them, who would know anything at all? So…’ She sat back and subjected him to intense scrutiny. ‘Not gay. Not seriously involved. There’s never been a woman who looked like being long term?’
‘Cut it out.’
‘Max told me you were really smitten once. A lady called Morag.’
Max was their pilot. Max talked too much.
‘Morag and I went out for about a month. Four years ago.’
‘Was that all? I thought it was serious.’
Maybe it was, Grady thought ruefully. He’d hardly thought through the consequences at the time but after she’d gone…he’d missed her like hell. Not that there’d been any choice in the matter. She’d buried herself in some remote little settlement and that surely wasn’t the life for him.
So what? Why was he thinking of Morag now? he asked himself. He’d moved on. He’d dated. Morag had been a one-month relationship followed up by a letter of sympathy after her sister had died. It had been an intense letter that had taken him a long time to draft, but she’d never answered. So…
So one of these days a lady would come on the scene who’d make him smile as Morag had made him smile. But with no attachments.
‘You don’t want kids?’ Jaqui asked.
‘Why would I want kids?’
‘You want excitement. Kids equal excitement.’
‘I’ll get my excitement some other way,’ he growled. He moved his queen, removed his hand from the board and then saw the danger. ‘Whoops. Check.’
‘Checkmate,’ Jaqui said sweetly, and then looked up as Max came through the door. One look at their pilot’s face and they knew there were to be no more chess matches that afternoon.
‘What is it?’
‘Code One,’ Max said shortly. ‘Huge. We’re going in first, with back-up on the way. The army’ll be in on this, but, Grady, you’ve been put in charge first off. Tsunami.’
‘A tidal wave,’ Jaqui said incredulously. ‘Where?’
‘Petrel Island. Contact to the island’s completely cut. The first reports have come in from fishing boats that were out to sea when the wave hit. All we know is that there were five hundred inhabitants on the island when a wall of water twenty feet high swept through. God knows how many are left alive.’
It was ten minutes before Morag met anyone at all. She was climbing down as people were climbing up, but the shortest way to high ground wasn’t the
track she was on. So her path was deserted. At every step she took her dread increased.
Finally she reached the town’s outskirts, and here she met Marcus. Marcus was the head of the town’s volunteer fire brigade, a brilliant fisherman and a man who normally could be absolutely depended on in a crisis. He looked…lost.
‘Marcus…’
He was at the top of the track she was taking into town, the road leading to the fire station. Or it was the track that had led to the fire station. Marcus was standing where the station had once stood. The flimsy shed had given way completely, and a pile of rubble covered the town’s only fire engine.
Marcus was staring unseeingly at the mess, and he didn’t turn as Morag touched his shoulder.
‘I don’t know where they are,’ he whispered, turning to gaze down at the ruined township.
He was soaked. He’d been caught by the wave, Morag thought, stunned, which meant the water must have washed almost three hundred yards inland. A shallow gash ran down the side of his face, and he looked as sick as she felt.
But they weren’t alone. Above the township was bushland and the bush seemed the extreme of the wave’s reach. Morag turned and looked upward and here was the first good news. People were emerging. They were still obviously terrified, but they were slowly venturing out.
All eyes were still turned toward the sea.
‘Marcus!’ It was a cry of disbelief-of tremulous joy. A woman was running toward them, towing two seemingly scared-witless teenagers after her. Judy. Marcus’s wife. Marcus’s face went slack with relief, and so did Morag’s.
This was Marcus’s family. With Marcus behind her she might get something organised, and now he had his family safe she could start.
Something…
What?
First things first. She had to wait until Marcus had gathered Judy and the kids to him in the hug of a man who’d thought he’d lost everything.
Finally he released them and turned to Morag. ‘S-sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ Morag said unsteadily. ‘I wouldn’t mind if someone hugged me.’
The Doctor’s Rescue Mission Page 3