‘Then we need to get everyone upstairs as quickly as possible!’
The major had no sooner said this than Dr Potosi arrived with her helpers and the next set of wheeled beds from the wards on level two. The familiar chimes announced the arrival of the lifts and Robin left them to it. She ran on upstairs. Richard’s suggestion put Miguel-Angel and his father at the forefront of her mind and of her conscience, as she had refused the help he had offered them. She ran into the ward and found little had changed. The young doctor was gone and Señor Guerrero’s leg was covered. The other three occupants were sitting and lying exactly as they had been when she left. Miguel-Angel was by the window, staring down at the water with horrified fascination. ‘How is your leg feeling, Señor Guerrero?’ she asked as she came up to his bed.
‘A little easier. The doctor gave me an injection. He has gone now.’
‘Good. We’ll be moving you soon. You may have to climb some stairs from the top floor on to the roof. Could you do this if you had support?’
‘I could try …’
‘Excellent.’ No sooner had Robin finished speaking than the major arrived with several of his men. ‘You take those three,’ he ordered. ‘My brother and I will see to my father. Be quick. Time may be short. Don’t wait for us.’
Dutifully the others took the three beds and wheeled them out in the direction of the lifts as fast as they could. ‘Miguel-Angel,’ ordered the major, ‘come along. It is time to take Papa to the roof.’ He clicked the brakes off the bed’s wheels with the toe of his army boot and eased the bed gently away from the wall. Miguel-Angel came at once, and Robin turned to follow him out of the ward. As they entered the passage she saw the other three beds being pushed into a lift at the far end. ‘Send the lift back for us, please,’ called the major, and one of the men raised a hand to show he had heard. It was precisely at this point that Robin realized she could hear a distant rumbling, as though a massive freight train was approaching or a jumbo jet was revving up for take-off. Her mouth went dry and her heart fluttered. ‘Here it comes,’ she called. ‘We’ll need to get a move on or we’ll be too late — if we’re not too late already.’
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.