The Time Bubble Box Set 2, стр. 294
Thankfully for me, as I passed the low balcony of a hotel onmy right, I was spotted by two British middle-aged men, in Union Jack shortswith pot bellies.
“Up here, love!” one of them called over the sound of theonrushing water.
There was a car parked just below their window so Iscrambled aboard, and they pulled me up, just as the water reached the car.
Then it began to subside. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be asbad as I feared after all. Grateful to my two hosts for the rescue, I eagerlytook the beer that they offered. Despite my raging hangover, I was seriously inneed of a drink.
We watched in horrified fascination as the water retreated,sucking back bottles, plastic furniture and all manner of other stuff with it,before the shocking realisation hit us that it wasn’t all over. It was actuallygoing to be much worse than I had initially feared.
A second, much bigger wave crashed in, this time passing ourposition and sweeping the car I had climbed upon up the road as if it was aboat. All around people were screaming and I saw more than one disappearbeneath the water, having been knocked over by cars, bins and other heavyobjects.
The water was everywhere and sweeping up everything in itspath as it pushed on up the street. If I had still been down there, I have nodoubt that I would have been killed.
I still feared for my safety, even from the relative safetyof the hotel. The water had almost come up the floor of the balcony and wouldclearly have flooded the ground floor. Would the building be strong enough tohold?
Fortunately it was a modern hotel block made of concretethat held firm. The same certainly couldn’t be said for some of the morelightweight dwellings closer to the shore. For anyone still down there, theoutlook would be bleak indeed.
Temporarily safe, my thoughts turned to Rachel. Was shesafe? I didn’t even know where she had spent the night. All I knew was she hadleft with the Frenchman and I couldn’t even recall his name. It might possiblyhave been Pierre, but that was barely more than a guess. Addled with alcohol asI had been, small details such as the names of people I had met at the partyhad simply not stuck.
I recalled the happy, smiley faces the previous evening,dancing around the fire in what was then paradise on earth. How many of themwere still alive now in what had become the complete opposite?
As the water retreated a second time, the true cost of thedisaster was becoming apparent. One of my companions was recording everythingon a handheld camcorder and it made for grim viewing. Everything was beingdragged back down the street by the retreating flood water, not just all thejetsam and flotsam that had been generated by the wave, but people, too.
Some were still screaming for help, but others weremotionless apart from the contortions the water was wreaking on their bodies asit twisted them to and fro like rag dolls.
When the lifeless body of a girl, no more than five or sixyears, old floated past, I had to turn away from the balcony and dash into thebathroom where I was physically and horribly sick.
This wasn’t just the throwing up of someone who’d had toomuch to drink the night before. I was sick with shock, panic and fear. I wasonly eighteen – I was too young to be coping with this alone, but there was nobig sister beside me to lean on. The fear I felt for my own safety began to bereplaced by fear for her. I prayed that she was still shacked up in bed withthe Frenchman, safely out of harm’s way. I didn’t dare even contemplate thepossibility that she might have been down on the beach.
I had my mobile phone with me and tried calling her numberbut I couldn’t get any sort of signal. It seemed all communications were out.As soon as the waters subsided again, I thanked the two men who had helped me,and dashed back out into the street, despite them warning me it might be toodangerous.
It was a scene of sheer carnage. Desperately I ran, callingher name, as I skirted around everything from upturned cars to fridge-freezerswhich were scattered everywhere. I wasn’t alone by any means. There were dozensout there in a similarly distressed state going through exactly what I was –locals and tourists alike.
Invariably I came across more bodies and forced myself tolook at the faces of at least three girls who could have been Rachel. When Isaw that they weren’t I felt a strange mix of emotions. There was relief at thediscovery that they weren’t Rachel, tempered with an increasing desperation atnot finding her.
I also felt a more than a tinge of guilt at feeling reliefas the friends and relatives of these poor souls were ultimately going tosuffer the grief of discovering their lifeless bodies.
It seemed like I had been stumbling around for hours whenthe first relief teams began to arrive. It took a long time for them to getthere. This wasn’t just a case of ambulances and fire engines rolling up at anincident because the incident was widespread. They were needed everywhere.
This had all happened five days before I arrived back hereon my latest trip through time. The relief effort had spent most of those fivedays recovering, removing and identifying bodies. Most surviving tourists hadbeen evacuated. I had still been here because I had refused to leave with theother evacuees, I had spent those days scouring the shoreline for miles in bothdirections, desperately searching for any sign of Rachel.
I asked around the hotels, desperate to track down where theFrenchman had been staying, but it was no good. I had nothing to go on otherthan a vague stab at a first name. There was nothing else, not even a photo.Had this been a few years later when I and everyone