It lasted for three nightmarish sweat soaked days. The ground shook and heaved the walls of the safe room groaned from the strain of trying to stay together. It felt like at any moment they would all be torn apart or just crushed to death by the collapsing walls. Elizabeth was pressed against one of the walls clutching her cell phone to her chest. She had tried making contact with her parents to no avail. She had tried contacting anyone to tell them about their predicament but nothing got threw. The phone was now dead from constantly being opened and closed but she couldn’t stop herself from checking she couldn’t stop herself from looking for an answer.
Baruti had told her after she had stopped screaming that it was a tsunami. As he was about to go for a swim he saw the water rush away exposing a good hundred yards of new beach. Remembering his survival training he ran back to the mansion telling everyone on the way to get to the safe room. After seeing that she was safely in the room he went to his room and grabbed some boots and extra cloths for himself then hurried to the kitchen and grabbed as much food as he could; hopping that it would be enough for all the people for at least a week until help arrived.
She turned on her flashlight and looked around the room. They had stopped using the flashlights constantly after the first 24 hours now they only turned them on when they ate and went to the little cubicle latrine in the corner. There was close to twenty of them everyone except for herself and Baruti were the workers that kept the place running. Mostly all of them were islanders there English wasn’t really good and she wasn’t really good at their language. They all looked disheartened their faces long and downcast. Most were asleep probably feeling that it was better to die asleep then awake. She quickly turned off her light not wanting to see those faces anymore.
The room shook again and Elizabeth braced herself against the wall but then everything went silent. After three days of constant bombardment and noise the silence was deafening. Lights started coming on all over the bunker and the workers started to look around expectantly. They waited another hour with no other sound than the quick exchange of speech. After some quick discussion with the islanders, Baruti somehow new their language perfectly, they decided to try opening the doors after five hours to give the water time to recede. They really didn’t have that much choice in the matter they were sealed in a room and the oxygen tanks only had enough air in them for another ten hours.
They hours seemed to drag into days everyone was whispering excitedly with each other. Baruti went around making sure that everyone had the proper footwear on. He didn’t want anyone to cut their feet on the glass sure to be there from the broken building. He instructed some of the islanders to wrap cloths around their feet if he wasn’t satisfied with what they wear already wearing. Finally the time came to open the door and everyone was looking at it expectantly. Baruti unsealed the doors keeping the bolt in place and checking the edges looking for water coming inside ready to seal it in a moment’s notice if any water came in from the top. No water came in and Baruti looked a little confused but slowly he unlocked the door and opened it to the outside.
The light was blinding and Elizabeth held up her hand to shield her eyes. Baruti was the first one out and everyone else followed and then stopped to stair around in amazement. It was the strangest sight that Elizabeth had ever seen, nothing was wrong. Elizabeth looked around in bewilderment she had seen pictures of natural disaster sights and they were nothing like this. Nothing was wrong the mansion was their looking exactly like it did right before she went into the safe room. In a daze she went over to one of the walls and put her hand on it. It felt solid she pushed a little harder yep defiantly solid. How was this possible she had felt the tremendous blows of the tsunami she had heard the house fall breaking into a million pieces.
She ran around the mansion checking on everything, it was all there, nothing was out of place. She ran into her room all of her clothes were still their even her sandals that she had kicked off before changing. She went over to her desk her charger was there and she bent down and plugged her cell phone in. The screen light up and the charging sign appeared on the display. Nothing was wet and everything still worked even the electricity. She noticed something out of the corner of her eye and turned to look out of her big bay window at Baruti who was standing their looking out at the ocean. She went out and stood next to him, he didn’t even look at her, she looked at what he was staring at and almost swallowed her tongue.
Out to the horizon maybe 30 yards from shore the earth was splintered. It almost looked like a very realistic water coloring or looking through a pane of glass one that seemed to follow the curvature of the island. A bird took off from one of the trees and flew to the spot were space did not match up before it could get to close it whiled away and went over the island. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing it didn’t make since it looked like something out of a freaky sci-fi movie.
“Baruti what’s going on?” Elizabeth asked her voice sounded hollow to her own ears.
“I don’t know Miss Ammons I just don’t know.” suddenly something caught his eye down on the beach right next to the dock. “No! What are you doing come back here.” He switched to the islanders language and kept on yelling running down to the dock.
Elizabeth ran next to him seeing now what he had seen. Some of the islanders had grabbed some of the kayaks and began to paddle them out into the sea towards the huge wall of what looked like glass. Baruti stopped at the water’s edge and started yelling at the men in the kayaks in their islander tongue. They started yelling back and Baruti started yelling again shaking his head and making motions to come back to shore. They shook their heads and continued to head to the fractured space
“Baruti, Baruti what is going on?” surprisingly my voice was choked up with emotion, for some reason I already knew the answer.
“They are leaving Miss Ammons to go to their home island and find their family.” Baruti started yelling at them again telling them to come back to shore; there was now a frantic edge to his tone. One of the kayaks had already made it to the fractured space and slowed down. Then with determined strokes the islander headed right into it and disappeared. The man in the kayak right in back of him screamed and threw himself off his kayak and started swimming to the shore the kayak he was on slowly hit the wall gliding into it and then it to was gone disappearing right in front of their eyes.
Word spread among the islanders and none of them would even go close to anything that looked remotely like fractured space. But Elizabeth couldn’t really care the only thing she was thinking about was her mother and father. She had tried calling them when her phone was charged but she didn’t have any bars so none of her calls made it out. She hardly slept at all she just looked out into the distance at the docks where her mother and fathers boat should pull up when they arrived. Somehow Baruti convinced the islanders to continue working as if nothing had happened but he was the one that came to her room with food he kept talking to her about the different things that were happening. How the food never ran out how they always seemed to have running water and electricity how one of the workers cut her arm and it had healed by the next day. Elisabeth didn’t know how long she had been like this maybe a couple of days maybe a week but it was she that first saw the newcomer. He came swimming through the waves crawled onto the shore and laid down on his back. Before she could think she was screaming for Baruti and running down to the beach.
No comments:
Post a Comment