The Doctor's Rescue Mission. Marion Lennox
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.
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