CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Nikolas finally took it upon himself to free them from the handcuffs. He took a paperclip off a desk and went to work on the lock. He had it open fairly easily after that. They shook their wrists free and rubbed them for a while. It was something to do they could concentrate on and achieve. All around them was utter chaos. The noise was incredible…a bedlam of screaming and shouting and vehicles blaring horns and helicopters overhead. Freed, they wandered around corridors in the school. They joined a progression of ghostly people, the mud people, wandering, looking. At first they thought the rooms were full of the injured until the unnatural stillness told them they were bodies. Bodies everywhere—on the stairs, in corridors, filling the classrooms. Most of them seemed to be entirely uninjured. Some of their fellow ghosts would occasionally fall to a body, silently grasping it, not crying, too shocked to make a sound.
Finally, they found what they were searching for, the bathrooms. There were other tourists there, men, women, and families, all trying to bring a little normality back into the chaos. When their turn came, the water was clear and sweet from the taps, and they began to wash the mud off. It took a very long time, as every time they filled a sink full of clean water it was filthy within moments. They persevered, until, other than their hair, which was too caked to attempt cleaning, they were recognisable again. They stood regarding themselves in the mirror. Nikolas put his hand out and touched Ben’s arm. Despite the other people milling around them, Ben took the gesture the way he wanted to and came into Nikolas’s arms, hugging him tightly. Nikolas hugged back. They stood for a very long time, just reassuring themselves they were alive and together. Nikolas finally held Ben away and began to inspect him. He was black and blue from shoulder to knees, and his hands and feet were torn and bleeding. The worst bruise was apparently across his shoulders, where Nikolas told him it looked as if he’d been hit by a car, which, Ben reflected, he might have been.
Ben then examined Nikolas’s scalp, but he couldn’t see through the mud. “Did you get hit?”
Nikolas shook his head. “Thanks to you.”
“How did you know? If we’d been in the boat—” Ben couldn’t finish that sentence. The thought of that wall of water catching them down on the exposed sand actually made him feel sick, so he stopped thinking about it, but repeated, “How did you know?”
Nikolas took his arm again and pulled him through the throng of people now crowding the bathroom. He tried to find them a quiet place in a corridor. They sat down alongside the bodies of some children. Staring at them seemed to free Nikolas’s tongue. “It was Nika. I saw him, and he told me to climb.” He glanced over at Ben. “I think he’s forgiven me.”
Ben didn’t know what to say. He stared at Nikolas’s drawn face and simply nodded, accepting. What did he know? The whole world had turned to mud and death around them, but here they were—alive, vital, and together. He couldn’t explain it any better.
They went into the makeshift medical facility and got treated for the cuts to their hands and feet. They weren’t unaware of the dangers of open wounds in such a hostile environment. When that was done, they were at something of a loss what to do next. There was such chaos all around them they could, in theory, have done anything. No one was paying them any attention at all. Finally, Nikolas glanced at Ben. Ben returned the look. They were clearly both thinking the same thing. Neither wanted to do it.
Still, they stole an army jeep. They wanted to borrow boots, but being six foot four was a disadvantage in a country where people, by and large, were so much smaller. So, barefoot, still in only their makeshift shorts, they headed back to the disaster area to find the man they’d left behind. Special Forces don’t leave anyone behind.
They couldn’t find him. They wouldn’t have been able to find anyone or anything in the vast area of destruction they returned to. They had no idea where they’d been or which way to go, but they didn’t really have time to worry, for as soon as they climbed out of the jeep at the edge of the disaster area there was someone who needed help, then someone else, and then a body to be dug out, a child still alive buried in another car, an old woman sitting down in shock to be carried to a rescue vehicle, and another body, and another, and then it was only bodies, more and more to be pulled from the mud and carried to shelters and laid down, again and again until the light began to fade. They came across a bus. It was upside down on the roof of a building. It was utterly surreal but utterly normal for this place, where the insane had become the sane. The bus had been packed with people. It was now full of bodies just crumpled in a pile against the roof. They looked as if they’d been going to market, for they all had bags and purses and best shoes. It took them hours to pull them out and carry them down off the building. They worked on into the night until at one point Ben almost fell asleep on his feet. He just crashed, still standing, but no longer aware.
They had to stop. They climbed into one of the buses they’d found and emptied, and curled up together on the backseat, too exhausted to find it uncomfortable.
§ § §
When they woke a few hours later, it was to a world that had become rapidly more terrifying during the night. The smell hit them first. It was unbearable. They tore shirts to make face scarves and emerged into blistering sun and swarms of flies. Dogs had appeared overnight, terrified, disturbed and feral, attacking the bodies still trapped. When they pulled at a collapsed roof, snakes poured from it. In one street, a live electrical cable was still sparking and arcing in the mud. Around it were half-a-dozen people, electrocuted, but they couldn’t reach them. The buzzing of the flies was getting worse. They swarmed into their eyes and noses. If it hadn’t been for the people they found still alive, they would’ve given up. But every so often a body moved, eyes focused on them and arms lifted for help.
By now, there were emergency teams working alongside them and stretchers to load those still alive onto and take them to the hospital. They heard a rumour the medical supplies had run out, and a sense of desolation fell on them, even as they found survivors. Some were entirely unhurt, just sitting with a possession, perhaps a precious plate or jug also undamaged in the midst of all this ruin.
By nightfall of that second day, the conditions were so bad they were forced to return with an ambulance to the hospital. They’d entirely lost their jeep, as there were no landmarks to use to navigate through the ruin. At the hospital, they treated themselves as best they could for the renewed damage to their feet. Ben’s bruises were spectacular now, but he claimed he couldn’t feel them. Snakes had bitten them both; they just washed the bites and ignored them. The tented complex had grown as aid agencies moved in from other parts of the country. Some were international, and they heard a mixed smattering of voices. Unbelievably it seemed to Nikolas, he heard a Russian voice and discovered a young girl in her teens trying to ask if anyone had seen her parents. He translated for her, and that was the beginning of his new job. He spoke most of the European languages well enough to translate such a simple question—“Has anyone seen the people I love?”—and to translate the heartbreaking answer, “No.” He was assigned to an army unit. This came with the unbelievable privilege of being able to use the field showers that had been erected, as well as having a space to sleep allocated in one of the tents.
Standing under the cascading hot water together, stripped of the awful stinking shorts they’d been wearing for days, was one of the most luxurious things they’d ever done. They washed each other, hair and skin all gently soaped and rinsed, soaped and rinsed. They’d been found some sarongs, as none of the army fatigues would fit them, and these they tied with wry smiles of amusement. They looked like native gods. Finally they were clean, and they were alive. It was enough. The cot beds they’d been allocated didn’t seem as if they’d support their weight, but they dragged them together, climbed on and knew nothing more until they woke to the increasing chaos of the fourth day.
Bodies were appearing everywhere. They were being washed up on the shore, falling literally from the sky, as people who’d taken shelter in trees and then drowned anyway fell bloated to the ground. The fourth day in the blistering sun, these bodies weren’t easy to handle. They came apart unless carefully eased onto stretchers. Ben carried on with a small team of Red Cross workers, searching the devastated areas, while Nikolas became more and more involved with the authorities. Once he’d begun helping, just with some translation, he realised how much chaos there was, how lacking in any systems they were. He began to organise. Soon people were listening to the giant, blond-haired man who could switch from English to French to Spanish to Russian, Danish or German, and was willing to make decisions. They went from listening, to seeking his advice, and then nothing seemed to get done unless he drove it through. He was allocated an office, acquired a phone, and the following day was given a laptop with satellite communication. He immediately contacted Kate.
He and Ben managed to snatch an hour or so together in the evenings, to shower, to eat, and they moved their camp beds into Nikolas’s office and slept side by side. Ben was having a rougher time than Nikolas, for his job was impossibly emotionally draining. But Nikolas listened to his stories, ensured he was eating and taking his antibiotics to ward off infection from the dead, and held him until he fell into exhausted sleep every night.