MIRACLE ON KAIMOTU ISLAND/ALWAYS THE HERO (20 page)

A map of the township was on a table and grids had been drawn on it. There were cans of spray paint in a box on the floor. They were going to be assigned areas and would spray information on the walls about what they found. Whether there were people trapped. Or needing urgent attention for their injuries. Or dead. If they came across serious injuries, they could only take the time for an initial stabilisation and then summon backup for transportation to the hospital. They had to keep moving as fast as possible.

There was no way Tom’s presence was going to be enough to make everything okay here, either. It was going to take a lot of people and a lot of time. They were facing a gruelling night of probably grim and possibly dangerous work.

There was also absolutely no chance of Tom taking her in his arms and holding her, and that was a good thing. She was over him. She’d spent years getting over him and she couldn’t afford to let those protective walls around that place in her heart fall apart.

And surely there was no chance that Tom would instantly see himself in Jack, was there? She’d managed to avoid letting Tom know exactly how old Jack was, which would be a dead giveaway, and there shouldn’t be any need for the two of them to be in the same place at the same time.

When Jack and the other children turned up, they would be cared for in the community centre. She would be able to get there and reassure herself that he was fine and then she could have him go to Ben’s parents, Doug and Ailsa. Or Hannah, up at the hospital.

Somehow she had to keep Jack hidden from Tom.

At least until she had some time to try and think this through.

Abby barely heard the last instructions being issued by Tom and Mike and Don. She tightened the straps on her backpack full of medical supplies.

‘So you’ll be Tom’s partner,’ Mike said, as though summarising everything she hadn’t heard clearly enough. ‘You’re going to triage the northern half of the village but if we need you for major medical stuff, you’ll be contacted by radio.’

Abby could only nod.

Tom’s
partner
.

How ironic was that?

At least they had an urgent mission to focus on. No time for anything personal to interfere with the job that needed to be done.

No time to herself to try and think things through.

To try and deal with the awful dread that she had, in fact, done a terrible thing by not making more of an effort to tell Tom about Jack a long time ago.

CHAPTER THREE

T
HE
 
CHOPPING
 
BEAT
 
of a hovering helicopter was loud enough to preclude the need for any conversation as Tom and Abby stepped out of the information centre, which had now morphed into the island’s incident control headquarters.

Abby was shading her eyes against the lowering sun to peer upwards.

Tom raised his voice, although the chopper was moving again, now. ‘That’ll be the extra doctors arriving. And maybe the first USAR team members. Hopefully with a search dog.’

He saw Abby close her eyes for a moment and take a deep breath, as though summoning a fresh burst of courage. He had to fight the urge to touch her. To offer her some of
his
strength.

‘Who else will come, do you think?’

Tom didn’t have to raise his voice any longer. ‘I imagine the army will be involved by now. If they’ve got an Iroquois helicopter available they can dispatch a few troops, which will be useful. It would be good to have more space available for evacuating any serious trauma, too.’ He glanced down at the map in his hand. ‘Let’s get going. Where’s Hickory Lane? That’s the southern border for our search area.’

‘A few blocks up this way.’ Abby set off. ‘It’s got a bakery on one side called The Breadbin and the Fat Duck café on the other side. There’s a big metal duck sculpture that hangs off the side of the café. You can’t miss it.’

Except the quirky café icon was no longer hanging off the brick wall. It was buried somewhere beneath the rubble. There were several local men standing in the middle of Hickory Lane, where it branched off the main street.

‘Hey, Abby,’ one of them called. ‘You okay?’

‘That’s Jim,’ Abby told Tom. ‘He’s our butcher. His shop’s a bit further down.’

She stepped closer to the men. ‘I’m fine, Jim. What about you? Oh, help...look at your hands.’

The middle-aged butcher was still wearing his blue-and-white-striped apron but it was filthy. His arms were just as grimy but they were also scratched and bruised-looking. His hands were a mess, his knuckles ripped and bleeding.

Tom saw them cupped in Abby’s much smaller hands. He saw the expression on Abby’s face. This man wasn’t just the local butcher. He was someone Abby cared about. Part of a community she cared about. A place and a way of life that made
him
an outsider.

He didn’t like that feeling.

‘It’s nothing.’ Jim dismissed Abby’s concern but his smile was grateful. ‘I’ve just been shifting a few bricks.’

‘A few!’ One of the other men gave Jim a friendly thump on his shoulder. ‘This man’s been a right hero. Single-handedly dug at least three people out from under where they got buried here.’ He pointed at the Fat Duck.

‘Everybody inside got out in time,’ Jim told them. ‘But poor Miriam got hit in the head by a brick or something. And some others got under the picnic table. They got buried good and proper.’

‘Where’s this Miriam?’ Tom asked.

‘We just sent her up to the hospital. Used the back of Johnno’s ute. She should be there by now.’

‘And the others?’

‘Not too bad. We sent them all off to get checked, though.’

‘So the café’s clear of people?’ Tom had his can of spray paint ready. ‘Are you sure about that?’

Jim nodded. ‘Business was pretty quiet. Miriam was last out. She was making sure all her customers were safe first, bless her.’

‘Right.’ Tom sprayed the word ‘Clear’ and the time on a window that was still intact. He could see inside the café. There were tables with plates of uneaten food on them. Toppled chairs and an abandoned handbag that was spilling its contents into the puddle created by an overturned water cooler. They needed to move on.

‘Let’s go, Abby. Next building. We’ll do the rest of Hickory Lane and then come back to the main street.’

‘What can we do to help?’ Jim asked.

‘Best thing you can do is head for the information centre. They’ll be organising teams and giving out some safety gear and radios and things. We don’t want you just off on your own. It’s too dangerous.’

‘I don’t think there’s anybody up Hickory Lane,’ another of the men said. ‘My wife and kids were along there and they got out fast. Everyone panicked and ran when they heard the siren go off. Someone said they should all go to the community centre in the new school hall.’

‘We’ll check anyway,’ Tom said. ‘But thanks.’

They moved swiftly along the narrow lane, climbing over rubble to peer into buildings. Yelling as loudly as they could.

‘Is anyone here? Can you hear me?’

There could be people buried or too injured to respond but they would be found later by the urban search and rescue teams and the dogs in a second sweep. Right now, the priority was to try and get an idea of the big picture and find anything urgent that could be dealt with fast.

Back on the main street they came across another knot of people, these ones in front of the hardware store. They spotted the overalls and helmets Tom and Abby were wearing and backed out to make room amongst the rubble.

‘We can hear someone,’ a man said, clearly distressed. ‘Groaning.’

Sheets of corrugated iron from the veranda roof along with timber beams were making it impossible to get any further. As they stood there, something rolled from higher up, bounced and narrowly missed Abby as it fell with a crash.

Tom gripped Abby’s elbow and hauled her back. ‘Everybody move back,’ he ordered. ‘We’re going to have specialist teams here very soon.’ He marked a sheet of iron beside where the men had been working. ‘Trapped 1’, he painted. ‘1725 hours’. He added an arrow pointing to the interior of the shop.

As if to back up his words to the locals, a group wearing the bright orange overalls of a USAR team appeared on the main street, walking down from where the last helicopter had landed beside the hospital. One of them had a dog, which was straining at its leash.

‘Where’s the info centre?’ one of them called.

‘Keep going that way,’ Tom directed, pointing. ‘And take these guys with you. We need to clear this zone of civilians.’

He and Abby moved on. The next building they checked was a book-and-toy shop. Nobody answered their calls and he was about to declare it clear when he heard a cry from Abby. She climbed over a shelf teetering on a pile of dislodged books and headed deeper into the shop.

‘Abby, stop! We don’t know if it’s safe.’

‘It’s Millie,’ Abby shouted. ‘Tom...come here,
quick
...’

The shop had been created inside an old cottage. A brick chimney had collapsed and brought down part of a heavy slate roof. Trapped beneath a beam of wood and a shower of bricks was a woman who looked to be in her eighties.

The heavy beam was directly over the woman’s chest, weighted down at one end by most of the chimney bricks.

Abby was bent over the woman’s head, desperately searching for signs of life. Breathing. A pulse. Tom could see that she wasn’t going to find any. He crouched beside her.

‘It’s too late,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m sorry, Abby, but we have to keep moving.’

‘But it’s
Millie
...’ Abby was crying. ‘She’s known every child on the island for generations, now. She has a story circle every Saturday morning when she reads to them. Everybody loves Millie. She...she just helped Jack choose his backpack and pencils for school...’

Tom froze. ‘What did you just say, Abby?’

‘That everybody loves Millie. We can’t just leave her here like this.’

‘About Jack.’ Yes, it was a tragedy that an old lady every child on this island loved had been killed, but Tom couldn’t give it any head space whatsoever. Something huge was exploding inside him. ‘He’s at
school
?’

Abby scrubbed tears from her face, making huge streaks amid the dust and grime already covering her skin. She gulped in air, trying to get herself under control, but she was nodding. ‘He started a few weeks ago. He’s on his first school outing today and I still don’t know if...’

As if a switch had been thrown, Abby suddenly stopped crying. She went very, very still.

It was happening for her as well, Tom realised.

The world had stopped spinning because it needed to adjust the tilt of its axis. That ‘something huge’ still splintering inside Tom meant that his world would never turn in quite the same way again.

Slowly, Abby raised her gaze from Millie to Tom. Her eyes looked enormous and her face, beneath the grime, was as white as a sheet.

‘Oh...
God
...’ she whispered.

* * *

She had no one to blame for this but herself.

Abby had just walked off the edge of the precipice without even looking. She’d told Tom
exactly
how old Jack was. Five years and a few weeks. Given this man’s intelligence, it would probably only take him two seconds to do the maths. To work out that nine months before Jack was born had been when they had been utterly in love. Unable to keep their hands off each other. Not always as careful as they could have been about protection because they had been blinded by how strongly they had felt about each other.

As blind as she had just been, stepping—no,
throwing
—herself off anything remotely resembling safe ground. But finding Millie dead had been the last straw, hadn’t it, on top of the terror of the earthquake and the dreadful anxiety about Jack’s whereabouts and safety.

The shock of seeing Tom again and the relentless punches of seeing the worst of the damage as their search progressed. Knowing with more and more clarity just how big a disaster her community and home had suffered.

She’d snapped. Somehow it had all coalesced into grief for a pillar of her small community and her own connection with this sweet old lady. Her son’s connection.

Tom was rising from where he’d been crouched beside her. In slow motion, as if he was trying to counter the effects of being shot with a stun gun. And when he was on his feet, he stood as still as a stone. His lips barely moved as he spoke.

‘Who’s Jack’s father, Abby?’

She couldn’t say anything. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t even breathe.

He knew. Of course he knew. He just needed to hear her say the words. The way people did when someone they loved had just died. It wasn’t real until you heard the words.

‘It’s me, isn’t it?’

She still couldn’t make her lips move. Or take enough of a breath to push it out and make words.

A glance up showed a muscle twitching on Tom’s jaw. He was processing this. He was shocked, of course, but he was also...furious?

Yes. When he spoke, his voice was dangerously controlled. Almost too quiet to hear.

‘And you didn’t think to tell me?’

Now Abby could move. She pushed herself to her feet.

‘I tried to.’

A snort escaped Tom. ‘Funny...I don’t remember that.’

‘You weren’t there. You...were off on a mission.’

It had been the final straw on that occasion. Confirmation of why their relationship could never have worked. Why it could have ruined more than one life if Abby had gone through with her intention to tell Tom he was going to be a father.

‘Oh...so you couldn’t have waited an hour or so?’

‘I... You... It was after we’d broken up, Tom.’

He turned a glare on Abby that made her flinch. ‘And that makes it okay? To
pretend
that you were going to tell me? Or maybe you did turn up at the base. After you saw the chopper take off, perhaps? When you knew I wouldn’t be there?’

That wasn’t fair. Abby opened her mouth to snap that he could go back and check the visitors’ sign-in log if he thought she was lying but she didn’t get a chance to speak. There was an ominous rumble and the ground began to shake with the biggest aftershock yet.

Abby started to turn her head to look for something to shelter under but felt herself being grabbed before she had time to think, let alone spot something. Her feet left the floor and, even as things rattled and more bricks came in through the damaged roof, Tom was moving at speed.

The aftershock had stopped by the time he reached the street but he didn’t let go of Abby. He let her put her feet on the ground but kept her pinned with one arm, looking around and up as he assessed their safety, pulling her out of range of anything that could come loose and fall from roof level.

A four-wheel-drive vehicle was coming up the street. Mike Henley was driving.

‘You guys all right?’

A burst of something like hysterical laughter almost escaped Abby. All right? Millie was lying dead in the shop they’d just escaped from. She could have just been killed herself. She was terrified. She didn’t know where her son was or if he was all right. Tom had just learned that he was a father. Jack was
their
son.

No. It was inconceivable that either of them were ‘all right’ at this moment.

‘I’m on my way to check the airstrip after that aftershock. There’s an Iroquois on the way in. They’ve got army troops on board and a couple of structural engineers who can assess buildings properly. Oh, and, Abby?’

‘Yes?’

‘The crew of a fishing boat spotted the school bus. It’s trapped on the cliff road between a couple of big slips. They’ve seen a bunch of kids and adults waving at them so we can assume everyone’s okay. Including your Jack.’

‘Oh...oh...’ Abby’s legs were threatening to give way. She was shaking all over and suddenly Tom’s arm holding her up was very, very welcome. ‘Oh, thank God...’

‘Doesn’t look like there’s any way to clear the slips and get them out tonight but they’re talking about using a chopper to drop some food and blankets to get them through the night. Right... Gotta go.’ Mike gunned the engine. ‘You two should stop for a break soon. There’s a lot of teams ready to take over.’

One of those teams was just down the street, in fact. In front of the hardware store where Tom had left the painted message about someone being trapped. They weren’t trapped any longer. A man’s body, strapped to a back board, was being carefully lifted over the mangled iron and other debris.

Tom and Abby hadn’t even scratched the surface of the conversation they needed to have but they weren’t going to get a chance to continue it right now, either. Tom’s radio crackled into life.