He instinctively covered Lani with his body. Pieces of debris and shrapnel from the tank peppered the wall. A tremendous heat wave singed the hairs on Kai's arms. He felt a sizzling burn crease his thigh and screamed in pain and shock. A chunk of white hot metal had ricocheted off the wall.
'Are you OK?' he said to Lani as the noise subsided.
'Oh my God, Daddy!' Lani said, pointing at his leg. 'You're bleeding.'
Kai looked at his pants. A five-inch gash was drawn laterally across his thigh. Blood dripped from the wound, but it wasn't deep. The shrapnel had just grazed the skin. A few inches to the left, and it would have gone right through his leg, tearing through the femoral artery.
'I'm fine. It's nothing to worry about.' Once the adrenaline was gone, Kai knew the pain would come, but it didn't look like he'd bleed to death, so he ignored it. 'Are you OK?' he repeated.
'Yes,' Lani said. 'But where are the others?'
'I think they were in the other apartment.'
They ran back into the hall, and the sight that greeted them was appalling. Part of the hallway wall had disintegrated, spilling bits of plaster and drywall all over the floor. Through the doorway of the condo on the other side of the building, they could see that the entire exterior wall had been shattered. Visible out of that gaping hole, the remains of the high-rise to the north burned, covered with what was left of the liquefied propane. The right side of the high-rise simply wasn't there any more. A jagged wound was carved out of the left side, but it wouldn't last long. As Lani and Kai watched, in seeming slow motion the remaining steel and concrete buckled, and in a hail of dust and a low rumble, the building collapsed into the water below.
It was like seeing their fate played out in front of them. The building they were standing in was stronger than the one that collapsed, but Kai was worried now that it also had sustained significant structural damage.
He and Lani began yelling for the others.
'Brad! Teresa! Mia! Jake! Tom!'
Kai heard coughing from the stairwell and ran over to it. The fire door was off its hinges, but the building had shielded the main stairwell from significant damage. The stairs to the roof were a mangled mess of twisted railings and pulverized concrete.
He looked down to see Tom peering from the doorway on the eighth floor. Tom's face was contorted in a rictus of confusion and agony. With his right hand he held his left arm, which hung at a grotesque angle at his side. His complexion was ashen.
'Tom!' Kai said. 'Where's Jake?'
Tom nodded towards the hallway. 'In there. I think he's dead!'
Kai wanted to comfort him, but they didn't have time. There were only 15 minutes left before the next tsunami.
'Are you sure?' Kai said.
Tom shook his head. 'No, but he's not moving.'
A yell came from the other end of the hallway.
'Help! Help!'
It was Teresa.
'Teresa! We're out here.'
Teresa poked her head out of the condo Brad had been in. The look of alarm on her face was enough to tell Kai something terrible had happened.
'Are you OK?' he said.
'It's Brad and Mia. The wall fell down. They're trapped.'
Chapter 36
The stairs leading to the roof of the flat-topped Moana tower in the Grand Hawaiian were steep but wide. Normally, the access was strictly limited to hotel employees who needed to maintain the rooftop air conditioning units. But Max Walsh was forced to herd the guests up the steps. There was no elevator to the roof, so the lack of power was irrelevant. Because many of the guests were disabled, with some of them in wheelchairs, the going was slow. The only good news was that they had just one floor to climb.
Max conferred with Bob Lateen before deciding that, one at a time, Max and Adrian would carry each of them. Some of the wives-none of them under 70-volunteered to help, but Max was afraid one of them would fall, and he didn't need any more problems than he had already. Max counted the disabled guests and saw that they would have to make eight trips to get them all up.
In the meantime, Max asked all of those with cell phones to try calling someone who could send a helicopter to rescue them. Of course, he could go up to the roof and try to flag one down, but that would delay the movement of the disabled guests. He asked three of the ladies to leave their husbands to signal for help by waving a tablecloth.
It took two minutes to get the first wheelchair-bound guest up and situated comfortably on the roof, much more time than Max expected. At that rate, it would take over 15 minutes to get them all up, so he decided to send the able-bodied people up the stairs first.
While Adrian finished helping guests walk up the stairs, Max went to the window to look at the devastation below.
The streets were unrecognizable. A steady stream of water flowed back toward the ocean, dragging all kinds of flotsam with it. It would be only a matter of minutes before the land was completely drained.
He could clearly see the skybridge now. A huge gash in the roof exposed part of the walkway to the bright sunlight. Max couldn't see the piece of debris responsible, but it must have been something big. Anything large enough to leave that mark could have easily torn the skybridge from its moorings. As it was, the bridge appeared to be hanging by the thinnest of threads.
Twenty floors below Max, Rachel reached the sixth-floor conference center. The skybridge in front of her looked like it had been blasted by a truck bomb. Every shard of glass had been torn out of the windows, exposing the walkway to the ocean breeze from floor to ceiling. The skybridge itself was tilted at an extreme angle, with the beach side higher, as if the wave had pushed up one edge but couldn't wrest it from its steel cables.
The skybridge was unusually bright. The mid-day sun poured through the hole in the roof, illuminating the sorry state of the floor itself. Like every other surface the tsunami had touched, a fine layer of soupy silt coated the decking. In many places, holes had been punched through the floor as well as the ceiling. Fifty feet below, the outflow of water was now only ten feet deep. They were lucky the skybridge was still there at all. It certainly wouldn't stand up to another onslaught of water.
As Rachel approached the bridge, the family appeared on the other end of the 60-foot walkway. They heaved visibly from the exertion of racing down twenty flights of stairs. The father carried a small girl, while a 10-year-old boy and another girl several years younger than the boy leaned on their mother. All three kids had their mother's black hair and lean figure, but their light mocha skin was obviously a combination of their parents' complexions. The man, slightly jowly, towered over them. His shirt draped over a beer gut past its infancy.
Another couple was with them, people Rachel hadn't seen before. Both of them were in their fifties and appeared relatively fit. The man's curls were just succumbing to a salt-and-pepper transformation, providing a striking complement to the rugged tan lines marking the face of someone who worked outside. The woman, short- haired and elegant in her poise, held his hand tightly.
The group hadn't started across the skybridge yet, uneasy at the sad state of the structure. The railing along the beach side of the slanted walkway had been ripped off and rested atop the railing on the other side.
Rachel yelled down the hall. 'I'm the hotel manager. My name is Rachel Tanaka. Are you all right?'
'Yes,' the father said. 'We met these people on our way down.'
'What are your names?' In her line of work, Rachel found that it always made things go more smoothly if she
