Matty.
Sick at heart, she motioned her mare forward. ‘It’s okay, Gigi. It’s okay.’
Only of course it wasn’t. She could see from here…
Houses crushed. Roads impassable…
She pressed on. The ants became people, tearing at their houses, working furiously. The mud was everywhere. They didn’t notice her as she passed-tragedy was everywhere.
Matty…
She reached him. He hadn’t seen her approach. He’d stopped in the middle of the road. He was still on his horse, staring before him, his eyes wide with terror.
There was another horse beside his. He was holding the reins in his hand. He looked crazily small so near such a great creature.
The horse was Blaze. Kass’s stallion.
How had Blaze reached here?
Rafael?
‘Matty,’ she whispered and the child turned to her, his face devoid of all colour. She had him, reaching across to take him from his horse, hauling him into her arms whether he willed it or not. He came but he was still enough of a horseman-enough of a prince-to keep the reins of both the other horses in his hand.
Before them were people, men and women, attacking a vast mound of debris with their hands. The silence was broken by sobbing.
A sign on a flattened gate told her what horror they were facing.
A school. Crushed.
‘Matty,’ she whispered into his hair and he crumpled against her, his face soaked with tears.
‘My Uncle Rafael,’ he whispered against her breast. ‘He’s gone in there. He’s gone in there and the stuff moved on top of him and no one can get him out.’
CHAPTER NINE
KELLY had spent the last five years on the goldfields. She’d panned for gold and she’d dug. Sure she’d been a research historian, she’d spent hours at her desk, but she could handle a spade with the best of the men.
She also knew the basics of mining. She’d researched every shaft dug back at the theme park and they were authentic. She knew what the miners had done to make themselves safe a hundred and fifty years ago, and she knew what they’d had to do to make the tourist mines even safer now.
She handed Matty to the care of the women. She took a deep, steadying breath, looked at the heap of sludge they were facing and decided they risked more people being buried alive the way they were going.
The school house was built against a cliff face. The sludge had washed down the mountain from the other direction. In most places it had swept over and onward, but here the cliff face had stopped it, so it had mounded up in a vast heap, completely obscuring the school buildings.
It was one vast, unstable mass. To dig in without shoring it up as they went was the way of disaster. She rolled up her sleeves and started issuing orders.
Amazingly, the men listened. Amazingly, they did what she said.
Matty couldn’t dig but he wouldn’t shift from where he was. The older people in the town would have taken him into one of the undamaged homes but Matty refused. He stayed, taking care of the horses. Wanting desperately to dig himself if only his elders would let him.
The damage in the town was awful, Kelly learned as she worked, but not as catastrophic as she’d first thought. Yes, houses were crushed, but the landslip had started high up. The tremors had been felt before it had hit, and most people had been outside. The mass had moved slowly, giving people time to run to higher ground.
Two elderly couples had been killed instantly when their houses had crashed around them. There were injuries-people had been hit by the sliding mud-but the worst of the rush of earth had been over before it had hit the town.
But the school…It was on the outskirts, which meant it had been one of the first buildings to be hit. To have the children run to higher ground would have been impossible.
‘There’s a basement underneath,’ Kelly was told by the grim-faced mayor. ‘We’re thinking the teacher panicked and had everyone head for the basement. Then the mud hit the front, blocking the exit. When we got here, we could hear screaming. Prince Rafael…he took a torch in. He could just make it in through a gap in the debris and we thought we could get everyone out that way. Only then the whole lot shifted and the roof came down. And now…’
‘You can’t hear?’
‘Muffled stuff when everything’s still,’ the mayor told her. ‘We’re hoping against hope they’re all down there. Twenty kids and their teacher and our Prince. And all we can do is dig.’
‘Is help coming?’ she asked, trying not to sound terrified.
‘The roads are all blocked,’ the mayor told her. ‘The tremors have been felt all the way to the border so outside help isn’t going to happen. We can’t get equipment in.’
So they dug. It sounded simple. Moving a small mountain of mud from over a basement. Trying not to do any more damage. Working from the outside in, so no more weight would go on to the basement roof-if indeed it had held.
There were people alive in there. When the mayor held up his hand for silence they could hear faint cries but the mass of mud stifled everything.
‘If Rafael’s down there…he has a radio,’ Kelly said as she dug and the men around her looked at each other and didn’t respond.
If he had a radio then he’d be able to communicate. He wasn’t communicating. He wasn’t…he couldn’t be…
She dug.
It was mind-numbing work, with nothing to alleviate the fact that tons of mud had to be shifted by hand. No one thought of bringing in machinery-to cause vibrations on top of the basement would be crazy. Care was taken to distribute diggers so no further pressure was on the mass, making the risk of further falls as small as possible.
Fatalities elsewhere had been accounted for-the injured were being cared for. This was the only area where people had yet to be found.
There were twenty children missing, one schoolteacher-and Rafael.
The workers who’d been here when Rafael had gone in were grim-faced. They’d cleared an area around the stairway into the basement. What they thought had happened was that the front of the building had collapsed. The rear of the building was set hard against the cliff face, leaving no form of exit. So the children must have fled for safety downstairs.
They’d heard them calling clearly when they’d first arrived. They were safe, they were okay. So they’d hauled the mass of timber blocking the path away. As it had cleared, the teacher below had wanted to send children up, but Rafael had stopped them.
‘Let me try it first,’ he’d growled. ‘I don’t want a child halfway up if that mass above decides it’s unstable.’
Which was pretty much what had happened. Armed with a torch, Rafael had disappeared into the gloom. And then another tremor had struck and the entire building and some of the cliff face behind had subsided, leaving a mountain of debris with no one knew what underneath.
Had Rafael reached the safety of the basement? Was the basement still safe? They could hear muffled cries through the rubble but it was too thick to decipher words.
Please…
Please.
Kelly dug as she’d never dug in her life before. But all around…
People were deferring to her.
‘What should we do?’
