Before long I woke up and found the real world was shaking. I reached out my hand and touched Richard, who was next to me, sleeping. "Tremor" I said, and I shook his arm. He stirred while everything rumbled. "TREMOR" I insisted and shook harder.
"What" he mumbled and stirred. The walls were banging agains the side of the bed, and the whole room seemed to be creaking and grinding.
"Tremor" I said again, and he got it this time. In the darnkness his eyes opened and said "It will be over soon".
"Tremor" I said again, and he got it this time. In the darnkness his eyes opened and said "It will be over soon".
He repeated that over the next few seconds, that at the time seemed extremely long but in retrospect seem extremly short. He kept repeating it even though it wasnt true, and then as if to mock his promise the earthquake intensified greatly.
The bed, he and I moved, I think. Cracking, grinding and yawning sounds multipied into a cacauphonous scream as the building wobbled with the force of the quake. At one point I heart huge crashing sounds that sounded like thunder, but all it was was the gigantic structure
giving and breaking in its insides somewhere.
Richard stoped talking, I think, and I thought about the fact that I was about to die. We were on the fourteenth floor, and this was not getting any better. Those sounds were probably the building comming appart. We were going to fall hundreds of feet to our deaths, and be crushed by thousands of pounds of shattered concrete.
My heart was racing, but I wasn´t crying or begging for salvation. The huge beast of a building was going to bury us all in it's fallen skeleton. I was going to be crushed or splattered or trapped. Everything is over now. Okay.
Then the cracking stopped. The 22 story high building stopped moving left to right, the bed started to shake less. We weren't dead yet. We might live through this.
Finnally things ceased in a few seconds of infinite time, and a thousand alarms seemed to go off in the city far below. I got out of the recently/jumping bed and looked at the city below and saw utter depths of darkness, all electricity everywhere was gone. Richard announced it, and he tried the door. It was locked. He told me to get the key. I got it and it didn't work. The door was jammed and we were trapped in this only-god-knows-how-dammaged building. Images ran threw my head of passengers trapped on the low decks of sinking ships. I did not want to be in the aerial version of that.
I started to franticly struggle with the door, but it did not give. The pins inside had broke somehow, and the knob was utterly unresponsive to our attempts to open it.
A half an hour passed, and Richard tried to open it with a knife and later with tweezers (to remove a part that looked like it was broken that was preventing the door from being opened).
Nothing worked.
The neibours were all out doors and we heard them in the hall. Richard was absolutely, stupidly, absurdly and impossibly calm. He was too young, I thought internally, still obstinately afflicted with the juvenile belieif in his own immortality. If he had any sence, I reasoned, he would be more concerned about opening that door now, right now.
I wasn't being stuck in this room, and we were leaving now. I talked to the voices in the either outside the door and told them they were trapped. After an annoying wait someone came and kicked down the door from the other side.
All the time the building rumbled, and I am told taht we experienced heavy aftershocks during the whole proces, one of which itself was not less than 6.9 in itself. Really, over the weekend anyone in the Chilean centre of the country was not a survivor of one earthquake, but of a number of not less than 10 good size seismic events. Events that in and of themselves would merit the title of earthquake if they occured individually in the United States or Europe.
The constant shaking of everything made us into cats. All of our senses were heightened, and we were always on edge.
We went out to the hall after I gathered matches and tissues (I was sick) as well as a package of cookies. Richard took the wad of cash that was our paychecks and I took my passports. A percentage of my brain mentally said goodbye to the room that I was not entirely expecting to return to.
We sat in the hall and faced eachother wondering what to do next. If the neibours stayed or left, I am not sure. I think they left immediately, but others waited near their appartment door listening to a radio.
A breathless man came down the stairs telling us to evacuate. He paused, looked around, then continued his mission down the stairs.
Plaster was lying on the grownd as the mouldings had come off of a lot of the doors. We left rubble in front of our defenseless unlocked door before we left, to leave a trace in case some robber decided to take advantage of us while we evacuated.
We then stupidly took the only remaining elevator down to the grownd floor. When we arrived at the ground floor we quickly observed that everything was flooded everywhere. The whole building's plumbing was dealt a mortal blow by the quake, leaving it a leacky mess of water and combustible natural gas.
We filed out into the courtyard along with the rest of the residents for a very long wait. People had been caught in the middle of their dreams, right before the disaster and the evidence was everywhere. They were calm, sleepy but alert. They were dressed in payjamas, robes, sweaters hastily thrown on and mismatched outfits searched for in the dark.
The waiting game began...
