The desk protected Jacob from most of the debris but even one the roof was over the ground continued shaking like the ground was going to split open. It was the ground still shaking that saved Jacob’s life, if the ground had stopped shaking his life would have most likely ended under the pile of rubble that had at one time been an office building but as the ground shook it evened out the pile and a lot got knocked off. Jacob had been somewhere in the middle of the building and like the bones of a prehistoric giant being revealed, so too was Jacob’s desk. There was still rubble to dig through but Jacob could see sun light and as soon as he could see sunlight he knew he would live. As the earth still shook with after tremors, Jacob climbed up to see what the world had become.
How many people died that day, and the days following as a result of the earth quake has never been counted. It was a world wide disaster that brought down buildings in all nations and formed new islands. The rough estimates of casualties numbers in the millions. Jacob was on one of these newly formed islands, cut off from the rest of the world, with huge waves washing the beaches around him, and every ship that had sat in the marina near his office was gone, smashed against the shore into little pieces.
Jacob of course wasn’t the only survivor, though the dead far out numbered the living. All around him other people climbed out of the wreckage, most of them sporting at least bruises and some of them were crying with pain. Jacob realized that he didn’t have any time to be shaken himself, no one else seemed to be doing first aid.
Another man finally came forward who said that he was a nurse at a hospital and they started to work through all of the wounded. Jacob wasn’t a nurse but as part of his interest in survival training he had learned how to basic things, like set bones and do field stitching on cuts. As they worked through the wounded Jacob started to order the people around him who weren’t hurt, or not hurt badly, to save people buried under rubble and to salvage what supplies they could find in the ruins. As people were uncovered they were brought forward to be taken care of. Some of them were past saving, at least with the medical equipment that they had available and Jacob ordered people to at least try and make them comfortable. Giving people something to do was important, Jacob knew, you couldn’t let people think and panic themselves, they had to be kept moving.
Jacob worked all that night by the light of fires, there had been enough smokers among the survivors that things to make fire hadn’t been a problem, yet. Jacob had to wonder what would happen when they ran out of tobacco; right now everything was fine in that area though. It had been agreed by all parties that whatever could be found was common property, and that included the ruins of any tobacco shop. Jacob prayed for anyone who would be foolish enough to try to protect their damaged property and keep up business as usual with the mood people were in at the moment.
As dawn finally started to peek over the horizon Jacob and the nurse, whose name was Alex, finally sat down for a short break before doing the rounds again. There would be people who had died during the night while they had tried to do what they could for others, and there would be people who needed bandages changed. All around them people were sleeping around the dying embers of their fires, they had slept in groups, like animals, but it wasn’t an ugly scene for Jacob. This was after all the stuff that he had day dreamed about, only a week ago now that he thought about it. It hadn’t even been a full twenty-four hours since the earthquake and already it seemed distant.
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