I'm running along the hard, rocky road, my bare feet bleeding slightly. Damnit, I'm late! I think to myself. I turn into Leaf Street, and swear quietly. Miss is going to kill me! I start counting the house numbers. When I get to number 26, I stop, take a deep breath and knock on the door.
Almost instantly, one of Miss's daughters opens the door. She looks at me for a second, then lets me in. She knows me pretty well, and she calls to Miss, 'Mum! Olivia's here!'.
Miss comes thundering down the stairs, then down the hallway and stops right in front of me. She looks from my wet hair and face, to my dirty rags, at my bleeding feet and then back at my face. She slaps one of my cheeks. It was hard, but I dare not cry.
'You're late,' she snarls. I hurry off to the rest of Miss's servants. They are in the living room, scrubbing the wooden floors. I grab a sponge, when suddenly Miss grabs my shoulder. 'Oh no. You will be in the garden with Ms Silk. Together you will fill twenty buckets full of weeds. Then you will be watering all my plants. And then mowing the lawn. When you are done, you will pick five roses each, place them in a vase and put them on my bedside table. Then, and only then, will you get your euro. Am I clear?'
We both nod, then head outside into her expansive garden. Her plot is actually 5 acres, four of which is her garden. I start de weeding. It is hard work, but we get it done by dusk. It is later than we usually finish, but we had four acres for two people to do, an average of two acres a person.
When I get home, dad is sobbing over mum's dead body. I sit beside him. Tears start to flood my eyes.A few doctors carry her into the back garden. They perform a short Autopsy, then whisper to dad as they leave, 'The plague is back."
Silence.
Shimmer, our collie sheepdog cross, enters the room and starts barking. The barks are full of grief and fear, yet we can still tell she also knows something we don't.
It is a week later. We are still mourning over mum. Me, dad and my twin sister, Lily, who had just returned from a trip to France, are all mourning for her.
The ground suddenly shakes. It is a slight shake, one that not many would notice. But it unearths our floorboards. Shimmer barks.
Another shake. Lily screams. We know that this is the start of an earthquake. And a deadly one at that.
We leave the house. The ground is not giving seperate shakes, but a series of them. It does groups, ten shakes at the most. Then it stops shaking. It is teasing us. This is the foreshock. Already some houses are slightly broken. Ours has cracks, some wide enough for me to fit my whole hand in.
Then the real trouble starts. The ground shakes again, yet this time, the shakes are more forceful, coming more often and in greater quantities.
Soon houses are fully destroyed. Cracks are forming in the ground. Dad is running away from one of the largest ones. It is half a metre wide and is starting other cracks in the earth, like a tree. Suddenly he trips on a rock. He falls in the gap, holding on with only his hand. The gap starts closing in, still vibrating hard. Suddenly, it gives a wild jerk. The gap closes in on dad, crushing his body. When the gap opens again, he is at the bottom of the crack in a pool of blood. He is hardly even human looking, from being crushed. I know he is dead but still reject the thought.
First mum, now him? Why is this happening to me? Will Lily be next? Or my two best friends, Jessica and Kloe? And what will happen to Shimmer? I know she is not dead, as she is right beside me, but what will happen to her if I die? And what is the fate of everyone else? My relatives, Miss?
Then I remember my older brother, John. He was returning from the army today. He is alive, but what will happen when he arrives back home and finds that his home country is all destroyed and down in ruins?
Through all my thoughts, I haven't realised that the mainshock of the earthquake is over. I am at the top of a building. It is steel, and rather tall. It is supposedly indestructible for earthquakes 6 and below. Though ours is 6.5, it is still mainly intact. A large chunk of it had fallen off, killing at least twenty five people. It is also really bent, shaken and angled.
When the earthquake is over, I start descending the stairs, leaving the rooftop terrace. We know what will come next. After the mainshock comes the aftershock. The aftershock is normally quite minor just a few shakes for our city, but after the aftershock comes a tsunami. We live close to the coast, in a small town called Snowtop. It usually smells like cinnamon apples, as there are many carts full of them.
That's away from the point. The point is, we have to get underground to shelter.
I am at the shelter's trap door. I am the last to enter, and I can see the wave. It is crashing through the town, swallowing all the debris it picks up. I leap into the shelter and shut the trapdoor. I can hear the wave passing over the trapdoor. There are many drops of water entering the shelter.
Drip, drip, drip. It's almost torture hearing the water. It seems as though we are hearing our fate. A tear rolls down my cheek.
Drip, drip, drip. I pray to God that we will live. I glance at the water, then at the hundreds of people down here with me.
Drip, drip, drip. The water is coming in more quickly, like a pipe spurting water. Like a tap.
Suddenly, the trapdoor gives way to the tremendous weight of the tsunami. Water gushes in and soon the whole shelter is full. I struggle out of the shelter and am lucky to come on the right side of the wave. Though the water is definitely at least two metres deep, the wave is moving away. My head is bobbing above water, occasionally entering the water.
The water level is decreasing slowly, and after about an hour my feet touch the ground. I am glad to have this comfort but the water is still up to my chin. Sometimes, Mother Nature teases me and lifts the water level by a few centimetres, then drops it again.
I see distant helicopters, and start waving my hands and arms violently. The helicopter is coming my way, and soon it is hovering a few metres above the water. They see me and drop a rope ladder. Some of it is in the waist-deep water. I climb the ladder and enter the helicopter.
They instantly hand me a towel. 'You must be freezing,' a woman says to me. I shrug. It is a warm day so I don't mind.
There are only four people on the helicopter so far, the woman, two other men and me. I am shivering, but I don't mind. I am hoping they find someone other than me.
Anyone, really.
I listen to what the people are saying. 'Yes, Rivertown was always a place prone to earthquakes. We had to expect one sometime soon. And here we are! A 6.5 on the Richter Scale and a tsunami with a wave about a hundred metres high!'
'You're dreaming,' says the pilot. 'No wave can be a hundred metres high.'
'The highest wave was more than five hundred metres!' exclaims the woman. Then she turns and looks at me. 'My name is Amy Leaf. Who are you?'
I mutter my name quietly, and she repeats it with the same sonority. I think that she can tell from my clothes that I am not very rich. I don't think that I lost any respect, she just made a mental note.
An hour of searching later and Lily has been rescued. Her arrival brought new joy to my heart. She was weak, and in a mini coma. She almost drowned. She woke up half an hour after she was rescued.
The people are returning to wherever they left from. They give me and Lily a sandwich each consisting of bread, butter and grated carrot. We tell them that this is our first sandwich ever. We are used to an apple or a slice of bread. Normally the food has gone off, so our family was somewhat protected from the plague. This plague, the plague that killed mum, is as different and unrecognised as many others.
We finish our sandwiches and look out the window. We are flying across the seas. I ask where we are going. 'You two are coming all the way from Korea to the Welsh countryside,' replies the co-pilot, 'Welcome, girls, to your new home.' he says as the helicopter lands.
When Lily and I step out of the helicopter, we are greeted by our new foster parents. They know our situation, about the earthquake and everything like that. They are nice and say that we will go to school.
I don't know what school is. I've never even heard the word before. Is it a dungeon, a place of torture? I guess I will have to find out myself. School will start in two weeks, as the school holidays (no idea what they are) are almost over.
We enter the house. It is wooden on the outside, and some of the interior is painted white. My twin and I share a room.
Two weeks pass and we are wearing our school uniform. I am tying up my blonde hair. Cars are a rare sight on the road. Horses are more popular. We ride on our horses. We got our very own mares a week ago from a farm. Mine is named Ebony Nettle, and Lily's horse is Mystery.
We arrive at school, and get our horses into the stables. About fifty other horses are already in the stables. Our school's name is Hilltop College. It teaches about seventy five students, and the land is about two hundred metres square. There are only five buildings, one for each teacher. Each teacher teaches either two or three grades each.
We are in year seven, and head off to the classroom. Our teacher is Mr Smith. When we enter the classroom, he looks at us and says 'You're late,'.
We lower our heads in self shame. We have almost no idea what he said, but we knew we were being criticised in some way. We then sit at the back of the class at our own desks. Lily is my neighbour in terms of desks.
The desks are wooden and only one student can sit at them. They each have one storage drawer for all our books underneath the desk. They all have a little wall at the front and left. The reason for the wall is so that no one can copy someone else. There is no wall on the right because then you can write. Both Lily and I are right handed.
There are only fifteen people in our class, which is two grades. The rest of the class take out their literacy books and start writing who knows what. I stare at the page blankly. Not only am I terrible at speaking Welsh, but I also don't know how to write a single letter.
I look over at Lily. She, too, is clueless. She is better at speaking Welsh than me but is no better at writing down things. Then Mr Smith walks by. He stares at my page, then Lily's, and loudly exclaims, 'You two had better get writing, otherwise you will be in big trouble. You might even have to stay in at recess. And you don't want that to happen.' Everyone sniggers, but we just look at him blankly. Seeing that we have no idea what he is saying, he smirks and walks off.
'He's an idiot,' I say in Korean. Lily looks at me and says my name harshly. I blush and start drawing on my page.
When the bell rings, Mr Smith collects all of the classes' papers.
We walk out and sit on a bench together, talking in Korean. Many people pass us and point at us and laugh.
