Cataclysm

De: A. B. King

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Barbara and Ann are sisters. Right from early childhood there has always been a strong invisible bond between them. Whenever Ann was in serious trouble, Barbara would know. Barbara is the older sister, and married to John, a Sussex farmer. Ann, is a highly successful fleet street journalist until she gives up her career to marry David, a geophysicist working for the National Physical Laboratory. Along with Norman, a highly skilled engineering toolmaker and his wife, and a young man called Barry and his widowed mother, and a schoolgirl called Mary they all become caught up in a developing holocaust of nature that has its origins in a field in John's farm. As the tide of destruction sweeps over the land, these people are drawn together under the shadow not only of the terrible powers of nature, but also into the path of a ruthless psychopathic killer who condemns them to a slow horrific death locked in an underground vault. Only Barbara can save them, and Barbara is far away, but in her final desperate hour of need, Ann calls her, and the invisible bond that holds the sisters together draws one against impossible odds to fight to save the other. Revised edition - October 2014 Excerpt. (from the end of the Chapter Nine) At two minutes past one o'clock on June the first, following a day of continuous earth tremors, with the storm still raging in all its fury, the volcano roaring and belching fire, lava, red- hot rocks and cinders at a prodigious rate, the earth suddenly shook with a violence that completely transcended everything that had gone before. In moments, buildings collapsed, shaken to their very foundations, gaping rents appeared in the heaving landscape that rolled like a sea in a storm. The earth contorted itself like a sleeping dragon awakening to stalk the land with unimaginable terrors. For exactly eight seconds the ground convulsed and shuddered as if possessed of a hideous life of its own. Water mains fractured, sending cascading fountains high in the air alongside geysers of flame from ruptured gas-pipes. Sewers collapsed, the last power lines sagged and came flailing down to be followed by the disintegrating pylons. In the south, the spire of Chichester Cathedral swayed like a galleon's mast in a hurricane, before slowly collapsing majestically in on itself, destroying a large part of the thousand year old building in the process. Hundreds of people who were gathered within its precincts died even as they prayed for salvation.