And now the ground was pitching. She lay flat, spread-eagled, trying not to be turned over. It was like being on a violent sea, she thought — but not quite, for the motion was compound, shaking her up and down and side to side. More as if she was a flea on the back of a dog, shaking after a swim.

She was surrounded by explosions. The window burst, creating a new hail of glass fragments over her neck and head. The wall cracked with a report like gunfire.

Then the whole building fell, just like that, dropping through several feet, and she landed hard on her front again.

There was a grind of metal, the soft crump of fresh explosions. That open car lot on the ground floor must have collapsed. The building was now a storey shorter than the architects had planned it.

More booms. Smoke, curling into the window. That would be gas tanks going up, in the crushed automobiles beneath.

Cecilia’s Toyota 4Runner. Her pride and joy, paid for by the company. Even now, lying here in her own blood in the middle of the greatest damn earthquake since Cecil B. de Mille, Joely found room in her head for a touch of spiteful joy at that.

The floor was still shaking, but maybe not so violently. She got to her knees. She turned, looking for Cecilia.

Cecilia’s pc lay smashed on the floor.

It occurred to Joely that with the intranet destroyed, so was all the work she had done here; she had no hard copy, anywhere. Nothing to say why she had made her way here, today of all days. All those e-mails, lost like dreams, forever unanswered.

If this is the end of us, she thought, we will leave less behind us than the citizens of Pompeii. So much of what humans had created in the last few decades had been, when you got to it, just electronic patterns, stored on some tape or chip or disc somewhere. And when the power failed…

She saw a pair of legs, dimpled with cellulite, protruding from a too-short skirt. The edge of the stone desk top, still in one piece, had come down just above that skirt. Joely could see there was only a couple of inches clearance between the sharp rim of the desk and the floor.

Just a couple of inches, into which a human torso had been crammed.

There was blood seeping out under the desk, thicker and darker than Joely had imagined. Jesus. She felt bile rise at the back of her throat.

She looked for the door. It was on the other side of the desk, and she wasn’t sure if she could make it that far. And even if she could it looked as if it had buckled in its frame. No way to get that down except with a fire axe.