Chapter 10 The Second Surge

The first two hundred yards were the worst of it, because that was where the water was carrying the town. Juna Reyes went first with the rope's bitter end around her forearm and the other end belayed to nothing at all, which was a piece of rope she had been tying to things for six years and had never once tied to a person. Ramon Delgado followed with his mouth shut and his eyes on her fins, and for a hundred and fifty yards the two of them made four knots, which is the pace of a man who has never been towed and does not entirely trust the arrangement. A wall of siding came down the street beside them, pivoted once, and went on. A propane tank rolled past at knee depth, spinning slowly. A car door came by open like an exhibit. "How much of that is under us?" Delgado's voice came up through the water, thin. "Most of it." She got a hand on the roof of a minivan and let herself be lifted for a few strokes. "Don't fight anything. Let it go and come back to me." Another two hundred yards and the roofs thinned out, and then there was the harbor mouth, which had stopped being a place and become a line between two conditions. On the town's side, brown water over brown town. On the seaward side, black water over clean bottom, and the difference showed as a seam of foam that ran across the whole width of the channel like a seam in a hide. The white band was four hundred yards inside that seam and coming. "On the point!" Delgado shouted. "There. The tower." She could see it. The granite outcrop stood a hundred and ten feet out of the new landscape with the tower on top of it, and on the gallery a figure in a dark jacket was hauling a coil of line over the rail. She took the last hundred yards at a dead sprint, got a fistful of the granite at the foot of the outcrop, and reached up. The line came down. She clipped it to her belt, and Omar Hadid pulled with the slow measured stroke of a man who had spent a career not being surprised by anything. Delgado came up next, and Juna got a hand under his arm and held his face out of the water until Omar could get the rope to him. Then the wave came through the channel. It did not arrive the way the first one had. The first surge had been a wall with a noise in front of it. This one arrived as a lifting of the entire sea, a slow enormous shoulder standing up out of the water across the whole width of the bay and starting forward without breaking, and then the sound arrived, and the sound was not a roar. It was one long grinding note, like a heavy door being dragged across concrete, and Juna felt it come up through the rock into her knees and her jaw. The outcrop took the first of it. Water came over the shelf in a sheet, went past the tower's door, and broke up into spray that reached the gallery a hundred and ten feet above the old waterline. Then the town's water lifted and shoved a mile of it inland, and the whole brown surface went flat and hard and fast, and the trees on the hill above Front Street bent all one way and stayed that way. Juna lay on the granite with her forearms hooked over a seam in the rock and watched the level come up. It came up past the fire hall. Past the cannery. Past the school ridge road, where it stopped climbing and began to run along the road in a smooth brown river, both directions, fast. The second-floor windows of the school went under. The water stood against the school's north gable for a long minute, and then it began to go down, and Juna heard herself make a sound she had no memory of making. "It has to run out," Omar said, from somewhere above her. "Bay has to fill and drain. Twice a day, forever. You will watch it go and come and you will stop being able to think about anything else." "How long?" "Watch the floating dock lumber at the two o'clock bearing. When that stops turning." He was on the ledge above her with the wind coming around the tower, and his voice had the awful evenness of a man reading numbers aloud. "Fourteen minutes on the flood, and then it will start going out for three hours. It does not come back up like that. Not this one." The water went down. It went down the way a bathtub goes down, faster than water has any right to move, dragging the town with it and pulling a mile of timber back out through the channel in a slow reversing tide. The lighthouse point came back first, then the school ridge, then the fire hall roof, then the storefronts on Front Street in a long sequence, each one surfacing with a sheet of water running off it. Then it stopped, and the silence was so complete that Juna could hear the gallery railing ticking as it cooled. Delgado lay on the granite with his arms out. Omar came down the outside steps and sat beside him. "Sixty-one feet," Delgado said, to nobody. "Sixty-one feet at the mouth." "You want to tell me about that?" Delgado sat up. He had water running out of the cuffs of his coverall and he did not seem to notice. "Tuesday night, before any of this, the state's warning center called the district office. A man read a number off a fax and asked me to wake the harbormaster. Sixty-one feet of water at the harbor mouth if the fault lets go twice." He put his hands on his knees. "The harbormaster never woke anybody. I didn't wake anybody. I went home and my mother was complaining about her pipes." Omar looked at him for a while. "You are telling me this because you want somebody to do something about it." "I'm telling you because I'm going to have to tell thirty-one people on a ridge in an hour." "You'll tell them." Omar stood up slowly. "Come inside. Both of you. There's dry wood above the second landing and I would like to know how much water we have, and I would like to do it without an audience." The tower base was dry. That was the one mercy in the whole county. The granite shelf had taken the wave on its seaward face and thrown the overflow up and over, and the door of the storage shed at the tower's foot stood open on an interior that smelled of turpentine and tar paper and had four inches of water in it. They bailed it with a paint pan. They got the tarps down and made a bed out of the shelf where the old lens used to sit. The gallery was gone. Not the gallery. The railing. Forty feet of iron stanchion and chain rail had been taken off the catwalk and was somewhere down the hill in the trees, and with it went Omar's antenna, which was the anchor chain hung off that rail and a copper spool tied under it with a clout nail. "I put that thing up with my own hands," Omar said, looking at the empty stanchion bolts. He said it without heat. Then he keyed the handheld and got nothing at all, and keyed it again, and the meter did not even twitch. "Sixty watts into a piece of junk, and now I have a transmitter and no antenna." "Make another one," Delgado said. "There is nothing on this coast left to make one out of that will reach the mainland. I could hang the ladder off the lantern mount and gain maybe a mile, in the right direction, in clear weather." He put the handheld down. "It is not a radio any more. It is a noisemaker." Juna had gone up to the tower door and looked out at the water. The town was a lake with a road through it. She could see the ridge road where it climbed out of the flood and stood in a line of foam across the hill, a brown river running uphill on one side and downhill on the other, and above that line nothing moved at all. "The peak," she said. "Can we get there tonight?" Omar came and looked. "Walk up the ridge road? That road is under four feet and running. Walk the goat trail from its lower end? That is a quarter mile of switchbacks on a grade that is under six feet of moving water, with a swell arriving on the flood every eleven minutes." He shook his head. "No. We go at slack, near four in the morning, when the current is off the trail. That is eight hours from now and the trail is a scramble in the dark with two people who have never used it." "Then we wait eight hours." "Then we wait eight hours." He sat down on the door sill. "Go and sleep, both of you. One of us stays up." Juna did not sleep. She lay on the lens shelf with her hand around the butt of her knife and listened to the flooded town tick and settle, and at some point she got up and went out to the granite and lay on her back with her ears against the stone. There was a sound down there in the water. Not the beacon. Something under the seabed, low and steady, arriving in the stone in a pulse she could count if she wanted to. She counted it for a while. Then she got up and went and told Omar, and Omar got the notebook out and wrote the time next to the number. "Forty-eight seconds between them," he said. "It was fifty-four an hour ago." He did not say what it meant. He turned the page over and wrote it down on the clean side, and Juna watched him do it, and neither of them said out loud the sentence they were both thinking, which was that the machine under Signal Rock had been counting down in hours, and the hours had run out, and now it had started counting something else.