Chapter 14 Forty-Six Feet

At six-forty they were on the eighth switchback, four hundred feet above the draw, and Juna saw it happen with nothing between her and it. First the sea went out. Not far, and not the way it had gone out on the first morning, when it had pulled a mile of seabed up out of the bay like a tablecloth. This was local. Out past the harbor mouth the surface lifted into a long straight ridge of moving water, two hundred yards wide, with the wind tearing the top off it, and then the ridge bent, and the whole band of it curled toward Signal Rock the way a current bends around a hole. The foam ring was gone. Where the ring had been there was a bowl, black and hard-edged, and the water was going into it in a single smooth curve. Then the wall came up out past the point. It stood there for a long time, longer than any wall of water has any business standing, and it did not break. Juna watched it hold, the whole thing, from its right hand to the harbor mouth, with the drowned town lying flat in front of it. The front of it was not white. There was no foam on it at all. It was the color of the water in the bay, and the only thing that gave it away was the line of spray coming off the top like a cloud standing still in the wind. Then the noise arrived, and it did not sound like the first surge. It was lower and it went on too long, one grinding note under another, and she felt it come up through the rock under her feet before it came through the air. And the wall went in. It went into the bay and it went past the harbor mouth, and the water that went into the bay came on up the valley the way water comes on up a valley, brown and fast and a foot deep, and it went through the school, through the car park, through the ridge road, and up the draw, and for the next eleven minutes Juna Reyes climbed eleven switchbacks in water that came up after her the entire way like something following her home. When she came out onto the gravel pad the sky had gone from black to the color of a coin, and the lookout tower was standing in eighteen inches of water with the catwalk gone and four feet of standing water inside the ground floor. Aughrim had the thirty-one on the high granite shoulder behind the tower, sitting in the rain in their blankets, and she had done it in the dark, in the twenty minutes between the water arriving and Juna coming over the top, without being told to. Two of them were hurt. Dalton Hague had gone through the catwalk railing at the high point and put his shoulder out of its socket on the way down, and he was sitting with his back against the granite and his hat on his knees, entirely calm, saying nothing, which Juna had learned was how he handled anything. The four-year-old's mother had a hand opened along her forearm by a piece of the windbreak frame, and she was holding it in her lap and keeping it out of the light, and Niko was asleep against her good hip with his fingers curled shut, and his feet were bare, and there was water in the gravel where he had been standing. Juna went up the hill behind the lookout on her knees in the water to the top of the granite knob, twenty feet above the lookout pad, and looked out at what was left of the bay. The school was gone at the ground floor and standing at the second. The whole ridge road was a river going uphill. Everything below the dome was the same flat brown sheet with timber and fences and the occasional roof lying flat on it, and the current was already slackening, and out in the bay the water was falling. Falling fast. That was the thing she could not stop looking at. The wave had come and gone in twenty minutes, and it was supposed to go, and instead it kept going down, and the bay was taking itself somewhere. On the school mast, standing black against a gray sky, she could see the forty-foot lattice still bolted to its roof. It had not moved. That would matter in about six hours. Omar was on the lookout gallery, or on what was left of it, one boot in the frame and a board nailed to the tower leg. He had been out in the water in the dark with a lamp and a piece of chalk, and he had marked the level, and when Juna climbed up to him he turned the lamp on the mark instead of saying anything at all. The mark was forty-six inches above the leg's foot, and a strip of the tower had been floating level with the water when he made it, and Juna looked at it for a while before she understood what she was looking at. "How high does that make the peak's shoulder?" "Forty-six feet at the shoulder of this tower, taken at eight-forty, on the flood, with the highest mark I could find in the dark." He closed the lamp. "The district annex puts sixty-one feet at the mouth of the harbor. I have been out on that number for three days like a man holding a rope he cannot put down." "So the wave was smaller." "The wave was smaller at the top than the model says, by fifteen feet, and it should have been larger." He turned around and leaned against the wet iron. "Fifteen feet of that model went somewhere it was not supposed to go. And I know where it went, because I have a buoy on that rock with a current meter in it that I wrote the maintenance schedule for, and the current meter is the only instrument I have ever trusted without reading the manual twice." "Omar—" "I was wrong." He said it flatly, to the horizon. "I stood on this gravel at six o'clock last night and told thirty-one people that at six-forty this morning there would be sixty-one feet of water on this ridge. I gave you an hour and a number and I put it in a book, and the book said sixty-one, and there is forty-six feet on this tower and the tower is still standing. I was wrong in front of them. That is what they needed to know, and I am glad of it, and I would like to buy it again tomorrow." Juna looked down the hill at the water going out of the bay. "Twelve hours," she said. "Maybe fifteen. Look at it. It is still draining, and the tide has three hours to go before it is even due to come back." "Yes." "Then it is not finished with us." "No." He looked at the board on the plank, at the numbers in a child's careful hand, at the last one, which was the time, and then at nothing. "There is a hole in the bottom of the bay, and for the next several hours the bay is a bathtub with a crack in it, and everything we do from here on has to be done while the water is going the wrong way." Behind him, Halleck came up the granite on his hands and knees and lay on the flat rock with his forehead against it for a while before he stood up. "The mast is on the school roof," he said. "I saw it." "The gym took water again at the twenty-minute mark, same as every time. It is the boosters that I want." He sat down hard. "There is a box on that mast called a booster. It is the only piece of the school that can make a noise at somebody far away. And I have known since yesterday afternoon that I was going to have to go into that gym to get it, and I have been not saying so since yesterday afternoon, because I did not want to be the man who said it in front of those children." Juna was already unclipping her belt. ---