Chapter 2 Radio Silence

They spent the first hours taking inventory. Not of supplies—of themselves. Omar Hadid had been in his rented workshop on the harbor's north side when the first surge hit. The building was a corrugated-metal shed on a concrete pad at the waterline, and the wave took it like a crumpled can. He'd been underneath a heavy workbench when the water came in, and the bench formed a pocket—a thin air space between its steel frame and the ceiling as the building filled. He pressed his face into that gap and breathed while the water rose around him, debris slamming the walls, the whole structure groaning as the current tried to slide it off its pad. He survived because the building did not slide. It held through the second and third surges, and when the water stabilized he kicked out a wall panel and swam to the surface. His tools—the meticulous, organized tools he'd built a career around—were gone. The radio equipment, a portable transceiver with a hand-built antenna, sat in saltwater. Reference books, notebooks, structural surveys from the harbor assessment: all of it, gone. "But you're the marine infrastructure consultant," Juna said. "You have to know this coast." "Twenty years on the Outer Banks, twelve on the Gulf. I've been through hurricanes and a couple of small tsunami scares." Omar gestured at the drowned town. "Never seen anything this size. You?" "Coast Guard Medevac, and then SAR here. We drill for the big one twice a year. Nobody believed it." They worked through the morning gathering what the point could offer. The lighthouse keeper's quarters, converted to a harbor storage shed, had survived because the granite outcrop stood well above the flood. Inside they found the usual detritus: paint cans, coiled rope, a wheelbarrow, four tarps, a box of first-aid supplies expired the previous year, and a locked metal cabinet. Omar picked the lock with two bent nails and found the most valuable object in Tidefall—a dozen sealed survival ration packs left over from a Coast Guard training exercise, stamped with a date that had been current three years ago. "Rations don't expire so much as disappoint," Omar said. "Better than starving." They also found the lighthouse itself. Its door was a heavy plank affair that had swollen shut with decades of sea air; Juna put her shoulder to it and the hinges tore out of the frame. Inside, a circular tower climbed its full height into the gray sky, with a spiral stair wound up the inner wall to the lantern deck. The gallery at the top, where the lens had once turned, was now an open ring of iron protected by a waist-high railing. The base floor was damp but dry. "We'll camp here," Juna said. "It's the highest point on this side. If a second wave comes, this is where we want to be." "A second wave." Omar didn't make it a question. "You heard the surges. Five of them. The biggest was the third. A lot of tsunami events have a largest wave in the middle or late in the sequence. We could be done, or we could be between acts." Omar looked out at the waterline, which now ran like a bathtub ring across the town at the height of the fifth surge. "Are you telling me the water might come back?" "I'm telling you we plan like it will." They spent the afternoon on the radio problem. Omar had salvaged nothing from the workshop, but the harbor department's shed yielded a handheld VHF patrol radio in a hard case. The battery was dead flat. Juna found the solar panel that had once powered the marine weather beacon on the point—a three-foot panel bolted to the shed roof, its cable severed. Omar rewired it to the shed's battery bank, and by evening the handheld had a charge bar. They keyed it on every channel in the marine band. Channel 16, the distress channel, gave them nothing but a low, persistent hiss. Hailing channels, the local repeater frequencies, the broadcast band of the weather radio—all dead. Omar twisted the squelch knob and listened hard, as if silence were a sound he could learn to read. "Nothing on the water," he said at last. "No rescue traffic, no aircraft, no ships closer than the horizon. Either everything for a hundred miles went down with us, or nobody is out there to talk." "They'll come," Juna said. "Oregon has a state response plan for a quake and tsunami. This is their backyard." "To come, they need somewhere to land. The airport is underground, the highway's gone, the harbor's a junkyard." He set the radio down on a paint crate. "They'll come when they can. We just have to last until then." That evening they moved what mattered into the lighthouse base. The tarps became a roof for the doorway. The ration packs went into a dry corner. The battery bank and solar panel were dragged inside on a wheeled dolly from the shed. Omar's salvaged wiring—he had saved a spool of copper, a coil of insulated wire, and a handful of connectors from the shed before the water reached them—sat in a neat pile beside the radio. "We should signal," Juna said. "Not just listen. If a helicopter passes, we need them to see us." "Working on it." Omar had found a conical metal buoy marker in the shed, rusted and discarded. "Anchor chain from the harbor might work as an antenna if I can get it up the tower. A long wire on the gallery might carry a few miles, maybe more on a good band." "Is that safe? The tower's the highest lightning rod on the coast." "Lightning isn't our problem tonight. Tonight the problem is that not a single human being knows we're alive." At dusk they climbed to the gallery and hung the anchor chain from the railing, cleverly jury-rigged with the rope Juna had carried from the mercantile. Omar connected the copper spool to the chain with a clout nail hammered flat, and ran the wire down the tower stairs to the radio. It was not elegant. It would have made an electrical engineer wince. But when he keyed the transmitter and sent a five-second carrier wave, the handheld's analog meter kicked. "We're transmitting," he said. "Sixty watts into a piece of junk, but we're transmitting." They sent the same five-second carrier every fifteen minutes through the night, on the emergency channel, followed by a voice call: "Any station, any station, this is Tidefall Point, tidefall point on the water, over." No reply came. The hiss stayed uniform. The radio remained what it was in the morning: a machine for talking to nobody. While Omar nursed the radio, Juna walked the perimeter of the point—a hundred yards of cracked granite from the waterline to the tower. She studied the flood. The water had a color now, a flat olive brown from mud and engine oil and the guts of a thousand ruined buildings. Flotsam moved slowly in the current, some of it alive: gulls riding sheets of plywood, a rat on a plastic drum, once a distant seal surfacing and diving with mechanical calm. The drowned town was settling. Every hour, something shifted, cracked, or sank with a hollow boan that carried across the water without an echo. She thought about Danny Waxler and the dock crew. She thought about the *Vera K* and the family that owned her. She thought about the school on the hill, built well above the flood line, and tried to tell herself the children had been safe there. She could not know. She could not reach them, either—the ridge road ran along the contour of the hill, high enough to be dry, but the distance was several miles on foot through broken ground, and the sun was almost down. "Tomorrow," she said to the water. "Tomorrow I go looking." She came back to the tower and found Omar sitting on an upturned paint bucket, the radio in his lap, staring at the analog meter. "Something's wrong," he said. "The radio?" "No. The meter." He held out the handheld. "It's receiving. Look." Juna looked. The meter needle sat quiet at zero, the way it should on an empty channel. Then, in a rhythm too slow for a heartbeat, it twitched. Three beats, a gap, three beats, a gap. It repeated for a full minute before going still. "Static?" she said. "Static does not repeat." Omar turned up the volume. The speaker gave them nothing audible, just the sea wind and the distant slap of water against the rocks. "That's not from the radio itself—I checked the squelch, I checked the battery. Something is keying a transmitter close enough to ride right on top of the channel, at the edge of our hearing." "What is it?" "I don't know. But it's been doing it for the last half hour, in the same pattern, from the same place." "Where?" Omar pointed south, past the drowned rooftops, past the collapsed marina, past where the harbor mouth used to be. He pointed at the open water—and at the one structure that still stood over it. "The old lighthouse light, no. Not the tower." He corrected himself, frowning. "The reef. Signal Rock. The light was on Signal Rock before they moved it to the point. When the tide rose, the rock went underwater. There's something out there, under the waterline, sending the same three beats over and over." Juna stared out into the dark. The pattern had gone quiet. The harbor hissed with wavelets. The drowned town creaked and settled. "Three beats repeated," she said. "That's a distress pattern—in Morse, the letter S. SOS." "It is," Omar said. "But SOS is sent by people. There are no people left on Signal Rock. Not in the water, not under it." They sat in the dark tower with the radio between them and waited for the pattern to return. It did not, that night. But Juna had grown up on this coast, and she knew the water did not make mistakes like that. Something was out there, keeping time under the flood, and it was not the sea.