Chapter 20 Seven of Seven

The second party came off the peak at seven with twelve adults and no children, and they made the creek by nine minutes past ten that night, which was fast, and it was fast because one of them was a school secretary's husband and one of them was a man who had not slept since Tuesday and who found that useful, and one of them was Ramon Delgado, who carried the last of the water and would not put it down until somebody took it off him. They crossed the bench in the dark because they had to. The wind had not let up. It came across that open mile at thirty-four knots and every one of them was wet to the thigh by the time they were in the trees, and Aughrim's voice came out of the dark ahead of them the entire way, counting, because counting is the only thing she has ever needed. They came onto the creek at ten past ten that night, and there were already nineteen people on the bank and eleven cut-off fire hoses lying across the gravel with the river running out of them into buckets, and Juna Reyes was asleep sitting up against a boulder with her hand still on the handset, and Hollis Halleck woke her up and told her there was a boat. At ten to six in the morning, on the last of the ebb, the sea showed a seam of lighter water out past the north head, and out of the seam came a fifty-four-foot purse seiner with her bow in her own wake, making eleven knots, and her name on her bow in white letters, and an old man standing in her wheelhouse with a hand on the horn. She put her anchor down in eleven feet off the creek mouth at eight minutes past six and did not take it off again for two hours, because Pike had spent the whole night in the *Vera K* threading a channel for her with his sounder and calling the depth to her wheelhouse over a hand key every three minutes. Twenty-two people went down the bank at twenty past six. The eight children went first. Then the eight who were over sixty, with the two stretcher poles strapped to her pack frame, and they carried Aughrim down the bank on it because she would not step down it, and she went down it lying back with her arms folded and her eyes shut and her mouth moving. They went into the *Ansel Reyner* in three counts and got her deep. Thirty people went aboard that river boat between six twenty and seven ten in the morning, and eleven of them had been in a school gym's worth of emergency blankets for three days, and they all of them went forward, all of them, into the three hundred and fifty ton forward hold of a boat built to hold fish. The thirty-first was on the bank with a coil of cord over one shoulder, because somebody had to be standing on the ground when the boat let go of it. At seven-forty in the morning Juna Reyes was standing on the creek bank on an empty coast with the tide coming in. She had her father's old knife on her belt and she had the coil of the old cord around one shoulder and the tip sensor's wind reading on a scrap of paper in her pocket, and she had been awake for thirty-one hours, and she sat down on the pump house rock at eight o'clock and put her feet in the water and let them be wet. At nine minutes past seven the booster came up out of the tote on the gravel pad three hundred and fifty feet above her, and there was nobody on the peak to hear it except one man, and what it said to him was this. "Omar Hadid." "Yes." "You have been up on that rock for two days doing arithmetic, and I would like the number." He did not answer for about fifteen seconds, which for him was a shout. "The creek," he said. "Get that boat out of the channel and stay south of the bar. Do not let anybody stand on the bar and do not put a hand on a channel marker, because there is not one left to put a hand on. When the lid goes, everything on that bed goes with it, and the bed is the creek." "Omar—" "Eleven thousand cubic yards an hour at four o'clock yesterday afternoon. It is fourteen thousand now, and the rate is going up the way a hole gets wider when you put a hose in it." His voice was perfectly level and perfectly fast, which was how Juna had learned to hear him. "I have been treating it as a bathtub with a crack in the bottom. It is not a bathtub. It is a mine with a hole in it, and the water going down the hole is taking the floor out from under the ceiling. There are two hundred and forty thousand cubic yards of 1946 granite left over that void, and we had twenty-two hours on the number Pike gave me, and I have been sitting here since midnight with a magnifying glass turning that into nine." Nine hours. "The creek is on the north bar," Omar said. "The north bar is the same bed as the shelf. The shelf is the lid. Pike sounded the basin between the bar and the channel at a hundred and ten feet in the north end on Tuesday and he sounded it at two hundred and thirty this morning. The lid is not thin yet. It is thinning at the rate the drum is telling me, and the drum is telling me it is going faster than it was." "So we have until—" "Until the number runs out, and then until the last of it falls, which is not a number I can give anybody." He stopped. Out on the creek a gull went over, and somebody on the bank said a word in a language that was not English and was not any language Juna knew either. "Tell Pike south. Right now, away from the mouth, and keep his sounder running while he does it, because I want the profile of that hole on every channel that will take it before this is over." "He is standing twenty feet from me," Juna said, "in the wheelhouse of the *Vera K*, with the only set on this creek that reaches anything at all." "Then put him on the key," Omar said. "Key the count and the name of the creek and the number. Somebody on that coast is listening, and that is how we found you in the first place, and I would like the whole coast to have my number before we find out I have it wrong a fourth time." For one long minute at the end of that morning, the only sound on that creek was water moving in the shallows and thirty people standing in the forward hold of a purse seine listening to a man they had all met forty hours ago, and one woman on the pump house rock with a handheld against her jaw, and one man on the gravel pad three hundred and fifty feet above her counting them out loud as they crossed, because he had decided that if this went wrong it was going to go wrong in a way that had a number on it. He had been up since four. He had the plank across the paint cans in front of him, and the drum beside it with its smoked paper going round, and the eleven-twenty-two and the three hundred and ten feet and the twenty-two and eleven written on the board in a nine-year-old's hand, and the wind coming over the dome at thirty-one and taking the north half of the windbreak with it about once an hour. At twenty past eight he stood up and walked to the west side of the lookout, which was the only place on that dome where you could see eight miles of the coast. The water was coming back in. He could see it come all the way up the valley, a pale line under the trees on the ridge road, and he stood and watched it get to the school and go past the school and keep going, because that was what water did in that valley, and he had known it would for four days. And then he went and sat back down on the plank, and put his hand flat on the case, and waited. Then, at nine minutes to nine in the morning, the machine under the sea answered.