第11章 What the Water Kept

Slack came at ten past four, and the three of them left the tower base with a rope and a hand light and no more than the clothes they stood in. Omar went first up the granite, because a man who has spent forty years looking at rock knows which of the seams will hold a boot, and he chose a route that looked insane and was not. The goat trail came down off the dome in eleven switchbacks cut by the county in 1961 for a fire crew, and the lower half of it stood in the new lake with the water moving through the cuts at knee depth and rising twice an hour. They went up it in a line, roped, one at a time on the bad pitches. From the sixth switchback, looking back and down, Juna saw the town. She had swum through most of it in the dark and she had never once seen it from above. Tidefall lay under eleven feet of flat brown water from the point all the way to the foot of the hill, and the only things standing proud of it were roofs, the crane boom at the cannery, the top two floors of the cannery's office block, and a stand of dead trees on the ridge road that had lost every leaf overnight. Boats lay on the hillside two hundred feet above their own moorings, upside down, in rows. The school stood with four feet in its ground floor. The gym was gone entirely. Water stood in the car park to the second row of parked cars. Nobody spoke for a while. "They went up here," Delgado said at last. "Thirty-one of them. On foot, in the dark, on a road I certified for buses." "They walked it twice," Juna said. "Out and back." They crested the dome at twenty past seven. The lookout on Cathedral Peak was a riveted steel frame with no glass in it and a catwalk of rusted grating, and beside it the county had put a gravel pad, a rain barrel, and a steel mailbox on a post. Thirty-one people had made a town out of those three objects. Tarps made a windbreak along the north rail. A school gym's worth of emergency blankets lay in the lookout's bare room in a neat grid, seven of them occupied by children, and the rest by the old, who had been given the wall side out of the wind. Bernice Aughrim came down off the rail to meet them. She was sixty-eight and she had been the secretary at that school for twenty-two years, and she took in the state of Ramon Delgado, the drowned valley behind them, and the third stranger, and she did not ask a single question until she had put a mug of something hot into each of their hands. "The water took the ground floor at about twenty past five," she said. "It came up the stairwell to the second landing and stopped. Nobody here was below the ridge road at three in the morning, and that is because of you." She looked at the mug in her hands and then at Juna. "You said thirty-one. It is thirty-one. I have counted every hour." "Hollis has been on the watch since midnight," Aughrim said. "He won't sit down. Dalton Hague has been running water up from the school roof tanks with a bucket and a rope and a word count." Halleck came around the windbreak with a hundred yards of salvage cord over his shoulder and no patience at all. "You're the engineer on the radio." "I am." "Then you should know that there is nothing coming up this ridge but us, and no way to tell anybody." He set the cord down. "I have watched every hour from that rail. Nothing on the water. Nothing in the air. I have counted nine boats going out of the bay before the first one came in, and I have counted every one of them going the wrong way, and there has not been a single engine sound since Tuesday morning." He looked at Delgado's coverall. "Who are you?" "Ramon Delgado. Town flood response. I built the beacon you are hearing on the handheld." Halleck's eyebrows went up. "The one saying three beats?" "Yes." "Hasn't that thing ever once said anything useful?" "It has been saying three beats since I wired it in 1996," Delgado said, "and until about six hours ago it had never said them on purpose." They fed the thirty-one first. That took the better part of an hour, and it took the food out of the tin, and afterwards nobody in the windbreak was in a mood to be told anything at all, except the three of them, who went down at nine with a rope and a hand light and Omar's spare battery. The truck bay roof was clear by then. Juna went down through the skylight and into the bay, and the bay was nine feet of black water and she had to swim it. The safe house door had been thrown open and jammed against its frame by the surge, and when she got her shoulder into it she found she could not move it at all. "Delgado." "Your side." They got it between them. The room was full to the ceiling, and the surface of the water was one inch below the tiles, and the whole of the tide-table world they had lived in for nineteen hours was floating gently against the roof with its bunks and its tank and its thermos. The folder was on the table, where he had left it. Delgado put his hand in and brought it up. Twenty-two ruled lines, and every line after the sixth had run together into a grey brick. He looked at it for a long moment and then set it on the sill of the window and left it there. "The sleeve," he said. "In the back of the folder." It was there. A clear plastic report sleeve, sealed, with a district flood-response annex page in it, and on the back of the page in pencil, in the same clerk's hand: *TUE 2210 — state advises 61 ft @ mouth, two-slip model. Do not wake town. R.D.* Below that, added later, in a shakier version of the same hand: *I did not wake the town.* The radio was on the table too. Delgado got it into the crook of his arm and they took it up the ladder and out through the hatch and across the roof and into the rising afternoon, and neither of them mentioned the folder on the sill. Back at the peak, Omar Hadid put the sleeve flat on the gravel and read the printed side with the sun behind his shoulder so he could not see the numbers. "Harbor district flood response annex, section six," he said. "Standby wave heights. It is a design document. It says that in the event of a Cascadia margin rupture the town should assume a harbor mouth runup of sixty-one feet and a ridge road inundation of fourteen." His finger went to the last line of the printed text and stayed there. "It also says this: the bay contains one permanent reference for the state survey, being the shelf at Signal Rock, and that the shelf shall not be disturbed by any works of the district without notice to the state." "They blasted it flat in 1946," Juna said. "They cut it down to a table at four feet below datum and left the mass behind the table." Omar turned the page over. "There is a survey pin on it. R-9. That is what the number is." He wrote out the relay's series on the back of a ration carton and set it beside the annex, and he did arithmetic for eleven minutes while nobody spoke to him. When he came up out of it he was not looking at either of them. "Then it is an hour," he said. "An hour for what?" "For the wave." He turned the carton around so they could see. "The relay reports the distance from the fault trace to the shelf. The shelf is forty fathoms of granite and it does not move. When that number reaches zero, the rupture front has reached the bay. And the annex tells me how many feet of water that puts on this ridge, and sixty-one feet is a number I can turn into minutes, because I know how fast that water comes up a valley like this one." Delgado put his hand flat on the gravel. "Say the hour." "Say it and I will put it in the book." "Six-forty in the morning," said Omar Hadid. "Slack high. One tide tomorrow. Same as the first." He closed the notebook. "Go and tell them. I want to give them the whole day to decide what to do with it, and I want to be wrong in front of thirty-one witnesses."