Jake Morrison's Arc

Chapter 32 of 54

At dawn Jake and Marcus stood on the dock with a coil of rope and a stack of cut boards. The gate frame lay ready on the planks. But no one knew how deep the water ran here. If the bars stopped short of the seabed, a creature could slide under and reach the boats. Jake stared at the black water. "We build blind, we build wrong," he said. Marcus wiped grease from his hands. He worked engines back when the world still ran, and he thought like one now. "So we measure first," he said. He tied a wrench to the rope and dropped it over the side. The line fed out and stopped. He marked it with his thumb. "Twelve feet at the mouth." He walked the pilings and dropped again. "Fourteen here. Sixteen at the end." The bottom sloped down toward open sea. Sofia came down with her notebook. She tracked every board and nail on the island, and she frowned at the numbers. "Your frame's built for twelve," she said. "The deep side leaves a four-foot gap. Wide enough for the thing that came up last night." Jake felt the weight of it. One gap was the same as no wall. He thought of the creature's tentacles hooking the piling. "Then we don't build one frame," he said. "We build it stepped. Long bars on the deep side, short on the shallow. Match the slope." Marcus nodded and started cutting the deep-side bars to sixteen feet. They worked through the morning. Marisol sat on a crate near the ramp, two months from the babies, and read out each depth while the men lowered the frame. Sofia checked every joint against her figures. When the last bar dropped, it kicked the seabed and held. Jake pulled the net taut across the bars and lashed the gate shut. Nothing could pass under now. He grabbed the boat hook and drove it down along the deepest bar, probing for a gap. Steel scraped mud the whole length. Sealed. He stood and let out a breath. "It's closed. Top to bottom." That afternoon the radio crackled. Marisol leaned close and listened, then waved Jake over. A scavenger group was calling. They had found land fifteen miles out. Ten miles of island, pine trees, caves along the shore. Smaller islands ringed it, thirty more miles of room. Space for survivors this crowded rock could never hold. Jake looked at the sealed dock, then at Marisol's belly. The babies were a month closer than this morning. "We're full here," he said. "But that place isn't." Marcus set down his gaff. "You want to check it out." Jake nodded slow. "Before the babies come. We take a boat and see it with our own eyes." The dock was shut. Now a bigger door had opened, and Jake meant to walk through it.