Jake Morrison's Arc

Chapter 42 of 54

The storm came from the west two nights after Darrell's boats left. Frank's charts named these blows. Jake knew the drill. He walked the cabins and called the order. Settlers pulled the boats up the ramps and lashed them tight. They shuttered every window on the resort island. They locked the domes and dropped the dock gates. By dusk the wind screamed and the rain came sideways. The colony held its breath behind wood and wire. Jake sat with Marisol and the twins until the noise finally broke. Morning came gray and still. Jake stepped onto the porch and saw the wreck. A fishing trawler lay broken on the rocks past the broken dock. Its hull was split. People clung to the wreckage. Jake counted seven, maybe eight, waving weak arms at the shore. Marcus came down the steps behind him, wrench still hanging from his belt. He looked at the wreck and then at Jake. "We closed the island," Marcus said. "You told fifty-five people no more strangers." His voice was flat, but his hands were already moving toward the skiff lines. Six months of trust let Jake read him. Marcus wanted to go. He just needed Jake to say it. "We inspect them first," Jake said. "Every one. Same as before." He and Marcus took the skiff out through the gate. Sofia met them on the east dock with the wire pen ready, her baby left with the nurse. She checked arms and legs while Jake watched their faces. No bites. Half-drowned, sunburned, thin as rope. He let them into the pen. Their leader was an older woman with a cracked lip and salt-white hair. She gripped the wire and would not sit. "You have walls," she said. "You have children who sleep at night. We had that too." She told them the name. Emery Heights, a city 250 miles north. A tyrant ran it. He threw people who crossed him into a pit of the infected. His scientists cut into the living to breed smarter creatures. "We ran two months on the water," she said. "The storm did the rest." Marisol stood at the dock rail, listening. Her face went hard. "Smarter creatures," she said. "On purpose." Jake thought of the laughing man who dismantled his fence from the inside. He thought of the tentacled things that clung to hulls. Jake made the call. He opened the pen. "You're ashore," he told the woman. "You eat, you sleep, you work." The survivors wept on the dock boards. That night Jake sat with Marcus and Sofia in the main cabin. "The island was our answer," Jake said. "Distance. Water. Walls." He set his hands flat on the table. "But there's a man 250 miles north building better monsters and breaking people. Water won't stop that forever." No one argued. The safe place they'd built now had a direction to face, and it faced north.