Jake Morrison's Arc

Chapter 44 of 54

The footage still glowed on the cracked screen. Two hundred creatures. Loaded boats. But Jake did not know when they would sail. If the invasion launched tomorrow, his island had no warning. His people would be cutting fish and rocking babies when the boats came over the horizon. Blind on timing was as dangerous as blind on numbers. He turned to Darrell in the walled enclave. "We can't just wait for them to hit us," he said. "We need our own fleet." Darrell crossed his arms, wrench-scarred hands tight. He and Jake had hauled trash together before the world fell. Now he ran a walled city, and he did not spook easy. He looked at Marisol, the girl who had built a flying machine from junk. "Those flying things you made," he said. "Can you build them bigger? Big enough to carry a person?" Marisol chewed her lip. She was nineteen and half Darrell's size, but the room waited on her answer. "Maybe," she said. "Bigger frames. Bigger motors. More power. With enough parts, yeah. I think so." "How many?" Darrell asked. "Could you build fifty?" She blinked. "Fifty." She stared at her sketch, doing the math out loud. "I'd need a crew. A hundred engineers, maybe. Even then it's slow." She looked up. "Two weeks. Give me two weeks and we might get some ready. Not all fifty. Some." "I'll help," Jake said. He stepped to the crate and put his hand flat on her drawing. "I fetch, I lift, I build. Whatever you need." Darrell nodded once, decided. "Then it's done. I'll pull two hundred people off the walls and the gardens. Every hand I can spare." He jabbed a thumb toward the mall halls behind him. "You take the electronics floor and the workshops. Motors, wire, metal, batteries. Anything in these walls, it's yours." He looked hard at Marisol. "You just make them fly." Marisol's shoulders squared. She rolled up the sketch and tucked it away. "Then we start now," she said. "I need tables. I need light. I need every motor in this place on the floor by morning." By dawn the enclave changed. Darrell's people carried motors and aluminum into the halls. Marisol marked a spot for each machine on the concrete. Jake hauled batteries in his arms until his shoulders burned. The garbage man and the goth girl and the trash hauler turned tyrant, all bent over the same wire. Jake stood at the edge of the crowded floor and felt the fear shift. He still did not know the day the boats would sail. But he no longer waited empty-handed. In two weeks his people would have machines in the air, eyes on the water, and weapons over the enemy's decks. The island would not be caught cutting fish. He picked up another battery and got back to work.