Children of the Storm

by Dean Koontz

  Tina was still sniffling, but was getting over her fear with remarkable speed.

  Sonya did not respond, but went to the window and opened the interior shutters just as Peterson delivered a first, solid kick to the far side of the door, just about where the latch was. She slid the window up, letting in the blunt fingers of the storm, letting in Greta's voice and thereby dulling the sound of his second kick which, nevertheless, she was sure was as effective as his first had been in loosening the latch screws and gaming him entry.

  "Look here," she told Alex.

  He stood beside her, rain pelting his face through the open window, and looked out at the roof of the first floor porch. "You want us to get down there?"

  "You first," she said. "It's a flat roof, and it shouldn't give you much trouble if you don't stand up on it. The wind will blow you off if you try to stand up straight, do you understand?"

  He nodded vigorously.

  Peterson kicked the door.

  A single screw pinged loose, and the latch rattled.

  "Stay on your hands and knees," she said.

  He had crawled onto the windowsill, facing her. She took hold of his hands, helped him to squirm out, groaned as she took his weight on her arms. She leaned forward, trying to put him as far down as possible, dropped him when his feet were only eighteen inches from the porch roof. He fell, dropped to his knees at once, and crouched there in the high wind, as tenacious as a little animal.

  "Your turn," Sonya told the girl.

  "I'm scared," Tina said. She was pale and trembling, and she looked utterly unable to withstand even a few seconds in Greta's ferocity. But she was going to have to withstand it, and for longer than a few seconds.

  Sonya kissed her, gave her a big hug. As kindly and firmly as she could, she said, "You'll be okay, angel."

  "You coming, too?"

  "Of course, angel."

  Peterson was calling to her from the hall, but she did not listen. He had nothing to say that would change her plans; they had only one chance of escape, and they must take it quickly.

  She repeated the routine she had used with Alex, letting Tina dangle from her hands, above the black porch roof. She was two and a half feet from safety, a more dangerous distance than Alex had been, but when she fell, her brother grabbed her and held her, making a more difficult weight for the wind to move around.

  Peterson had stopped talking and was kicking the door again. Another screw pinged loose, and the whole latch slipped, close to being torn completely free.

  Sonya sat on the window ledge, dangling her legs a moment, then pushed off and fell to the roof. She landed on her feet, which surprised her, felt the wind tug at her, crouched, scurried to the kids and directed them to the edge of the porch roof, helped them jump to the lawn eight or nine feet below, followed them.

  Kneeling in the grass, she turned, squinting as stinging whips of rain lashed across her eyes, and she looked back at the bedroom window from which they had come.

  Peterson was there, his face twisted in rage, his hands gripping the sill, as if he were about to follow them, a decision she fervently hoped he would make, for they would then have a chance to get inside and to the storm cellar, a small chance, but something, anyway. Instead, he turned abruptly away from the window, disappeared.

  He would be on his way downstairs.

  She had no door key with her, and they would never be able to break a window in the door and get inside to the storm cellar entrance before he met up with them.

  She stood, bent over by the ungodly hammer of the wind, her hair skinned tightly back from her head, drenched despite the plastic windbreaker she wore, her whole body stung by pellets of hard rain, like thousands of determined gnats or mosquitoes. She had hold of the children's hands, and she drew them close to her, aware that they would be feeling the murderous anger of Greta more fully than she.

  "He's coming after us!" Alex yelled.

  "I know," she said.

  Tina had to hold her head down, to keep from suffocating in the dense sheets of rain that battered her small face.

  "What can we do?" Alex asked. He was taking it all very well, she thought, and that gave her the nerve to say what she had to say, as ridiculous as it was going to sound.

  Screaming to be heard above Greta's deep and unfeminine voice, Sonya said, "We're going to go to Hawk House, to see the Blenwells."

  "Across the island?"

  "Yes," she said.

  She wasn't sure they'd heard.

  She said, "We can get help there! Now, hold tightly to my hands. Don't let go of my hands no matter what."

  She felt their fingers tighten around her palm, and she tightened her grip as well.

  "Try to walk as fast as you can for as long as you can," she said. "Don't ask for a rest unless you just can't go another step." She looked closely at each of them. They looked like two bedraggled puppies, and she couldn't see how they would ever make a mile and a half in the middle of the worst hurricane in almost thirty years. But they had to. They would make it simply because they had to; they had no other choice, other than to wait for Peterson and to die.

  She kissed Alex, then Tina.

  "Come on, then," she said.

  She started forward, her head bent so that the rain did not blind her, and she was happy to see that the children had either copied her posture or had come to it naturally. That was a good sign. Maybe not good enough, but something, anyway.

  The first few steps were not so hard at all, even with the wind driving them a step sideways for every three steps forward, and she felt that, if she could reach the shelter of the palm forest, they might find the going just easy enough.

  Every now and again, she raised her head to be sure they were still moving in the right direction and, as they neared the edge of the long lawn, she turned to see if Peterson was after them yet.

  He was nowhere in sight.

  Her heart leaped at that, and she got them started, even faster, for the shelter of the big trees.

  BOOK FIVE

  * * *

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Seawatch was at the point-end of the island's first hill, perched on the brow, with its lawn extending across the crest of the hill until the palms began on the far, downward slope and continued for the length of the island's spine, or at least until they were cut down to form the grounds around Hawk House more than a mile away. As Sonya led the children down that first small slope, slipping and sliding in the wet grass, moving toward the start of the palm thicket, she was surprised to see that the tiny glen at the hill's base was awash with brackish-looking water. The rain kept her from looking very far to either the left or the right, but so far as she could see, this slopping, choppy stream continued. She could not, or would not conceive that this might be part of the sea, that the storm had driven the waters this far in from shore, and so she assumed that what lay below was simply the rainwater which had run off from this hill and the next.

  Though the stream appeared to be no more than a foot or two deep, its surface was deceiving, for it came nearly to her hips. If it had had any currents in it, she might have found it impossible to carry both children across, which she managed, now, in two trips.

  Climbing even the gentle slope of the second hill proved a supreme challenge, for they all three slipped and fell repeatedly, as if they were on a greased ramp. At last, when they did reach the top, they were into the thickest growth of palms and cut off from at least a third of the wind's battering ram.

  The going was still not easy, not by any stretch of the most vivid imagination, not anywhere so easy as Sonya had hoped that it would be when they got this far. Even at two-thirds its real volume, the wind was staggering and, when it gusted by an additional twenty and thirty miles-per-hour, it tore through the trees like fusillades of cannon fire, knocking them against the boles of the pine trees and, sometimes, driving them uncontrollably to their knees in the mucky earth.

  And, if they gained an advantage from the windbreak effect of t
he trees, they had to suffer another torture they would not have been faced with in open land. The wind, already with a voice like a herd of mastodons, made the brittle palm branches rattle and scrape until the resultant din was almost more than human ears could take. She hoped that she would not have to tell Alex or Tina anything important, for even with her mouth to their ears, they would have trouble hearing her above the chorus of chattering fronds.

  Occasionally, but less often than she would have liked to because the effort required and the time lost made it dangerous to do very often, she turned clear about and looked to see if Peterson was anywhere in sight, her heart in her throat each time, sure that he would be there, frighteningly close, still holding his knife.

  But he was not.

  They were alone.

  After one of these pauses, she turned to go forward again and leaped in fright when a coconut and several palm branches crashed to the earth five feet ahead of them, torn from their moorings by the wind. Had they taken another two steps, one of them might have been killed or received a skull fracture from that coconut.

  Now, in addition to Peterson and the wind and the rain and the slippery ground, she had another thing to worry about.

  They stepped across the fallen boughs and hurried on.

  * * *

  TWENTY-FIVE

  In a short while, the land began to fall away again, into a slippery incline, as the second hill in the island's chain rounded off and fed into another small glen. Here, as in the first depression which they had crossed, the water swirled between the boles of the trees, up to Sonya's waist, ugly and choked with what appeared to be seaweed.

  She could hardly believe that the slimy stuff was what it seemed to be and, after she had carried the kids across, one at a time, making four trips through the water, she scooped up a trailing mass of this floating vegetation, and she saw, when she looked at it more closely, that it was indeed seaweed and that this must not merely be rainwater that had run off from the hills on both sides.

  They climbed the hundred foot slope of the third hill, keeping to their hands and knees so that they could make better time, their faces down so that they saw little more than grass filmed by water, their hands digging into the grass for support, inching toward the top and level land where they could get up and walk again.

  Sonya was over halfway up the slope when she realized that Tina had fallen behind, rather far behind. Letting Alex to go ahead alone, she returned for the little girl and half-dragged her along.

  At the top, Tina gave her a weary but big smile, and Sonya repaid that with a strong hug, hugged Alex too, and sat down with them to rest, before going on.

  She had no idea how far they'd come.

  And she had even less of an idea of how much farther they had to go before they'd reach Hawk House.

  However, she would not let herself think of failure. She had to make the most of her famed optimism which Daryl Pattersen and Lynda Spaulding, at the university, had first made her aware of. Her back ached from the base of her spine up and across both shoulders, as if she had been squeezed into a brace meant to torture. Her neck was afire once again, and had driven spikes of pain into her head, right through the top of her skull, so that the rainwater seemed to be seeping into her brain and scorching trails across the top of her cerebellum. This did not worry her, because she knew that over-exertion and the pains of exhaustion could be cured. Her legs, however, were another matter altogether... They were all quivery with the strain they'd taken, and had she been even willing to consider the slim possibility of failure-which she was not-she might have doubted their ability to get her up when the rest period was over and to carry her on however long was necessary; she might have expected them to turn rubbery, to bend, wriggle and finally buckle under her. She might have expected to drop on them, soon. But since she was permitting no thought of failure, she was only worried that, once they reached Hawk House, her legs might give out on her for good, forever.

  She worried a good deal about the kids, for if she were this exhausted, what must they feel like? Of course, she had helped them along most of the way, and she alone had fought the resistant waters in those two flooded gullies which they had had to cross. Still, she knew that they must be very tired indeed.

  She hoped they weren't close to surrender.

  She looked at Tina, who was huddled miserably against her side, the small head slick with water, and she knew she'd soon have to begin carrying the child the whole way, not just up the sides of the slippery hills, but on the level ground as well.

  That was okay.

  She could manage that.

  She couldn't, however, carry both of them.

  She looked at Alex, afraid that she would see him on the verge of surrender, too. For a moment, she thought that he had already given in, and her heart sank. He was leaning against the bole of the tree, his legs splayed out before him, leaning far forward, as if he had collapsed and were unconscious.

  If he were, they were finished. They could try to wait the storm out, here in the woods, hoping Peterson would not find them. But that was a small hope. The storm would rage for at least another day, and they would all be dead of exposure by then.

  Abruptly, Alex moved, and she saw that he was not, after all, unconscious.

  She looked closer.

  His legs shielded an ant hill which the storm had partly eroded, and he was watching a few of the brave little worker ants trying to repair, despite the wind and water, the damage that had been inflicted.

  Unbelievably, mostly because Alex was shielding them with his legs, the couple of dozen tiny ants were winning their desperate battle to restore the integrity of their earthen home, oblivious of the greater fury of the storm, concerned only with this unimportant bit of destruction that it had caused.

  The boy seemed to sense that he was being watched. He turned and looked at her, a bright smile splitting his cherubic, mud-streaked face, looking not a little bit like his father.

  Sonya felt like crying with happiness.

  But she knew that took energy and might be misinterpreted. She could not afford to dampen his spirits, even accidentally.

  Instead, she reached out for the boy's hand.

  He took hers.

  She nodded toward the ants, still unable to make herself heard above the wind and the clash of the palm boughs overhead.

  He looked at the ants, then back at her. With one hand, he pointed at the ants and, with an inclusive gesture, at all three of them.

  "Yes," Sonya said.

  Her voice was carried off instantly, but at least he had understood what she meant. The ants were a sign of good fortune, just as the shark, days ago, had been a sign of bad times to come.

  She roused them then and led them across the top of the third hill, angling them toward the shore-edge of the forest in hopes that she could get a glimpse of the sea and understand why the gullies, between the hills, were so water-logged.

  Ten minutes later, when they reached the thinned-out edge of the palm forest, a place where they could view the seaward slopes of the hills, the beaches and the sea beyond, Sonya wished that she had not been so curious. What, after all, could she gain by knowing the first thing about the condition of the sea? Nothing. Her only problem was getting to Hawk House for help, into the safety and protection that Kenneth Blenwell might be able to give her. She had no obligation to report on the nature of the seas when she arrived there. She could gain nothing by this stupid exploit-but she could lose a portion of her hope, a fragment of her carefully nourished optimism. And what she saw, when she looked down the hill toward the sea, brought her terror back to her and made her think, again, that their long march from one end of the island to the other, was ridiculous, sheer folly...

  The Caribbean was aboil, foaming and tossing.

  A sick brown color, the water heaved up and subsided with such drastic rapidity and to such absurd extremes that it looked like nothing so much as a pail of water that some large man had taken in his hand
s and which he was shaking furiously.

  Waves higher than a house, higher than Sea-watch, crashed toward the shore, exploded on the rocks, on each other, and were diminished only slightly by these collisions, swept clear across what had once been a wide beach.

  The beach was gone...

  The sea had devoured it.

  Impossible.

  But true.

  The towering waves boomed against the base of the hills, moving as fast as freight trains, rolled over the palms that were growing on the bottom of the slopes and which they had not completely torn away yet, and crawled to within a dozen feet of the top, a huge, dirty, lapping tongue that was insatiably hungry.

  She felt as if the sea itself had singled them out as its targets and was straining mightily to reach them.

  Where the land fell away between the succession of low hills, the sea surged into this gap, forming the hip-deep pools of water which she had twice before struggled through while carrying the children in her arms.

  When she realized that, on the other side of the narrow island, the other arm of the sea would probably be doing much the same thing, and when she pictured how Distingue must look from the air at that very moment-it would not look like an island at all, but like an isolated string of tiny knolls, five or six hilltops, the last one on either end sporting a huge house at its crest-she shuddered and turned quickly away from the raging ocean, having seen far, far more than she had wanted to.

  Impossible.

  But true.

  Alex, however, was fascinated by the scene and did not want to leave it so soon.

  Tina had reacted much the same as Sonya had and, from her first sight of this watery monster, had refused to look at it again.

  Sonya tugged at the boy's hand and got him turned around.

  Holding tightly to both of them, her heart racing, determined not to be upset by what she'd seen, but upset anyway, she plunged back into the denser regions of the palm forest, heading again toward Hawk House.