Children of the Storm (22 page)

    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.

    

    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 hands 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.

    

    Jeremy saw the three of them running across the lawn and into the first of the palm trees, but he did not realize, for a moment, what Sonya had in mind. While he watched, they had nearly been blown from their feet half a dozen times during that short journey; only a fool would attempt to run the gauntlet of the hurricane clear to the far end of
Distingue,
more than a mile away. Instead of that, he was certain, she intended to get the kids into the trees, without him seeing where they had gone, then hide them there until such a time as it was safe to bring them back-either until the storm ended and help had arrived (which might be day yet), or until the others in the storm cellar learned about Saine and found who the villain was. She would expect them to overpower him, Jeremy, and make it safe for her to lead the kids back to Seawatch.

    He chuckled.

    At first, when she had locked herself in that room, and when he had broken the door down only to find them gone through the window, he had been more furious than ever in his life. He would have killed anyone just then, no matter whether they had already suffered enough in their life or not.

    Now, however, he was calm again.

    He watched them duck into the trees and laughed out loud.

    He was not completely over his anger, but now that he knew where they were and had already decided how to get at them, he felt in control of things again, and he was not worried. When he caught them, he'd spend a little extra time carving up the woman before he killed her, a few extra minutes of pain so that she would better understand what he was trying to do, what his mission in life was. But that was all. Otherwise, he would carry on with the plan just as he would have if she had not pulled that trick in the upstairs hall and locked him out of the kids' room.

    Careful to keep out of sight of the palms where she had entered them, he went down the seaward side of the hill on which the house was built, and always keeping the sea at his side, crept around the hill, so that he would eventually enter the palms just slightly behind them.

    He felt good.

    He carried the knife, even out here in the wind and rain, opened and pointed straight ahead of him.

    He was surprised to find how high the sea had come, and he felt it surge at his feet once or twice as he skirted the side of the hill, like a cold-nose nudge from a favorite dog.

    Following the edge of the hill, he reached the first narrow ravine where the land fell for a short space before rising again, saw that the depression was filled with a thick finger of seawater. He was sure she wouldn't try crossing that, with two kids, not a woman alone, and he finally turned inland, expecting to come up behind them.

    In the heart of the island, crouching down out of sight in the water-bottomed gully, the roar of the disturbed palms made his head ache pretty badly, though nothing so insignificant as a headache could turn him back.

    Not now.

    Not so close the kill.

    Rather-not so close the execution, the punishment, not so close the application of the sentence which he, as the judge, had so long ago decreed.

    Besides, though the wind in the palm boughs was grating on the nerves, it also reminded him of the noise that might be generated by a thousand raging sword fights… Two thousand blades singing and smashing off one another… And that image was not altogether unpleasant. Swords were sharp, all honed and glistening, with tips fine enough to peel an apple with… And he had a special fondness for sharp things, more than a sportsman's interest…

    He crept up the gully, into the trees on the top of the second hill, and he peered out between the jumble of dark boles, looking for a sign of movement.

    He saw none.

    He moved, first, to the right, being careful not to lose his footing, keeping a low profile, hidden by trees and brush, and he looked for the woman and kids. When he saw nothing to the right, he went left, and even when he had no success there, he was not unduly worried. He began to circle the whole broad hilltop, peering in, hoping to spot them as if they were animals in their natural habitat and he a visitor to this complex zoo.