Children of the Storm (23 page)

    Ten minutes later, he had not found them.

    Not a trace.

    He stood in the rain, oblivious of it, of the wind and even of the music of sword fights.

    He realized that the woman, the crazy damned woman, had taken the Dougherty kids deeper into the island, and by the grace of some sixth sense, he also knew that, as ridiculous as it sounded, she intended to take them all the way to Hawk House.

    Where there was help for her.

    “No!” he shouted.

    But shouting at the wind didn't make the situation any better, didn't make the truth any less true.

    In his excitement to be after her, consumed by both disbelief and by fear that she would succeed in her goal, he turned and ran toward the third hill in the island's chain, tripped over an exposed root and went down, hard, his knife turning back on him like a slippery eel and gouging the palm of his right hand.

    Blood dripped into the sand.

    He looked at it, disbelieving.

    He sucked the wound, examined it when he had it sucked clean, watched new blood well up.

    It wasn't so bad.

    Not bad enough to stop him, anyway.

    He stood, picked up the knife, looked at it with new respect.

    This was the first time that he had ever been hurt by his own knife, and he felt like a betrayed father, amazed at the scandalous doings of a bad son.

    He carefully folded the knife.

    He put it in his pocket, where he could get it easily when he caught up to the three of them.

    Then he started after them at a more reasonable pace than he had first employed-though, he was sure, at a pace that far outstripped their own…

    

    Between the third and the fourth hills, in the third ravine that they had to cross, Sonya found that the brown water was deeper than it had been either of the first two times she had had to wade through it. She tried crossing it alone, without either of the children in her arms, to test its depth, and though she tried it at several places along its banks, she found that it always rose to her chin and would, in a few more steps, go well above her head before she would reach the other side and the slopes of the fourth hill.

    She would never be able to carry Alex and Tina across a pool so deep as that, not even if she could hold her breath and carry them high above her head on rigidly extended arms.

    And she did not have that kind of strength now.

    She had not even had it when they'd first set out from Seawatch-an eternity ago.

    Yet she would not let the obstacle defeat her. If she stopped now, Peterson or Jeremy or whatever you wanted to call him would be onto them before long. She looked back at the kids, saw that Tina was lying on the ground, her head in her brother's lap, while he sat with his back against a palm bole. They were both nearly coated with mud so that they appeared to be little Negro children, and still they were cute, more precious than anything else. Certainly, more important than the condition of her legs and her back.

    She studied the pool, which was approximately thirty-five feet across, only dangerously deep for half that distance or, at most, for no more than twenty feet. It was a width that kept her from walking it under water, especially with one of the kids as a burden, but it would be a relatively simple thing to swim across.

    She could not expect Alex or Tina to swim it, of course, not in their present condition, for they were minute-by-minute closer to utter collapse. But if she could find…

    A couple of minutes later, she located a three-foot-long log which lay in underbrush hardly more than thirty yards from where they had stopped. She strained, hefted it off the ground and held it across her arms as if it were a baby, and, struggling with it as if it weighed a ton instead of, maybe, forty or fifty pounds, she carted it to the edge of the pool and dropped it into the water, watched it sink, rise. She pushed it off a ways, so it would be in deeper water.

    It floated.

    She waded in, pulled it back, stuck it in the mud at the edge of the water, and went to get Alex.

    Tina, still with her head in her brother's lap, had fallen asleep, despite wind and rain and all the worst that Hurricane Greta could throw at them. When Alex slid out from under her, she continued to sleep, nice a tiny spirit, an angel. Like the scene, earlier, with the ants, Sonya counted the child's peace, in the midst of chaos, as a sign of good fortune ahead.

    Alex, when he saw that Sonya wanted him to more or less ride the log across the pool, while she swam behind him using her feet to stay afloat and her hands to push with, thought that she had come up with one of the neatest ideas since the bicycle.

    Of course,
he
didn't have to push.

    He waded into the water with her, until it had risen to the middle of his chest, waited while she went ahead a bit and left the log wallowing in deeper water. She returned, picked him up, carried him out to where the water rose slightly over his waist, settled him onto the log and directed him, with her hands, to lay on his belly and clutch his ark with hands and knees.

    He got the knack of it straight off.

    Gently, gently, she released his weight, let the log take it and, in turn, let the water take it. She was immensely relieved to see that, though the log went under, a good part of the boy atop it remained above the surface and that he had only to keep his head raised in order to get his breath.

    He seemed happy.

    In three minutes, she was happy too, for she had gotten him to the other side without incident. She turned around and started back to get Tina, who still slept so peacefully in the mud and rain on the other shore.

    The closer she drew to that shore, the more she began to fear that, just as she was getting to the child, Peterson would appear at the crest above, as bedraggled as they, the knife in his hand…

    She gained the shallow water, stood up, pushed the log into the mud, to keep it from drifting out of reach and stranding them on this side. She went to wake Tina.

    Peterson had not yet appeared.

    The ants were right.

    The little girl rubbed her eyes with two balled fists, looked blearily at her surroundings, obviously bewildered by what she saw, looked up at Sonya as if she could not place who she was and as if she were about to start crying.

    Sonya's heart went out to the girl, for she knew only too well what it was like to wake up in a strange place and not know how you had gotten there. It was an experience she had suffered too often, and it was a fear which, all these years later, all mature and adult now, she could still not forget.

    Magically, things seemed to click in place for Tina, like pieces of a puzzle. She smiled, tentatively, and she reached up with both hands, asking to be held.

    Sonya carried her back to the water, got the old log in place, pushed the log and carried the child into the deeper regions of the pool.

    Tina still blinked, sleepily, but she seemed to understand what Sonya wanted her to do. She took hold of the log almost as well as her brother had, holding her head high even though she did not sink quite so far as Alex had.

    Sonya cast one last, apprehensive look back at the far shore, saw nothing moving, began the last trip across the pool.

    They made the crossing without incident. On the other side, Sonya cast the log adrift and struggled up the next slope with the children beside her. This rise proved easier to negotiate than any that had come before it, because it was spotted with all sizes of rock outcroppings which they could set as goals and which they could use to steady themselves when the grass grew treacherously slippery underfoot.

    At the top, she stopped, not to call for a rest period, but to catch her breath and to look back across the top of the other hill, which was now on the same level as they were. She thought that, far off in the twining palm boles, she saw movement that was unlike anything the wind might cause, the purposeful advance of a man on foot.

    She turned to hurry the children along and found that Tina was asleep again.

    She woke her, stood her up and brushed her muddy hair away from her face, hoping that would somehow make her feel fresher and more awake.

    It did not.

    Her small eyes fluttered, closed, even as she was on her feet, and she swayed towards Sonya.

    The woman caught her, saw that even this near-fall had not awakened the child, and knew that from here on out, she was going to have to bear the extra weight the whole way.

    Alex seemed sturdy enough yet, or perhaps he was keeping going only on that male chauvinism that even little boys seemed possessed of, unwilling to admit that he could ever grow weary sooner than a woman.

    Then she saw that something else might also be motivating the boy to go on. He was watching the hilltop across the ravine, and he too appeared to have seen that man moving in their direction.

    Before their stalker could catch a glimpse of them, she urged Alex forward and, following with Tina cradled in her arms, hurried closer to Hawk House, conscious that their time was running out and that their chances of escape had been greatly reduced.

    

    He was gaining on them.

    For the past ten minutes, he had been sure that they were nearby, just ahead, not far ahead, barely beyond his range of vision, and he had been equally sure that, before the hour was out, he would at last have them in his hands.

    As he ran, he slapped his knife which bounced around inside of his trousers pocket, and he knew that, soon, he would have the opportunity to use it, according to the plan-even if the plan, since this chase had begun, was not as clear to him as it had once been. For a while, as he ran, he tried to recall exactly why this thing must be done, these lives taken, and couldn't exactly do it; parts of the story remained blank for him, not different than they had been but totally blank, as if someone had taken an eraser to his mind and obliterated a number of important things. But that hardly mattered. Just to use the knife… That was what counted, to use the knife, the sharp thing… And he knew he would have a chance for that. This certainty, like his realization that Sonya had herded the kids toward Hawk House and had not merely hidden them in the fringes of the forest, came from the same sixth sense, the same superhuman source, from the same privileged psychic pool that produced his special superiority as judge and jury over others. This he knew, and in his mind it was a sharp thing…

    Once, when he gained the brow of the third hill after a number of hard falls on the slippery slope, his bleeding palm broken open wider in one of those tumbles, and when he was running fairly hard again, he felt that he had gone right past them, past the three of them without seeing them, felt that they must have grown too weary to continue and that they had dropped down in a thick clump of brush. Yes… He felt certain… They had hidden, and he had passed right by them in his headlong rush to get them in his hands…

    This feeling became so strong, so demanding, that he slowed his pace for a bit and seriously considered doubling back on his tracks, just to make sure that such a thing, such a potentially disastrous thing, had not happened.

    But he hadn't gone back, in the end, because he recognized the source of his crazy urge to retreat.

    It was demon-sent.

    It was inspired by the forces that would like to see him lose his chance to pass his judgment and deliver his retribution. It was a cheap, a downright shoddy, attempt to detain him, to delay him from his most righteous duty.

    Realizing this truth, he plunged ahead once more, at top speed.

    Now, he came to the third and largest of the pools where the sea had rushed in between the hills and, since he was drenched to the skin anyway, he waded out into it until he could wade no farther, then dove forward and swam to the far shore where he thought, in the soft, wet earth, he could see signs of their passage.

    The fourth hill was rocky and, therefore, easily topped, a welcome change from the greased grass he'd had to lumber up before.

    At the top, sucking in air as if it were to be outlawed in an hour, he looked along the table of this hill and thought he saw, at the far end, three figures disappear over the brink.

    He touched his knife which was still in his pocket, and he ran after them, joyous, half the island behind him and half ahead, the perfectly isolated place for what he had in mind.

    

    Two hours earlier, not long after dawn, Kenneth Blenwell had spent half an hour fastening down the shutters on Hawk House, not long before Henry Dalton and Leroy Mills had performed the same chore at the other end of the island, in Seawatch. He had worn a heavy canvas rain slicker with a hood that closed tight around his face by means of a drawstring that tied beneath his chin, and he had still felt damp and chilled to the bone before the job was a quarter finished, his own body heat trapped under the slicker and turning cold the perspiration that filmed his skin.

    Standing outside, facing a window, swinging the heavy wooden, tin-backed shutter panels into place and working the rust-stuck bolts through their loops, he had felt as if a couple of hundred malicious children, with slingshots and a supply of ripe grapes, were using his back as a target. From previous, similar experiences, he knew that the quickest way to get this routine finished, the easiest way to endure the punishment of the wind and the rain, was to let his mind wander and forget what he was doing… He would move from window to window like some sort of robot, an automaton who need only fall into a familiar work pattern and did not need to think, letting his mind dwell on other matters; then before he realized it, he would have rounded the house and closed down all the windows. Therefore, he began to consider the mess over at Seawatch, Saine, the Dougherty family, everyone who was involved with the strange threats against the Dougherty children…