Children of the Storm

by Dean Koontz

  Fifteen minutes later, he went to see how Walter and Lydia were getting along in the storm cellar. The place was as comfortably furnished as their regular living room, though the concrete walls gave off an unmistakable chill. They counteracted this irritant by wearing coats and draping their legs with afghans which Lydia had made herself. They were sipping wine and reading, clearly upset that they must miss their television programs for a while, but functioning nonetheless, in their usual style.

  "You should be down here too," Lydia warned him.

  "I will be, shortly."

  "What's taking you so long, anyway?" his grandfather asked.

  "Tying things down."

  "Never took this long before."

  "I'm getting old," he said, smiling.

  Hattie, the maid, was there too, reading, sipping cola instead of wine. She smiled at him, a rare thing these days. Though he had often been angry with his grandparents for keeping her on just because, after working a lifetime for them, she had nowhere else to go, he was now glad that they had ignored him. She was grumpy, aging faster than either Walter or Lydia, though they were senior to her, and she was no longer a particularly efficient housekeeper and cook. But her presence was a testament to his grandparents' generosity and their concern about people they touched. She reminded him of how Walter and Lydia had been, when they were more vital, recalled to him the thousands of other kindnesses he had seen them extend and which they had extended to him. For that reason, despite her grumpiness, Hattie was good to have around.

  "I'll give you just another fifteen minutes," Lydia said, looking at her watch.

  "And you'll spank me if I take longer?"

  "No, but your grandfather might."

  "She doesn't speak for me," Walter said, chuckling.

  "Why not?" she asked him. "I always have in the past."

  The old man threw Ken a meaningful glance. "This woman," he said, "has been my lifelong bane."

  "And you hers," Ken said.

  The old people laughed.

  "I'll be back," he told them, when he had ascertained that they were comfortable.

  "Fifteen minutes!" Lydia called after him.

  "I heard!"

  Behind him, as he walked away, he heard Walter say, "Don't nag the boy, my dear. To us, he's still a child, but to the rest of the world, he's a grown man, more than a grown man."

  He did not hear her reply.

  Upstairs, he sat down in his chair once again, pulled it up to the window and stared toward the edge of the palm forest, resuming his vigil.

  He thought about Saine, the Doughertys, Sonya... But because there was no new data, no new experiences, since he'd early thought of these things, he was covering ground that he had been over before and, in the case of Sonya, thoughts he had given way to a thousand times in the last couple of weeks...

  Before the fifteen minutes had passed, he began to feel like the village idiot, sitting at his watch-tower, waiting for an event that, in all logic, would never transpire. He was worrying his grandparents for no good reason. Though he didn't think that Greta would manage to rip Hawk House apart, it was possible that he could receive a severely lacerated face from the flying glass if the window before him should be broken-and that would be enough to have the old people in hysterics.

  Perhaps he needed more coffee.

  But he didn't want it.

  He fidgeted.

  He thought of Sonya again.

  Laughing...

  Riding the boat, hands gripping the rail, her blonde hair streaming out behind her...

  She was whiteness, he blackness. Together, facing the world together, what would they make of it, in such contrasting colors, half in pure white and half in gloomy black. The cynic in him answered that question with a sneer: they'd make gray together, unrelieved, depressing gray. He laughed bitterly at his ability to always bring himself back to the reality at hand, back to the moment.

  Sonya was not yet and probably never would be his responsibility, while, on the other hand, those old people in the storm cellar downstairs were definitely his responsibility. As he had once trusted in them to protect him from harm and make him comfortable, they now, perhaps unconsciously, had switched roles and depended on him to do the same for them. He must forget "what ifs" and tend to the "what is," to Walter and Lydia and, yes, to Hattie.

  He stood up, abruptly convinced that nothing would be gained by remaining here and watching for a madman in a hurricane. He was a bit angry with himself for even having seriously considered such a ludicrously melodramatic development. He was the realist, after all. He was the cynic. He did not believe, as so many people did, in a life that was like a motion picture, where drama arose at the exactly necessary point...

  He pushed his chair back and drew closed one of the shutters.

  He took one last look at the lawn.

  Wind, rain, glowering clouds, dancing trees, nothing more.

  He swung the second shutter around in order to bolt it tightly to the first half that was already in place.

  * * *

  THIRTY-TWO

  Jeremy came over the brow of the hill and, digging his heels into the mushy earth to keep from losing his balance and falling to the bottom, he started down toward the sea-flooded ravine, yet another of the watery obstacles which had become familiar and hated. He had gone a third of the way down the hill before, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something more than green vegetation and gray rain at the top of the next slope, beyond the pool. He looked up, gasped when he saw the woman, Sonya, standing with her back to him, holding one of the children.

  The other child was nowhere in sight.

  For a moment, he could not move.

  The sight of her made him realize he'd not really expected to catch them, no matter how hard he'd tried to convince himself that he would. And, coming upon her unexpectedly like this, his memory was jarred so that he could not instantly recall why he had been chasing her... He could not think of her name or what relation she was to him and, when he was honest, he could not exactly remember who he was, himself. He stood there in the pounding rain, sweating, his brow furrowed, desperately trying to recall what this was all about.

  Then the other child, the boy, came into sight, looking down into the ravine and, instantly, discovered his pursuer, turning to the woman to tell her that the gap had been closed.

  In the same moment, Jeremy remembered that he was a judge, that he had held a trial, that he had passed a sentence and must now see that it was carried out. The Doughertys must suffer, must understand what life was really like. That was fair.

  He took out his knife.

  The three people above turned away from him and disappeared into the trees, but he was not worried, for he knew he would have them shortly.

  He started across the pool, his knife held before him again, the blade gleaming in the rain.

  * * *

  THIRTY-THREE

  Sonya was not a violent woman; violence repelled her, for it was so closely associated with death and unhappiness. Yet, when she saw what must be done in order to save their lives, she did not hesitate, even briefly, to do it, though she knew that she might end up killing a man who had once been Bill Peterson.

  Perhaps it was just this thought, couched in just those terms, that made her able to perform a violent act against another living creature-the painful realization that he was no longer that man whom she had known and had felt affection for and, having gone so far over the edge of madness as he had, would never be that man again. Either Jeremy, the black side of his schizophrenic personality, would rule the mortal shell from now on, or he would become a catatonic case for the mental wards, a staring and helpless vegetable without any personality at all, far beyond the help of any branch of modern medicine. She would not, then, be killing a friend, but an absolute stranger. Indeed, if you wanted to be blunt about it, she would not even be attacking a man, but a thing, a living and moving being that was less than a wild animal.

 
But she would have to act fast.

  She had maybe three minutes, or four.

  No longer.

  She put Tina down again, stood her on her feet and tried to make the little girl understand that she would no longer be carried.

  Tina blinked at her, on the verge of tears again.

  No, please, Sonya thought. Don't cry.

  If Tina didn't fully grasp the import of their situation now that Peterson had nearly caught up to them, her brother, Alex, did, for he grabbed hold of his sister's hand and held it tightly.

  Relieved, Sonya stood and pointed through the palm forest, in the general direction of Hawk House, and indicated that she would be along behind them in a minute or two.

  Alex turned away from her and tottered off, pulling Tina with him, not moving quickly but at least moving, not with much of a chance of survival but at least with a small chance, a tiny one. If she could stop Peterson without getting hurt herself, they would make it yet. But if she was hurt and could not catch up to them, they'd die. They'd die even if she'd killed the madman and he could no longer reach them, for they were almost sure to lose themselves in the storm and die of exposure during the long night ahead...

  Sonya turned away from them.

  Peterson had still not crested this hill; he was still down there in the ravine.

  She went quickly to the fallen coconuts and pulled away the palm boughs that half-concealed them. Each of the three fruits was as large as a cannon ball, and each looked about that deadly.

  She tried to pick up two coconuts at once.

  Couldn't do it.

  They were too big and heavy for that. She needed both hands for each of them, and she lost valuable seconds fumbling with two before she realized this.

  She dropped one of them.

  As quickly as she could, legs rubbery, she carried the other coconut to the edge of the hill, careful not to let herself be seen by Peterson, who must by now have crossed the pool below.

  She went back for the second coconut.

  She put it by the first.

  She retrieved the third, lined them up.

  Looking at it, she realized what a puny arsenal it was, and that she could hardly afford to miss him, even once. But she did not see what else she could do, at this point, except to go on with it. She hadn't the time to run all over the hilltop in search of other shaggy missiles.

  She lifted the first sphere.

  She stepped to the edge of the slope, where he would be able to see her, and she looked for him.

  He was halfway up the slippery grass incline, trying to make it on his feet and not his hands and knees.

  She raised the coconut overhead.

  He sensed her, looked up.

  He threw his hands up to protect himself, lost his balance, and fell backwards, to the bottom of the incline.

  She realized that she had lost the precious advantage of surprise, now, but she did not throw the coconut yet. She wanted to hit him when he was on the hill, so that, with a little luck, he would lose his balance again and fall to the bottom, hurting himself in the process, perhaps even breaking a leg.

  For a moment, they seemed stalemated.

  He stood by the pool, looking up.

  She stood atop the incline, looking down.

  He held the knife.

  She held the coconut.

  Then he started up again.

  He came at a run, jumping from side to side instead of making a direct line for her, covering ground in the manner he had been taught in the army, in the war.

  She waited.

  He was halfway up, his neck strained into corded ropes of muscle, his head thrust out ahead of him, bent in an odd manner to give himself the best balance and the lowest point-of-gravity.

  She threw the coconut.

  He tried to run under it.

  It struck the center of his back and bounced off him, struck hard enough to drive him down onto his stomach, dazed.

  She picked up the second missile.

  She was shaking uncontrollably, as if she had a severe fever, and she could not manage to get rid of the vision of that first direct hit, which remained behind, playing over and over again as if on some internal motion picture screen. She saw the brown ball arching... She saw it come down on his spine, saw it bounce... He crashed forward into the mud, his face driven into the mud so that he must have gotten a mouthful of it... And she could almost feel the excruciating pain which she had caused him. Having done that, having hurt him like that, even if he were less than a human being right now, she felt unspeakably sick and knew, if she survived this ordeal, here was the material for new nightmare aplenty.

  Nevertheless, she was resolved to continue this almost comic battle with coconuts and to take whatever moral punishment was her due as a result of her brutality. She had not started this private war, after all; she was an unwilling combatant.

  He lay still for long seconds.

  She wondered if he were dead or unconscious, but she knew she did not dare leave him there without being sure, for he might be hoping to trick her and then come close behind, when there was no slope for her to fight him on to her advantage.

  At last, he moved.

  He raised up on his hands.

  Shook his head.

  He looked around himself, then up at her.

  She threatened him with the coconut she held.

  He looked around him, on all sides of him, concentrating closely on the grass and mud, as if he couldn't figure out what it was-then he came up with the knife which had fallen from his hand when the coconut had hit him.

  He inspected it.

  It was in fine condition.

  Holding it out before him, not attempting to stand now, he started up the hill again, on his knees, battered by rain and wind but seemingly unaware of everything except Sonya.

  She waited another moment, gauging the distance, until she felt the time was right, then threw the coconut as hard as she could.

  It arched...

  But the wind was very strong, not strong enough to lift away so heavy an object, though forceful enough to deflect it. Because of the wind, the second missile missed him altogether.

  He grinned at her.

  He was only forty feet away now.

  The knife looked longer than a sword.

  She turned and picked up the last coconut.

  He stopped smiling when he saw it, and he concentrated on making better time on the glass hillside.

  He had no way of knowing, she discovered, that this was her last missile. He might think she had an endless supply of these and that she could, with a better aim, hold him off for a long while, or permanently injure him.

  This, however, was a psychological advantage she would not have much longer, for he would soon know that she had nothing else to use against him.

  For the most part, he kept his face to the ground, moving toward her like an insect oblivious of the world above it. Now and again, however, at fairly regular intervals, he raised his head to look at her and to gauge the angle of his ascent. She picked up the rhythm of these upward glances and, when she felt he was just about to raise his head again, she threw the coconut with all her might.

  He looked up.

  He screamed.

  It caught the side of his face.

  He went backward, head over heels, to the bottom of the rise, fell half into the water and did not get up or move.

  She waited, trembling, on the verge of throwing up but not sure if she had the time for that.

  He lay still.

  Water lapped at him.

  She thought of going down there and turning him onto his back, to see if he were dead, but the memory of what his strong hands had almost done to her in the bougainvillea arbor kept her where she was.

  She saw the knife where he had dropped it, more than halfway down the hill, its point directed at her, its red handle like a small beacon in the midst of the drab, storm-painted earth. She wondered if she could risk going that close to him
so that she could get hold of the knife and deprive him of his most dangerous weapon. She remembered how fast he had run up the first section of the slope, jumping from side to side and digging his heels in like a soldier taking enemy ground during an offensive action, and she knew she would have to turn and renegotiate half the hillside while he would be chasing her... Yet, she thought, now, that he was unconscious, and she knew that, when he came to, even if that was while she was retrieving the knife, he would not have the wits about him to give immediate and competent chase. And if she could have the knife...

  She started over the brink of the hill and had taken four or five steps when he shuddered, thrashed about, and tried to get his hands under himself.

  Terrified, she turned, scrambled to the top again, and ran after the kids.

  They had not managed to get very far, no more than a third of the way across the flat top of the hill.

  She scooped Tina up and urged Alex to make better time than he had thus far.

  From somewhere, she did not know where, though it might have been from a terror that was greater than any she had ever known before, she found a new supply of energy. Her legs were rubbery, but they drove her on with renewed speed; her back and arms felt as if they would require major surgery to ever be right again, yet they were laced with new strength that made Tina seem less of a burden than she had before.

  The sounds of the storm seemed so loud now that she felt as if they were coming from within her head and not from the land around her; she felt as if she could buckle under the demanding explosions of the sound alone.

  At the next slope, she turned and looked back, hoping to see that they were unpursued.

  For a few seconds, it seemed that way, seemed safe. Then, she caught sight of him, weaving drunkenly between the trees but nonetheless closing the distance between them.

  * * *

  THIRTY-FOUR