Children of the Storm

out when she brushed against him, recoiled like a kitten from a snake.
        She turned.
        He grabbed her, whirled her around to face him once more, though in that pitch, she could only suppose they were face-to-face.
        His hands let go of her arms and, in an instant, had a tight hold on her neck.
        She screamed.
        It was a terribly weak scream, too shallow to have carried clear over to Seawatch, much too shallow to be heard and draw any help. A useless, whispered scream…
        He pressed her back against the wall of the arbor.
        Hard ropy vines gouged at her back, like horns or like talons, hurting her.
        Even now, even as she gagged and twisted under the pressure of his large, dry, determined hands, Sonya tried to see something of him. His face could be no more than inches away from her own, for she could feel the wash of his rapidly exhaled breaths against her forehead… But the darkness, in the final analysis, was too deep, too intense for her to discover anything at all about him. Except, of course, that he was frightened of being discovered and that his hands, his squeezing hands, were awfully large and strong.
        Strangely, though his grip on her throat was decidedly uncomfortable, it was not deadly. He held her against the wall of the arbor, and he cut off most of her breath, but he delayed making that last little bit of effort that would finish her off-almost as if he had to have time to build up his courage for the kill…
        She squirmed, tried to pull free of him, found that she was only making the pain at her throat worse, like a hot file scraping away at half her esophagus.
        She tried to scream again.
        No sound: just pain.
        Okay, no screaming. She would talk to him, reason with him, ask him to please let her go so they could talk this over like reasonable human beings. But when she tried to speak softly and persuasively, she found that she had no more luck than she had had with her scream: the words remained unspoken, choked down.
        Without warning, without apparent reason, he tightened his hands, moving closer, having gotten the necessary courage…
        An even deeper darkness, a thousand times blacker than the pitch beneath the arbor, whirled and danced tantalizingly at the back of her mind, growing ever larger, closer, beginning to envelope her like soft raven wings-or like a shroud.
        For the first time in this nightmarish encounter, Sonya was genuinely, unreservedly terrified and not merely afraid. Her terror swelled, bloomed, blossomed into the ultimate horror: the expectation of certain death…
        Somehow, until this very minute, she had not been able to envision herself as a corpse, lifeless and cold and finished forever. Perhaps it was an absurd application of her overly-optimistic approach to everything in life, but she honestly had not seriously considered the possibility that she might die here, in the gardens, between the madman's hard, dry and deadly hands.
        Now, of necessity, she understood.
        She grabbed his wrists.
        They were thick, corded with muscle.
        She could not budge them.
        Quickly, she slid her hands along his arms, to his biceps, trying to force him away.
        Blackness: closer, closer…
        She raked her nails at his face. And again. She missed both times, striking only air.
        She twisted and fought, growled deep in her throat as she felt herself weakening and knew that she must not give in to that sweet, beckoning unconsciousness that, right now, seemed so welcome, so very desirable.
        He was gasping for air, too, as if he were the one who was being methodically strangled to death, and he whimpered eerily, like some wounded animal, with each indrawn breath. Sonya could sense, rather than feel, the great, nervous tremors which shook the man's entire body like reverberations passing through a gong.
        She knew that she had only moments left. Almost unconsciously, with the mindless desperation of a cornered animal, she raised her right foot and brought the hard, plastic heel of her loafer down solidly on the toes of his left foot, ground hard. He was wearing only canvas-topped sneakers, which afforded him no protection at all.
        He cried out, let go of her with one hand as he reached for his injured foot.
        She twisted, pushed hard against him, tore free.
        “Hey!”
        She ran,