Children of the Storm

place.”
        He grinned.
        He said, “I thought of that.”
        A trace of fear lay beneath her calm again, but she tried to keep it small, to keep it from burgeoning and taking over. She was beginning to see that his madness was too entrenched, and that she could never really shake him up badly, crack him open.
        He said, “I'll cut Bill a few times, not seriously, but deep and with a good bit of blood running. Then I'll dispose of the knife. He can give them a description of me, tell them that I cut him and that he fell and passed out. He can convince them that I spared him because I probably saw him bleeding and thought he was dead. No one will suspect him for long, if at all. He's too nice a guy. Everyone knows that he is.”
        By now, she had realized that the noise in the hall must have been made by the storm, for she had heard nothing like it again, and no one had appeared to help her. She could think of nothing further to say to this madman, nothing to delay him any longer; and if she could not keep him engaged in conversation, he would step forward in a moment and put that knife under her chin, very deep under her chin. Her only hope now was to distract him, to turn and try for the door. If he gave chase, she ought to be able to lead him downstairs, where a cry for help would be heard.
        She turned, without warning, struck the edge of the open door, and spun clumsily through into the hall.
        He grabbed her almost at once.
        The knife came up.
        Remembering the fight in the bougainvillea arbor, she stamped down on the same foot she had injured then, harder than she had before, grinding hard to the right.
        Though he had been able to conceal his injury to this point, had not needed to limp, that portion of his foot had been particularly tender, and now it erupted into white hot pain.
        She jerked loose of him.
        He swung the knife.
        It sliced along the upper part of her left arm, drawing blood but not digging too deeply.
        She stepped back into the kids' room and, in one fluid series of movements, slammed and bolted the door, making them temporarily safe from the man who was now calling himself Jeremy but had once been a new and special friend.

----

    TWENTY-THREE
        
        Sonya had not, for a moment, believed they would be indefinitely safe in that second floor bedroom, even though the door was bolted. Bill Peterson was a strong, vital, young man who would be able to kick in even one of these sturdy old doors if he were given a few minutes for the job. She did not think that they could afford to sit by and hope that, before he had smashed the latch, someone would have come up from the storm cellar to see what was delaying them. She was sure that, already, someone had most likely decided to come looking for them. But what chance did men like Henry Dalton and Leroy Mills have against a man like Peterson, when Peterson had so easily dispatched with someone like Rudolph Saine. A madman, with his system pumping extra adrenalin, could often have the strength of three or four men his size and weight; and even without this advantage, men like Mills and Dalton would have been no match for him. They might make it up the stairs, against his wishes, but they'd never get close to this room or to rescuing her and the children.
        As soon as she'd locked the door, she ran to the bed and twisted the wire loose of Alex's wrists, told him to get the other length off his feet, then freed Tina.
        “What are we going to do?” Alex asked.
        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