Children of the Storm

you off if you try to stand up straight, do you understand?”
        He nodded vigorously.
        Peterson kicked the door.
        A single screw pinged loose, and the latch rattled.
        “Stay on your hands and knees,” she said.
        He had crawled onto the windowsill, facing her. She took hold of his hands, helped him to squirm out, groaned as she took his weight on her arms. She leaned forward, trying to put him as far down as possible, dropped him when his feet were only eighteen inches from the porch roof. He fell, dropped to his knees at once, and crouched there in the high wind, as tenacious as a little animal.
        “Your turn,” Sonya told the girl.
        “I'm scared,” Tina said. She was pale and trembling, and she looked utterly unable to withstand even a few seconds in Greta's ferocity. But she was going to have to withstand it, and for longer than a few seconds.
        Sonya kissed her, gave her a big hug. As kindly and firmly as she could, she said, “You'll be okay, angel.”
        “You coming, too?”
        “Of course, angel.”
        Peterson was calling to her from the hall, but she did not listen. He had nothing to say that would change her plans; they had only one chance of escape, and they must take it quickly.
        She repeated the routine she had used with Alex, letting Tina dangle from her hands, above the black porch roof. She was two and a half feet from safety, a more dangerous distance than Alex had been, but when she fell, her brother grabbed her and held her, making a more difficult weight for the wind to move around.
        Peterson had stopped talking and was kicking the door again. Another screw pinged loose, and the whole latch slipped, close to being torn completely free.
        Sonya sat on the window ledge, dangling her legs a moment, then pushed off and fell to the roof. She landed on her feet, which surprised her, felt the wind tug at her, crouched, scurried to the kids and directed them to the edge of the porch roof, helped them jump to the lawn eight or nine feet below, followed them.
        Kneeling in the grass, she turned, squinting as stinging whips of rain lashed across her eyes, and she looked back at the bedroom window from which they had come.
        Peterson was there, his face twisted in rage, his hands gripping the sill, as if he were about to follow them, a decision she fervently hoped he would make, for they would then have a chance to get inside and to the storm cellar, a small chance, but something, anyway. Instead, he turned abruptly away from the window, disappeared.
        He would be on his way downstairs.
        She had no door key with her, and they would never be able to break a window in the door and get inside to the storm cellar entrance before he met up with them.
        She stood, bent over by the ungodly hammer of the wind, her hair skinned tightly back from her head, drenched despite the plastic windbreaker she wore, her whole body stung by pellets of hard rain, like thousands of determined gnats or mosquitoes. She had hold of the children's hands, and she drew them close to her, aware that they would be feeling the murderous anger of Greta more fully than she.
        “He's coming after us!” Alex yelled.
        “I know,” she said.
        Tina had to hold her head down, to keep from suffocating in the dense sheets of rain that battered her small face.
        “What can we do?” Alex asked. He was taking it all very well, she thought, and that gave her the nerve to say what she had to say, as ridiculous as it was going to sound.
        Screaming to be heard above Greta's deep and unfeminine voice, Sonya said, “We're going to go to Hawk House, to see the Blenwells.”
        “Across the island?”
        “Yes,” she said.
        She wasn't sure they'd heard.
        She said, “We can get help there! Now, hold tightly to my hands. Don't let go of my hands no matter what.”
        She felt their fingers tighten around her palm, and she tightened her grip as well.
        “Try to walk as fast as you can for as long as you can,” she said. “Don't ask for a rest unless you just can't go another step.” She looked closely at each of them. They looked like two bedraggled puppies, and she couldn't see how they would ever make a mile and a half in the middle of the worst hurricane in almost thirty years. But they had to. They would make it simply because they had to; they had no