Children of the Storm

despite the wind and water, the damage that had been inflicted.
        Unbelievably, mostly because Alex was shielding them with his legs, the couple of dozen tiny ants were winning their desperate battle to restore the integrity of their earthen home, oblivious of the greater fury of the storm, concerned only with this unimportant bit of destruction that it had caused.
        The boy seemed to sense that he was being watched. He turned and looked at her, a bright smile splitting his cherubic, mud-streaked face, looking not a little bit like his father.
        Sonya felt like crying with happiness.
        But she knew that took energy and might be misinterpreted. She could not afford to dampen his spirits, even accidentally.
        Instead, she reached out for the boy's hand.
        He took hers.
        She nodded toward the ants, still unable to make herself heard above the wind and the clash of the palm boughs overhead.
        He looked at the ants, then back at her. With one hand, he pointed at the ants and, with an inclusive gesture, at all three of them.
        “Yes,” Sonya said.
        Her voice was carried off instantly, but at least he had understood what she meant. The ants were a sign of good fortune, just as the shark, days ago, had been a sign of bad times to come.
        She roused them then and led them across the top of the third hill, angling them toward the shore-edge of the forest in hopes that she could get a glimpse of the sea and understand why the gullies, between the hills, were so water-logged.
        Ten minutes later, when they reached the thinned-out edge of the palm forest, a place where they could view the seaward slopes of the hills, the beaches and the sea beyond, Sonya wished that she had not been so curious. What, after all, could she gain by knowing the first thing about the condition of the sea? Nothing. Her only problem was getting to Hawk House for help, into the safety and protection that Kenneth Blenwell might be able to give her. She had no obligation to report on the nature of the seas when she arrived there. She could gain nothing by this stupid exploit-but she could lose a portion of her hope, a fragment of her carefully nourished optimism. And what she saw, when she looked down the hill toward the sea, brought her terror back to her and made her think, again, that their long march from one end of the island to the other, was ridiculous, sheer folly…
        The Caribbean was aboil, foaming and tossing.
        A sick brown color, the water heaved up and subsided with such drastic rapidity and to such absurd extremes that it looked like nothing so much as a pail of water that some large man had taken in his hands and which he was shaking furiously.
        Waves higher than a house, higher than Sea-watch, crashed toward the shore, exploded on the rocks, on each other, and were diminished only slightly by these collisions, swept clear across what had once been a wide beach.
        The beach was gone…
        The sea had devoured it.
        Impossible.
        But true.
        The towering waves boomed against the base of the hills, moving as fast as freight trains, rolled over the palms that were growing on the bottom of the slopes and which they had not completely torn away yet, and crawled to within a dozen feet of the top, a huge, dirty, lapping tongue that was insatiably hungry.
        She felt as if the sea itself had singled them out as its targets and was straining mightily to reach them.
        Where the land fell away between the succession of low hills, the sea surged into this gap, forming the hip-deep pools of water which she had twice before struggled through while carrying the children in her arms.
        When she realized that, on the other side of the narrow island, the other arm of the sea would probably be doing much the same thing, and when she pictured how Distingue must look from the air at that very moment-it would not look like an island at all, but like an isolated string of tiny knolls, five or six hilltops, the last one on either end sporting a huge house at its crest-she shuddered and turned quickly away from the raging ocean, having seen far, far more than she had wanted to.
        Impossible.
        But true.
        Alex, however, was fascinated by the scene and did not want to leave it so soon.
        Tina had reacted much the same as Sonya had and, from her first sight of this watery monster,