Children of the Storm by Dean Koontz Page A

cloud grew nearer, nearer still, soft and warm. She only managed to keep going because the thought of collapsing so close to escape utterly infuriated her-and from her fury, she found a few last dregs of energy.
        The end of the arbor was only thirty feet away, though she would not have questioned anyone who told her that it was really a mile instead; it felt like a mile, each step a major journey. Then the air was cooler, the darkness less dark… At the end of the arbor, he caught her again, one hand on her shoulder, spun her around with a suddenness that jerked her off balance.
        She gasped, staggered, almost fell.
        He would have gone for her throat in another second, and then she would have been finished for sure. But she did not give him that second; she stamped out, twice, caught his injured foot on the second try. She did not strike it hard, but just hard enough.
        He yelped, hopped to one foot, fell with a crash.
        She turned and ran again.
        The night air was cooler than she remembered it, really cool, almost chilly.
        Her throat burned as if a fire had been set inside of it, and it was too raw to permit, yet, a cry for help.
        She passed the bench where she had been sitting when the man had first appeared from the arbor, kept on going.
        A dozen paces from the edge of the garden, on the verge of the open lawn where the light of Seawatch spilled more profusely, Sonya tripped on a loose stone in the walk, fell.
        She tried to get up.
        She could not.
        Her heart racing, so winded that she could only barely get her breath, she passed out.

----

    TEN
        
        When she woke, she did not know where she was-though she definitely knew where she wasn't. She was not in her huge Polynesian bed on the second floor of Seawatch, not in the center of that soft, queen-sized mattress where she had spent the past eleven nights. The surface beneath her was hard and somewhat chilly.
        She lay still for a long while, trying to remember what had happened and where she was. She hated, more than anything else, to wake up in a strange place and not know, for a few moments, how she had gotten there. When her parents were killed in the automobile accident, she had gone through a number of scenes like that. First, in the middle of the night, she had been moved to the neighbors' house while she slept, her parents already an hour or so dead, her babysitter sent home; in the morning, when she had opened her eyes, her heart had risen instantly into her throat, for she recognized nothing around her. That day, she was taken in by an aunt and woke in that house the following morning, confused, somewhat frightened, longing for the familiarity of her own bedroom with the dolls she knew so well, the scatter of knicknacks and souvenirs that instantly reassured her when she woke there among them. The day before the funeral, she was moved in with her grandmother, where she was to stay, and was faced with a third strange setting to grow accustomed to. She remembered the fear in the morning, when she opened her eyes on the unfamiliar ceiling, lying in a bed which she did not remember and was sure she'd never used before, a sense of impermanence sweeping over her like a black tide…
        Suddenly, she recalled the corresponding blackness in the tunnel of the bougainvillea arbor, the blackness that had closed in on her and made her faint, and she opened her eyes like shutters flying up on two small, twin cameras.
        The starry sky lay overhead.
        Part of a moon.
        She seemed to be alive, something she was surprised to find.
        She was stretched out at the edge of the gardens, lying half across the stone walk and half in the grass, where she had fallen. One arm was flung out to her side, the other above her head so that, had she been standing, she would have looked as if she were preparing to do a flamenco dance. Despite her