Now that he had gotten this far—and, maybe, now that he had drunk this much—reason had returned to him. He really, really should never have left the house. What he was doing was insane, and very dangerous. At the moment, however, it made no sense to try to go back. The sea was getting worse and worse. He would only end up getting swept off the boardwalk. The radio this morning had been telling everybody to get up to the high school. That was what he was going to have to try to do.
He put the flask securely back into his pocket and went out into the wind again. It really was getting worse. It was pushing so hard at his back that he kept threatening to fall on his face, splat, slapped against the concrete like a pesky bug. He turned down a side street to get away from it. He couldn’t tell which side street, because the rain was so heavy he couldn’t read the street sign. He wasn’t even clear about which buildings he was passing, or which direction he was going in. The wind seemed to curl in on itself, to make eddies and waves, to sneak up on him from behind.
The side street did not look familiar. It must have been, because David had walked every street in Bellerton, North Carolina, a million times, but the houses all looked blank and odd. The lawns looked alien. The street was full of debris.
David didn’t know when it was he lost all sense of where he was or what direction he was going in. Away from the wind, that was all he was sure of. There was so much water in his eyes, they stung. He was wet to the bone even under his rain gear. He just kept pushing ahead, pushing ahead, away from the wind, away from the slanting direction of the rain. There was water in the street at least an inch and a half deep. He slogged through it as if he were wading on the beach.
He turned a corner and then another corner. The houses got less and less familiar. The damage got worse and better and worse again, a random scattering of disasters. The torn-off shingles were ubiquitous. Other things—dolls; dinner plates; furniture—seemed to have been chosen without sense by imps or gremlins, small sly creatures who hated people as a profession.
I’m losing my mind, David told himself.
And then he was clear of it all, the houses and the wreckage. He tried to see in the rain and got only asphalt and dirt. He thought he had to be out on Route 152. That was the closest two-lane blacktop to town. The gutters here were full of water, but he was far enough away from the worst of the storm so that there wasn’t as much broken and trampled on the ground.
Left, David told himself. If I go left I go north and if I go north I get to—the high school? the camp? He couldn’t remember. He wished he could get another swig at the flask, but he knew it would be impossible in all this wind and rain. He would just get his eyes and nose filled with water, tilting his head back the way he would have to.
His head was full of rhythms. Go on, go on, go on. Walk fast, walk fast, walk fast. Keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. Walking this way, the rain was falling against his back. It got under the collar of his jacket and ran across his neck, cold and slick.
Up ahead of him was the Bellerton Full Gospel Church—was that in the right direction? The church was as boarded up and blank as the houses in town. It wasn’t one of Bellerton’s bigger churches, not like that complex Henry Holborn had out on the Hartford Road. The Bellerton Full Gospel Christian Church had lost the cross that used to sit on the peak of its roof. The cross was lying in the road, split in two, the edges jagged. David wondered, irrelevantly, what it had been made of, and why it hadn’t been protected. Maybe, being a religious person, the pastor here had thought that Christ would protect His own.
David made his way past the church and then around its parking lot to a wider, more open space. The trees here were planted more thickly together. They seemed to be protecting each other. Not so many of them were down. Not so many were bent double with the force of the blow.
There was a shortcut through those trees to the high school. David was sure of it. He just couldn’t remember exactly where the shortcut was or which way it went. The ground was starting to rise. He had to be going in the right direction. The ground rose and rose and then it got to the high school. Then it rose and rose some more and got to the camp. That was the only high ground in town. Everything else for miles around was dead flat.
David started to search the trees, for a break, for a path, anything. He was finding it hard to breathe. He hadn’t gotten this much exercise in years. It couldn’t be good for him. He tried to take a deep breath and choked on rainwater. He turned toward the trees as he started to cough—and then he saw her.
For a second or two, with all the insanity of the storm, he thought it was just a branch or a piece of junk being thrown around by the weather. It kept coming and coming and finally he recognized it. Her. He stood up and stared, oblivious for a moment to everything that was happening around him.