He went over it again and again. The first step, the only possible step, was to regain the money that had been taken from him. Stolen from him, if you wanted to look at it that way.
The next problem was a weapon. The big man was too hard to handle without an effective weapon. Flagan began a slow and thoughtful search, and in the end he found a weapon far better than he had expected to find. There was a very tiny closet in the room. It had a clothes bar made of one-inch pipe. The pipe fitted into slots and lifted out easily. It was three feet long, too unwieldy if held at the end, but by holding it near the middle he found he could swing it quickly and powerfully.
After he had the weapon, he thought about the problem of survival. The closet door was sturdy. It looked as if it would float well. It would not, of course, support his weight, but he decided that by clinging to it, he could keep his head above water. His single window was on the south side of the house. He broke the hinge pins loose with the length of pipe and took the door off and put it near the window. He poked the glass out of the window and pried the shutters open just enough so that he could look down and see the surface of the water. It was about a nine-foot drop to the water. The current seemed to be moving very swiftly. He shuddered as he looked at it. He knew that when the moment came, if he hesitated, he would be unable to drop. It would have to be done quickly.
He opened the room door and went in search of Malden, the length of pipe held behind him in concealment, moving cautiously and on tiptoe like a fat greedy child playing an intricate game, oblivious to the storm sounds that would have covered his footsteps even had he walked heavily.
The stairway was directly ahead of him. He stopped as Malden came up out of the stairway, moving quickly. Malden turned in the other direction, not noticing him. Flagan took two quick steps and brought the pipe down on the back of the man’s skull, striking heavily so that the pipe seemed to ring in his hands. Malden took a heavy step forward and pitched onto his face. Flagan knelt and dropped the pipe and worked the folded envelope out of Maiden’s hip pocket. He put it back in his own pocket and stood up, picking up the pipe. This time he grasped it by the end. He straddled the unconscious man. He raised the pipe.
Virginia Sherrel heard the new sound far off, an incredible sound half masked by the tumult of the winds. She had known that the air pressure had dropped. Now she felt the physical change as it dropped even further. She could not breathe deeply enough. The far-off sound grew in strength. It was a noise she could not have imagined. It sounded like a hundred low-flying jet planes, coming toward the house in formation. She could not believe that mere wind could make that sound. She saw Hal Dorn slowly lift his head and the glint of Jean Dorn’s wide eyes in the fading light. She knew that when that horrid noise struck, she had to be with Steve Malden, close to the strength and bulk of him. She hurried to the door and turned toward the stairway. And she saw in the bright beam of her flashlight Malden stretched out on the floor, Flagan standing over him, club lifting to strike again.
Virginia screamed, but in that moment the scream was utterly lost as the violence of the winds of the bar cloud struck the house. The roof was wrenched away as though by an explosion, and in truth it had the characteristics of an explosion. The air inside the house exerted sudden pressure on the roof and the walls as the outside pressure dropped almost to tornado level. The roof was wrenched away, and the winds drove in upon them. Virginia and Flagan were thrown against the hallway wall. Shutters on the west side were blown inward as those on the east were exploded outward. She was forced against the wall, half kneeling, and the wind was a hand that held her there. She felt the house turn and shift, move and tilt dangerously and hold steady.
She slid down the wall until she lay near Steve. Then she worked her way over to him and half lay across him as if to shield him from the storm. She put her arm around him, and her fingertips touched his throat. She felt, under her fingertips, the slow, strong beat of his pulse.
She turned her head and saw Flagan moving down the hallway on his hands and knees, moving slowly. A part of the west wall was torn away as she watched, and the thick timber slammed into the plaster wall directly above Flagan and wedged there. He continued to crawl slowly, laboriously, back toward the room he had been in, across the hall from the Hollises.
Hal Dorn was on his feet when the roof was torn away. He was lifted by the wind and slammed against the wall two feet from the shuttered window. It blew out, shutters and all, in almost the same moment, and he knew that if he had been standing in a slightly different spot, he would have been carried through the window. He fell to the floor, stunned both by the shock of hitting the wall and by the very violence of the wind. The wind held his eyes shut, and when he opened his mouth, it was as though the wind would force his throat open. He sensed that he would have to reach the shelter of the opposite wall and wormed his way over to Jean. He knew that, no matter how loudly he yelled at her, she could not hear him. He pushed at her, motioning toward the far corner and catching Jan in the curve of his arm. Her mouth was wide open, eyes squeezed shut. She was screaming in terror, but he could not hear her. Slowly, laboriously, in the odd saffron light, they worked their way across the small room to the single sheltering wall, and he tried not to think of what would happen if that wall, now unbraced by the roof, should be blown over. One of the blankets moved straight up, caught by a trick of the wind, made a slow uncanny loop, and then was flung out of sight over the east wall so quickly he could not follow it with his eye.
He pushed at Jean until he saw that she and the two children were in the safest part of the room. He crawled then to the doorway and wormed his way out into the hall. Malden was there, face down, the Sherrel woman shielding him. He pushed at her shoulder, caught hold of Maiden’s thick wrist, motioned to her. With great difficulty they rolled him onto his back. Virginia took one wrist and he took the other and, bit by bit, they tugged him along the five feet of hall to the doorway and through it, and placed him along the wall, his head near Jean and the children. Virginia crawled by Malden, sat near Jean, took Maiden’s head in her lap.
Hal looked at them and saw that he could do no more for them. Nothing could be done while the insane screaming of the peak winds lasted. He went back to the hallway. He realized he was getting very tired. Each movement required great effort. When he rested and looked up, he saw that the air over the house was not empty. Solid objects whirled by, too rapidly for him to make out what they were. At the far end of the hallway the west wall leaned inward, almost touching the east wall, making a sort of crude tent of the hallway. He crawled into the tent and felt the wind’s strength lessen. The door of the Hollises’ room was blown away. He worked his way through. And he saw that it was no longer a room. The roof was gone and the entire east wall of the room had been blown away. From the center of the room the floor sagged toward the drop. He saw the couple. They lay together, arms around each other, in the northwest corner of the room, the same relative place that, in the room Dorn had left, provided the greatest protection. They were huddled back in the corner and Hal could see the grim set of Hollis’s jaw, the bloodless lips, the tautness of his arm around the girl. When Hollis turned his head slightly and saw Hal, his eyes widened. It was impossible to make them hear in the fury of the wind. Hal beckoned to them and pointed down the hall, trying to convey the idea to them that the other room was safer.
Bunny Hollis’ young wife had turned so that Hal could see her face too, her expression. She looked calm, incongruously at peace, almost happy.