Hollis shook his head. The sagging floor looked dangerous. Even as Hall looked at it, it sagged further. The couple could not stay there. Yet Hal felt he did not want the responsibility of trying to help them. He was so wearied by the efforts he had already made that he wanted to close his eyes. And he wanted to go back, to be with Jean and the children.
In the very beginning, he had felt resolute, decisive. The blows from the fists of Flagan had thrown him back into an apathy greater than before. Now, stung into reluctant action by the appalling climax of the hurricane, he had crawled about like some slow disabled insect, thinking only of gathering all the others together so that each of them might have a greater chance. It had not been a calculated decision. It had been almost as instinctive as the way the frenzied ants gather the eggs from the shattered hill.
Yet now there was time to stop and time to think. He moved cautiously, trusting his weight to the sagging floor. He had no desire to move toward the trapped couple, yet he knew he would. He would move toward them, help them, get them out of this room.
Hollis made frantic motions for him to stay back, but Dorn ignored him. And as he moved so carefully, he felt within himself the rebirth of pride. Perhaps it was both trite and egocentric to think of it as manhood. Yet now he was doing a difficult and dangerous thing with no feeling of gratification of self. And it pleased him. It showed him that even defeat had its limitations. It could not destroy a man utterly.
By stretching as far as he could, and keeping his left hand on the door frame, he was able to reach the girl’s ankle with his right hand. He tugged hard. Hollis resisted for a moment, and then began to help him. The girl turned carefully. They stopped as the floor sagged another foot.
She held his arm, and he worked his way back until she could reach the relative safety of the hallway. Dorn wormed his way back into the room to help Hollis. Still holding the door frame, he reached his right hand out. Hollis caught it. Just as Hal Dorn began to believe that they had made it, the floor sagged suddenly. It sagged to the level of the black moving water. Hollis slid down the incline, still holding Hal’s hand and wrist in his two hands. The full strain came on Hal and he felt the creak of shoulder muscles, felt the strain in his left hand. He could see Hollis’ strained face, see the flavor of panic in the man’s eyes.
Hollis would not let go. He would take both of them. Then, as Hal’s fingers began to slip, he felt the girl take his left wrist with surprising strength and he knew, without looking back, that she had somehow braced herself in the hallway. It gave Hollis enough time to get his toes against the slant of the wet flooring. With some of the strain taken off, and with Hollis helping as much as he could, they slowly brought him up to the doorway.
The three of them crawled back down the hallway. In the open space the wind buffeted them. The situation in the first room was unchanged. The children were all right. Malden was still unconscious. Virginia Sherrel seemed unaware of anyone else, unaware of the storm, aware only of the unconscious man. The Hollis couple sat side by side near Jean Dorn. Hal, sitting near Maiden’s legs looked at the small group and thought of how, under this direct and almost unbelievable onslaught of the elements, mankind reacted with something of the patient passiveness of cattle in a windswept field — finding what meager shelter there was and enduring as best they could.
It was at that moment that Hal remembered Flagan. He had not seemed to be a part of the group at any time. Yet Hal could not understand how he could have gone down that hallway after the Hollises and forgotten that Flagan was alone in the small room across from theirs.
Hal knew that, should he stay where he was and wait out the peak winds, no one would blame him. He could not be accused of anything. Yet there was a debt to be paid. The debt had been incurred when he had not got up from the floor as quickly as he was able, when he had felt the fear of more punishment from Flagan’s heavy fists.
If this was to be rebirth, it could not be partial. If this was to be a reaffirmation of self, there could be no half-measures, no self-deceit. The responsibility could not be passed on to Malden. He moved quickly while the urge was fresh, and once again he fought against the dangerous strength of the wind until he reached the place where the half-collapsed wall gave partial protection. His progress was slower than before because he was nearing the limit of his physical endurance.
The door of Flagan’s room was in the slanted section of hallway wall. He could not force it open until he lay on his back and braced his feet against the door and pushed with all the strength of his legs. The door broke free suddenly, was caught by the wind, vibrated, and then was torn from the hinges and whirled away, like a leaf torn from a tree. He turned and looked into the ceilingless room, his eyes squinted against the hammering of the big winds. He looked and saw Flagan, just inside the door and slightly to his left. He could have reached out and touched Flagan’s hand. He looked until he was certain, and then he turned away and began the laborious, torturous crawl back to the others. When the house moved slightly, he paused, as though listening. He tried not to think about Flagan. The two-by-four could have come from this house, but more probably it had come from afar, from some shack much nearer the water, much nearer the unimpeded sweep of the winds. It had been moving fast. It would have had to be traveling at high speed to drive the splintered end entirely through a man so heavy.
He crawled on. And as he crawled he tried to think of the next thing to do. Should the house go over, it would break up. If it broke up there would be pieces, maybe whole walls. Those would float. With enough strength, enough determination, he might make certain that his family stayed together, that his family survived.
He knew he was near the end of his strength, yet he was miraculously certain that, if more strength, if more endurance should be required, he would find some reserve. He would be able to do what had to be done.
His life in the past year had made him feel limited, inadequate, unable to compete. His life in the past forty minutes had taught him that there was more left than he had ever believed. In a crisis he could survive. In a crisis he could do more than survive. He hoped that there would be some way he could tell Jean of this so-important thing he had learned.
Chapter 9
“This is Station WAKJ transmitting on stand-by power. The time is now 6:18. Hurricane Hilda intersected the West Coast of Florida at six o’clock at the mouth of the Suwanee River, moving in an east-northeast direction at approximately eight miles per hour...
“Up around Stephensville, Steinhatchee, Horseshoe, Cedar Key and Yankeetown the water is coming far inland. That is flat land up there. The water is many feet deep over Route 19 in places. As soon as the wind dies in that area, planes will be going in there to drop emergency supplies and effect helicopter rescues. The Red Cross will be standing by to go in there as soon as possible...
“And here’s a new report. A navy plane has bucked the heavy winds and followed the coastline all the way up. Visibility is good in the wake of the storm. The pilot reports that the water is so high and has come so far inland that he can’t pick up the familiar landmarks. The whole coastline looks altered to him. Soon the tide will drop and we will start getting a runoff of all that water...”
The great roaring, screaming winds faltered, changed. The scream dropped one octave, another. A sudden driving rain came. It came at first at a slant, but in the moments of heaviest rain, the wind died, and the rain came solidly down. It did not last long. Not over ten minutes. But it seemed to be the final unspeakable indignity as it drenched the occupants of the roofless bedroom. Then the rain left them, hurrying eastward, northward.