So that's what he did. Hilda drove up in a bikini that made his jaw drop, and bought a pair of polarizing contacts from Jason, and Perry turned the till over to one of the more trustworthy vendors, and they hit the road. Hilda nuzzled him and prodded him all the way to the beach, kissing him at the red lights. The sky was blue and clear as far as the eye could see in all directions, and they bought a bag of oranges, a newspaper, beach-blankets, sun-block, a picnic lunch, and a book of replica vintage luggage stickers from hawkers at various stop-points. They unpacked the trunk in the parking garage and stepped out into the bright day, and that's when they noticed the wind. It was blowing so hard it took Hilda's sarong off as soon as she stepped out onto the street. Perry barely had time to snatch the cloth out of the air. The wind howled. They looked up and saw the palm-trees bending like drawn bows, the hot-dog vendors and shave-ice carts and the jewelry hawkers hurriedly piling everything into their cars. "Guess the beach is cancelled," Hilda said, pointing out over the ocean. There, on the horizon, was a wall of black cloud, scudding rapidly toward them in the raging wind. "Shoulda checked the weather." The wind whipped up stinging clouds of sand and debris. It gusted hard and actually blew Hilda into Perry. He caught her and they both laughed nervously. "Is this a hurricane?" she asked, joking, not joking, tension in her voice. "Probably not." He was thinking of Hurricane Wilma, though, the year he'd moved to Florida. No one had predicted Wilma, which had been a tropical storm miles off the coast until it wasn't, until it was smashing a 50km-wide path of destruction from Key West to Kissimmee. He'd been working a straight job as a structural engineer for a condo developer, and he'd seen what a good blow could do to the condos of Florida, which were built mostly from dreams, promises, spit, and kleenex. Wilma had left cars stuck in trees, trees stuck in houses, and it had blown just like this when it hit. There was a crackle in the air, and the sighing of the wind turned to groans, seeming to come from everywhere at once -- the buildings were moaning in their bones as the winds buffeted them. "We have to get out of here," Perry said. "Now." They got up to the second storey of the parking garage when the whole building moaned and shuddered beneath them, like a tremor. They froze on the stairwell. Somewhere in the garage, something crashed into something else with a sound like thunder, and then it was echoed with an actual thunder-crack, a sound like a hundred rifles fired in unison. Hilda looked at him. "No way. Not further up. Not in this building."