The Taking

  When Molly rose to her feet again, she thought that the woods, already crowding the highway before she dropped to her hands and knees, had grown closer while her back was turned. The saturated boughs of the looming evergreens hung like sodden vestments—capes and robes, cassocks and chasubles.

  Unseen but acutely felt, alert observers watched her from the hooded cowls of those pines, creatures less ordinary than owls and raccoons, and less clean.

  Frightened but sensing that a show of fear would invite attack, she did not at once retreat. Instead, she rubbed her muddied hands together, rinsing them in the downpour, though she would not feel clean again until she could wash off the rain itself.

  Counseling herself that the hostile presences she sensed in the forest were only figments of her imagination, but knowing that her counsel was a lie, she continued unhurriedly around the Navigator, returning to the driver’s side with a nonchalance that was pure performance.

  Before retreating to the Explorer, she snatched the doll from the backseat of the Lincoln. Its shaggy blond hair, blue eyes, and sweet smile reminded her of a child who had died in her arms a long time ago.

  Rebecca Rose, her name had been. She was a shy girl who spoke with the faintest lisp.

  Her last words, whispered in delirium and making no apparent sense, had been, “Molly…there’s a dog. So pretty…how he shines.” For the first time in her life, there at the end of it, she had not lisped at all.

  Having failed to save Rebecca, Molly saved this rough image of her, and when Neil got in the Explorer after her, she gave him the doll for safekeeping.

  She said, “We might encounter the girl and her parents on the road into town.”

  Neil did not remind her that the Navigator had been traveling in the opposite direction when abandoned. He knew that she recognized this as clearly as he did.

  She said, “It’ll be nice to have the doll to give her. I’m sure she didn’t intend to leave it behind.”

  Intellectually, she knew that the war of the worlds, if indeed it had begun, would not spare children.

  Emotionally, however, she refused to acknowledge that no degree of innocence could guarantee immunity in a plague of genocide.

  On one rainy afternoon long ago, Molly had saved some children and been unable to save others. But if the fine grain of hope in her heart were to be the foundation of a pearl, she must believe that no child would ever again suffer in her presence and that those who came under her care would be safe, protected, until she herself died defending them.

  As the Explorer rolled forward and they resumed their journey into town, Neil said, “It’s a beautiful doll. She’ll be happy to see it again.”

  Molly loved him for always understanding precisely what words she needed to hear. He knew what motivated her at all times and in all circumstances, even in these.

  16

  THEY HAD NOT DRIVEN FAR FROM THE ABANDONED Navigator when Molly realized belatedly that the rain had been imbued with less scent than at any time since she’d stepped onto the porch among the coyotes. The underlying semenlike odor had faded altogether, and the mélange of other fragrances had been only a fraction as intense as they were at the Corrigan house.

  Neil confirmed her observation. “Yeah. And it’s also not quite as radiant.”

  The goblin night still appeared to stream with Christmas tinsel; however, the rain was a few lumens dimmer than it had been earlier, though it fell in undiminished volume.

  Perhaps these changing conditions should have given Molly heart. Instead they troubled her. Evidently the first phase of this strange war was drawing to an end. The second would soon begin.

  “I half remember,” Neil said, “your Mr. Eliot wrote something famous about doomsday.”

  “Yeah. He said we’ve become hollow men, stuffed men, heads filled with straw, no convictions or higher purpose…and for hollow men, the world will end not with a bang but a whimper.”

  Leaning forward in his seat, squinting up toward the drowned sky, Neil said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m expecting the bang.”

  “Me too.”

  Just a minute later, how the world would end, with what noise and degree of violence, suddenly concerned Molly less than she would have imagined possible. The sight of a hiker, walking at a brisk pace in the northbound lane, turned her thoughts away from planetary catastrophe to the more intimate cataclysm that had changed her life at the age of eight and had shaped it every day thereafter.

  You couldn’t accurately call him a mere pedestrian. There were no sidewalks along the county road, no encouragement whatsoever for anyone to travel the ridge line on foot. Besides, he walked with a determined stride, with the purpose of an enthusiast.

  Molly first thought he must be one of those who calculated that if he walked often enough and far enough, and never dared to eat a spoon of ice cream, he would live forever—barring, of course, the threats that self-denial could not affect, such as runaway trucks, crashing airplanes, and alien invasions.

  In utter disregard of the weather, he wore no rain gear. His pale-gray slacks and matching shirt, suggestive of a uniform, were soaked.

  He must have been miserable, but he soldiered on, his pace hardly if at all affected by sodden clothes and other discomforts. Indeed, because poor visibility and caution and a fear of what she might find in town caused Molly to hold the Explorer to little more than coasting speed, the hiker seemed to be walking north almost as fast as the Explorer cruised south.

  His thick dark hair was plastered to his skull. He kept his head down, the better to net each wet breath from the vertical ocean.

  As the Explorer closed on him, the hiker looked up, across the two-lane blacktop.

  Even through the blur of the storm, his features were bold and clean. He would have seemed movie-star handsome to Molly if she hadn’t known that the mind behind that charming face was monstrous, corrupt, and cunning.

  The hiker was Michael Render. Her father. The murderer.

  She hadn’t seen him face-to-face in almost twenty years.

  At once she looked away from him, less because she worried that he would know her than because, even at this distance, she feared the power of his eyes, the magnetism of his gaze, the vortex of his personality.

  “What the hell?” Neil said, shocked, turning around in his seat to look out the tailgate window as Molly accelerated. “He’s supposed to be locked up.”

  Her husband’s instant confirmation of the man’s identity prevented Molly from taking refuge in the hope that her imagination had run away with her and that the hiker was in fact a stranger with only a vague resemblance to Render.

  Usually, she thought of him not as her father but only by his surname, which as a girl she had dropped in favor of her mother’s maiden name. When occasionally he appeared in her dreams, he had no name, but the skull was visible beneath his skin, and his hands were scythes, and in his broad grin, his teeth were broken tombstones.

  She worried, “Did he…”

  “What? Recognize you?”

  “You think he did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We recognized him.”

  “Because of the headlights. Harder for him to see you.”

  “Has he changed directions, is he coming behind us now?”

  “He’s just standing there, I think. I can’t really tell. He’s almost out of sight.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “The hell it is,” she said sharply. “You know where he was going.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What else would he be doing out here?” she asked. “He was going to our place. He was coming for me.”

  “He doesn’t know where you live.”

  “Somehow he found out.”

  She shuddered when she realized what would have happened if they had chosen to ride out this storm at the house, mistaking home for security.

  “I can’t see him anymore,” Neil said. “I think…he continued
north, the way he was going.”

  In the rearview mirror, Molly saw only falling rain and clouds of backspray from the tires.

  With a successful plea of insanity skillfully supported by a clever attorney, Render had avoided prison. He had spent the last twenty years in a series of mental institutions. The first had been a maximum-security facility, but with each transfer, he had moved to a less restrictive environment, and been allowed more amenities.

  Therapy and medications had helped him take slow steady steps out of his mental darkness. So the psychiatrists said, though their reports were written in circumlocutions and obfuscatory jargon meant to conceal that their conclusions were mere opinions unsupported by facts.

  They claimed that he’d come to regret his actions, which by their way of thinking merited more relaxed living conditions and more frequent therapy sessions. If eventually he progressed from regret to remorse, he might then be viewed as rehabilitated and, under certain circumstances, might even be judged to have been cured.

  The previous summer, his case had come up for mandatory review. The evaluating psychiatrists differed in their analyses of Render’s condition. One recommended that he be released under supervision, but two opposed that recommendation, and he was remanded to the care of mental-health authorities for an additional two years.

  “What’ve the idiots done?” Molly wondered, and in her agitation, she accelerated too much.

  She half believed that the rearview mirror would sooner rather than later reveal Render in the backspray, running after her with inhuman balance and agility, with superhuman speed.

  “If they’ve let him loose,” she said, “the crazy bastards are as sick as he is.”

  “We don’t know what’s happening beyond these mountains, out in the wider world,” Neil reminded her, “except that everything seems to be falling apart, breaking down. Not every last crewman on every sinking ship stays at his post.”

  “Every man for himself,” Molly said. “We’ve come to that now—if we haven’t always been there.”

  The pavement was greasy with oil, water. She felt the tires skating, but could not find the courage to slow down. Then gnawing tread bit blacktop, found purchase, and the four-wheel drive staved off a slide.

  Neil said, “This latest institution he was transferred to…It’s not exactly a stone-cell, steel-door, straitjacket sort of place.”

  A short bitter laugh escaped her. “Television in every room. Porn on demand, for its therapeutic value. High tea every afternoon, croquet on the south lawn. Maid service for those who promise, under penalty of the most severe disapproval, not to rape and kill the maids.”

  She was in a dark humor that was new to her and, she sensed, dangerous to indulge.

  “If the staff skipped,” Neil said, “and surely they did skip, the inmates wouldn’t let ordinary locked doors and wire-glass windows hold them in for long.”

  “‘We don’t call them inmates,’” Molly said, quoting one of the psychiatrists. “‘We call them patients.’”

  “But the most recent place they were keeping him—it’s far up north.”

  “Two hundred fifty miles from here,” she confirmed.

  “The storm, this nightmare—it didn’t begin so long ago.”

  Indeed, when Molly considered the swiftness with which the usual order seemed to have given way to chaos, a jittering terror crawled the darker hallways of her mind. Could human civilization crumble significantly, worldwide, in a matter of hours, in but a quarter of a day, as suddenly as the planet itself might convulse if struck by an asteroid the size of Texas? If their as yet unseen adversary, come down from the stars, could topple centuries-old kingdoms and overturn all of history so swiftly, without meaningful resistance, then surely it was easy to foresee—and impossible to prevent—the eradication of every human life, in every low habitation and high redoubt on Earth, in just twenty-four hours.

  If the technology of a greatly advanced extraterrestrial race would seem like purest magic to any civilization a thousand years its inferior, then the masters of that technology would be as gods—but perhaps gods with enigmatic desires and strange needs, gods without compassion, without mercy, offering no redemption, no viaticum, and utterly unresponsive to prayer.

  Neil said, of Render, “He couldn’t have broken out and gotten here so quickly. Not even with a fast car and your address, not in these driving conditions, with plenty of roads washed out or flooded between here and there.”

  “But there he was, and walking,” Molly said.

  “Yes, there he was.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing impossible tonight. We’re down the hole to Wonderland, and no White Rabbit to guide us.”

  “If I remember correctly, the White Rabbit was an unreliable guide, anyway.”

  In a few miles, they came to the turnoff to Black Lake, both the body of water and the town. Molly turned right, leaving the ridge, and followed the descending road, into the steadily darkening rain, its luminosity nearly spent, between massive trees that rose in black ramparts, toward the hope of fellowship and the disquieting expectation of new terrors.

  PART THREE

  “Through the dark cold and the empty desolation…”

  —T. S. Eliot, East Coker

  17

  MOLLY EXPECTED THAT THE POWER GRID would have failed by now and that the town would stand in darkness. Instead, the glimmer of shop lights and streetlamps was amplified by the refracting rain, so Black Lake looked as if it were the site of a festival.

  With a year-round population of fewer than two thousand, the town was much smaller than Arrowhead and Big Bear, the two most popular destinations in these mountains. Lacking ski slopes, Black Lake didn’t enjoy a winter boom, but in summer, campers and boaters outnumbered locals two to one.

  The lake was fed by an artesian well, by a few small streams, and now by the deluge. Instead of mixing with the existing lake and being diluted by it, the accumulating rain seemed to float atop the original body of water, as oil would, its luminosity compounded by its volume, shining as if the moon had fallen here.

  With inflow substantially exceeding the floodgate outflow, the lake already had risen beyond its banks. The marina was under water, the boats tethered to cleats on submerged docks, the belaying ropes stretched taut.

  Silver fingers of water explored with blind patience among the shoreline buildings, learning the lay of the unfamiliar land, probing for weaknesses. If the rain continued unabated, within hours the houses and the businesses on the lowest street would disappear under the rising tide.

  Molly had no doubt that during the coming day, the people of Black Lake would face worse threats than flooding.

  With most houses brightened by lamplight in every window, the citizens were clearly alert to the dangers at their doorstep and to the momentous events in the world beyond these mountains. They knew that darkness was coming, in every sense of the word, and they wanted to press it back as long as possible.

  Black Lake’s residents were different from the former flatlanders and the vacation-home crowd drawn to the more glamorous mountain communities. These folks were at least third-or fourth-generation highlanders, in love with altitude and forests, with the comparative peacefulness of the San Bernardinos high above the overpopulated hills and plains to the west.

  They were tougher than most city people, more self-sufficient. They were more likely to own a collection of firearms than was the average family in a suburban neighborhood.

  The town wasn’t big enough to have a police force of its own. Because of inadequate manpower spread over too much territory, the county sheriff’s response time to a call from Black Lake averaged thirty-two minutes.

  If some hopped-up loser, desperate for drug money or violent sex, broke into your house, you could be killed five times over in thirty-two minutes. Consequently, most of these people were prepared to defend themselves—and with enthusiasm.

  Molly and Neil saw no faces at any windows, but they knew that they wer
e being monitored.

  Although they had friends throughout Black Lake, neither of them was keen to go door-knocking, partly because of all those guns and their anxious owners. They were also wary of walking into a situation as bizarre as that at the Corrigan place.

  In the unrelenting downpour, the cozy houses with their lamplit windows appeared welcoming. To the hapless insect, of course, the Venus’s-flytrap offers a pretty sight and an alluring scent, while the two-lobed leaves wait, jaws cocked and teeth poised.

  “Some will have kept to their own homes,” Neil said, “but not all. The more strategically minded have gathered somewhere, pooling ideas, planning a mutual defense.”

  Molly didn’t inquire how even the most rugged individualists among these mountain rustics—or an army, for that matter—might be able to defend themselves against technology that could use weather as a weapon on a planetary scale. As long as the question remained unasked, she could pretend there might be an answer.

  Black Lake had no grand public buildings that could serve as a nerve center in a crisis like this. Three elected councilmen, who shared the title of mayor on a rotating basis, held their meetings in a booth at Benson’s Good Eats, one of only two restaurants in town.

  No schoolhouse, either. Those kids who weren’t home-schooled were bused to out-of-town schools.

  Black Lake had two churches, one Catholic and one evangelical Baptist. When Molly cruised by them, both appeared deserted.

  At last they found the master strategists on Main Street, in the small commercial district, safely above the steadily rising lake. They had gathered in the Tail of the Wolf Tavern.

  A dozen vehicles were parked in front of the place, not along the curb, where the gutters overflowed, but almost in the middle of the street. They faced out from the building, forming an arc, as if they were getaway cars ready to make a fast break.

  Under an overhanging roof, protected from the rain, two men stood watch outside the tavern. Molly and Neil knew them.

  Ken Halleck worked at the post office that served Black Lake and a few smaller mountain towns. He was known for his smile, which could crease his rubbery face from muttonchop to muttonchop, but he was not smiling now.

  “Molly, Neil,” he said solemnly. “Always thought it would be the nut-case Islams who did us in, didn’t you?”

  “We aren’t done yet,” said Bobby Halleck, Ken’s son, raising his voice higher than necessary to compete with the rain. “We got the Marines, Army Rangers, Delta Force, we got the Navy Seals.”

  Bobby was seventeen, a high-school senior and star quarterback, a good kid with a gee-whiz spunkiness like that of a character from a 1930s or ’40s football movie with Jack Oakie and Pat O’Brien. He seemed not too young to be standing guard but certainly unseasoned, which was probably why his father, armed with a rifle, had given Bobby a pitchfork, which seemed an inadequate deterrent to alien storm troopers although less likely to be accidentally discharged.

  Bobby said, “TV’s gone kerflunk, so we aren’t hearing about them, but you can bet the U.S. military is kicking ass.”

  Ken watched his son with affection that it was his nature to express openly and often, but now also with a grief that he would never dare put into words for fear that sadness would soon thicken into unrelieved despair, robbing their last hours or days together of what small joys they might otherwise share.

  “The President’s holed-up inside some mountain somewhere,” Bobby said. “And we got secret nukes in orbit, I’ll bet, so the bastards won’t be as safe high up in their ships as they think they are. You agree, Mr. Sloan?”

  “I’d never bet against the Marines,” Neil told the son, and put a hand consolingly on the father’s shoulder.

  “What’s happening here?” Molly asked Ken, indicating the tavern.

  “The idea is mutual defense,” he said. “The reality…I don’t know. People have different ideas.”

  “About whether they want to live or die?”

  “I guess they don’t all see the situation that starkly.” Of her disbelief, he said, “Molly, you know, folks in this town are still who’ve always lived here…except, as people, they aren’t always the same as they used to be. Sometimes I think we’d be better off if the TV had gone kerflunk fifty years ago and never come back on.”