The Taking

41

TALL MAN SCREAMING IN THE DARK BELOW, CRACKLE of combusting wood, hissing of undetermined origin, excited cries of frightened children, and Neil shouting words broken into meaningless fragments of sound by the pounding hammer of Molly's heart

He stepped forward, leveling his shotgun at her. She tucked and rolled into the low smoke, and he fired over her.

Although she held her breath, she tasted the greasy vapors and scrambled to her feet, gagging, spitting.

Out of church rows instead of corn rows, across this field where only souls were cultivated, the dead parishioners in their ragged grave clothes approached like scarecrows set walking by sorcery, some on fire and spreading flames as they moved.

The floor quaked, the walls shook, a stained-glass window cracked along a line of leading.

Virgil barked as if to say, Time to go.

Molly agreed.

The shotgun roared.

Johnny had retrieved the flashlight dropped by the fat man. He gave it to Molly.

All energy and instinct, flashlight in her left hand and pistol in her right, she disdained the knob and kicked open the sacristy door.

Although flapping a dazzle of bright wings behind her, firelight feathered into darkness just past the threshold.

She shouldered through the rebounding door, thrusting recklessly into the room, chasing shadows with the beam, ready to shoot anything that light alone could not banish.

The church rocked, cabinet doors flew open, and she fired two rounds into cassocks and chasubles just to be sure that they were only vestments hanging from a closet rod.

Virgil padded past her, unfazed by the gunfire, quick to the outer door.

Hollow haunting groans and semi-electronic yowls, reminiscent of the voices of whales, rose from the very bones of the church, as if out of a hundred fathoms. This time the floor both trembled and sagged.

Turning, shouting for the kids, Molly discovered that all five had already followed her.

Beyond them, Neil stood in the doorway, facing the sanctuary, prepared to defend their retreat.

The floor had turned spongy, quivering like a membrane with each step she took. She threw open the outer door, and the dog dashed from the church.

Alert for hostile forces-known, unknown, and unimaginable-she led the children into the rectory yard, where the purple light had grown no brighter with the progress of the morning. The ceiling of fog still hung low, so dense that the position of the sun could not be discerned.

Except for their little group, there were no signs of life, Earthborn or otherwise. Black Lake lay bound in stillness, wrapped in muffling mist, as ready for eternity as a pharaoh embalmed for the tomb.

As Neil backed out of the sacristy into the yard, a storm seemed to break inside the church. A hard clap of thunder shuddered the building, as violent as any lightning-chasing crash that ever shook the heavens.

Crumblings of loose mortar rattled out of the stone walls. Dust and paper debris plumed from the open sacristy door.

Surely the floor had collapsed into the basement. The roiling fire damped suddenly, briefly, then flared higher and brighter than before, flamboyantly illuminating the sacred geometries of the colorful windows. Even this roar brought no citizens into the street. They were huddled in their homes with baseball bats and handguns, or gone to other redoubts-or dead. Or worse than dead: living farms for alien fungus, living egg cases for the entomological wonders of another world.