The Taking

25

AT THE BAR AGAIN, WHEN MOLLY DISCOVERED THAT strong coffee was available, she ordered a mug of it. Hot, black, thick, fragrant, it had the power, if anything did, to wake her from this dream if she were dreaming.

From the table of the tosspots, Derek waved at her. She ignored him.

Neil took coffee with her, suggesting answers to some of the things that puzzled her, though he had none of substance for the questions that were the most profound and therefore most urgent.

"So he recognized us when we passed him on the ridge road," she said. "But how did he find us here?"

"The Explorer's parked out front. He recognized it."

"If he didn't come to kill me, why did he come?"

"From what you've said, it sounded like he was… throwing down a challenge to you."

"Challenging me to what-kill him? What sense does that make?"

"None," Neil admitted.

"He called me a barren woman. How could he know?"

"There's ways he could've found out we don't have kids."

"But how could he know that we've tried so hard for seven years and that… I can't."

"He couldn't know."

"But he did."

"He was just guessing," Neil said.

"No. He knew, all right. He knew. He stuck the knife in exactly where it would hurt the most. The crude bastard called me 'an empty hole.' "

Her thoughts seemed muddled, maybe because she'd had too little sleep or because this night had been filled with too much event to process. The coffee hadn't clarified her mind yet, and perhaps even a pot of it wouldn't bring her thinking up to speed.

"Funny but… I'm glad now we didn't have children," Neil said. "I couldn't handle being unable to protect them from all this."

His left hand rested on the bar. She covered it with her right. He had such strong hands but had used them all his life in gentle pursuits.

"He quoted T. S. Eliot," she said, coming now to the thing that most mystified and most disturbed her.

"Are we back at Harry Corrigan's place?"

"No. I mean Render. He said 'between the idea and the reality' and later 'between the desire and the spasm.' They were wrapped up in his other crazy rantings, but they're lines from 'The Hollow Men.' "

"He could know Eliot is one of your favorites."

"How could he know?"

Neil considered a moment but had no answer.

"Just before he left, he said 'Dark, dark, dark-they all go into the dark,' which is more Eliot. The thing that used to be Harry Corrigan… and now Render."

She sensed that she was circling an elusive insight that, once seized and opened, would unfold into a stunning revelation.

"That lurching, head-shot Harry Corrigan wasn't really Harry," she said. "So I wonder… was my father, in the rest room, really my father?"

"What do you mean?"

"Or maybe he was really Render… but not only Render."

"I'm still chasing you and losing ground."

"I don't know what I mean, either. Or maybe I know down on a sub conscious level, where I can't get my hands around it… because right now, the hairs are quivering on the back of my neck."

Too little sleep, too little coffee, too much terror. Layered veils of weariness and confusion hid the truth from her if in fact she was close to any truth at all.

Deputy Tucker Madison, chief strategist of those who were determined to resist the taking of their town and their world, joined Molly and Neil at the bar.

"A few of us are remaining here in case new recruits show up," he informed them, "but most of us are forming task groups and heading out. One squad to inspect the bank and find ways to better fortify it. Another to truck food out of the market before it floods. A third to procure more weapons from Powers' Gun Shop. Are you with us?"

Molly thought of the yellow-spotted black fungus squirming with repulsive inner life, growing rapidly in the janitorial closet, the harbinger of a new world, a changed world, and even if no other choice might be as sensible as to fortify the bank and hunker down, the effort seemed futile.

"We're with you," Neil assured Tucker. "But there's this… situation we have to deal with first."

Molly glanced across the room at Derek Sawtelle and his group of fugi-tives from reality. Just as she feared before submitting to his macabre little show-and-tell, he had been an agent of despair.

"We'll meet you at the bank in a little while," Molly told Tucker.

Futility is always in the eye of the beholder. Her fate was in her own hands. With hope, all things were possible.

That was what she had always believed. Until tonight, however, she had operated automatically on that philosophy and had not found it necessary to remind herself of it or to argue herself into that conviction.

Derek hadn't been the only agent of despair she'd encountered in the past few hours. The first had been whatever entity controlled the corpse of Harry Corrigan.

The third had been Render. What reason could he have had for his bizarre performance if not to leave her shaken, frightened, and despairing?

Once more, she felt that enlightenment lay within her reach, waited just around the next turn in the twisty coils of logical deduction.

With a start, Neil put down his mug so hard that coffee slopped onto the bar. "Here it comes again."

For a moment, Molly didn't know what he meant-and then she felt the heavy, rhythmic pulses of pressure that were not accompanied by sound, that had no visible effect on anything in the tavern, but that undeniably surged through her, throbbing in the bone, an afflux and a reflux in the blood, the flesh, as if the ghost tides of a long-dead sea pulled at the race memory in her cells, reminding her of life before land.

Earlier in the night, at their house, she had not been aware of this phenomenon at all until Neil had spoken of it. Even after he had drawn her attention to it, she hadn't felt it a fraction as strongly as she did now.

Perhaps these throbbings were akin to magnetic pulses produced by colossal engines of unimaginable size, based on a technology as incomprehensible to her as the internal-combustion engine would be incomprehensible to any tent-dwelling native wandering the cityless plains of America a thousand years before the birth of Christ.

She looked at her wristwatch. The hour hand spun toward next year, while the minute hand whirled perhaps sixty times faster toward last year, as if to rob time of its power and to encourage those with timepieces to consider the moment, and to realize that it is all they ever have.

Throughout the tavern, a palpable anxiety had drawn people to their feet. They, too, consulted their watches if they had them, or looked toward the Coors clock on the back wall.

With the mysterious pulses came the impression of a looming mass in transit through the rain: Neil's mountain descending, Lee Ling's falling moon.

"Coming in from the north," Neil said.

He continued to be more sensitive than Molly to the nuances of this phenomenon.

Others, too, had sensed the point of approach. Several among the drunkards, the peace lovers, the fence-sitters, and the fighters-none of whom had yet left on their various missions of resistance-also faced north, staring at the ceiling at that end of the room.

Conversation had ceased. No glassware clinked.

Most of the dogs gazed up, as well, but still a few sniffed the floor, their instinct for danger blunted by their fascination with the scents of old beer and food stains.

"Bigger than I thought before," Neil whispered. "Bigger than any mountain or three mountains. And low. Very low. Maybe just… ten feet above the highest treetops."

"Death," Molly heard herself say, surprised by her own voice, but she sensed, by virtue of a gift more profound than instinct, that the word she spoke was not adequate and that the traveler in the storm was something both more impossible and less mysterious than she had heretofore imagined.

Toward the front of the tavern, a child began to weep. Her sobs were thick and miserable, but so rhythmic that they seemed false, and strange.