The Taking

44

HUMAN WEEPING OF INHUMAN SOURCE, RED reptiles as big as cougars in the trees, a headless dead man or something worse knocking on the manhole cover, knocking to be released from the storm drain: Mere anarchy had been set loose upon the world, a blood-dimmed tide that threatened to wash sanity up by the roots, tangle it like weeds, and sweep it away.

Molly kept moving, although she doubted they would escape the canopy of trees. To her surprise, they reached the intersection with Main Street, where the only architecture overhead was the ceaselessly changing, frescoed purple vaults of fog on fog.

Before she could indulge in even a timid hope, one of those silent luminous craft appeared again in the overcast, racing toward them out of the west, one second glimpsed, six fast heartbeats later hovering overhead. Shape without form. Light that did not reveal its source. Its awesome power was suggested by the absolute stillness of its levitation.

As before, Molly felt physically scrutinized to a cellular level, every filament mapped in the rich braid of her emotions, every turning of her mind from its brightest to its darkest places explored in an instant and understood in finest detail. By analytic rays, by probing currents, by telepathic scans, by science and technology beyond the conception of the human mind, she was pored through, and known.

In the previous encounter, she had felt naked, terrified, and ashamed. She felt all those things now, and in no less measure than before.

The children appeared to be bedazzled, as might be expected, and afraid, as they should be, but she did not believe that any of them felt violated as profoundly as she did.

Glancing at Neil, in whose face and slightest gestures she could always read volumes, Molly saw more than raw fear; she recognized terror in all its subtleties from anguish and anxiety to incipient panic, but also what might have been piercing sorrow. Struggling with his sorrow was anger at this intrusive examination, to which no name could accurately be given except perhaps "psychological rape."

Her heart flooded with anger, too, in a volume to rival blood, for it seemed to her that if their world was to be taken and if all of them were to be slaughtered sooner or later, then they were owed the minimal mercy of a swift and easy death. Instead she felt as if she were a living toy on a leash held by a vicious master: savagely teased, tormented, tortured.

She couldn't explain to herself how an extraterrestrial species, a thousand years more advanced than humanity, with the wisdom to beat the limitations of the speed of light and cross galaxies in a clock tick, could be so barbarous, so pitiless. A civilization sufficiently sophisticated to construct ships larger than mountains and machines capable of transforming entire worlds in mere hours ought also to be a civilization exquisitely sensitive to suffering and injustice.

A species capable of the merciless destruction committed in the night just past, however, must be without conscience, without remorse, incurably sociopathic.

Evil.

Surely, a civilization built by individuals motivated by pure self-interest, incapable of empathy, without pity for others, would attain no grand heights. Evil would turn upon itself, as it always did, and such a species would reduce itself to dust long before it could reach for the stars.

Unless

Unless perhaps it was a hive, in which every individual lacked a conscience, lacked even the concept of pity, reveled in cruelty, and had no personal identity different from those of all the other billions of its kind. Then each might direct its evil urges outward from the hive, bend its intellect to the creation of dark technologies, in the interest of furthering the evil of all. Their need to destroy, their implacable fury, would be brought to bear upon anything not of the hive or not of use to the hive. They would raze, ruin, and extirpate everything in their path.

If for a decade or a century they colonized Earth, they would eventually move on to some other world. They would leave behind a lifeless sphere, as barren as Mars, all sand and rock and ice and mournful wind.

The as yet unseen destroyers of worlds delighted in the havoc they unleashed, in the terror and the blood. Their driving need was the destruction of all that was Other to them, and their sole bliss was the suffering they administered. This truth could be confirmed by ample evidence everywhere in Black Lake.

These thoughts raced through Molly's mind even as she kept the children moving along Main Street under the silently hovering craft. Luminous reflections of the fog-veiled vessel played on the pavement as it tracked them step by step to the tavern.

No guards were posted at the door.

As before, the neon beer-company logos in the windows, now all dark, were backdropped by lowered shades. Nothing of the interior could be seen.

The pact Molly had made with Neil-that henceforth they would go everywhere together, would die side by side if death found them, and would never leave each other to die alone-must be amended.

If the two of them went inside to persuade those in the tavern that one form of death or another was breeding in the basement beneath them, the five children would be left outside alone. Easy pickings.

On the other hand, if they took the children inside, they would be exposing them to perhaps the very horror from which they had saved them in the church-or to something worse, considering that something worse, hour after hour, was the specialty of the enemy.

In this instance and in other situations to come, she and Neil would have to split up. If they didn't have the courage to act alone when necessary, they might as well go directly to the bank right now, with the five kids for whom they had made themselves responsible, and forget about the other children who might need them.

Like Cassie. In the tavern.

Neil wanted to go inside, but they agreed that whoever stayed with the kids ought to have the shotgun.

Indicating the luminous craft hovering in the shrouding fog, Molly said, "Shotgun won't bring that down, but the spread pattern of buckshot ought to stop more big bugs and nasty animals than all the rounds in my pistol."

Neil tried to give her the 12-gauge, but she wouldn't take it. She had never fired a shotgun before. She suspected that the hard recoil would compromise her effectiveness at least until she learned how to compensate for it.

Only a fool or a suicidal depressive would choose to learn the proper handling of a new weapon while in the heat of battle.

Neil would stay in the street, guarding the kids.

Armed with the 9-mm pistol, Molly would go into the tavern, argue the wisdom of evacuation to those inside, and one way or another get Cassie out of there.

Along Main Street, nothing moved in the moody half-light except the thin violet mist, which eddied lazily in the breathless morning.

The silence of a fly in amber, of a fossil hidden in the heart of a stone, lay upon Black Lake.

Then in the distance a man wept in misery. A weeping woman answered him. And then another.

All three sounded as if they were torn with emotion, convincing, until you realized that the cadences of their grief were identical, one to another.

The morning had grown warmer. Molly took off her raincoat.

The red dragons of the trees might be watching from a distance. Maybe they only hunted in their arbors. Or maybe they came down to kill in the street; it didn't really matter, she supposed, because if not them, something else would.

Fifteen feet overhead, the thick velvet fog was a curtain drawn between dying humanity-which was both the tragic protagonist and the audience-and the last act of Armageddon. Stagehands were moving into place the final scenery of doom.

The luminous craft hovered, attentive. Molly had not grown accustomed to the all-penetrating scrutiny of those aboard it. She felt humbled, curiously ashamed, frightened, and angry.

She nurtured the anger. Like hope, it staved off despair.

Virgil nuzzled her left hand, then returned to his watchful patrol between the children and the dead town.

Molly didn't need to tell Neil that she loved him. He knew. And she knew what she meant to him. They said it as well as it could be said with just a meeting of the eyes, a touch of hands.

With the pistol and a flashlight, she went into the tavern.