The Taking

50

THE TWITCH OF THE DOG'S TAIL CONVINCED MOLLY to follow it by flashlight out of the receiving room, to the women's lavatory. No dog would wag if he had lost a child entrusted to his care, and especially not one of these dogs, in which seemed to be vested an uncommon intelligence plus a loyalty even greater than their four-footed kind usually exhibited.

Cassie stood in the rest room, her back pressed in a corner, guarded by the two mixed breeds. Just for a moment, these mutts presented bared teeth to Molly, surely not because they mistook her for a threat but perhaps because they wanted her to see-and to be reassured by-their diligence.

Someone had closed the window through which Render had escaped. The floor at that end of the room was still puddled with rain, but nothing grew in it.

Distraught, Cassie came at once into Molly's arms, buried her face against Molly's throat, and trembled uncontrollably.

Molly comforted the girl, stroked her hair, and determined that she had not been harmed.

Under the logic of the old reality, getting out of the tavern would have been a priority. Flee first, counsel the child later.

In the new reality, the world outside would be as dangerous as any room the tavern, including the cellar.

Any outdoor place was in fact more dangerous than the tavern. In spite of the resident of the janitorial closet and regardless of what spores might be fruiting in the self-mutilated congregation in the cellar, the grotesque: me and hostile life forms of another planet roamed open places in increasing numbers.

The masters of this magical-seeming alien technology were able to extract their prey from any sanctuary, through walls or floors or ceilings, and surely they themselves could pass through solid matter in the same fashion. The lower life forms, however-the equivalent of Earth's mammals, reptiles, insects-had no such ability; walls were barriers to them.

The frenzied fluttering horde in Johnny and Abby's house had been struggling to find a way out of their nest behind the lath and plaster. The insectile behemoth in the church basement would not have torn violently out of the oak floor if it had been able to phase through that planking with ease.

Consequently, although the tavern provided no safe haven against the powerful lords of this invasion, it offered some protection from the venomous creatures of their ecology.

"They're all dead, aren't they?" Cassie asked.

Because the girl's mother and father were among the missing, Molly said, "Maybe not, honey. Maybe they-"

"No." The girl didn't want to be coddled. "Better dead… than with one of those things inside you."

This seemed to be a reference to something other than spores entering the body through lacerations. Most likely, Cassie had-never seen what grew in the janitorial closet or the white colonies that now crawled the half-light of the purple morning.

"What things?" Molly asked.

"The things with faces in their hands."

Angie had mentioned one such being. The girl spoke of things, plural.

The three dogs stirred and made thin anxious sounds and growled softly, as though they remembered the entities of whom she spoke.

"What does that mean, Cassie-faces in their hands?"

The girl's voice fell to a whisper. "They can take your face and keep it in their hands, and show it to you, and other faces, and crush them in their fists, and make them scream."

This explanation failed to dispel Molly's confusion. The answers to a few more questions gave her a somewhat better idea of what had happened to Cassie's parents and to others in the tavern, but left her with an inadequate image of the things with faces in their hands.

Three of them had risen through the tavern floor, into the midst of the people gathered there. They were humanoid in form-between six and seven feet tall, with two legs, two arms-but far from human in appearance.

The extreme alien aspect of these creatures caused even the peace lovers to panic. Some had tried to flee, but the ETs had halted them simply by pointing, not with a weapon or instrument but with a hand. Likewise, a mere pointing at once silenced those who screamed and caused those with weapons to drop them without firing a shot.

To Molly, this suggested telepathic control-another reason to wonder if the taking of the world could be resisted to any significant extent.

The three ETs had then moved among the people, "taking their faces." What this meant, Molly could not adequately ascertain.

At first, according to Cassie, there was just "smooth" where each person's face had been, and the face that had been removed was "alive in the thing's hand."

Subsequently, for a moment, an alien face-like those of the three who had risen through the floor-formed out of the smoothness where the stolen countenance had been. Then it faded, and the original face, the human face, returned.

This had suggested to Cassie that alien masters had been installed inside these people, but that was definitely movie thinking and might not be the correct explanation.

The girl had not witnessed all of those in the tavern being subjected to this process, because in fear she'd fled to the women's lav, with the dogs accompanying her. She hadn't been willing to risk leaving by the front door, because to get there, she would have been forced to pass too close to the ETs.

Here in the lavatory, Cassie had waited, expecting one of the things to seek her out and to take her face.

Molly wasn't able to sift any useful hard facts from the girl's bizarre account, but she inferred from it that Cassie had been spared neither by accident nor by oversight. The ETs intentionally allowed her to escape. When she'd run, they could have halted her as they had halted any adults who tried to flee.

Abby and Johnny, trapped in a house that was "changing… almost alive," had not been attacked either by the beast that slaughtered their drunken father in the garage or by the agitated multitudes whispering in the walls.

Eric, Elric, and Bethany had not been "floated" through the ceiling and into the storm with their parents and grandmother. And in the attic, they'd been rescued from the amorphous predator visible only in peripheral vision, the thing that smelled of "burnt matches, rotten eggs, and poop."

In the church, although Bethany had a close call, all five of the children had been saved from certain death-and perhaps not entirely because of actions that Molly and Neil had taken.

The inference that Cassie had intentionally been spared led to the further inference that at this point in the taking of the world, the war plan called for the ruthless extermination of most human beings above a certain age-but specified the preservation of the children.

At first this seemed baffling if not inexplicable, but then in the mare's-nest of surreal events, among the tangle of dark wonders and impossibilities that defined the past twelve hours, Molly found and followed a thread of logic leading inexorably to a suspicion that chilled her.

One by one, she met the eyes of each of the three dogs. Mutt, mutt, retriever: They regarded her forthrightly, expectantly, tails wagging tentatively.

She scanned the floor, walls, ceiling.

If her thoughts had been read, her suspicion known, she expected that something would enter the lavatory through one solid surface or another, take her face, and then her life.

Here at the still point of the turning world, she waited to die-and didn't.

"Come on, sweetie," she said to Cassie, "let's get out of here."