The Taking

61

RENDER HAD KILLED FIVE CHILDREN IN HER SCHOOLroom, twenty years ago, and here were five more at risk.

As if he knew what she was thinking, he said, "The magic number are present, aren't they?"

She would have expected the vault walls to cast his voice back in metallic echoes, but they muffled, softened. Although his words were mocking, he sounded like a funeral director, murmuring in respect of the lead.

Molly held the gun in both hands, pointed at his handsome face. "I'm taking them out of here."

"Dead, maybe."

"Nobody dead but you," she said, "if it comes to that."

" 'If it comes to that,' " he repeated mockingly. "You're too morally confused to do the right thing, Molly dear. You could have shot me at the tavern, but you let me go. Let me go to commit what horrors?"

She shook her head. "You're underestimating me."

Quaking, tail tucked, head low, Virgil slipped past Render to join the children.

Render produced one of his killer smiles, of the intensity and warmth that had charmed her mother into marriage. "What do they call it when you murder your own father? Patricide, I think."

"I have no father," she said.

"You tell yourself you don't, but you aren't convinced. You know that I came to your school that day because I loved you and didn't want to lose you."

"You've never loved anyone but yourself."

"I loved you so much that I killed to get you that day, killed whoever stood in my way, just to have a chance to raise you as a good father should."

He took a step toward her.

"Stay back," she warned. "Remember, I shot you twice that day."

"And in the back," he agreed. "But you were innocent then, and less aware of the complexities of right and wrong."

He took another step and reached one hand out to her, palm up, as if in a plea for an emotional connection.

She backed away from him.

Still approaching, he said, "Give Daddy a hug, and let's sit down and talk about all of this."

Molly backed into the open gate between the money room and the vestibule. She could retreat farther only if she left the room-and left him with the children.

He kept coming, hand out. "Your mother always believed in the power of love, the wisdom of discussion. She said anything can be accomplished with good will, with compromise. Didn't she teach you those values, Molly?"

She shot him in the chest. The vault did not muffle the clap of the gun, but rang with it, as if they stood inside a giant bell.

She heard the children scream and was peripherally aware that some of them covered their ears with their hands; some covered their eyes.

The slug jolted Render. And his eyes widened. And he smiled.

She shot him again, a third time, a fourth, but he did not go down. Four bullet holes marked his chest, but no blood spilled from him.

Lowering the gun, she said, "You were dead already. Dead when you came to the tavern."

"When everything began to fall apart, some of the guards at the sanitarium would have turned us loose," he said. "Out of pity, out of compassion, rather than leave us caged like animals, to starve or worse. But there were two who wouldn't have it-and shot us in our cells before they left for home."

What stood before her was not her father, but a simulacrum of exquisitely convincing detail. Now it changed, and became what it really was: a mottled black-and-gray thing with a face that seemed to have once imploded and been badly reconstructed. Eyes as large as lemons, protuberant, crimson with elliptical black pupils. From shoulders ridged with spiky plates of bone, leathery wings hung folded along its sides.

She knew that she stood now in the presence of a prince from another star, one of the species that had come to take the earth.

When it showed her its big, taloned, and powerful hands, she saw a face in each. Unlike the faces in the fungi, these had some dimension, and looked even more real, more disturbing than those she had seen earlier. In the left hand, the face of Michael Render. In the right hand, the face of Vince Hoyt, the football coach standing faceless now in the lobby of the bank.

The ET closed its enormous hands, and from within its clenched fingers, she heard her father screaming in agony, and Vince Hoyt.

When it opened its hands, the faces had changed, and now she saw a famous politician in the left, a famous actress in the right. These, too, cried out in misery when it crushed them in its fists.

Molly felt light, without any weight at all, as in a dream, as if she might float out of this place and into another chamber of the nightmare.

The thing's mouth was as ragged as a wound, and when it spoke, she saw teeth like broken glass. "I'll let you keep your face and walk out of here with four of the lambs. But only four. You choose the one to leave behind."

Heart knocking hard enough to shake her body and make the pistol jump in her uneasy grip, she looked at the five children, who had heard the creature's proposition. She would die before she left any of them.

She met the crimson eyes, and as strange as they were, she nevertheless could read them, and realized a truth. Like the walking corpse of Harry Corrigan, like Derek Sawtelle in his tweed jacket and hand-knotted bow tie, like Michael Render, like the talking doll and the walking colonies of fungi, like nearly everyone and everything that she had encountered since waking to the sound of rain, this was an agent of despair, intent upon reducing her to hopelessness.

They had used the bloody tragedy of her childhood, the abiding grief at the loss of her mother to cancer, her deepest fears, her greatest self-doubts, and even her love for the work of T. S. Eliot-which had always given her strength and inspiration-to confuse her, to exhaust her, to induce in her a black despondency that would leave her a hollow woman, a paralyzed force, of no help to the innocent.

There were many things about these events that she didn't understand yet, that she might never understand, but she knew one thing for certain, even if she didn't know why it should be true: As long as she had hope, they could not touch her.

"You have no power over me or them. I am their tutelary," Molly declared, surprised to hear the word escape her, for it was not one she had ever used, though she knew that it meant a special kind of guardian. "I'm taking them out of here. All of them. Now."

It reached for her face. Its spread talons extended from her scalp to below her chin, from ear to ear, and its touch was as cold as ice, and greasy.

She did not pull back. Or flinch. Or breathe.

After a hesitation, the thing drew its hand away from her.

The ET stared at her for a moment, and though its expressions were as alien as its face, she knew that it was filled with hate and fury and frustration.

As if it were suddenly weightless, the thing rose from the floor, floating upward as, moments ago, she had feared that she herself might have done. It passed through the ceiling, perhaps drawn up into the colossal ship passing over Black Lake.