Dean Koontz - The Taking

"Dork," said the girl.

"Geek."

"Walking fart," she countered.

The longer they proceeded beneath the canopy of branches, the more movement that Molly detected above them, although it remained stealthy. She suspected that they were accompanied by many arboreal presences, not just a single creature.

When she glanced back at Neil, Abby, Johnny, and Virgil, she saw that they, too, were aware of the secretive travelers in the trees.

Neil held the shotgun in both hands, in a semi-relaxed grip, the muzzle pointed upward as he walked, ready to swivel left or right and fire into the branches at the first provocation. This lovely man had passed thirty-two years in gentle pursuits-scholar, shepherd, cabinetmaker-but this night he'd proved to be a courageous protector in a pinch.

"The thing in the attic," Elric said, "might've got us if she hadn't made it back off."

"Would've gotten us for sure," said Bethany.

"She just sort of shimmered out of thin air. She was like that guy in that old movie, that Star Wars guy," Eric said, "but she wasn't a guy, and she didn't have a light sword-or any sword."

Immediately ahead of Molly, though not stirred by a breeze, leaves spoke to leaves, moss trembled at this conversation, and a hand of one of their stalkers appeared, only the hand, gripping a branch for perch, for balance.

"Obi-Wan Kenobi," Elric said.

"That's the guy," Bethany agreed. "An old guy."

The revealed hand was approximately the size of one of Molly's, perhaps with an extra digit, fiercely strong by the look of it, deep scarlet, scaly, reptilian.

"She wasn't old though," said Eric.

"Pretty old," Bethany disagreed.

"Not as old as the Star Wars guy."

"No, not that old."

Four knuckles per finger, endowed with black claws as pointed as rose thorns, the scarlet hand released the limb and vanished into foliage as the nimble creature proceeded ahead of them.

Speaking of the menacing presence encountered in their attic, Elric said, "I don't know how she made it stay away from us."

"She spelled it away," Bethany replied.

Molly wondered how something her size could move so swiftly from tree to tree, yet in near silence and with so little disturbance of the leaves and moss. And she wondered how many of them were swarming through the branches both below and above the dense fog.

"She didn't spell it away," Eric said impatiently.

"Magic words," Bethany insisted. " The force be with you.' "

Molly counseled herself to keep moving. Intuition told her that any hesitation would be interpreted as weakness and that any sign of weakness would invite attack.

"That's stupid," Eric said. "She didn't say 'the force be with you' or anything like that."

"Yeah, so what did she say?"

They were just fifty feet from the next intersection. Ahead lay Main street, with three generous lanes of pavement instead of two narrow ones; trees did not overhang the entire width of it, as they did here.

"I don't remember what she said," Eric admitted.

"Me neither," his brother said.

"She said something," Bethany declared.

Just three steps ahead of them, the scarlet hand or one like it appeared on another bareness of branch.

Molly considered firing her pistol into the tree. Even if she hit the creature and killed it, however, this might be reckless. Instinct-which, with intuition, was all she had to go on-told her that firing a shot might invite instant vicious assault by others in the wooden highways overhead.

Simultaneous with the appearance of the hand, an appendage, at least four feet long, red mottled with green, more than an inch in diameter at the shank but dwindling to a tasseled and barbed whip at the end, perhaps a tail, slid out of the leaves, drooped down before them in a lazy arc-then snapped up, shearing moss, and out of sight.

Bethany and her brothers had seen this sinuous display. They had been meant to see it. The exposed tail was intended to be a challenge and a prod to panic.

The kids halted, clutching at one another for reassurance.

"Keep moving," Molly whispered, "but don't run. Walk. Just like you were doing."

Fear made the children cautious, but a slow pace was better than a sprint, which might, as with a tiger, invite pursuit. They would not win a chase.

They were thirty feet from the end of the canopy.

As if all these terrors were a mad composition, systemized in meter, orchestrated, out of the bleak morning came again the weeping of a woman, answered by the more distant but nonetheless miserable weeping of a man, and also ahead of Molly and to her right, an iron manhole cover rattled in the blacktop, knocked upon from below by some restless entity, perhaps by the headless body of Ken Halleck.

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.