Dean Koontz - The Taking

"She kinda looked like you," Bethany told Molly.

"No, she didn't," said Eric.

"Well," Elric said, "I sorta think she did."

"Kinda like you," Bethany insisted.

Eric studied Molly's face. "Yeah, maybe she did."

Molly had no idea what to make of this development, whether to make anything at all of it.

More important, in walking these children through their story again, she had found support for the terrible suspicion that had overcome her in the tavern.

She surveyed the surrounding town. In the west, one of those luminous craft, disc or sphere, streaked north to south through the fog layer, and at ground level its passing light made the shadows of houses and trees appear to quicken after it like a horde of malevolent spirits drawn by a Piper playing a tune beyond human hearing.

The ETs, these new masters of a remade Earth, were indifferent to suffering and were capable of cruelties that exceeded in every instance the wickedest acts of humanity, which was frequently a cruel species in its own right. Yet they were allowing-perhaps ensuring-the survival of most if not all of the children.

These destroyers of civilizations were without mercy. If most or all of the children were intentionally being spared, surely their reprieve would be temporary. The ETs must have some special use for them.

"WHAT SPECIAL USE?" NEIL ASKED.

"Don't know, can't even guess," Molly said.

They stood in the middle of the street, apart from the six children and the four dogs, speaking softly, looking not at each other but at the surrounding buildings and trees.

For the immediate future and probably for the rest of their lives, which might be one and the same, they would be on sentry duty no matter what other tasks they were engaged upon. When they grew weary, they would have to take turns sleeping.

Maybe the ETs wanted the kids to survive for the time being, and maybe Molly and Neil, as guardians of the children, were not on the extermination list, at least for the moment, but they couldn't trust that she had made the correct inferences from recent events. Their best hope was diligence, if they had any hope at all.

A grim analogy occurred to her. "We're harvestmen."

"We're what?" Neil asked.

"The children are the crop. We've been sent into the fields to harvest them."

She could see that this idea was a spider that crawled his nerves, perhaps because it rang as true as penitential bells.

"We are who we are, doing what we want to do," he said by way of weak denial.

"Which makes us useful to the bastards," she suggested. "But whatever fate the kids are being harvested for, we damn sure aren't going to deliver them to it."

Considering the imbalance of power between them and the aliens, this oath sounded like bravado and felt like ashes in her mouth, but she meant to die, if necessary, in the fulfillment of it.

"Don't trust the dogs," she warned him.

Neil studied the four canines that, alert for danger, slowly circled the children. "They're devoted to the kids."

"Loyal, courageous," she agreed, "as dogs nearly always are. But these aren't ordinary animals."

"We know that much from their behavior," he agreed.

"They're dogs but something more than dogs. At first it seemed magical, with Virgil and the rose and all. But it's the 'something more' we can't trust."

He met her eyes. "You all right?"

She nodded. "It was ugly in the tavern."

"All dead?"

"Or worse."

He said, "If it comes to that…"

Trying to help him, she said, "Death, you mean."

"If it comes to that, you want me to give you extreme unction?"

"Can you?"

"I don't hold the office anymore, but I still know the words, and believe them." He smiled. "I think I'll be cut some slack."

"All right," she said. "Yes. I'd like it if you would. If it comes to that."

"Have you prepared yourself?"

"Yeah. The first time one of those bright craft hovered over us, pretty much your classic flying saucer, you and me with Johnny and Abby in the street. I expected death rays like something from The War of the Worlds."

"In the movie," he said, "both Gene Barry and Ann Robinson survived."

"Earth's bacteria killed off all the mighty Martians," Molly recalled.

She didn't expect a Hollywood ending this time.

Remembering how Neil, a film buff, had stood in front of the TV watching moments of favorite old movies for the last time, before they had left home, she knew that he would enjoy a question to test his knowledge.

"Whatever happened to Gene Barry, anyway?" she asked. "Did he make any other movies?"

"Several, including a really great one. Thunder Road with Robert Mitchum."

Leaving the kids to the care of the other three dogs, Virgil had come to Molly's side. He chuffed with impatience.

Stooping before the shepherd, scratching gently behind his ears, giving no indication that her trust of him was no longer complete, Molly said, "All right, boy. I know. Time to do the work."

At this, Virgil turned from her and padded away, hurrying south on Main Street.

They set out again: Molly following Virgil, the six kids and the other three dogs close behind her, Neil guarding the back of the column.

The wine-dark day, clammy between the sodden earth and the low overcast, said funeral, said cemetery.

Black-and-gray bunting, shadows and moss, swagged the trees, and along the curb, parked vehicles seemed to be waiting to form a ceremonial procession as soon as the hearse appeared and led the way.

The shops and houses rose like blank-walled mausoleums, lacking names and epitaphs, as if the dead had been forever forgotten as soon as they had been interred.

The breathless day lay in throttled silence again. The mimicry of weeping women and sobbing men had ceased.

No feathered omens of death-no ravens, owls, crows-dared the ominous sky. None sang or hooted in the trees, either, or hopped the wet yards in search of fat earthworms, or gathered to sit shivah on fences or on porch railings.

Despite a lack of winged portents, Molly sensed that most of the people in Black Lake were dead. Not long ago, she had thought they might be found huddled in their fortress houses, armed with guns and knives and baseball bats, prepared to defend their families, but she knew better now.

Those who had not been slaughtered had instead been taken and imprisoned to serve as subjects of experimentation or as objects of cruel play. Nothing lived in most of these houses anymore-unless otherworldly vermin crawled the damp rooms, unless unearthly plants rooted in cellars, in rich beds of decaying cadavers, spreading pale leaves and black blooms.

Molly glanced back at the children and winced when she saw that they regarded her so hopefully, with such evident conviction that she could be relied upon. A few smiled thinly, and their pathetic confidence moved her. She looked forward again to prevent them from seeing the tears that she blinked away.

Although she was prepared to die for them, she didn't deserve their trust. In this worldwide holocaust, during which entire armies had perished before one soldier could fire one shot, she was acutely aware that she and Neil were inadequate to the task before them.

A failed writer with a pistol, a failed priest with a shotgun. In their lives they had succeeded-truly and unequivocally succeeded-at only one thing: love. In their enduring and always growing love for each other, they had found redemption, peace.

Their enemy, however, was impervious to the power of love. Judging by all available evidence, these invaders lacked even the capacity to grasp the concept.

Virgil turned right at the corner, onto Marine Avenue, and when Molly followed him, she thought for an instant that the humid air and the peculiar light had conspired to play a trick, the equivalent of a mirage or Fata Morgana. It seemed that an enormous mirror filled the intersection a block to the west, reflecting Virgil and the procession that followed him.