Dean Koontz - The Taking

Hoping that the bright vessel would continue to hover over the house, shedding light through the windows, and that she would not be forced to work by flashlight in the company of the ambulatory fungi, Molly plucked the knife off the bed and sawed at the binding tape.

Their names were Bradley and Allison, and Molly did her best to soothe their fears as she also explained how directly and quickly they must leave the house. She lied about the fate of their parents when they asked anxiously after them.

Saving all these children's lives might be easier than helping them to accept a future founded on the shaky ground of personal tragedy and catastrophic destruction.

Resolutely, she turned her mind from that consideration. To do this work, she must live in the moment, and to give the children hope and counsel them out of the despair that came with dwelling on things forever lost, she must eventually teach them to live in the moment, too.

She realized only now that since stepping across the threshold at the front door of this house, she had at some point acquired the conviction that they would have a future, when previously she could not find reason to foresee long-term survival. She knew some of the reasons for this change of heart, but not all of them; evidently her subconscious had perceived other causes for optimism that it was not yet ready to share with her.

Because Bradley was young and more frightened than his sister, Molly freed him first and told him to stay close to Virgil, in whom most of her trust had been restored by recent events.

As she finished freeing Allison, Molly heard a wet, decidedly organic sound and looked up as the skin on a round, cantaloupe-size fungus in the overhead colony peeled back like the lids of an eyeball. Under those membranes lay a human face.

Of all the impossible and grotesque things that she had seen since the coyotes on the porch, this rated as the most bizarre, the least comprehensible, the most disturbing. Repulsed, she nevertheless could not avert her eyes.

A longer look revealed that the face in the fungus wasn't molded dimensionally. The surface of the sphere under the peeled-back lids was smooth and curved and transparent, and the human face appeared to float within it like an object in one of those Christmas snow globes.

This particular face was that of a man with blue eyes and blond mustache. His gaze turned to Molly, and he seemed to see her. His expression was anguished and imploring, and he appeared to be crying out to her, though he produced no sound.

White membranes peeled back from a second fungus in the colony, revealing another face held in another sphere: a woman screaming and in a state of abject torment. Her screams were silent.

These were not real faces, but watching them in a paralytic state of awe, of dread, Molly suspected-and quickly came to believe-that each represented a human consciousness, the mind and memory of someone who had actually lived. They had been stripped out of their physical bodies at death and somehow captured in these hideous structures.

Each colony of white fungi was some kind of organic penitentiary in which were imprisoned the consciousnesses of those people who died at the hands of the new masters of Earth. More accurately, perhaps, the colonies might be data-storage systems in which were accumulated human minds complete in every aspect, including memory, cognitive functions, and personality.

Molly's pounding heart seemed to tighten and shrink within her breast, as if withered by these considerations.

More lids peeled back, revealing additional faces, not only on the colony that crawled the ceiling but also on the one that crouched in the corner, and Molly suddenly knew, from the way they focused on her and on the children, and from their expressions, that they were aware in their prisons. Aware, alert, and desperate, some of them had been driven mad by their condition and raged insanely, silently.

Wisely, Virgil split for the upstairs hall.

Anxious to spare Bradley and Allison from further exposure to this abomination, Molly hustled the kids after the dog.

At the doorway, she glanced back and saw another lid peel away from another sphere, revealing the face of the scarred man whom she had shot no more than two or three minutes ago. His gaze found her, and his features twisted with hate.

Abruptly the faces were allowed voices, and from them arose a shrill cacophony of weeping, wailing, screaming, pleas for help, shrieks of rage, cursing, and ululations of mad laughter.

As Molly fled behind the children, down the stairs, the bright craft hovering above the house moved on, leaving the windows muddy purple once more and casting the interior into darkness.

NEIL WANTED TO EXAMINE HER MANGLED AND blood-caked ear, but Molly insisted they must get on with the work. Virgil was already on the move, padding east along the street, back the way they had come.

This time the children-eight of them now-proceeded at the head of the column, behind the dog. Molly and Neil followed them, watchful but not any longer in the grip of hair-trigger paranoia.

"The only thing we have to protect the kids from is people," Molly said. "Ordinary, born-of-man-and-woman people. The bad ones, the sick ones. But the ETs and everything that's come with them from their world… they'll leave the children untouched."

"How can you know that?" he asked.

She quoted the scarred man. " 'Kids ain't for sifting.' "

"What?"

"Things happened in that house, gave me a different perspective. I'll tell you later. The main thing is, the kids are untouchable."

"Why?"

"I'm not sure, but I'm working on a theory. Another thing is… I think those of us searching for them are untouchable, too."

"Something sure touched your ear."

"Not one of them, nothing… alien. There was this guy, this psycho, he killed their parents, was going to kill Bradley and Allison."

"I thought I heard a shot. But it was muffled, and I couldn't be sure. I almost came in."

"It was over by then."

He regarded her with something more than amazement, perhaps wonder. "You used to just write books."

"Did I? Maybe a long time ago."

The shepherd led them into Black Lake's small downtown center.

Swags of blackish moss draped all the trees and suffocated some of them. Moss had begun to clothe the buildings, as well: fringes along the rain gutters, the windowsills.

"So," he asked, "are we rescuing or harvesting them?"

"Rescuing, I think. And I feel better about the dogs."

Quick dark figures capered across the roofs and porch roofs, in and out of the low fog layer, leaping from building to building. They were the size of monkeys, with the agility of macaques and capuchins, but without the playful spirit of monkeys. Their heads were too large for their bodies, which were covered in scales rather than fur, and from a distance their asymmetric faces appeared to have been half melted in a fire. With hands that featured as many fingers as-but a greater complement of knuckles than-the hands of man or monkey, they sometimes tore at themselves as if they were in torment, though the only sounds they made were choking noises that in some instances resembled a wicked chuckling.

Fungi grew everywhere: across lawns and parks, in flower beds and flower boxes. They sprouted from cracks in sidewalks, on the walls of clapboard and wood-shingled buildings. They were not all pale white or black with yellow spots, but came in a great variety otshapes and colors that suggested not a fairyland panorama but a phantasmagoric wasteland of continuously mutating forms in the sweat-drenched dream journeys of a comatose junkie on the edge of overdose.

"What I'm wondering," Molly said, "is if maybe we've been wrong to think the ETs are a monolithic force, a hive dedicated to a single mission, driven by a single desire."