Dean Koontz - The Taking

In mere days, selected public gathering places had electricity provided by portable generators. The grand scheme promised electrical service to some neighborhoods within a year.

Medical clinics were established. Drugs were scavenged from pharmacies, to be rationed until a simple pharmaceutical industry could be reestablished.

The millions of dead could not be found, nor any smallest example of the alien ecology that had flourished so briefly.

For a long time, the stars would be regarded with suspicion, and perhaps for even longer, dogs would be treated less like pets than like family.

Every day, in a thousand small ways, civilization was pulled back from the brink.

In October of that year, hardly a month after Armageddon, Molly became a teacher and discovered greater joy in this work than she had ever known on the other side of books.

Once a priest, Neil had left the Church when he reported his rector for child molestation and discovered that his bishop lacked the wisdom, the will, and the strength of faith to purge the offender from the priesthood. Here along the coast, he first served this new community as a first-rate cabinetmaker, but by Christmas he found himself with a congregation again.

Molly had met him on the last day of his priesthood. On an afternoon when her heart had been troubled, she'd gone into a church just to sit, to think. Eventually she'd gone forward in the deserted nave to light a votive candle in her mother's memory. Quietly saying goodbye to his church, Neil had been standing in the chancel, in the complicated geometry of colorful light from a stained-glass window. His face had been so perfect, his eyes so kind, that she had mistaken him for a statue of St. John the Divine, until he moved.

The New Year came and was marked by only quiet celebrations in respect of the dead, but there was pleasure in life, more by the day.

Through the winter and into the spring, Molly continued to be intrigued with the healthy psychology of the children. They had not forgotten their loved ones, and spoke of them often, but they seemed to be under a dispensation from grief. And from nightmares. They did remember the terrible things they had witnessed, but almost as if they had seen them in movies. More so than the adults, they were able to live in the moment, at the still point of the turning world, where the dance of life occurred.

In April, Molly learned that she was pregnant.

ON A WARM DAY IN JULY, IN HER FOURTH MONTH with child, when school was in recess until September, Molly sat on her patio overlooking the sea, in the shade of a whispering phoenix palm.

On the glass-top table before her was one of her mother's books, which the world had forgotten even before the world had ended, but which she treasured and reread from time to time.

She had set the book aside after discovering a reference to Noah and the ark.

When Neil appeared with glasses of iced tea on a tray, she said, " 'The flood, the ark, the animals loaded two by two, all that Old Testament bullshit

He raised an eyebrow.

"I'm quoting Render in the lavatory at the tavern. But Neil… besides sin and selfishness and stone idols and that sort of thing, does the story of Noah suggest any special reason that the world was wiped clean?"

Settling into a chair with his own glass of tea and a biography of W. B. Yeats, he said, "In fact, yes. A tolerance of murder."

She wasn't sure she understood.

"Most people had become too tolerant of murder," he elaborated, "punished it too lightly, even excused it when it was in the service of Utopian visions. Why?"

"There's a reference in Mother's book." She indicated the volume on the table. "I was just wondering."

He sipped his tea and lost himself in the life of Yeats.

For a time, Molly stared at the sea.

Hitler killed more than twenty million. Stalin fifty million. Mao Tse-tung as many as a hundred million. More recently, two million had been murdered in Sudan, another two million in Rwanda. The list of holocausts went on and on.

In the name of religion or political justice, in the pursuit of a better world through one ideology or another, mass graves had been filled, and who among the murderers had ever been punished, aside from a few Nazis convicted at the Nuremberg trials more than half a century ago?

No clouds were gathered over the sea. Blue met blue at a nearly invisible horizon.

Every day in the old world, so recently vanished, the news had been full of stories of suicide bombers, street-gang shootings, men who killed their pregnant wives, mothers who drowned their children, teenagers who shot their classmates. She remembered reading once that the average time served for murder in the Old United States had been seven years.

Render had never seen a prison, only sanitariums with counselors and rose gardens.

The more she thought about these things, the more she realized that the children's psychological recovery and their reluctance to dwell on their ordeal was matched by the adults' strange disinterest in discussing the ETs. Why had they traveled thousands of light-years, murdered millions, begun to reinvent the earth, but then departed?

Surely this should be the primary subject of discussion for the next century. But as the children were under a welcome dispensation from grief, the adults-including Molly herself-seemed to have granted themselves a dispensation from reason and from curiosity, at least in regard to the end of the world.

Rather than interrupt Neil, she went into the house, found a thick book of famous quotations, and returned with it to the patio.

She remembered something that she'd heard on the speakerphone when Neil had been talking to his brother, Paulie, in Hawaii: "-having great wrath because he knows that he hath but a short time." Those words had come through amidst static when telephone service had begun to break down.

As her key word, she looked under wrath in the index. She found the reference quickly. The quote was from Revelation, chapter twelve, verse twelve:

Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea, for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

Come down unto you? Was not Hell thought of as a place below?

In the bedroom of their house on that night in September, when Molly had awakened Neil from a nightmare, he had stood gazing at the ceiling, feeling the passage of the leviathan for the first time, and had said, "… sift you as wheat." When she'd asked him what he meant, he hadn't remembered speaking those words.

Suspecting that this, too, was a quote, she spent a quarter of an hour with the fat volume on the table before her, and found the source. Luke, chapter twenty-two, verse thirty-one:

And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat.

Molly gazed at the sea.

When she picked up her glass of tea, she was surprised to find it empty. She didn't recall finishing it.

She went into the house, got the pitcher from the refrigerator, returned to the patio, and poured more tea for herself and for Neil.

"Thanks, honey," he said.

She remembered something the scar-faced psychopath had said in Bradley and Allison's house, regarding his intention to "sacrifice" those children: "Them that rule the world" wanted the children, the innocents, more than anyone, but "kids ain't for sifting."

Although the day was hot, a chill found her here in the shadow of the phoenix palm.

After a while, she said to Neil, "I'm going to take a walk on the beach."

"Want company?"

"Enjoy the biography. I'll be fine."

Switchback stairs led down from the bluff to the beach. At the bottom, she took off her shoes and carried them.