The Taking

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The unthinkable was there in the darkness between her and the stairs, just a lunge away from her: the dripping thing, the hangman, the eternal Footman, the Stranger who comes to everyone’s door sooner or later, and knocks and knocks and will not go away, now here for her in the impossible form of dead Harry, her lost friend.

She ran behind the wildly leaping light, toward the inconstant light, toward the polished mahogany newel post marking the way down, and she didn’t look to her left, where the resurrected neighbor had fallen backward into shadows.

It must have risen, moved, approached, because Neil fired again. The flare from the muzzle chased a flurry of shadows, like a flock of bats, through the hallway.

Molly reached the stairs, which seemed markedly steeper in the descent than they had been in the ascent. Flashlight in one hand, pistol in the other, she was not able to clutch at the railing, but owed her balance to sheer luck. She plunged down steps as unforgiving as ice-crusted ladder rungs, headlong, stumbling, flailing her arms, and landed, staggered, on both feet in the foyer, in a billow of raincoat.

The front door stood open. As a third shotgun blast rocked the house, she fled those dry rooms for the questionable sanctuary of the radiant storm.

She hadn’t pulled up her hood. Torrents of rain washed her face, her hair, and a trickle at once found its way down the nape of her neck, under her collar, along her spine, into the cleft of buttocks, as if it were the questing finger of a violator taking advantage of a moment of vulnerability.

She sloshed across the flooded turnaround, to the driver’s door of the Explorer. Soft lumpish objects bumped against her boots.

The flashlight revealed dead birds—twenty, thirty, forty, more—beaks cracked in silent cries, eyes glassy, bobbing in the silvered pool, as if they had been drowned in flight and washed down from the flooded sky.

Neil rushed out of the house, toward the idling SUV. Nothing pursued him, at least not immediately.

Climbing behind the wheel of the Explorer, Molly dropped the flashlight in the console cup-holder, put the pistol between her legs, and released the hand brake.

With the Remington smelling of hot steel and expended gunpowder, Neil came aboard as Molly shifted out of park. He pulled his door shut after they had begun to roll.

Out of the feathered pool, up the driveway that appeared to be paved in the glistening black-and-silver scales of serpents, to the county road, they escaped that haunted precinct of the cataclysm and drove into another.

12 (#u23f41bf5-c3b4-55ec-ab00-ad9d9c17eaf8)

IN THIS NIAGARA, ON PAVEMENT AS SLICK AS A bobsled chute, speed was worse than folly; speed equaled madness. Nevertheless, Molly drove too fast, eager to reach town.

Here and there, weak and sodden tree branches cracked loose, fell to the roadway. Layered veils of rain obscured the way ahead, and often she couldn’t see obstacles until she was nearly upon them.

Cold terror made of her an expert driver, and a keen survival instinct improved her judgment, honed her reaction time to a split-second edge. She piloted the Explorer through a slalom course of storm debris, wheeling into every slide, jolting through chuckholes that made the steering wheel stutter in her hands, powering out of a near stall when a flooded swale in the pavement proved to be deeper than it looked.

When she saw a gnarled, clawlike evergreen limb too late to avoid it, those broken fingers of pine tore at the undercarriage, scratched, scraped, knocked, as though some living creature were determined to get at them through the floorboards. The branch got hung up on the rear axle, rapping noisily for a quarter of a mile before it finally splintered and fell away.

Chastened, Molly eased up on the accelerator. For the next quarter of a mile, she glanced repeatedly at the fuel gauge, worried that the gas tank might have been punctured.

The indicator needle held steady just below the full mark. No instrument-panel lights appeared to indicate falling oil pressure or a loss of any other vital fluid. Her luck had held.

At this slower speed, less intently focused on her driving, she could think more clearly about the grisly episode at the Corrigan place. No matter how hard she mulled it over, however, she could not understand it.

“What was that, damn, what happened back there?” she asked, recognizing a scared-girl note in her voice, neither surprised nor embarrassed to hear her words strung on a tremor.

“Can’t get my mind around it,” Neil admitted.

“Harry was dead.”

“Yeah.”

“Brains all over the bathroom.”

“That’s a memory maybe even Alzheimer’s couldn’t erase.”

“So how could he be up on his feet again?”

“Couldn’t.”

“And talking.”

“Couldn’t.”

“But he did, he was. Neil, for God’s sake, I mean, what does something like that have to do with Mars?”

“Mars?”

“Or wherever they’re from—the other side of the Milky Way, another galaxy, the end of the universe.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“This isn’t like ETs in the movies.”

“ ’Cause this isn’t the movies.”

“Doesn’t seem to be real life, either. The real world runs on logic.”

Having fished spare shells from his raincoat pockets, Neil reloaded the shotgun. He didn’t fumble the ammunition. His hands were steady.

Never in her memory had his hands been otherwise, or his mind, or his heart. Steady Neil.

“So where’s the logic?” Molly asked. “I don’t see it.”

Half as big as pineapples, two objects dropped from overhead, bounced off the hood of the Explorer.

Molly braked before she realized they were pine cones. They resembled hand grenades as they ricocheted off the windshield and arced away into the night.

“Parasites,” Neil said.

She brought the Explorer to a full stop, half on the road, half on the graveled shoulder. “Parasites?”

“They might be parasites,” he said, “these things from the far end of the universe or the dark side of the moon, or wherever they’re from. Parasites—that’s an old theme in science fiction, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Intelligent parasites, capable of infecting a host body and controlling it as if it were a puppet.”

“What host body?”

“Anything, any species. In this case, Harry’s corpse.”

“You call that logic?”

“Just speculation.”

“But how does this parasite—I don’t care if it’s smarter than the entire membership of Mensa combined—how does it control a host that’s blown out itsbrains?”

“The corpse still has a jointed skeleton, musculature, intact nerve pathways below the brainpan,” he said. “Maybe the parasite plugs into all that-and can manipulate the host, brain or no brain.”

Her anxiety ebbed just enough to allow for a small amazement. “You sure don’t sound like a guy who was schooled by Jesuits.”

“Oh, but I do. They value nimbleness of thought, imagination, and open-mindedness.”

“And evidently they watch old Star Trek episodes too much. The parasite theory doesn’t qualify as logic in my book.”

For a moment, Neil studied the dripping, silvered forest, which darkled to a black void in the distance. With evident uneasiness, he surveyed the rain-washed county road ahead and behind them.

“Let’s keep moving,” he said. “I think we’re more vulnerable when we’re sitting still like this.”