The Taking Read online

  The cold gray stone exterior of the tavern promised less warmth than the interior in fact delivered: worn mahogany floors, polished mahogany walls and ceiling, photographs of the town’s early residents in that time, a century previous, when the streets were shared by automobiles and horses.

  The air was redolent of stale beer spilled through the years, of fresh beer recently drawn from taps, of onions and peppers and the limy corn-tortilla fragrance of nachos, of damp wool and cotton clothing slowly steamed dry by body heat—and of a faint sour scent that she imagined might be the odor of communal anxiety.

  Molly was dismayed to find only about sixty people, perhaps twenty of whom she knew. The bar held twice that many on an average Saturday night; it could have accommodated four times that number in this emergency.

  Only six children were present, which worried her. She expected that families with kids would have been among the first to organize a community defense.

  She had brought the doll with her, hoping that the girl who’d left it in the abandoned Navigator might be among those sheltering here. None of the children reacted to the sight of the doll, so Molly put it on the bar.

  There was always a chance that the doll’s owner would still arrive here, out of the storm. Always hope.

  All six children were gathered at a large corner booth, but the adults had settled in four distinct groups. Molly sensed at once that they were divided by four different ideas about how best to respond to the crisis.

  She and Neil were greeted by those they knew and studied by those they didn’t know with a calculation that was almost wariness, as if they were viewed, first, not as allies by the simple virtue of being neighbors, but instead as outsiders to be greeted with greater warmth only when their opinions and loyalties were known.

  More than anything else, the dogs surprised her and Neil. She’d once been to France, where she had seen dogs in both drab working-class bars and the finest restaurants. In this country, however, health codes confined them to open patios, and most restaurateurs did not even tolerate them in an al fresco setting.

  She saw four, six, eight dogs at first count, in every corner of the room. There were mutts and purebreds, mid-size and larger specimens, but no lap dogs. More canines than children.

  Almost as one, the dogs rose to their feet and turned their heads toward her and Neil: some comic faces, some noble, all solemn and alert. Then, after a hesitation, they did a peculiar thing.

  18

  FROM ALL OVER THE TAVERN, BY DIFFERENT routes, the dogs came to Molly. They didn’t approach in the exuberant romp that expresses a desire to play or with the tail-tucked caution and the wary demeanor that is a response to an unfamiliar and vaguely troubling scent.

  Their ears were pricked. Their tails brushed the air with slow tentative strokes. They were clearly drawn to her by curiosity, as if she were something entirely new in their experience—new but not threatening.

  Her first count had been one short. Nine dogs were present, not eight, and each was intrigued by her. They circled, crowding against her, busily sniffing her boots, her jeans, her raincoat.

  For a moment she thought they smelled the coyotes on her. Then she realized that when she had ventured onto the porch among those beasts, she had been in pajamas and robe, not in any of the clothes she currently wore.

  Besides, most domesticated dogs had no sense of kinship with their wild cousins. They usually reacted to the scent of a coyote—and certainly to the cry of one in the night—with raised hackles and a growl.

  When she reached down to them, they nuzzled her hands, licked her fingers, welcoming her with an affection that most dogs usually reserved for those people with whom they had enjoyed a much longer acquaintance.

  From behind the bar, the owner of the tavern, Russell Tewkes, said, “What’ve you got in your pockets, Molly—frankfurters?”

  The tone of his voice didn’t match the jokey nature of the question. He spoke with a heavy note of insinuation that she didn’t understand.

  With the build of a beer barrel, the haircut and the merry face of a besotted monk, Russell was the image of a friendly neighborhood barkeep. For the woebegone, he had a sympathetic ear to rival that of any child’s mother. Indefatigably good-natured, at times he came dangerously close to being jolly.

  Now a squint of suspicion narrowed his eyes. His mouth set in a grim line. He regarded Molly as he might have reacted to a hulking Hell’s Angel who had the word hate tattooed on both fists.

  As the dogs continued to circle and sniff her, Molly realized that Russell was not alone in his distrust. Others in the bar, even people she knew well, who had a moment ago greeted her by name or with a wave, watched her not with the previous political calculation, but with unconcealed suspicion.

  Suddenly she understood their change of attitude. They were as familiar with those alien-invasion movies as she and Neil were, and the creepshow currently playing in the theaters of their minds was one of those they-walk-among-us-passing-for-human tales, perhaps Invasion of the Body Snatchers or John Carpenter’s The Thing.

  The singular behavior of the dogs suggested that something about Molly must be different. Even though the nine members of this furry entourage wagged their tails and licked her hands, and seemed to be charmed by her, most if not all of the people in the tavern were no doubt wondering if the dogs’ actions ought to be interpreted as a warning that something not of this earth now walked among them in disguise.

  She could too easily imagine what their reaction would have been if all of the dogs—or even just one mean-tempered specimen—had greeted her with growls, hackles raised, ears flattened to their skulls. Such a display of hostility would have received but one interpretation, and Molly would have found herself in the position of an accused witch in seventeenth-century Salem.

  In at least two places in the large room, rifles and shotguns leaned against the walls, arsenals within easy reach.

  Many of these would-be defenders of the planet surely were packing handguns, as Molly was. Among them would be a few, wound tight by dread and frustrated by their powerlessness, who would be relieved, even beguiled, to have a chance to shoot something, someone, anyone.

  In this fever swamp of paranoia, if the shooting started, it might not stop until every shooter had himself been shot.

  Molly turned her attention toward the back of the room, where the children were gathered. They looked scared. From the moment that Molly had seen them, they had struck her as terribly vulnerable, and now more than ever.

  “Go,” she said to the dogs, “shoo, go.”

  Their reaction to her command proved as peculiar as their unanimous attraction to her. Instantly compliant, as if all nine of them had been trained by her, they retreated to the places they had been when she had entered.

  This remarkable exhibition of obedience only sharpened the suspicion of the sixty people gathered in the tavern. But for the grumble of the rain, the room had fallen silent. Every stare made the same circuit: from Molly to the retreating dogs, and back to Molly again.

  Neil broke the spell when he said to Russell Tewkes, “This is one strange damn night, weirdness piled on weirdness. I could use a drink. You doing business? You have any beer nuts?”

  Russell blinked and shook his head, as though he had been in a trance of suspicion. “I’m not selling the stuff tonight. I’m giving it away. What’ll you have?”

  “Thank you, Russ. Got Coors in a bottle?”

  “I only sell draft and bottled, no damn cans. Aluminum causes Alzheimer’s.”

  Neil said, “What do you want, Molly?”

  She didn’t want anything that might blur her perceptions and cloud her judgment. Surely survival depended on sobriety.

  Meeting Neil’s eyes, however, she knew that he wanted her to drink something, not because she needed it but because most of the people in the tavern probably thought that under the circumstances she ought to need a drink—if she was merely human like them.

  Survival would
also depend on flexibility.

  “Hit me with a Corona,” she said.

  While Molly had to study people and brood about them to arrive at a useful understanding of their natures, much in the rigorously analytic fashion that she built the cast of players in her novels, Neil formed an instinctive understanding of anyone he met within moments of the first introduction. His gut reactions were at least as reliable as her intellectual analysis of character.

  She accepted the Corona and tipped it to her lips with an acute awareness of being the center of attention. She intended to take a small sip, but surprised herself by chugging a third of the beer.

  When she lowered the bottle, the level of tension in the tavern dropped noticeably.

  Inspired by Molly’s thirst, half the assembled crowd lifted drinks of their own. Many of the teetotalers watched the drinkers with disapproval, worry, or both.

  Having won their acceptance by such a meaningless—if not downright absurd—test of her humanity, Molly doubted that the human race could survive in even the most remote bunker, behind the most formidable fortifications, if in fact the invaders could assume convincing human form.

  So many people had difficulty acknowledging the existence of unalloyed evil; they hoped to wish it away through positive thinking, to counsel it into remorse through psychotherapy, or to domesticate it with compassion. If they could not recognize implacable evil in the hearts of their own kind and could not understand its enduring nature, they were not likely to be able to see through the perfect biological disguise of an extraterrestrial species capable of exquisitely detailed mimicry.

  From their various posts around the tavern, the dogs still watched her, some openly, others furtively.

  Their continued scrutiny suddenly struck chords on that operatic pipe organ of paranoia that stands front and center in the theater of the human mind: She wondered if the dogs had rushed to greet her, grateful for human contact, because everyone else in the tavern was an imposter, even the children, all alien presences masquerading as friends, as neighbors.

  No. The dogs hadn’t reacted to Neil as they had to her, although Neil was unquestionably Neil and nothing else. The reason for their interest in Molly remained mysterious.

  Pretending indifference, they were acutely alert to her every move, their lustrous eyes seeming to adore her, as if she were the still point of the turning world, where past and future are gathered, exalted beyond ordinary mortal status, the only thing in Creation worthy of their rapt attention.

  19

  MOLLY AND NEIL CIRCULATED THROUGH THE tavern, listening to the experiences of others, seeking information that would allow them to better assess the situation both here in town and in the world beyond Black Lake.

  Everyone at the Tail of the Wolf had seen the apocalyptic images on television. Perhaps they would be the last in human history to witness world-shaking news through the communal medium of the tube.

  After the TV channels had filled with blizzards of electronic snow or with the enigmatic pulsations of color, some people had turned on their radios and had caught scraps of AM and FM broadcasts from cities far and near. Newsmen had spoken of terrifying presences in the streets—variously referred to as monsters, ETs, aliens, demons, or simply things—though often they were too consumed by horror to fully describe what they saw or else their reports abruptly ended in screams of terror, pain.

  Molly thought of the man whose head had been cleaved in half, falling to the pavement on a street in Berlin, and she shuddered at the memory.

  Others in the tavern had sought information on the Internet, where they had encountered such a raveled tapestry of wild rumor and fevered speculation that they had been more confused than informed. Then the phones—landline and cellular—had failed, as had cable service, whereupon the Internet had deconstructed as abruptly as a plume of steam in a gust of wind.

  As Molly and Neil had seen clocks behaving oddly, mechanical devices—like the music boxes—running of their own accord, and impossible reflections in mirrors, so had numerous others among those gathered in the Tail of the Wolf. Battery-powered carving knives had suddenly buzzed and rattled in closed kitchen drawers. Computers switched themselves on, while across the screens scrolled hieroglyphs and ideograms from unknown languages. Out of CD players had come exotic and discordant music like nothing on the discs that were loaded in the machines.

  They had stories of remarkable encounters with animals much like Molly’s experience with the coyotes, and with the mice in the garage. All the fauna of this world seemed to recognize that the present threat was unearthly, supplanting all previous and familiar dangers.

  In addition, everyone had sensed something ominous overhead in the rainy night, what Neil called “a mountain coming down,” a mass of colossal size and crushing weight that first descended, then hovered, then moved east.

  Norman Ling, who owned the town’s only food market, recounted how his wife, Lee, had awakened him with a cry of “the moon is falling.”

  “I almost wish it had been the moon,” Lee said now, with a solemnity that matched the expression in her dark, anguished eyes. “It would all be over now if it had been the moon, all of us gone—and nothing worse to come.”

  Nevertheless, though this cross-section of humanity had shared the same experiences and had drawn from them approximately the same conclusions—that their species was no longer the most intelligent on the planet and that their dominion of Earth had been usurped—they could not come together to devise a mutually agreeable response to the threat. Four philosophies divided the occupants of the tavern into four camps.

  The drunks and those who worked diligently at becoming drunk made the smallest group. To their way of thinking, the most desirable comforts of human civilization were already lost beyond all hope of recovery. If they could not save the world, they would drink to the memory of its glories—and hope that when one kind of brutal death or another came to them, they would be unconscious, courtesy of Jack Daniel’s or Absolut.

  More numerous than the drunks were the peace lovers, the meek who styled themselves as prudent and reasonable. They remembered movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which well-meaning aliens, bringing gifts of peace and love to the people of Earth, are willfully misunderstood and become the targets of mindless human violence.

  To this crowd, with or without benefit of liquor, the unfolding worldwide catastrophe was not proof of bad intentions, but rather a tragic consequence of poor communication, perhaps even the result of some unspecified, precipitous, and typically ignorant human action. These prudent, reasonable citizens were convinced—or pretended to be—that the current terrors would be satisfactorily explained in time, and rectified, by the benign ambassadors from another star.

  In these circumstances, The Day the Earth Stood Still had less relevance to Molly than an old episode of The Twilight Zone in which aliens arrived with solemn promises to alleviate all human want and suffering, guided by a sacred volume whose title translated as To Serve Man. Too late, the sheepish people of Earth realized that the sacred volume was a cookbook.

  Of the four groups, more numerous than the drunks and the peace lovers combined were the fence-sitters, who could not decide if the current crisis would best be addressed by a violent response or by peace overtures and songs of love—or perhaps even by consuming disabling quantities of alcoholic beverages. They claimed to need more information before they could make up their minds; they would no doubt be patiently awaiting further information even as a meat lover from Andromeda was basting them in butter.

  Molly was dismayed to see friends among the fence-sitters. She would have had more respect for them if they had embraced either pacifism or inebriation.

  The fourth group, only slightly less numerous than the fence-sitters, were those who preferred to stand up and fight, regardless of the odds against them. Among them were as many women as men, folks of all ages and persuasions. Angry, energized, they had brought most of the guns and were eager to strik
e back.

  They pulled up two more chairs and welcomed Molly and Neil, inferring from the shotgun and the pistol that they might be like-minded. This spirited group had put half a dozen tables together to form a U, the better to jointly speculate on all the possible what-ifs, as well as to discuss strategy and tactics for each contingency.

  Because they knew next to nothing about their enemy, all their theorizing and planning amounted to little more than blue-sky war gaming. Their discussions provided them with a sense of purpose, however, and purpose was at least a partially effective antidote to fear.

  While they might dread the coming confrontation, they were also frustrated that the invaders had not yet shown themselves, at least not in Black Lake. Although they were willing to fight and ready to die if necessary in the struggle, they couldn’t battle an invisible adversary.

  Molly felt at home among them—and glad that she and Neil at last had comrades.

  The unofficial leader of this live-free-or-die faction appeared to be Tucker Madison, a former Marine, currently a deputy with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. His composure, his calm voice, his clear direct gaze reminded Molly of Neil.

  “The only thing that worries the skin off me,” Tucker said, surely understating the number of his concerns, “is that they won’t soon or often come out where we can see them. With the ability to control the weather all around the world, what reason do they have to risk our gunfire, even if our weapons probably are primitive by their standards?”

  “Some of the godless bastards are apparently showing up in the cities,” said a squint-eyed, sixtysomething woman with sun-toughened skin, reminding Tucker of the news reports. “They’ll come here, too, eventually.”

  “But none of us has actually seen one,” Tucker said. “Those things on the news might be just reconnaissance machines, drones, robots.”

  Vince Hoyt, a history teacher and coach of the regional high school’s football team, had features as bold and commanding as those on ancient marble busts of the more iron-willed Roman emperors. His jaws looked strong enough to crack walnuts, and when he spoke in his gravelly voice, he sounded as if he had swallowed the shells.

  “The big question is, what happens if this rain doesn’t stop for a week, two weeks, a month? Our homes won’t stand up to that kind of deluge. I already have leaks at my place, major damage, and no safe way to get on the roof to fix it in this downpour. They might think they can drown our will to resist, wash the fight right out of us.”

  “If rain, why not wind?” asked a young man with curly blond hair, a gold ring in his left ear, and a red tattoo of a woman’s puckered lips on his throat. “Tornadoes, hurricanes.”

  “Targeted lightning,” the sun-baked woman suggested. “Would that be possible? Could they do that?”

  Molly thought of the enormous and evidently artificially generated waterspout churning up from the Pacific, sucking hundreds of thousands of gallons per minute from the sea. Targeted lightning didn’t sound as farfetched as it would have yesterday.

  “Maybe even earthquakes,” said Vince Hoyt. “Before any of that happens, we’ve got to decide on a headquarters where we can maybe consolidate an arsenal, food, medicines, first-aid supplies—”

  “Our market already has plenty of food,” said Norman Ling, “but it’s on a lower street. If the rain keeps up, the place will be underwater by this time tomorrow.”

  “Besides,” Tucker Madison said, bringing his Marine experience to bear, “the market isn’t a defensible structure, not with all those big plate-glass windows. And I hate to mention this, but it’s not just ETs we have to worry about. With the collapse of communications, civil authority is breaking down out there. Maybe it’s already been swept away. I haven’t been able to get in touch with the sheriff’s office over in the county seat. No police. Maybe no National Guard, no coherent command-and-control systems to make proper use of the military…”

  “Chaos, anarchy,” Lee Ling whispered.

  As calmly as anyone could have discussed this terrifying aspect of civilization’s collapse, Tucker said, “Believe me, there are lots of bad people who’ll take advantage of chaos. And I don’t mean just outsiders. We’ve got our own thugs and creeps right here in town, thieves and rapists and violence junkies who’ll think anarchy is paradise. They’ll take what they want, do what they want to anyone, and the more they indulge their sickest fantasies, the sicker and more savage they’re going to become. If we’re not ready for them, they’ll kill us and our families before we ever come face-to-face with anything from the other end of the galaxy.”

  A solemn silence settled over the group, and Lee Ling looked as if she were wishing again for a falling moon.

  Molly thought of Render, the murderer of five children and the father of one, last seen walking north on the ridge road.

  He would not have been the only monster freed from captivity this night. When prison and asylum staffs abandoned their posts, perhaps they had left the doors open behind them, either because they were careless or were motivated by misguided pity for the incarcerated. Or maybe in the chaos, the inmates seized control and freed themselves.

  This was the Halloween of all Halloweens, six weeks early on the calendar, with no need of jack-o’-lanterns and cotton-bedsheet ghosts when the night was patterned with the pus trails of so many suppurating evils.

  “The bank,” Neil suggested.

  Eyes turned to him, blinking, as if each person at the table, like Molly, had been roused from a waking nightmare by his words.

  “The bank,” Neil said, “is poured-in-place concrete clad in limestone, built in 1936 or ’37, when the state first enforced earthquake-resistant building codes.”

  “And they made things to last in those days,” Molly said.

  Tucker liked the idea. “The bank was designed with security in mind. One or two entrances. Not many windows, plus they’re narrow.”

  “Barred, too,” Neil reminded him.

  Tucker nodded. “Plenty of space for people and supplies.”

  Vince Hoyt said, “I never coached a single game where I ever thought a loss was inevitable, not even in the final quarter when the other team had us by four touchdowns, and I have no intention of trading that attitude for a loser mentality now. Damn if I will. But there is one other good thing about the bank. The vault. Armored walls, thick steel door. It’ll make a hell of a final bolt-hole if it comes to that. If they want to tear the door off and come in after us, we’ll make a shooting gallery of them, and take a slew of the bastards with us.”