The Taking. Dean Koontz

them in the eyes, eviscerating them with delight, prettier than a Barbie doll and just as heartless.

      Suddenly the remote control seemed no longer to be an instrument allowing random selection, seemed instead to be programmed to seek out atrocities. Channel after channel, blood burst, blood sprayed, blood spattered across the screen.

      Pay-per-view pornography—to which they had not subscribed, and which therefore they should not be able to receive—filled the screen with an explicit scene of violent gang rape. The victim was shown to be enjoying her vicious brutalization.

      Shrill comedians telling mean jokes drew meaner laughter from braying audiences.

      No crafted piece of propaganda could have mocked the pretensions of humanity more effectively than this apparently random selection of cruel entertainment.

      Neil pressed the power button on the remote, but the TV did not switch off. He tried again, without success.

      Under the control of some taunting entity, the screen swarmed with rapidly changing scenes of violent sex and horrendous murder. Here unspooled a chilling montage of humanity in its most debased and savage condition.

      “This is a lie,” Neil said through half-clenched teeth. “This isn’t what we are. It isn’t all we are.”

      The unseen master of the airwaves chose to disagree, and the images of primitive lust and blood hunger surged across the screen, tides of cinematic sewage.

      Molly remembered reading about one of the Nazi death camps—Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, or Dachau—in which the Jewish prisoners had been subjected to propaganda that portrayed their heritage as a deformed tree watered with lies, feeding on the labor of others, its branches twisted by greed. Their tormentors wanted them first to embrace this false history of their people and then to renounce it before accepting execution as their proper reward.

      Even the architects of genocide, their hearts sold to Evil and their souls already held in the portfolio of Hell, feel the need to justify their abuse of power. They wish to believe that their victims, at the penultimate moment, acknowledge guilt and recognize the justice of mass murder—which suggests that, even if unconsciously, the executioners know how far they themselves have fallen.

      Molly turned from the hideous spectacle on the TV. She glanced anxiously at the blinded windows, at the ceiling that seemed to press lower under a roof-crushing weight of roaring rain.

      She sensed that death trains, or their equivalent, were being marshaled now in railroad yards. Long chains of cattle cars were waiting to be packed with human cargo and hauled to mass graves where the remains of millions, plowed over, would eventually fertilize vast, lush meadows for the pleasure of creatures that were deaf and blind to the beauties wrought by untold human generations.

      High in the house, something thumped loudly. Rattled. Then subsided into silence.

      Perhaps a broken tree branch had dropped onto the roof. A loose chimney stone, sluiced from its mortar bed by the rain, might have rolled along the shingles.

      Or some unimaginably strange visitor had entered by the attic, and now explored the space under those cob-webbed rafters, searching for the trapdoor and spring-loaded ladder that would give it access to the second floor.

      “Time to go,” Neil said.

       PART TWO

      “Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.”

      T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”

       9

      FOR ONCE UNCONCERNED ABOUT NEXT MONTH’S electrical bill, they left lights on rather than allow darkness to take up residence in the house during their absence.

      In the utility room, they quickly donned rubber boots and black raincoats. The deep tread of the rubber soles squeaked on the tile floor.

      Beyond the utility room, the garage was chillier than the house. The humid air smelled of damp wood, moist Sheetrock; but as yet the rain had not worn a leak in the roof.

      The Ford Explorer stood ready, loaded. Although worried about the size of the monthly payments, they had recently traded up from their ten-year-old Suburban. Now Molly was glad to have this newer and more reliable vehicle.

      She took two steps toward the SUV before Neil drew her attention to his workbench. Thirty or forty mice had gathered on that surface. Because the rodents were silent and for the most part as still as ceramic figurines, Molly had not at once noticed the infestation.

      Field and forest mice, some brown, some gray, had fled their natural habitat for the refuge of this garage. As many of them congregated under the workbench as perched on top of it.

      In groups, mice huddled in the corners and along the walls. On the lids of the two trash cans. Atop a row of storage cabinets.

      They numbered more than a hundred, perhaps over two hundred. Many stood on their hind feet, alert, trembling, whiskers quivering, pink noses testing the air.

      Under ordinary circumstances, the mice would have scattered when Molly and Neil entered. These didn’t react. The cause of their fear lay outside, in the storm.

      Although Molly had always been squeamish about rodents and had taken more than the usual precautions to keep them out of the house, she didn’t recoil at the sight of these timid invaders. As with the coyotes, she recognized that men and mice lived under a common threat in this perilous night.

      When she and Neil got into the Explorer and closed the doors, Molly said, “If their instinct is to come inside, should we be going out?”

      “Paul and his neighbors are gathered in that courthouse on Maui because its architecture makes it more defensible. Our house, with all the windows, the simple locks … it can’t be defended.”

      “Maybe no place can be.”

      “Maybe,” he agreed.

      He started the SUV.

      The mice did not react to the noise of the engine. Their eyes shone red and silver in the blaze of headlights.

      Neil locked the doors of the Explorer with the master switch. Only then did he use the remote to raise the garage door.

      Molly realized that she had not locked the house. Keys and deadbolts no longer seemed to offer much security.

      Behind the Explorer, the segmented garage door rolled upward. She could barely differentiate the rumble of its ascent from the unrelenting voice of the rain.

      She was overcome by the urge to bolt from the vehicle and return to the house before the crouching night could be entirely let into the garage.

      A desperate domestic fantasy gripped her. She would make hot tea and serve it in a mug. Oolong, with its distinctive fragrance, grown in the distant Wu-I Mountains of China.

      She would drink it in the cozy parlor, eating butter cookies. Warmed by an afghan. Reading a love story of eternal passion and timeless suffering.

      When she turned the last tear-stained page, the rain would have stopped. The morning would have come. The future would no longer be bleak and impenetrable, would instead be revealed by an invisible light too bright for mortal eyes.

      But she did not open the passenger door and pursue that fantasy of tea and cookies and easy happy endings. Dared not.

      Neil popped the brake, shifted into reverse, and backed out of the garage, into the windless storm. The rain fell straight down with such judgmental force that the Explorer seemed to quiver in every joint, to strain at every weld, from the impact.

      Less out of concern for their property than in consideration of the frightened mice, Molly pressed the remote and closed the garage