The Taking. Dean Koontz

headlights, the formerly muted fluorescence of the rain brightened, seething with scintillating reflections.

      The cedar siding of the house, quaintly silvered by time, was more brightly silvered by the luminous wet. Along the roof line, from long lengths of overflowing rain gutters spilled shimmering sheets that veiled whole aspects of the structure.

      Neil turned the Explorer around and drove uphill toward the two-lane county road. The ascending driveway funneled a descending stream through which slithered great swarms of false serpents, more sinuous luminosities.

      When the SUV reached the top of the driveway, Molly peered back and down, through the rush of rain and the steadfast trees. All lights aglow, their house looked welcoming—and forever beyond reach.

      The shortest route into town was south on the county road.

      The two-lane blacktop remained passable because it followed the ridge crest around the lake, shedding rain from both shoulders. Here and there the pavement was mantled with a thick slippery mush of dead pine needles beaten from the overhanging trees by the storm, but the SUV had all the traction needed to proceed unimpeded.

      Even at high speed, the windshield wipers couldn’t cope with the downpour. Sluicing rain blurred their view. Neil drove slowly and with caution.

      To the east, the forest—portions burned out in the previous autumn’s fire—descended toward treeless but grassy hills, which in turn gave way to more-arid land and eventually to the Mojave. Only a few houses had been built in that territory.

      On the west face of the ridge, residences were numerous, though widely separated. The nearest neighbors to the south were Jose and Serena Sanchez, who had two children, Danny and Joey, and a dog named Semper Fi-delis.

      Neil turned right at their mailbox and halted at the top of the driveway, headlights focused on the house below.

      “Wake them?” he wondered.

      An indefinable quality of the house, something other than the lack of lights, troubled Molly.

      If the Sanchez family had been home, surely the unprecedented power of this rain would have awakened them. Curiosity stirred, they would have risen from bed, turned on the TV, and thereby discovered the fate of the world.

      Molly recognized the monotonous drone of the rain as the voice of Death, and now it seemed to speak to her not from the heavens but from the house at the foot of the driveway.

      “They’re gone,” she said.

      “Gone where?”

      “Or dead.”

      “Not them,” Neil hoped. “Not Jose, Serena … not the boys.”

      Molly was a mystic only to the extent that she was a writer, not to the extent that she suffered visions or premonitions. Yet she spoke with the certainty of unwanted intuition: “Dead. All dead.”

      The house blurred, clarified, blurred, clarified. Perhaps she saw movement behind the lightless windows; perhaps she did not.

      She imagined a sinuous and winged figure, like the mysterious thing they had glimpsed beyond the mirror, flitting now through the rooms of the Sanchez house, from corpse to corpse, capering with dark delight.

      Though she spoke in a tremulous whisper, her voice carried to Neil above the chanting rain. “Let’s get out of here. Now. Quickly.”

       10

      SOUTH OF THE SANCHEZ PROPERTY, THE WID-ower, Harry Corrigan, had lived alone since the previous June, when his beloved Calista had died at the foot of an ATM.

      This stone house, with a hipped and gabled roof, stood much nearer to the county road than did Neil and Molly’s place. The driveway was shorter and less steep than theirs.

      These were the lights that she had seen when she had first gotten out of bed and gone to the window to assess the violence of the storm. They had looked like the running lights of a distant ship on a mean and swelling sea.

      Every pane appeared to be lit, as if Harry had gone room to room, searching for his lost wife, and had left every lamp aglow either with the hope of her return or in her memory. No shadows loomed or swooped beyond the glass.

      If Harry was here, they needed to join forces with him. He was a friend, dependable.

      At the foot of the driveway, in the turnaround, Neil parked facing out toward the county road. He switched off the headlights.

      As Neil reached for the key in the ignition, Molly stayed his hand. “Leave the engine running.”

      They didn’t have to discuss the danger or the wisdom of going together into the house. Wise or not, they earlier had established that henceforth they went nowhere alone.

      Their raincoats featured hoods. They pulled them up, and were transformed into monkish medieval figures.

      Molly dreaded getting out of the SUV. She remembered how vigorously she had scrubbed her rain-dampened hand with orange-scented soap … and had nevertheless felt unclean.

      Yet she could not sit here eternally, paralyzed by the weight of fear or by a lack of faith. She could not sit here, shape without form, gesture without motion, waiting for the world to end.

      The 9-mm pistol nestled in a pocket of her coat. She kept her right hand on it.

      She got out of the Explorer and closed the door quietly, though a slam would not have carried far in the drumming deluge. Discretion seemed advisable even during an apocalypse.

      The tremendous force of the downpour staggered her until she planted her feet wide and moved with conscious attention to her balance.

      The rain was no longer ripe with the scent of semen. She could identify a faint trace of that odor, but it was now masked by new and sweet fragrances, reminiscent of incense, hot brass, lemon tea. She detected, as well, smoky essences for which she could think of no familiar comparisons.

      She tried to avert her face, but rain found its way past the hood of her coat. The pelting drops were no longer warm, as they had been earlier.

      Unthinkingly, she licked her lips. The taste proved to be not salty with the memory of the sea, but faintly sweet, pleasant.

      When she thought of the children eating blue snow, however, she gagged and spat, only to drink in more rain.

      The driveway drain had been blocked by fallen pine needles and wads of sycamore leaves. A pool of water, six inches deep, churned around their boots, brightened by silver filigrees of dancing eldritch light.

      Neil had unzipped his raincoat to be able to carry the shotgun under it. With his left hand, he clutched the front panels of the garment, holding them closed as best he could.

      A sloped flagstone walkway led from puddled pavement to front steps.

      Sheltered by the porch roof, Molly threw back her hood. She drew the pistol from her coat. Neil held the shotgun with both hands.

      The door of Harry Corrigan’s house stood ajar.

      An orange spot of light on the casing indicated the illuminated bell push, but these were not circumstances that recommended the customary announcement. With one boot toe, Neil gingerly nudged the door inward.

      While it arced wide, they waited. Studied the deserted foyer for a moment. Entered the house.

      They had frequently been here as invited guests before Calista’s murder in Redondo Beach, and a few times since. When the kitchen had been remodeled four years ago, Neil had built the new cabinetry. Yet now this familiar place seemed strange, nothing exactly as Molly remembered it, nothing quite in its place.

      The first floor offered much evidence of a simple life conducted in longstanding routines: comfortable furniture well used, landscape and seascape paintings, here a pipe left in an ashtray, here a book with the reader’s