The Taking (29 page)

66

SHE AND NEIL, VIRGIL, TWO OTHER DOGS, AND eight children took for themselves an abandoned house on a bluff above the sea.

In the early weeks of this new life, they had little time for contemplation, for puzzling out what had happened to them and to the world.

Supermarkets and warehouses stocked with canned food would last the reduced population for years, though not forever. Strategies for long-term survival had to be devised, and much hard work had to be done to implement those plans.

Remarkably (or perhaps not), the only adult survivors, the tutelaries, proved to be a diverse lot with a surprising breadth and depth of knowledge and experience for such a small number. They were doctors, dentists, nurses, engineers, architects, carpenters, skilled mechanics…. When a complete directory was compiled of those living on this immediate section of the coast, it seemed as though every surviving adult had been
chosen
not just to save the children but for the talents he or she could bring to this larger purpose.

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 good-bye 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.

67

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.

The astrophysicists say there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth.

They say that our universe is one of many, perhaps one of an infinite number.

She walked on warm galaxies of sand, strolled across universes, stooped to pick up a shell: a small nautilus with a chamber that seemed to curve away to infinity.

They say God made the universe. The astrophysicists don’t say it, but perhaps wiser men do.

They say that Heaven is another realm apart from this one, which might mean that it is another universe.

She scrunched dry sand between her toes. It was hot. She moved to the edge of the surf, where the sand was hard-packed and cool.

They say that certain arrogant angels rebelled, and that God threw them out of Heaven into Hell, which is a realm apart from both Heaven and Earth. Another universe?

She walked south along the beach, and the lapping surf washed her feet.

Astrophysicists—them again—tell us that black holes, which are collapsed stars of incredible density, are most likely doorways between universes.

Is death perhaps its own black hole, through which we change universes?

A single cloud appeared in the south, drifting silently north-northeast.

The leviathan had cruised the sky in silence because it had no engines nor any need of them; it was not a mother ship but a father ship, and not a ship at all. It was a thing of godlike power, the master of a universe beyond this one, a spirit of dark design having grown vast and hideous with the consumption of that one delicacy that it favored.

Who is the ultimate agent of despair, the master of deception, the emperor of lies?

Molly returned to the soft warm sand and searched along the border between beach and wild grass until she found a small stick. She returned to the sand that had recently slipped out of reach of the ebbing tide but that was still wet. She dropped to her knees.

An extraterrestrial species, hundreds or thousands of years more advanced than we are, would possess technology that would appear to us to be not the result of applied science but entirely supernatural, pure magic.

With the stick, Molly began to print words in the sand, calling them from memory.

New thought:
A supernatural event of world-shaking proportions, occurring in a faithless time when only science is believed to have the power to work miracles, might appear to be the work of an extraterrestrial species hundreds or even thousands of years more advanced than we are.

Her hands shook so that she had to pause from time to time in her printing. The words in an alien language, heard on the radio, transmitted from the space station after all the astronauts aboard had been killed, were engraved now in the sand before her. Her love of words, her passion for poetry, her ability to memorize verse with ease, had served her well.

Yimaman see noygel, see refacull, see nod a bah, see naytoss, retee fo sellos.

She had no way of knowing that these spellings were correct. She had rendered them phonetically, as they had sounded to her.

Expect deception. These are the words of a consciousness that sees right as wrong, wrong as right, that finds joy in pain, pain in truth, truth in lies, that looks at all things upside down and backwards.

The slowly drifting cloud shadowed the words on the sand.

In a while, the sun found them again.

The surf murmured, murmured, and ebbed away from her makeshift tablet.

She saw
soles
first.
Sellos,
minus one
l
and spelled backwards. And she knew the correct spelling must be
souls.

The word
is,
when spelled backwards, may be pronounced
see.

With the stick, she worked a translation under the first line that she had engraved:
My name is legion, is Lucifer, is Abbadon, is Satan, eater of souls.

She tossed the stick into the surf.

With one hand, she smoothed away both lines of words. In the last sluice of a breaking wave, she washed her hand.

She considered the luminous craft that had hovered over them more than once in Black Lake. In its light, she’d felt so profoundly analyzed and so intimately
known
that she had been ashamed, as if she had been naked before strangers. Not a craft. A benign spirit. Her guardian.

Of the countless millions who had been taken, floated through ceilings, drawn through floors: Some screamed in the transit but some laughed. Different destinations.

She retraced her path along the beach, to the stairs in the bluff, and climbed to the patio.

Neil was still occupied with the life of Yeats. He looked up. “Nice walk?”

“Incredible,” she said. “I’ve decided to write another book.”

“Might not be book publishers for a few years.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Molly said. “Ambition has nothing to do with this. I’m writing it for an audience of one.”

“Me?”

She took the biography from his hands, put it aside, and sat on his lap. “Maybe I’ll let you read it, too.”

“If not for me, then who?”

She patted her belly, in which the baby grew. “I’m writing it for her—or him. I have a story I want to tell her, and if anything happens to me before she’s old enough to hear it, I want the story written down for her to read.”

“Sounds important,” Neil said.

“Oh, it is.”

“What’s it about?”

She put her head upon his shoulder, and with her face against his throat, she whispered, “Hope.”