The Taking

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

“Waste and void. Waste and void. And darknesson the face of the deep.”

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”

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

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 door.

In the 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.