The Taking

house.
        As before, she felt closely observed, examined, but more than merely examined: She felt known in heart and mind and body, known in terrifying completeness.
        Her assailant apparently felt the same thing, because his body stiffened and he shrank a step back from the windows, pulling her with him. "What's this shit?"
        Fear distracted him, and when the pressure of the muzzle eased at Molly's throat, she knew this was the time to act, for she was in the moment as seldom before, clear-eyed and quick of mind, all the experience of her past and all the hopes of her future focused here at the still point that was now.
        From the desk she snatched the scissors. Simultaneously she pulled away from him and heard the double click of the trigger but not the boom of a shot.
        She swung toward him. The pistol a foot from her face. Muzzle so huge, so dark. He pulled the trigger again. The gun didn't fire.
        As ruthless as any Fate snipping a lifeline, she slashed at his gun hand with the scissors. He cried out and dropped the weapon.
        She threw the scissors at him, stooped, and snatched the pistol off the floor.
        Rising to full height, she saw him reach for her. She squeezed the trigger, and the gun bucked in her hand.
        He served as the sacrifice that he had intended to make of the children. The bullet found his heart with such accuracy that he was dead before he could look surprised, a cooling corpse before he hit the floor.
        His two misfires followed by her point-blank shot were not a series of coincidences, and the gun was not defective. Some power was at work on her behalf, some agency uncanny.
        Behind the plaster, the teeming hive had fallen silent.

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    57
        
        THE BRILLIANCE OF THE HOVERING UFO, POURING through the windows, brought too much revealing light to this body-strewn abattoir. Molly retrieved her flashlight from the desk and departed by way of the bath that connected this study to another room.
        A high window in the shower stall admitted light, which revealed her moving figure in the mirror-and the figure of another who was not present. She saw the other in a glance, halted in shock to look again, but only she herself was now reflected.
        She didn't know if her mother, Thalia, glimpsed in the mirror, had actually been there or whether this vision had been merely the ephemeral expression of her fondest wish, hallucination, even perhaps a flicker of madness.
        She wanted to linger, studying the mirror, but the lambs, having been spared from sacrifice, needed her. Through the next room, into the hall, her way was lighted by the vessel above, by virtue of windows and skylights.
        When she reached the door near the head of the stairs, it swung open wide in front of her.
        This was a girl's bedroom. Stuffed animals reclined against the headboard of a bed skirted in flounces. Satiny drapes trimmed with rickrack. Posters of teen idols on the walls, polished boys with an androgynous quality. Frills and thrills.
        Two chairs stood back to back. The girl with the Cleopatra bangs, perhaps ten or eleven, and her dimpled brother sat in them, secured at wrists and ankles by duct tape.
        Virgil guarded the children, and he had something formidable to guard against.
        A colony of fungi-white spheres, pale lung sacs-crouched in a corner. A second colony, having sprouted those thick yet insectile legs, hung from the ceiling over the bed. Except for the inflating and deflating sacs, they were motionless, although busy life might be asquirm within them.
        On the bed were the depleted roll of duct tape and the knife that the killer had used to cut it.
        Hoping that the bright vessel would continue to hover over the house, shedding light through the windows, and that she would not be forced to work by flashlight in the company of the ambulatory fungi, Molly plucked the knife off the bed and sawed at the binding tape.
        Their names were Bradley and Allison, and Molly did her best to soothe their fears as she also explained how directly and quickly they must leave the house. She lied about the fate of their parents when they asked anxiously after them.
        Saving all these children's lives might be easier than helping them to accept a future founded on the shaky ground of personal tragedy and catastrophic destruction.
        Resolutely, she turned her