The Taking

in the mirror, not stained and ruined and grown over with strange vines, nor cleaved through the face from brow to chin, but still so young, and bright-eyed with a desperate hope.
        
        Coolers filled with food, a case of bottled water, and basic first-aid supplies had been loaded aboard the SUV in the garage. They were prepared for travel where the ways were deep and the weather sharp.
        Molly had also packed her mother's books, and the four that she herself had written, plus her current uncompleted manuscript. Worlds might perish but, in her view, never the written word.
        Gathering courage to depart, she and Neil stood side by side in the family room, watching TV.
        Channel by channel, chaos had expanded its domain. More than half of the microwave highways were clogged with snow, scintillation, flare, woomp, and third-generation ghosts of people and objects unidentifiable.
        Another third carried the pulsing, serpentine, kaleidoscopic patterns of intense color. These were accompanied by the humming, hissing, blurping, wow-wows, squeals, whistles, and birdies that also rendered the telephone useless.
        They could find no news, no meaningful information.
        A handful of channels continued to broadcast clear signals: sharp pictures, surprisingly pristine sound. Every one of these was devoted to entertainment programming.
        For a minute, they watched an old episode of Seinfeld. An audience, real or virtual, laughed and laughed.
        Neil changed channels, found a game show. For a quarter of a million dollars and a chance to go on for half a million, name the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
        "T. S. Eliot," Molly said.
        She was right, but she suspected that one week from now a quarter of a million dollars might have no more value than last week's newspaper.
        On another channel, in the black-and-white Casablanca night, Bogart said good-bye to Ingrid Bergman as total war descended on the world.
        Neil knew the dialogue so well that he could recite it word for word. His lips moved to match those of the actors, though he made no sound.
        He switched channels: Here, Cary Grant, with exquisite comic timing, grew increasingly flustered in the face of Katharine Hepburn's nonstop screwball patter.
        And here, Jimmy Stewart wisecracked with an invisible, six-foot-tall rabbit.
        At first Molly didn't understand why Neil watched these old films with such shining-eyed intensity. Only moments ago he'd been determined to seek out the company of their neighbors as quickly as possible.
        Soon she realized that he expected never to have the opportunity to enjoy these movies again, or any other, if all of Earth fell under the rule of an alien people clutching their new gods.
        Greedily, then, she watched Gary Cooper walk the dusty streets of a Western town under the high-noon sun. Watched Tom Hanks gumping his way through a life charmed by virtue of simplicity. Watched John Wayne sweep Maureen O'Hara off her feet.
        Repeatedly she found herself holding her breath, a sweet pain in her breast. What had once been mere time-filling entertainment now seemed inexpressibly beautiful and profound.
        Neil surfed out of old movies and into a contemporary program-one of those orchestrated geek fests mislabeled "reality TV," which celebrated cruelty, championed ignorance, lured viewers with the promise of degradation, and never quite faded from popularity. A female contestant was eating a plateful of pale, squirming slugs.
        Here, a more recent film. A beautiful, lithe blonde executed impossible martial-arts maneuvers, wielding a sword, beheading a series of adversaries, stabbing 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-rilled 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