The Taking

between her legs, and released the hand brake.
        With the Remington smelling of hot steel and expended gunpowder, Neil came aboard as Molly shifted out of park. He pulled his door shut after they had begun to roll.
        Out of the feathered pool, up the driveway that appeared to be paved in the glistening black-and-silver scales of serpents, to the county road, they escaped that haunted precinct of the cataclysm and drove into another.

----

    12
        
        IN THIS NIAGARA, ON PAVEMENT AS SLICK AS A BOBSLED chute, speed was worse than folly; speed equaled madness. Nevertheless, Molly drove too fast, eager to reach town.
        Here and there, weak and sodden tree branches cracked loose, fell to the roadway. Layered veils of rain obscured the way ahead, and often she couldn't see obstacles until she was nearly upon them.
        Cold terror made of her an expert driver, and a keen survival instinct improved her judgment, honed her reaction time to a split-second edge. She piloted the Explorer through a slalom course of storm debris, wheeling into every slide, jolting through chuckholes that made the steering wheel stutter in her hands, powering out of a near stall when a flooded swale in the pavement proved to be deeper than it looked.
        When she saw a gnarled, clawlike evergreen limb too late to avoid it, those broken fingers of pine tore at the undercarriage, scratched, scraped, knocked, as though some living creature were determined to get at them through the floorboards. The branch got hung up on the rear axle, rapping noisily for a quarter of a mile before it finally splintered and fell away.
        Chastened, Molly eased up on the accelerator. For the next quarter of a mile, she glanced repeatedly at the fuel gauge, worried that the gas tank might have been punctured.
        The indicator needle held steady just below the FULL mark. No instrument-panel lights appeared to indicate falling oil pressure or a loss of any other vital fluid. Her luck had held.
        At this slower speed, less intently focused on her driving, she could think more clearly about the grisly episode at the Corrigan place. No matter how hard she mulled it over, however, she could not understand it.
        "What was that, damn, what happened back there?" she asked, recognizing a scared-girl note in her voice, neither surprised nor embarrassed to hear her words strung on a tremor.
        "Can't get my mind around it," Neil admitted.
        "Harry was dead."
        "Yeah."
        "Brains all over the bathroom."
        "That's a memory maybe even Alzheimer's couldn't erase."
        "So how could he be up on his feet again?"
        "Couldn't."
        "And talking."
        "Couldn't."
        "But he did, he was. Neil, for God's sake, I mean, what does something like that have to do with Mars?"
        "Mars?"
        "Or wherever they're from-the other side of the Milky Way, another galaxy, the end of the universe."
        "I don't know," he said.
        "This isn't like ETs in the movies."
        " 'Cause this isn't the movies."
        "Doesn't seem to be real life, either. The real world runs on logic."
        Having fished spare shells from his raincoat pockets, Neil reloaded the shotgun. He didn't fumble the ammunition. His hands were steady.
        Never in her memory had his hands been otherwise, or his mind, or his heart. Steady Neil.
        "So where's the logic?" Molly asked. "I don't see it."
        Half as big as pineapples, two objects dropped from overhead, bounced off the hood of the Explorer.
        Molly braked before she realized they were pine cones. They resembled hand grenades as they ricocheted off the windshield and arced away into the night.
        "Parasites," Neil said.
        She brought the Explorer to a full stop, half on the road, half on the graveled shoulder. "Parasites?"
        "They might be parasites," he said, "these things from the far end of the universe or the dark side of the moon, or wherever they're from. Parasites-that's an old theme in science fiction, isn't it?"
        "Is it?"
        "Intelligent parasites, capable of infecting a host body and controlling it as if it were a puppet."
        "What host body?"
        "Anything, any species. In this case, Harry's corpse."
        "You call that logic?"
        "Just speculation."
        "But how does this parasite-I don't care if it's smarter than the entire