The Taking

place.
        In the unrelenting downpour, the cozy houses with their lamplit windows appeared welcoming. To the hapless insect, of course, the Venus's-flytrap offers a pretty sight and an alluring scent, while the two-lobed leaves wait, jaws cocked and teeth poised.
        "Some will have kept to their own homes," Neil said, "but not all. The more strategically minded have gathered somewhere, pooling ideas, planning a mutual defense."
        Molly didn't inquire how even the most rugged individualists among these mountain rustics-or an army, for that matter-might be able to defend themselves against technology that could use weather as a weapon on a planetary scale. As long as the question remained unasked, she could pretend there might be an answer.
        Black Lake had no grand public buildings that could serve as a nerve center in a crisis like this. Three elected councilmen, who shared the title of mayor on a rotating basis, held their meetings in a booth at Benson's Good Eats, one of only two restaurants in town.
        No schoolhouse, either. Those kids who weren't home-schooled were bused to out-of-town schools.
        Black Lake had two churches, one Catholic and one evangelical Baptist. When Molly cruised by them, both appeared deserted.
        At last they found the master strategists on Main Street, in the small commercial district, safely above the steadily rising lake. They had gathered in the Tail of the Wolf Tavern.
        A dozen vehicles were parked in front of the place, not along the curb, where the gutters overflowed, but almost in the middle of the street. They faced out from the building, forming an arc, as if they were getaway cars ready to make a fast break.
        Under an overhanging roof, protected from the rain, two men stood watch outside the tavern. Molly and Neil knew them.
        Ken Halleck worked at the post office that served Black Lake and a few smaller mountain towns. He was known for his smile, which could crease his rubbery face from muttonchop to muttonchop, but he was not smiling now.
        "Molly, Neil," he said solemnly. "Always thought it would be the nutcase Islams who did us in, didn't you?"
        "We aren't done yet," said Bobby Halleck, Ken's son, raising his voice higher than necessary to compete with the rain. "We got the Marines, Army Rangers, Delta Force, we got the Navy Seals."
        Bobby was seventeen, a high-school senior and star quarterback, a good kid with a gee-whiz spunkiness like that of a character from a 1930s or '40s football movie with Jack Oakie and Pat O'Brien. He seemed not too young to be standing guard but certainly unseasoned, which was probably why his father, armed with a rifle, had given Bobby a pitchfork, which seemed an inadequate deterrent to alien storm troopers although less likely to be accidentally discharged.
        Bobby said, "TV's gone kerflunk, so we aren't hearing about them, but you can bet the U.S. military is kicking ass."
        Ken watched his son with affection that it was his nature to express openly and often, but now also with a grief that he would never dare put into words for fear that sadness would soon thicken into unrelieved despair, robbing their last hours or days together of what small joys they might otherwise share.
        "The President's holed-up inside some mountain somewhere," Bobby said. "And we got secret nukes in orbit, I'll bet, so the bastards won't be as safe high up in their ships as they think they are. You agree, Mr. Sloan?"
        "I'd never bet against the Marines," Neil told the son, and put a hand consolingly on the father's shoulder.
        "What's happening here?" Molly asked Ken, indicating the tavern.
        "The idea is mutual defense," he said. "The reality… I don't know. People have different ideas."
        "About whether they want to live or die?"
        "I guess they don't all see the situation that starkly." Of her disbelief, he said, "Molly, you know, folks in this town are still who've always lived here… except, as people, they aren't always the same as they used to be. Sometimes I think we'd be better off if the TV had gone kerflunk fifty years ago and never come back on."
        The cold gray stone exterior of the tavern promised less warmth than the interior in fact delivered: worn mahogany floors, polished mahogany walls and ceiling, photographs of the town's early residents in that time, a century previous, when the streets were