The Taking

this night had been filled with too much event to process. The coffee hadn't clarified her mind yet, and perhaps even a pot of it wouldn't bring her thinking up to speed.
        "Funny but… I'm glad now we didn't have children," Neil said. "I couldn't handle being unable to protect them from all this."
        His left hand rested on the bar. She covered it with her right. He had such strong hands but had used them all his life in gentle pursuits.
        "He quoted T. S. Eliot," she said, coming now to the thing that most mystified and most disturbed her.
        "Are we back at Harry Corrigan's place?"
        "No. I mean Render. He said 'between the idea and the reality' and later 'between the desire and the spasm.' They were wrapped up in his other crazy rantings, but they're lines from 'The Hollow Men.' "
        "He could know Eliot is one of your favorites."
        "How could he know?"
        Neil considered a moment but had no answer.
        "Just before he left, he said 'Dark, dark, dark-they all go into the dark,' which is more Eliot. The thing that used to be Harry Corrigan… and now Render."
        She sensed that she was circling an elusive insight that, once seized and opened, would unfold into a stunning revelation.
        "That lurching, head-shot Harry Corrigan wasn't really Harry," she said. "So I wonder… was my father, in the rest room, really my father?"
        "What do you mean?"
        "Or maybe he was really Render… but not only Render."
        "I'm still chasing you and losing ground."
        "I don't know what I mean, either. Or maybe I know down on a sub conscious level, where I can't get my hands around it… because right now, the hairs are quivering on the back of my neck."
        Too little sleep, too little coffee, too much terror. Layered veils of weariness and confusion hid the truth from her if in fact she was close to any truth at all.
        Deputy Tucker Madison, chief strategist of those who were determined to resist the taking of their town and their world, joined Molly and Neil at the bar.
        "A few of us are remaining here in case new recruits show up," he informed them, "but most of us are forming task groups and heading out. One squad to inspect the bank and find ways to better fortify it. Another to truck food out of the market before it floods. A third to procure more weapons from Powers' Gun Shop. Are you with us?"
        Molly thought of the yellow-spotted black fungus squirming with repulsive inner life, growing rapidly in the janitorial closet, the harbinger of a new world, a changed world, and even if no other choice might be as sensible as to fortify the bank and hunker down, the effort seemed futile.
        "We're with you," Neil assured Tucker. "But there's this… situation we have to deal with first."
        Molly glanced across the room at Derek Sawtelle and his group of fugi-tives from reality. Just as she feared before submitting to his macabre little show-and-tell, he had been an agent of despair.
        "We'll meet you at the bank in a little while," Molly told Tucker.
        Futility is always in the eye of the beholder. Her fate was in her own hands. With hope, all things were possible.
        That was what she had always believed. Until tonight, however, she had operated automatically on that philosophy and had not found it necessary to remind herself of it or to argue herself into that conviction.
        Derek hadn't been the only agent of despair she'd encountered in the past few hours. The first had been whatever entity controlled the corpse of Harry Corrigan.
        The third had been Render. What reason could he have had for his bizarre performance if not to leave her shaken, frightened, and despairing?
        Once more, she felt that enlightenment lay within her reach, waited just around the next turn in the twisty coils of logical deduction.
        With a start, Neil put down his mug so hard that coffee slopped onto the bar. "Here it comes again."
        For a moment, Molly didn't know what he meant-and then she felt the heavy, rhythmic pulses of pressure that were not accompanied by sound, that had no visible effect on anything in the tavern, but that undeniably surged through her, throbbing in the bone, an afflux and a reflux in the blood, the flesh, as if the ghost tides of a long-dead sea pulled at the race memory in her cells, reminding her of life before land.
        Earlier in the