The Taking

if she should feel a small hand on her ankle, it would be only the hand of a doll, no matter how demonically animated, just the hand of a doll.
        She wiped at her damp cheeks. "Are they really taking our world from us?"
        "The evidence says so."
        "Or is that just the way we're reading the evidence?"
        "I don't see how else to interpret it."
        "Neither do I. That thing in the janitor's closet…" She shuddered.
        She could still feel the airborne titan overhead, and now when she turned her attention to the ceiling, she could sense the vessel's movement, too, as it progressed southward through the storm. She seemed to be increasingly sensitized to it.
        "But fast-track terraforming is Derek's theory," she said, "and I don't trust him."
        "What is it with Derek?" Neil asked. "Why did he act like that with you?"
        "I don't know."
        "You said maybe Render wasn't only Render."
        "And I still don't know what I mean by that."
        "Is Derek really Derek but not only Derek?"
        "For sure, there's something wrong with him."
        Rubbing the nape of his neck with one hand, he said, "I'm back to the alien-parasite movies."
        "Then why haven't they burrowed into all of us? Why aren't we all controlled?"
        "Maybe we will be soon."
        She shook her head. "Life isn't science fiction."
        "Submarines, nuclear weapons, television, computers, satellite communications, organ transplants-it was all the stuff of science fiction before it was reality. And the biggest sci-fi theme of all is alien contact."
        "But with the power to change a world-why the psychological warfare? They could just crush us like ants, which they seem to be doing anyway, in the cities if not here."
        "You mean the doll, the mirror."
        "And Harry Corrigan, and this T. S. Eliot weirdness. If they can replace our entire environment with theirs, scour away human civilization in days or weeks, eradicate it more efficiently than a seven-continent nuclear war, they wouldn't bother to screw with our minds like this."
        Remembering the doll as it had stared at the ceiling just before it mutilated itself, Molly glanced up again and wondered if increased sensitivity to the storm-sailing leviathan would open her mind to its influence. Perhaps, eventually robbed of her free will, she would mimic the doll and gouge out her eyes.
        "We aren't already dead because they have some sort of use for us," she suddenly realized.
        "What use?"
        "I can imagine several…"
        "So can I," he said.
        "None of them good."
        "Remember the movie The Matrix?"
        "Forget movies. That's the way they want us to think, that's how we're being guided to think. But this is nothing like any movie ever made."
        She watched Vince Hoyt talking animatedly to a man she didn't know. Unwanted, into her mind came an image from the mirror: the coach with the top of his skull gone.
        "Maybe they don't have a use for all of us," she said, "but certainly for some of us. We've been targeted, not for death but for manipulation. That stuff with the doll and the bar mirror-everyone saw it, but maybe it was only meant to influence you and me."
        "Maybe only you," he said. "Derek came to you. Render came to you. Harry Corrigan came to you. None of them to me."
        Molly rebelled at the thought that their individual destinies might differ radically, and that therefore their paths must sooner or later diverge. "I don't know what it means, but it means something that we were the only ones not reflected in that mirror."
        "Not the only ones," he corrected. "The kids weren't there, either."
        The six children now stood together near the booth in which they had previously been seated. If earlier they had exhibited some spirit of adventure, it had given way entirely to fear. They appeared to be ready to bolt at the slightest provocation.
        Acting on instinct and with natural purpose, the dogs gravitated where they were needed most. While six canines still roamed the room, three- a golden retriever, a German shepherd, and a black-and-tan mutt with the build of a boxer but with the shaggy face of a Scottish terrier-had gathered around the children to soothe troubled hearts as dogs have always done, and no doubt to defend their young charges against any threat.
        Watching the kids and the