The Taking: A Novel
Dean Koontz
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0553593501
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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On the morning that marks the end of the world they have known, Molly and Neil Sloan awaken to the drumbeat of rain on their roof. A luminous silvery downpour is drenching their small California mountain town. It has haunted their sleep, invaded their dreams, and now, in the moody purple dawn, the young couple cannot shake the sense of something terribly wrong.
As the hours pass, Molly and Neil listen to disturbing news of extreme weather phenomena across the globe. By nightfall, their little town loses all contact with the outside world. A thick fog transforms the once-friendly village into a ghostly labyrinth. And soon the Sloans and their neighbors will be forced to draw on reserves of courage and humanity they never knew they had. For within the misty gloom they will encounter something that reveals in a shattering instant what is happening to their world—something that is hunting them with ruthless efficiency.
raise the garage door. Molly realized that she had not locked the house. Keys and deadbolts no longer seemed to offer much security. Behind the Explorer, the segmented garage door rolled upward. She could barely differentiate the rumble of its ascent from the unrelenting voice of the rain. She was overcome by the urge to bolt from the vehicle and return to the house before the crouching night could be entirely let into the garage. A desperate domestic fantasy gripped her. She would make hot
herself was gradually being washed away. Not hope. She would never lose hope; like calcium, hope was part of the structure of her bones. The certainty of purpose that characterized her approach to life seemed, however, to be less firm than usual, turning soggy under the influence of this deluge, so quickly washed thin and bleached of its former intensity. She didn’t know where she was going, other than to town, or why, other than to seek sanctuary with neighbors. She had always planned her
rightful place in a universe created by the God of light, but belonged in another universe than this one, where the divine impulse had been dark and twisted, the divine intention cruel beyond imagining. Folding the blade of his knife into the handle, pocketing it, Derek looked at Molly. “You still think it might be just an exotic mushroom you’ve never happened to run across before?” “No,” she admitted. 23 AFTER MOLLY AND DEREK HAD RETREATED from the janitorial closet, Neil took one last
techno-fantasy that their parents and grandparents had bequeathed them. “Mother ship. That’s what we think,” their sister agreed. “So they’ll be back. People who get beamed up sooner or later get beamed down again, but sometimes in other places.” Even in the middle of the street, they had to pass under the spreading boughs of the infected trees. Molly almost turned back, but they were on the last leg of the shortest route to the tavern. In the windless stillness, Molly thought she heard
bold, even the reckless. Again, by candlelight, she followed the blood trail to the cellar door. She was almost to that threshold when movement, glimpsed peripherally, made her halt, turn. A dog. The golden retriever—one of the three dogs that stayed behind with Cassie—stood in the doorway to the tavern. Posture tense. Eyes solemn. Then a wag of the tail. 50 THE TWITCH OF THE DOG’S TAIL CONVINCED Molly to follow it by flashlight out of the receiving room, to the women’s lavatory. No dog