The Taking by Dean Koontz

happening there?” Neil worried.
    “I finished saying Mass a few minutes before you called. But not everyone gathered here is a Catholic, so they need a different kind of comforting.”
    On the screen, the cameraman was knocked over by the panicked throng. The point of view swung wildly, crashed down to pavement level, revealing running feet that splashed up luminous sprays from darkly jeweled puddles.
    Holding tightly to the handset even though the speakerphone feature was engaged, as though he were keeping his brother on the line sheerly by the intensity of his grip, Neil said, “Paulie, what did you mean—the courthouse can be more easily defended? Defended from who?”
    Interference distorted the reply incoming from Hawaii.
    “Paulie? We didn’t hear that. The line broke up a little. Who’re you expecting to defend against?”
    Although audible again, Paulie sounded as if he were speaking from the bottom of a deep pit. “These are mostly simple people, Neil. Their imaginations may be working overtime, or they might see what they expect to see rather than what really is. I haven’t seen one myself.”
    “One what?”
    Static fizzed and crackled.
    “Paulie?”
    Among the broken, twisted words issuing from the speaker, one sounded like
devils.
    “Paulie,” Neil said, “if this line goes, we’ll call you right back. And if we can’t get through, you try calling us. Do you hear me, Paulie?”
    On TV, in a city now identified by caption—
Berlin, Germany
—the last of the soundless, running feet chased across the streaming pavement, past the fallen videocam.
    Suddenly out of distant Maui, as clear as if originating from the adjacent kitchen, Paul Sloan’s voice once more swelled loud in midsentence: “…chapter twelve, verse twelve. Do you remember that one, Neil?”
    “Sorry, Paulie, I didn’t catch the book,” Neil replied. “Say it again.”
    In Berlin, captured blurrily through a wet lens, legions of luminous raindrops marched across the puddled street, casting up a spray more glittery than diamond dust.
    A prescient awareness of pending horror kept Molly’s attention riveted on the muted TV.
    The action seemed to be over, the mob having moved on to other territory, but she assumed that the accompanying audio must be telling an important story. Otherwise, the network would have cut away from Berlin when the camera struck the pavement and was not at once snatched up again.
    She still held the remote. She didn’t press MUTE and summon the sound again because she didn’t want to risk blotting out anything that her brother-in-law might say.
    On the phone, Paul’s voice fell into an abyss, but just as Neil was about to hang up, the connection proved intact, and Paul rejoined them briefly again: “‘…having great wrath because he knows that he hath but a short time.’”
    The line finally went dead, transmitting not even the click and scratch of static.
    “Paulie? Paulie, can you hear me?” Neil pumped the disconnect bar in the phone cradle, trying without success to get a dial tone.
    On the TV, as silent as a bubble drifting into frame, a human head, perhaps that of the luckless cameraman, precisely cleaved in half from brow through chin, dropped to the pavement, landing flat-side down, one dead terror-brightened eye peering along the microwave pipeline from Berlin to California.

8
    UNTIL NOW, MOLLY HAD NEVER FELT A NEED to take a loaded pistol to the bathroom.
    She put it on the yellow ceramic tiles beside the sink, the muzzle toward the mirror. The presence of the weapon gave her no comfort, but made her bowels quiver.
    In the quick, when either you had the heart for justice or you didn’t, Molly could squeeze the trigger without hesitation. She’d done it once before.
    Nevertheless, the prospect of having to shoot someone half sickened her. She was a creator, not a killer.
    On her porcelain prie-dieu with flusher handle, she prayed that regardless of what might transpire in the hours