The Taking by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

sandwiches.”
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “We’ll eat anyway.”
    “But Neil—”
    “We don’t know what’s coming. We don’t know when we’ll have a chance to eat again…in peace.”
    He held out a hand to her.
    He was the most beautiful and appealing man whom she had ever known. The first time that she’d seen him, more than seven years ago, Neil had been standing in a complicated geometry of multicolored light, smiling warmly, his face so perfect and his eyes so kind that she briefly mistook him for Saint John the Divine.
    She gripped his hand, shivering with fear and inexpressibly grateful that fate had combed her and him from the tangle of humanity, and that love had braided them together in marriage.
    He drew her into his arms. She held fast to him.
    One ear against his chest, she listened to his heart. The beat was strong, at first quickened by anxiety, but then growing calmer.
    Molly’s heart slowed to match the pace of his.
    Steel has a high melting point, but higher still when it is alloyed with tungsten. Cashmere is a strong fabric, as is silk; however, a cashmere-and-silk blend will be more durable and will provide more warmth to the wearer than will either fabric alone.
    Alone, she had learned at a young age to carry all the weight the world piled on her. As long as she had Neil, she could endure not just the terrors of this world but also those that might come from beyond it.

6
    ALTHOUGH THE KITCHEN AND FAMILY ROOM were redolent of the rich aroma of coffee, Molly thought that she could detect the faint but singular odor of the rain penetrating the walls from the saturated night.
    She and Neil sat on the floor in front of the TV, the shotgun and pistol within easy reach, eating chicken sandwiches and potato chips.
    Initially she had no appetite. On first bite, however, she discovered that she was ravenous.
    No food had ever tasted as delicious as this. The chicken proved juicier, the mayonnaise creamier, the pickles more tart, and the chips crispier than any she had eaten before. Every flavor was exquisitely enhanced.
    Perhaps any prisoner on death row, savoring his last meal before being given a lethal injection, experienced the flavors and textures of food this intensely.
    On television, silvery-blue snow fell in the French Alps, in the mountains of Colorado, on the streets of Moscow. Each scene appeared to have been dusted with Christmas-card glitter.
    The domes and minarets of the Kremlin had never before looked so magical. Every glimmering shadow in those twinkling boulevards and sparkling plazas seemed to harbor elves, pixies, and other fairy folk who might momentarily spring into sight, dancing and performing aerial acrobatics in exuberant celebration.
    The ethereal beauty of the sequined blue snow suggested that whatever might be happening could not be entirely without a positive aspect.
    In Denver, although dawn had not yet broken, children were frolicking in the streets, tossing snowballs, drawn from their homes by the novelty of a blue, luminous blizzard.
    Their delight and their musical laughter inspired a hopeful yet uncertain smile from the on-scene network reporter. He said, “And another remarkable detail about this extraordinary phenomenon—the snow smells sort of like vanilla.”
    Molly wondered if the newsman had a sufficiently sensitive nose to be able to detect a far less appealing underlying scent if one existed.
    “Vanilla laced with the fragrance of oranges,” he continued.
    Perhaps here in the San Bernardino Mountains, the rain no longer smelled as it had when Molly stepped onto the porch with the coyotes. Maybe, as in Colorado, the night now offered the olfactory delights of a confectioner’s kitchen.
    Turning, encouraging the cameraman to pan with him, the reporter indicated the wintry panorama: the mantled street, the evergreen boughs laden with fluffy masses of sapphire flocking, the warm amber lights of houses huddled cozily in the blue impossible.
    “It’s