Dominion

by Bentley Little

Penelope turned toward him. Her mouth was still a thin, grim line, but there was confusion in her eyes, and what looked like sympathetic understanding beneath the rage and hurt.

  “Do you want to … stop?” Her voice was quiet, tentative.

  “I have to check,” he said. “I have to know.”

  Penelope nodded. She slowed as they reached the corner of Oak Avenue.

  “Which way?” she asked. “Left or right?”

  “Right.”

  She maneuvered the car onto the street, and he pointed toward the third house on the left. His heart was pounding as she parked the car next to the curb. The lawn was littered with empty wine bottles. A pair of ripped and bloody panties hung from the branch of a bush.

  The entire street was silent, and that seemed ominous.

  Their driveway was empty, the car gone, but the front door was open, the screen door ripped and hanging off its hinges, and as Kevin looked through the dark doorway into the dim interior of the house, his stomach did flip flops. He felt as if he were about to throw up.

  He turned toward Penelope. “Wait here.”

  “No. I’m coming with—”

  “Wait here,” he ordered. “Keep the doors locked and the engine running.

  If I’m not back in five minutes, or you hear or see anything strange, take off. Don’t wait for me.”

  Her mouth tightened as though she was about to argue, but then she looked into his eyes and nodded slowly. Her expression softened. “Okay,”

  she agreed. “I’ll wait here.”

  Kevin opened the car door and got out, hearing the locks click behind him. He was nervous, anxious, scared, and he wanted to run inside the house yelling, “Mom! Dad!” but he walked forward slowly, cautiously, going up the driveway one step at a time. The living room window was broken, he saw as he approached the house, and as he walked up the porch steps he prepared himself for the worst.

  Inside, the house was dark. And silent. The dead air smelled of something sickly, sweetly rotten, something he did not want to think about. The living room had been ransacked, lamps and tables broken, chairs and couch overturned, but there were no bodies. His parents weren’t here. He passed carefully through the living room, stepped slowly around the corner into the dining room.

  Nothing.

  He continued on into the kitchen. The refrigerator was open, its contents spilled onto the tile floor, lettuce rotting in milk and runny yogurt, salsa blanketing hot dogs and leftover spaghetti. He clenched his fists tightly to keep his hands from trembling. Until this point he had been more worried than frightened, but now the balance had started to shift. He hoped his parents were alive and unharmed, but if they were, he knew he didn’t want to meet up with them.

  He walked out of the kitchen into the hall and almost tripped over a teenage girl’s head.

  His scream was so raw and uncontrolled, expelled with such force, that his throat hurt. But he could not stop screaming, and he continued to scream as first his mother and then his father staggered out of their bedroom. Both were naked, both were drunk, and both were smeared with dried blood.

  Both grinned at him lasciviously.

  He ran out of the house, bumping against furniture, stumbling over debris. He leaped the porch steps and sprinted across the yard. Penelope was already revving the engine, and she unlocked the doors as he approached. He yanked open the passenger door, jumped into the car, and they took offt speeding down the street. He turned to look through the rear window as they fled, but he could not see if his parents had come out of the house after him.

  He faced forward, heart pumping, arms shaking.

  Penelope’s expression was hard. “What happened?”

  He took a deep breath. “My parents.”

  “Alive or dead?”

  “Alive.”

  Penelope nodded. He did not have to say more.

  They turned left on the next street, then left again until they hit Monticello.

  “Even if we get help, even if we get the police or National Guard or whoever out here, what are they going to do?” Kevin asked. “How are they supposed to put a stop to this?”

  Penelope shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing they can do. Maybe they—”

  “We’re high school kids! Shit. How are we supposed to know how to solve this? That’s their job. They’ll know how to do it They’ll figure out something.”

  Kevin’s voice caught in his throat. “I don’t … I just don’t want anything to happen to my parents.”

  “I know,” Penelope said softly.

  “Yeah, they’re drunk and crazy and everything. But I don’t want the cops shooting them.”

  “I know how you feel.”

  Of course she did. She was in exactly the same position. Her mother—her mothers—had not only been caught up in all this, they were the cause of it. They were the ringleaders. If anyone was going to be shot and killed, it would be them.

  Penelope had to be feeling even worse than he did.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She tried to smile. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  Monticello hit the highway, and Penelope continued south. The highway was in better shape than the streets had been, the piles of debris fewer and farther between, and she took the car up to sixty.

  There was no one else on the highway, no vehicles traveling in either direction, and Kevin found that unsettling. The valley seemed to have emptied of people during the night, leaving only the victims and their victimizers, with he and Penelope caught in between.

  The highway curved around the side of a small hill —and Penelope slammed on the brakes. The car skidded, fishtailing, before finally coming to a lane-straddling halt. The highway before them was blocked, littered with stacked cars, demolished trucks and burning bodies.

  Kevin, still bracing himself against the dashboard, stared through the windshield in dumb horror. The bodies had obviously been torn apart in last night’s craziness and had later been separated according to part:

  arm, leg, head, torso. Five individual bonfires were burning, and around them danced linked circles of nude revelers, all of whom had identically blank stares on their enraptured faces.

  Someone tapped on Penelope’s window, and she screamed.

  He jumped at the sound of her cry, looked immediately over. An old woman, face smeared with patterned blood that had been applied like war paint, laughed loonily. She breathed deeply, inhaling the thick, foul-smelling smoke. “Nose hit!” she said. “Contact high!”

  “Back up,” Kevin said softly. “Get us out of here before the rest of them see us.”

  Penelope nodded, threw the car into Reverse. As they sped backward, away from the woman, she began screeching, pointing, and several of the naked celebrants broke away from the nearest circle—the leg bonfire—and began chasing after the car.

  Kevin’s heart was pounding with fear, and he watched the men and women run after them, breasts and erections bouncing as legs pumped unnaturally fast. The blank expressions on their faces had been replaced by intimidating looks of grim determination, and he was suddenly certain that the revelers would catch them. They’d be yanked out of the car and torn apart, their body segments burned in the appropriate bonfire as drunken partyers danced.

  Then Penelope slammed on the brakes, spun the car around, and they were off, speeding back down the highway the way they’d come, their pursuers fading into specks behind him.

  Kevin coughed. The smoke from the bodies had seeped into the car, and it was nauseating. He pinched his nostrils shut, trying to breathe only through his mouth, but he could taste the horrid smoke in his throat, and he started to gag.

  Penelope reached over, turned on the air conditioner. “It’s pretty bad,”

  she said.

  But she wasn’t having a hard time breathing, he noticed. The smoke didn’t seem to have affected her at all.

  He breathed in the cold, filtered air, and his nausea passed.r />
  The car slowed as they reached the intersection at which they’d gotten on the highway. “What now?” Penelope asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We could try going north, but I bet both ends of the valley are blocked off.”

  “Then we’re trapped here. We can’t get out.”

  “How about one of the back roads?” Kevin suggested. “What about sneaking through Wooden Valley and circling back to Vallejo? Or taking Carneros into Sonoma?”

  “We could try it,” she said. “But I don’t think we should hold our breath.”

  “If not, what then?”

  She shrugged. “Hike out? I don’t know. We’ll figure something out when we get to that point.”

  They were both right. The highway was blocked by another pileup of vehicles just above Calistoga, and both the road to Sonoma and the various westbound side roads they attempted to navigate had been turned into heavily guarded obstacle courses.

  “These people may be wasted,” Kevin said after they’d narrowly avoided an ambush on the road to Lake Berry essa, “but they’re organized.”

  “It’s Dion,” Penelope said. “He doesn’t want me to leave.”

  The hairs prickled on the back of Kevin’s neck.

  They were both silent after that, driving back down to the highway, on the watch for attackers and pursuers. What was Dion like now? Kevin wondered. Would he recognize their previous relationships with him?

  Would he let them go if he caught them because of that past association?

  Or was all that forgotten history? Was Dion gone completely, entirely overtaken by … Dionysus?

  God, that sounded stupid.

  A demon he could understand. The spirit of an old murderer even. But a mythical god? It seemed so ludicrous.

  It wasn’t, though. He knew that.

  They reached the highway again, and Penelope pulled to the side of the road. She turned off the ignition, slumped forward.

  She started crying.

  “Hey,” Kevin said. “Don’t cry.”

  She began sobbing harder. He sat there uncertainly, unsure of what to do, then scooted toward her on the seat and awkwardly put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said.

  Penelope sat up, nodding, and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s just …

  It’s so frustrating. We keep trying all these roads and they’re all blocked. We’re in a cage here. We can’t get out.”

  He moved back away from her. “You want me to drive for a while?”

  She breathed deeply, nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” He checked behind the car, in front, to the sides, making sure there was no one around, then got out of the passenger door and ran around the vehicle to the driver’s side, while Penelope slid across the seat.

  “There’s one more road we haven’t tried,” he said, getting behind the wheel and locking the door.

  “Think it’ll do any good?” she asked.

  “No, but I’m obsessive-compulsive, and I have to finish the search.”

  She laughed, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes. He turned on the ignition, put the car into gear, and took off.

  The road, a winding, hilly route that led through Deer Park to Angwin, was cut off almost at the source by a group of over fifty who were holding some sort of bastardized, impromptu rodeo, taking turns rming what appeared to be milk cows and using broken wine bottles to goad the animals into moving.

  “We could try plowing through them,” Kevin suggested.

  Penelope started to respond, but the words were choked off in her throat. The color drained from her face.

  He thought at first that she was having a heart attack or an epileptic fit. Then he heard the noise. A voice. A voice as low and loud as the rumble of thunder. He could not make out the words, only the sounds, and he followed Penelope’s gaze to the top of the hill to their left. Coming down the hillside, striding purposefully, was a giant man as tall as a billboard. He was naked, his hairy skin stained with blood and wine, and he carried under his arm the limp, dead body of a goat. The unnatural glee in his expression nearly obscured the fact that the basic structure of his face was familiar.

  “It’s Dion,” Penelope whispered. “Dionysus.”

  “Fuck,” Kevin breathed. “Holy mother of shit.”

  A wave of people topped the hill behind Dionysus, following him down.

  Many of them fell, tumbling down the steep side, but no allowances were made for the clumsy, and the wave continued on, trampling those who fell before it.

  Kevin was already backing up, moving quickly but not too quickly, not wanting to draw attention to their vehicle. They might be able to escape ordinary runners, but there was no way they’d be able to escape Dionysus.

  He’d catch up to them before they hit the highway.

  Kevin’s mouth was dry, his hands not shaking only because they were gripping the steering wheel. He had been frightened before. He could not have imagined being more frightened than he had been last night on Ash Street. But nothing had prepared him for this. Intellect ally, he’d known what to expect. Penelope had descrit the metamorphosis to him, and he had understood how frightening it had been, had known what Dion had b&-| come, but there was no way to convey in words the sheeifi horrifying alienness of it all. The creature hurrying downl the side of the hill was not like a person, not like a horror| movie monster, not like anything he had ever seen or read f about or dreamed or imagined.

  There was a palpable power within the form, a force that could be sensed so clearly it could almost be seen, ,-and the presence of that ~i power skewed all other sensory perceptions in a way that left Kevin feeling not only terrified but disoriented.

  Dionysus reached the bottom of the hill, held the goat aloft, and broke off its head, tossing it to his followers while he drank in the spray that shot from the neck. He screamed, a cry of joy that rumbled through the hills like an earthquake, and Kevin forgot all about not drawing attention to the car and floored the gas pedal, sending the vehicle hurling backward.

  He swung into a dirt pull-out, shifted the car into Drive, and made a sliding U-turn toward the highway.

  “Is he coming?” Kevin asked.

  Penelope shook her head.

  “Jesus.” Kevin glanced in the rearview mirror, saw nothing, only trees.

  “Jesus,” he repeated.

  Penelope was quiet. He swerved south onto the highway, back toward Napa.

  The obstacles in the road were familiar by this time, and he sped around them, easily avoiding the crashed cars and the debris. “We’re going to be out of gas pretty soon. I don’t know how we’re going to get some more. I don’t even know if any of the pumps still work.”

  Penelope said nothing.

  “I didn’t realize he’d be so scary.” Kevin’s voice was softer than he’d intended, and more frightened. “I don’t know what we’re going to be able to^io against … that.”

  “Nothing,” Penelope said dully.

  “I think what we have to do now is start thinking about tonight. We haven’t seen a lot of people yet, but I don’t think they’ve gone anywhere. I bet they’re just sleeping.

  And they’ll probably come out at night. We need to find a place to hole up, get some weapons. There’s a gun store over on Lincoln. We’ll try there.”

  The gun store, Napa Rifles, was occupied. Even from the street he could see shadowed forms moving about behind the barred windows. A line of armed, overweight men, wearing sheets that had been fashioned into makeshift togas, were seated on the curb in front of the building.

  “Forget it,” Kevin said, catching Penelope’s glance as they sped by the store. “We’ll just have to make do with what we can.”

  Penelope leaned forward. “You want to go back to the school?”

  He shook his head. “Too easy to be trapped. I think we should go to …”

  He thought for a moment. “To the tourist cabins over on Coombsville.

  Napa Hideaway?”

>   “That slummy motel?”

  “A cabin would be easily defensible. We’ll scrounge what we can, hit Big 5 Sporting Goods, raid some houses if we have to.” He pointed at the clock on the dashboard. “If this thing’s right, it’s already after noon.

  We’ll need to find some food and supplies and be settled in before dark.”

  He was aware that his voice sounded calm and assured, but that word—dark—conjured up images from the previous night and made him tremble inside. He wasn’t sure he’d be strong enough to handle another night like the last one.

  “You’re right,” Penelope said, and in her voice was all the strength he lacked. “Let’s find what we need and stake out a camp for the night.”

  Her confidence gave him confidence, and he nodded. “Let’s switch. You drive. I’ll go out and find what we need. You wait.”

  “I don’t need to sit in the car. I can help you find things.”

  “I don’t—”

  “—know if you’ll live if I don’t go with you? I don’t either.”

  Kevin laughed. “All right.”

  *

  They were safely ensconced within Cabin 12 of thef| Napa Hideaway by four-thirty. They hadn’t been able tof find any guns, but Kevin had picked up baseball bats from 1 the supply cage at the Little League diamond, and they’d^ grabbed butcher knives and cleavers from a kitchen store. j| The floor of the cabin was lined with Drano and aerosol; cans and lighters that they’d stolen from a 7-Eleven. The hammers and screwdrivers they’d scrounged from the janitor’s office of the school were still in the car.

  Penelope sat on the king-size bed, watching Kevin finish nailing boards over the windows. She’d already helped him install two extra dead bolts on the door.

  The phones were out, but the electricity still worked, as did the water.

  The bacchantes were neither organized nor logical enough to try to shut down the utilities, and even television reception was unaffected.

  She stood up and walked across the room to change the channel on the TV, switching slowly through the stations, stopping when the familiar anchor team from San Francisco’s CBS news came on.

  She watched the entire broadcast. She expected to hear an update on the situation, to learn that the governor was flying in troops, that law enforcement agencies were banding together to converge on the valley, but the situation in Napa was not mentioned at all.