He stood, strode over the strewn bodies on the grass, and jumped into the river. The cold water felt good, refreshing, “and he washed off the grape stains, washed off the blood. He bent down, dunked his head, let the water clean the tears from his eyes, then stretched to his full height, shaking out his hair.
He looked down at his body. He was smaller than he should be, closer to a human than a god. Before, he had been bigger.
But this new skin was tight, confining. Even his brain felt small. He ran a hand through his hair, looked up into the overcast sky. His thoughts too were confined. He seemed unable to think clearly.
And he was not himself.
That was the most difficult adjustment to make. He knew things that he should not have known, felt things he should not have felt, thought things he should not have thought. He knew this new language, knew this new culture. He had memories of this existence. He had been reborn, but the rebirth had not happened the way he’d thought it would. He closed his eyes. The others would not have this problem. They would be reborn pure, as themselves. He was the only one who would have to suffer this dual existence.
And it was not fair.
It had always been thus. He was forever the outcast, Zeus’ whipping boy, forced to endure humiliation after humiliation merely because of the fact that he was half human.
And the fact that he preferred wine to ambrosia.
Those self-important elitists never could understand sensual pleasures, the wonders of the flesh. Or perhaps they could, on a purely intellectual level. But they could never feel it.
He could.
And they were jealous of that.
And they took it out on him.
He walked out of the river, back onto the bank. He was supposed to mate with Penelope, who would bring forth from her golden womb the remaining gods. He desperately wanted to mate with her—a combination, he knew, of his own sexual desires and Zeus’ subliminal prodding —but he was not at all sure that he wanted to share this world with the others. This was his world now, his alone, and he liked it that way. There was no reason he should share. He was as powerful as the other gods and more versatile in a lot of respects. He could assume their duties. He could take over Poseidon’s role as ruler of the seas. That was a part-time job to begin with. And Ares?| Who couldn’t wage war? A moron could handle that.
What about an underworld? That was a much bigger re-1 sponsibility.
Could he maintain that?
There was only one way to find out.
He looked around, finally focusing his attention on the < land across the river. Drawing upon the power within,: him, he loosed a withering blast of heat and fire at the location. The land scorched, burned, and was changed. In place of the trees and bushes, lawns and houses, there was charred earth and burnt air. The perfect environment for the dead.
But how to effect the dead’s transition?
He glanced about him. To his left, on a slab of concrete, was the mutilated body of a young man, someone’s used plaything. Grinning, Dionysus walked over and picked up the man’s corpse, raising it to the level of his face. He held the body and concentrated.
The man’s glazed eyes blinked, his mouth worked silently. His stiffened limbs moved slowly, with effort, the jelled blood in his joints flowing slowly across the cold skin.
Yes.
He could maintain an underworld too.
He threw the corpse across the river. It bounced against a burnt tree, cracking a branch, then stood awkwardly. The dead man remained unmoving for a moment, then shambled dumbly into the smoke away from the water.
Fuck the others. Fuck Zeus. Fuck Hera. Fuck Athena. Fuck Apollo. Fuck all of them! This was his world now. He did not need them.
He would not bring them back.
The clocks had stopped. All of them. Penelope thought at first that it was merely electric clocks that were not working, but battery-powered watches, wind-up alarm clocks, every timepiece in the house was now functionally dead.
Power had gone out sometime last night, although the water was still on.
Thank God. She didn’t relish the idea of not bathing, of not having a toilet that flushed.
But power? Water? Those were minor inconveniences.
The clocks worried her.
She might have imagined it, but last night had seemed unusually long, much longer than it should have, and she could not help wondering if Dion Dionysus —had somehow affected time, had somehow altered the normal laws of physics. She thought of the bolt of power she’d seen shooting into the sky from the meadow that first night, and she had no trouble believing that he could do it.
Maybe he was planning to shorten the days, lengthen the nights. Maybe everything here in the valley would happen in the rest of the world’s split second.
There was a sharp knock at the front door.
She glanced quickly toward Kevin, who was lying on the floor, reading a mythology textbook. He scrambled to his feet, looking as panicked as she felt.
Holbrook came rushing out of the kitchen, motioning for them to lay low.
He grabbed his shotgun. “Stay down!” he ordered.
There was another series of knocks.
Penelope hit the floor, crawling next to Kevin as she watched Holbrook first peek through the closed living room curtains, then hurry over and open the front door.
“Jack!” the teacher said. He ushered in another man, a short-haired, stern-faced, well-built, middle-aged man wearing the tattered remnants of a dark blue suit. The two of them gave each other what looked like some sort of secret handshake, a ritualized greeting that involved twisting thumbs and touching elbows.
Another Ovidian.
Penelope rose to her knees, then stood, as did Kevin.
Holbrook led the man into the living room. v “Jack, these are two of my students: Penelope Daneam and Kevin Something-or-other.”
“Harte,” Kevin said.
“Daneam?” Jack’s eyebrows went up.
“Their daughter.”
“And you are?” Kevin said.
“Jack Hammond. Napa P. D.”
A cop! Penelope smiled, filled with relief and a buoyed sense of hope.
“Thank God you’re here.”
“Are you a maenad?” Jack asked her.
The relief died as quickly as it had flared. There was a flat coldness in the cop’s eyes, a studied detachment in the way he looked at her that made her extremely uneasy.
“She’s one of us,” Holbrook said. “I think we can use her to get him.”
Use her.
She moved closer to Kevin. She didn’t like the way this conversation was going.
“So where are the rest of you?” Kevin asked. “Is this “I it?”
Jack nodded, and the coldness in his face fled, replaced by a weariness that looked closer to exhaustion. She suddenly noticed that there were bruises on his skin, dull splashes of dried blood on his torn suit.
“I couldn’t get here right away,” he said. “So I holed up in the H. Q.”
“Were any of the others there?” Holbrook asked.
“They were all there. They’d been slaughtered. Mike was naked and drenched with wine—it looked like he’d been trying to pass—but he’d been killed just like the rest of them.” He took a deep breath. “Their heads had been switched.”
“Bastards,” Holbrook breathed.
“They were still outside, and I only had one round in my revolver, so I
stayed there, hid. This was the first day I thought it was safe to come out.”
Penelope was extremely uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure if Jack—or Holbrook and Jack—blamed her in any way for what had happened, but she felt guilty nevertheless, as though she was a spy in the enemy camp.
She wasn’t a spy, though. She was on their side.
She was a traitor.
“Did you save your toga?” Holbrook asked.
Jack shook his head. “Nothing.”
“That’s okay. I have an extra
one for you. Come on.”
The two of them walked down the hallway to the basement door, started down.
Penelope looked at Kevin, standing next to her. He shook his head.
“Somehow, I don’t think that, in this instance, two heads are better than one.”
“Maybe we should get out of here,” she suggested.
“And go where? Did you see the way that guy was beat up? And he’s a cop!” He shook his head. “It’s dangerous out there.”
“Holbrook said they could ‘use’ me.”
“I didn’t like that either,” Kevin admitted.
“What do you think they plan to do?”
“From everything I can tell, they don’t have any plans at all.”
“What are we going to do?”
Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
Jack didn’t turn out to be all that bad.
He was a cop, of course, a conservative, hard-nosed kind of guy, but that cold steeliness she’d sensed in their first meeting seemed to have been the result of stress and hunger and lack of sleep. Rested, fed, and relaxed, he seemed nicer than Holbrook and infinitely more human, and she and Kevin found that they were able to get along with him quite easily.
She glanced over at Jack, curled up on the coucl sleeping. Kevin was sitting on the floor, leaning agains the opposite wall, reading one of Holbrook’s texts. Thej teacher, as always, was down in his basement.
They were all starting to get a little stir crazy, starting! to act a little funny, and Penelope wondered, not for the J first time, if it might not have been better if they’d stayed”! outside, roamed around in the car, and not holed them-;f selves up in here. She thought of all of those shut-ins who received their impressions of the world solely through television. They watched the newscasts, watched the news magazines, watched the based-onatrue-story made-for-television movies, they saw shootings and rapes and robberies, an they were convinced that the world outside their doors was filled with danger, that violent death lurked around every corner. Paranoia fed upon itself, and she wondered if they weren’t doing the same thing here, blockading themselves in Holbrook’s house as they talked and worried about and demonized the frightening outside world.
But it was hard to demonize a world that had real demons in it.
Or gods.
What was Dionysus exactly? God? Monster? It was more comforting to think of him as some sort of monster or demon. She could imagine going up against that.
It was harder to think about fighting a god.
Kevin put down his book, stood, stretched. He glanced over at Jack sleeping on the couch, then silently motioned for Penelope to follow him into the kitchen.
She looked again at the stopped clock above the dead television, then, walked out of the living room. Kevin was already peeking through the curtains that covered the window above the sink. “Anyone out there?” she asked.
He shook his head.
There had been earlier. A gang of wasted teenagers, dressed only in the bloody skins of domestic animals, had chased a herd of naked old men down the street using pistols and bullwhips. One old man had tripped and fallen, and they’d whipped him and trampled him, the last two kids in the pack picking the old man up by his legs and dragging him behind them as they disappeared from sight.
His head had left a bloody streak on the pavement.
Kevin turned away from the window. “I’m tired of being cooped up in here.”
Penelope shrugged. “Who isn’t?”
“I feel like I’m wasting my time, like I should be doing something.” He waved toward the world outside the window. “You know things aren’t slowing down out there.”
“No,” Penelope admitted.
“We need to do something before it’s too late.”
“It’s probably already too late.” She walked over to the cupboard, got out a can of warm 7-Up, sat down at the kitchen table.
Kevin sat next to her. He was silent for a moment. “So what were they like?” he asked finally.
“Who? My mothers?”
“Yeah.” He paused. “Before.”
She shrugged. “All right, I guess. I don’t …” She shook her head apologetically. “I don’t really know what you mean.”
“I mean, were they, like, good parents? Did they read your report cards?
Did they go to Open House? Did they make sure you brushed your teeth and ate properly?”
“Yes,” she said. “They were good parents.” And felt an involuntary twinge of sadness at the thought.
“Were they, like, radical lesbians?”
Penelope felt heat rush to her face.
“Was it ‘herstory’ instead of ‘history’ and all that?”
“No. Besides, those words come from different roots. ‘History’ is not ‘his story.’ It comes from the Greek ‘historia,’ which means ‘inquiry.”
“His’ isn’t even Greek. It comes from ‘he,’ which is Old English.”
He looked at her, surprised. “Where’d you learn that?”
She licked her lips nervously. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
They were silent for a moment. “You’re a little spooky yourself sometimes,” Kevin said.
Penelope nodded. “I know.”
They looked at each other across the table, and for the first time Penelope felt as though she was in one of those movie situations. He looked as though he was about take her hand, or reach over and hug her. And she ized that she would let him.
Jack walked through the door.
“Hey,” he said.
“About time,” Kevin told him.
The mood was broken. If it had been there at all. Peneml ope picked up her 7-Up, took a sip.
They needed to get out of this house. If they spentl another day in here, all four x)f them would end upjj fucking each other in one huge daisy chain.
She closed her eyes, tried to push the thought out of he head.
“So who do you want to play you in the movie?” Jacfclf asked, leaning against the sink.
Penelope nearly choked. “What?”
The policeman grinned. “After this is all over and done’ with, you know they’re going to make a movie out of it. This is a great story. If we play our cards right, we can! cash in on it.”
Penelope laughed. “Go on Donahue and Oprah and5 Geraldot “Hell, no. Let Fox make a quickie TV movie out of our| adventures. It’s a lot more interesting than Waco or O. J.”
“TV movies never get top stars,” Kevin said. “They’ll ‘ just get some sitcom actors play you two, have the young j stud of the moment play me.”
Penelope snorted. “Right.”
“They always get actors who are better-looking thanj the people in real life.” He grinned. “Maybe they’ll even ij find a semi-attractive girl to play you.”
“Ha-ha.” Penelope looked around the kitchen. “Where’s the king?”
Kevin shook his head. “His playroom. Where else? He’s probably building a little model of the Parthenon out of matchsticks.”
“No, I’m not. But I’m impressed that you knew the’;’ word Parthenon.
There’s hope for you yet.” Holbrook walked into the kitchen, dumping the cold contents of his coffee cup into the sink behind Jack. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been looking through my papers, trying to discover’
weaknesses of Dionysus, of the maenads. Things we could exploit.”
“Find anything?”
“Nothing beyond the obvious. But if I had access to my database—”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Jack said. “If I’d just made hard copies of all of my files, I would’ve been able to discover some way of taking this god down.”
Kevin glared at them. “Didn’t you guys ever think that if the gods returned, they might disrupt the power? They might screw up the phone lines? Hell, all you had to do was plan ahead a little. If you’d bought a generator and a CB radio, you could still be communicating.�
��
He stopped, blinked, “Shit.” He turned toward Penelope. “I’m as stupid as they are. All we have to do is hit Kmart, Walmart, Target, whatever, and find a generator or a battery or some type of power source—”
“We’re all stupid,” Penelope said. “All we need to do is find a car with a cellular phone.”
“Fuck!” Kevin slammed his palm against the table.
“I would not advise leaving the house,” Holbrook said.
“Why?” Kevin said dryly. “You planning to banish Dionysus from the earth by reading in your basement?”
The teacher faced him. “You don’t even know what you’re dealing with here, you arrogant little shit.”
“I do,” Penelope said.
“Your family’s the one who caused it all.”
Penelope stood, not bothering to respond, not even looking at him.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Let’s find us a car phone.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jack said. “Just in case.”
“You’re only encouraging them.”
“They might be on to something,” the policeman said. He hurried out of the room. “I’ll be back in a sec!” he called back. “I’m just going to get my gun!”
It felt good to be out again, driving.
There was evidence of new destruction—felled trees and still burning piles of furniture that had not been there when they’d driven the road yesterday—but it still felt re assuring to be outdoors rather than cooped up in H
And then they turned onto Monticello and she saw mall.
Whatever hope had been burgeoning within her died ii stantly. The mall was overrun. Huge holes had bees blown in the brown brick walls of the Nordstrom’s partment store. The Sears building was little more than three-walled ruin. Revelers streamed in and out of open doorways in the center of the mall, dancing and vorting. Many of them were naked and covered wit blood. Many of them were carrying severed body parts. lathe parking lot, cars were crashed or overturned, then twisted metal forms gaily decorated with flowers andf multicolored streamers.
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