Dominion

by Bentley Little

  “That’s why the warehouse would be better.”

  “Maybe we should burn the house instead,” Kevin suggested.

  The house? She had not really considered the fact that the house would be burned too, but of course it would. Truth be told, she had not thought any of this through. She supposed, in the back of her mind, she’d thought that the winery would burn and the fire trucks would show up before the blaze spread to the house.

  But there were no fire trucks.

  She looked at the house. Her home. All her things were still in there, in her bedroom. Her books, her records, her clothes, her photographs, all of her mementos and personal memorabilia. If the house burned, there would be nothing left. She’d have only the clothes on her back. And if her mothers were killed … She had to at least save her photo albums.

  “There’s ho wine in the house,” Holbrook told Kevin. “We’re here to destroy the wine supply.”

  Penelope put down the boxes Kevin had handed her. “I have to go in there. I have to get some of my stuff.”

  “No!” Holbrook ordered. He looked quickly around, lowered his voice.

  “No.”

  “Yes.” She didn’t want to debate it, didn’t want to be bullied into changing her mind, and she ran around a BMW and toward the side door of the house.

  “Penelope!” Kevin called after her.

  She did not look back but kept running. The door was unlocked, and she opened it, peeking in before stepping inside.

  The house was untouched. Of course. This was the home of the maenads, god’s right-hand women. No one would dare go in She could run upstairs, grab her photo albums, and out in less than a minute.

  She hurried inside, not closing the door behind he running through Mother Margeaux’s study, into the hall up the stairs, to her bedroom.

  Where Dion’s mom was on her bed, having sex wit another woman.

  They were lying side by side. The other woman’s headfj was buried between Dion’s mother’s scissored legs, but|j Dion’s mom was merely stroking the woman’s vagina, and she saw Penelope instantly.

  Penelope stood in the doorway, unmoving, the fear ands tension she’d been unable to muster until now blooming! fully formed within her.

  Obviously sensing that something was wrong, the other woman withdrew her face from between Dion’s mother’s! legs and looked lazily toward the doorway. She saw Penelope and sat up. “It’s her!” she cried excitedly, pointing. “It’s—”

  Dion’s mother broke her neck.

  It happened instantly, easily. She grabbed the woman’s head and twisted it. There was a loud crack, and the woman’s body went limp, falling across the bed.

  Penelope stared for a moment at the dead woman before meeting the eyes of Dion’s mom. “I just came to get my photo albums,” she explained timidly.

  Dion’s mother nodded numbly. She appeared dazed, drunk, but she seemed to know what was going on. “Get out of here,” she said. “Take your books and go. I won’t tell them you were here.” Penelope wanted to ask why, wanted to know more, but she knew how capricious maenads were, and she quickly went over to her desk, opened the bottom drawer, and withdrew her photo albums.

  Should she warn Dion’s mother? Penelope wondered. Dion’s mom had helped her. Should she return the favor?

  She turned as she reached the doorway. “Get out of the house,” she said.

  “Quickly.”

  Dion’s mother nodded tiredly, not asking for or needing more information, and Penelope raced downstairs, through the house, and out the side door where she’d come in. She nearly ran into Holbrook and Kevin, struggling with both her boxes and their own as they approached the side of the house.

  “Got ‘em,” she said, holding up her photo albums.

  “We thought you might get into trouble,” Kevin said. “You didn’t see anyone inside?”

  She shook her head. “No.” She took a box from Kevin, a box from the teacher, placing her photo albums on top of them.

  “We’re wasting time,” Holbrook said pointedly.

  “This way.” She led them down the walkway that curved around Mother Sheila’s garden in the back of the house and to the rear of the winery buildings.

  The back door of the main building was open, hanging half off its hinges, and an enormous puddle of dried blood covered the slab of concrete in front of it. She hesitated for a second before going in. The open door worried her. But she did not feel comfortable staying outside when just around the corner of the building bacchantes were loading trucks with cases from the warehouse.

  Holbrook shoved his way past her into the building.

  She looked toward Kevin and their gazed locked for a second. Then Kevin shifted the boxes in his hand and followed Holbrook through the doorway.

  Penelope went in after him.

  The inside of the building was filled with bodies.

  The extent of the carnage took her breath away. Despite what she’d seen the past few days, despite even the scene outside in the meadow, she had started to become inured to the bodies, had begun to view them as casualties of war, a natural effect of the current situation in the valley.

  But there was nothing natural about this.

  The long corridor had been carpeted with viscera, wallpapered with wet skin. What remained of the bodies after their skinning and evisceration had been hung up and strung up, attached to the ceiling with the heavy wire used to tie grapevines. They were hung low and high, positioned at regular intervals, forming makeshift dividers, creating narrow walkway that zigzagged through the wide corridor|

  The thing that truly sickened her was that she recognized some of the faces on the wall. Eyeless and toothless,! they were stretched tight, widened and lengthened, distorted. Yet she saw familiar features, individual attributes! in the forcibly misshapen faces. There was Tony Veltri’sf big nose. Here was Marty Robert’s close-set eyebrows.

  The stench in the corridor was horrible—rot and decay; 1 blood, bile, and excrement—and Penelope held her: breath, trying to breathe through her mouth.

  Only … it wasn’t quite as horrible as it should havef been. The shit was bad. And the rot. But the scent of the I blood was pleasant, alluring, and below it all she could 1 make out the sweet smell of wine, and she felt a familiarff tingling between her legs.

  She tried to breathe in through her mouth, out through | her nose, tried not to smell the odors, tried not to think, about them.

  Next to her, Kevin vomited loudly, bending over and| facing to the left so he wouldn’t throw up on the boxes inj his hands.

  Holbrook was already navigating the corridor, blithely! shouldering aside the bloody corpses as he walked for| ward. “How far to the wine?”

  he asked.

  Turning back toward the open door and taking a deepij| breath, Penelope followed after him, her feet sinking intof the squishy organs and tissue that covered the floor. “Sec-1 and door on He right should have some vats,” she said.1

  Behind her, still gagging, she heard Kevin literally following in her footsteps, his shoes making loud, squelch-Jf ing sounds.

  The door must have been locked, because Holbrooki had put down his boxes and was kicking it when shelf caught up to him. He kicked, slipped, fell into the grue on J| the floor, then got up and did it again. On the fifth try the door gave a little, and on the sixth it swung open.

  Inside, the pressing room was clean. No bodies, no gore**! no blood.

  Holbrook let his boxes drop to the floor He”! looked around the room at the huge steel vats and various Jf pieces of machinery. He turned toward Penelope, pointing;

  at a red-valved pipe protruding from the closest wall. “The power here,” he asked. “Is it electricity or gas?”

  “Both,” Penelope said.

  The teacher grinned. “Gas,” he said. “This may work after all.”.

  Kevin straggled into the room, lurching past Holbrook, trying to get as far away from the door as possible before putting down-his boxes and loudly e
xhaling.

  “Uh-oh,” Holbrook said, frowning and patting his pockets. “Did anybody bring a matchbook?”

  Penelope’s heart leaped in her chest.

  “What—” Kevin began.

  Holbrook grinned. “Just joking.” He opened one of his boxes. “Hurry up.

  Let’s get to work.”

  Under the teacher’s supervision, they soaked the rags and newspapers in gasoline, piling them in strategic locations. Penelope showed Holbrook where the runoff valves were, and he opened three of them to a trickle.

  It was becoming hard to breathe due to the fumes, and even Kevin was taking gulps of air from outside the doorway.

  “Isn’t this going to explode when you put a match to it?” Kevin asked.

  “How are we going to get out in time before it blows?”

  Holbrook was emptying the last drops of gasoline in a trail leading from one pile of rags to another. He tossed the can aside, walked over, and grinned. “I’m not completely dense.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a folded envelope. He opened it. Inside was a bluish white crystalline powder. “Chlorine,” he said.

  Kevin frowned. “Yeah?”

  The teacher reached into his box, withdrew a plastic container of transmission fluid. “Mix these two together, and they’ll start a fire.”

  “So will a match. What’s the point?”

  “There’s a delayed reaction. It’ll take a minute or so to start. I’ll put it next to some paper that hasn’t been doused with gas. It’ll have to burn through that first. Then it’ll start the rags on fire. Then the fire will spread. By the time this place goes up, we’ll be long gone.”

  “I hope it works,” Kevin said.

  “It will.”

  They finished placing the newspapers, rags, and boxes around the room.

  “Okay,” Holbrook said. “It’s time.” He poured some transmission fluid into the envelope and heaved the still mostly full container at the wall. He shook up the contents of the envelope to mix them, then twisted the envelope and placed it next to a long length of rolled newspaper.

  “Haul ass,” he said.

  They ran. Penelope nearly slipped in the corridor, slamming into one of the bodies, a sticky chest cavity hitting her in the face, but she kept going, and the three of them emerged outside seconds later.

  In front of them, the house was surrounded by young girls dressed in white and holding hands.

  “What’s that?” Kevin asked. “What are they doing?”

  “They’re virgins,” the teacher said.

  “Vestal virgins,” Penelope said. “Or Hestial virgins. They are to be consecrated to the goddess of the hearth.”

  “Consecrated? What the hell does that mean? Sacrificed?”

  “No. They’ll merely become the goddess’s servants or hand maidens.

  Priestesses, as it were. They will devote their lives to her. They will be killed only if they break their vows.”

  “Jesus,” Kevin breathed.

  “The virgins are probably sober,” Holbrook said.

  “That means—”

  “We have no choice,” Holbrook said. “We’ll just have to make a run for it.” He looked at Penelope. She nodded.

  They dashed between the two buildings, running toward the parking lot.

  They were probably spotted, probably seen, but there were not wild screams, no hot pursuit. The virgins remained in place, holding hands, and the other bacchantes continued their revelry and their harvest festival.

  They made it back to the car with no problem.

  They were on the road, nearly back in town, when the building blew.

  JITON Mel Scott looked around at the mounted heads on the wall, at the bodies of the doctor and the nurses on the floor. Flies had gotten hi somehow and were everywhere, buzzing, constantly buz/ing, alighting on the stinking heads and corpses, then flying annoyingly back into the air again.

  Paradise wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  His head hurt. It had been hurting all day, like a hangover, though he had remained consistently drunk enough that he should not be suffering from a hangover. The DT’s perhaps, but not a hangover.

  Barbara was dead.

  He had tried to fuck her back to life, had taken her first in the pussy, then up the ass, then in the mouth, but she had remained cold. He had prayed to his new god, but his god seemed to have forsaken him.

  And now he was running out of wine.

  The room stank and he was running out of wine.

  Paradise wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  There were people in the church again.

  Praying.

  To God.

  Pastor Robens peeked out through the crack in the door. They had abandoned God, all of them, had forsaken Him for mat drunken diety from Greece, and now they were back.

  It was too late, though.

  They had abandoned God, and now God had abandoned them.

  He listened to the frantic prayers, the desperate voices, and silently closed the door, locked it. He walked back to his desk and the bottle of wine. They’d been right the first time. It was the wine god whom they should be worshiping, not the Judeo-Christian deity.

  He was merely the contractor who’d put up this building.

  The new god was the landlord.

  And rent was due.

  Nick Nicholson felt himself die.

  He took a couple of them with him, the assholes who wouldn’t believe that there was no more Daneam, but there were twenty of them and only one of him, and they had taken him out in the end.

  The moment of death itself was not painful, but it was not pleasurable either. It was not a release or a transformation. It was merely a continuation. Different. Neither worse nor better. They killed him, beat him to death, then carried him across the river to the underworld.

  He stood, walked away.

  There were other dead men here—and dead women and dead dogs and dead children—but he did not talk to them. He could not talk to them.

  Something was wrong. He didn’t know what it was, but he could sense it.

  This was not where he was supposed to be. This was not the real underworld. This was a shadow of the real thing, an amateur version of a professional show.

  It would not last, though. He sensed that too. It would not hold together. This would only be temporary.

  He walked into a woman who had had her arms ripped off. They smacked foreheads, hard, and he wanted to apologize to her, but he could not.

  He backed up, moved to the right, kept walking.

  The streets were deserted, and they made it back to Holbrook’s with no problem. Kevin did not know how big the explosion had been or whether the fire had spread to the warehouse, but he knew that no fire trucks had gone rushing to the scene and he considered that a good sign.

  But where would they go from here? Even if they had succeeded in destroying all bottles of Daneam wine— which he doubted—why couldn’t the bacchantes just get wine from another vineyard? Hell, there were some eighty five wineries in the valley at last count. It wouldn’t be that hard.

  Even if that wasn’t possible, even if their access to alcohol had been completely denied, that didn’t mean that they’d automatically die or disappear.

  They would probably just be pissed off.

  And he didn’t want to be here when that happened.

  Holbrook parked the car in the driveway, and Kevin turned to look at the teacher. He had never much liked Holbrook, and he liked him even less now. He’d been so smug and superior when he’d lectured them about Dionysus and the maenads, when he’d bragged about belonging to his secret society, but the only plan he’d come up with had been to burn down some buildings—and he couldn’t have pulled that off without Penelope.

  Besides, he wanted to get into Penelope’s pants.

  Holbrook looked back at him, and Kevin turned away. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. The teacher might pretend to be asexual and all business, totally above
pretty concerns, but Kevin had seen the way he’d looked at Penelope back at the winery, and he knew what that look meant.

  Maybe it wasn’t Penelope herself. Maybe he jus wanted to know what it was like to fuck a maenad.

  Either way, Kevin didn’t like it.

  He got out of the car. “So was that the Ovarians’ plan? he said.

  “Burning down the winery?”

  “Ovidians,” Holbrook said. “And no, that was my ov idea.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see.” They walked into the house, and Holbrook started down the hallway toward his basement|f “I’ll be back in a minute!” he called.

  Kevin looked at Penelope. “You think we accomplished! anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There were a hell of a lot of people there. I don’t seel how we even made a dent.”

  “It’s not just Dionysus—Dion—that’s making them this! way. It’s the wine. Our wine. That’s why they were shipping it out.”

  “What’s so special about your wine?”

  “I don’t know,” Penelope admitted.

  They moved over to the couch, sat down. They did notl sit down next to each other, but they did not purposely sitf at opposite ends of the couch either, and Kevin was i acutely aware of the fact that their hands, resting on thej cushion, were almost touching.

  He wanted to get into her pants too.

  Yes, he had to admit it. He was attracted to Penelope, I and there was probably a bit of jealousy tied up with his j feelings about Holbrook.

  He felt guilty about wanting hen She was Dion’s; girlfriend, and even though Dion had turned into a monster god, he still owed it to his friend not to steal his] girlfriend.

  Not that he could steal her. She was obviously still in love with Dion.

  He looked toward Penelope, then glanced down the hallway, frowning.

  Something was wrong. He didn’t;

  know what it was, but he could sense it, and he suddenly felt uneasy.

  “Jack,” Penelope said, as if reading his mind.

  That was it.

  The policeman had stopped screaming.

  He stood up. It could be coincidence. Jack could be sleeping it off, getting over it. But Holbrook had been downstairs a hell of a lot longer than the promised minute, and Kevin had the feeling there was something seriously amiss.