He turned toward Penelope, who was also standing. “Where are the keys?”
he asked. “The keys to our car, the Mercedes?”
“In my pocket.” She met his gaze.
“Be ready,” he said.
They started toward the hallway, walking quietly, listening. There were no sounds at all, and that frightened him. He had been planning to ask Penelope to go outside and start the car, to be ready to take off instantly if something had happened to Holbrook if something else was down there —but he was not brave enough to go into the basement alone, and he did not object to her coming along.
They reached the door to the basement.
The lights were off downstairs.
“Holbrook!” he called.
No answer.
He looked to his left, toward the end of the hall, and noticed for the first time that while the door to the back bedroom appeared to be closed, it was not There was a crack of orangish late afternoon sunlight between the door and the doorjamb.
Jack had escaped.
“Jack!” he called.
No answer.
“Let’s get out of here,” Penelope whispered.
Kevin reached around the doorframe to turn on the basement light. The switch was already up.
“Enough proof for me,” he said. “Let’s bail.”
Downstairs, someone moaned.
They looked at each other. “One of them’s hurt or it’jj a trap,” Kevin said. “There’s only two choices here.”
“What do you want to do? You call it.”
He looked down into the darkness, took a deep breath| “Start the car,”
he said. “Be ready to roll.”
She nodded. “Don’t wait. If there’s something wrong get out.”
He smiled at her. “I have no problem with that.”
Penelope sped down the hall, and Kevin gathered his courage and started down the steps. “Holbrook!” he called. “Jack!”
The moan came again.
He hurried down the stairs, stopping at the bottom. Inj the darkness at the opposite end of the basement he saw| trolls: short, hairy creatures clutching pine cone-tipp spears.-He squinted into the dimness and saw that the fig-j ures were not trolls after all.
They were Penelope’s mothers.
As one the naked woman rose from their collective;! crouch. They were filthy, covered with mud and bloody grime and wine. Their ratted, uncombed hair stuck outj wildly in all directions, and it was this that in the darkness had given them that hairy, inhuman look.
He would have known better how to react had they not! been human, had they really been monsters. But somehowj this revelation was even more frightening, and he found himself unable to act, rooted in place by shock.
On the floor behind them was a pulpy red mess that had| to be either Jack or Holbrook.
Or both.
The women laughed, jabbering in some foreign language.
He went through his options quickly: he could try tol find a weapon, he could try to fight them, he could run.|
He ran.
He took the steps three at a time and sped down the hallway with the sound of the maenads screaming in back of him. He ran outside, slamming the front door behind him, and rushed to where Penelope was waiting in the idlj ing car. “Go!” he screamed.
They took off.
They sped down the street, Penelope accelerating so fast that he was thrown back into the seat before he could get his safety belt on. “Where to?” she asked.
He was still breathing heavily, his heart pounding, and he could not speak. He shook his head.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll find something.”
Penelope lay in the darkness, staring upward.
They were holed up in a small apartment at the north end of the city, in the last unit of a single-story complex that faced away from the street.
Kevin’s screwdriver had still been in the car, but everything else had been left behind at Holbrook’s and they’d been unable to find any other weapons save a couple of butter knives and a pair of scissors.
“Do you think we’re down to the last days?” Kevin had asked as they’d driven around, looking for an easily defensible place to spend the night. “Do you think we’re going to make it?”
“Of course we’ll make it,” she said. But it was the phrase “last days”
that stayed with her, and despite her outward optimism she was not at all sure that they would survive.
Which was why she’d considered raping him.
She hadn’t done it, hadn’t been able to go through with it. It would not even have been rape because he so obviously wanted her—she could see the bulge of a permanent erection in his pants—but it hadn’t felt right to her. Part of her wanted to reward him for the past few days, to let him experience sex at least once in his life, in case they did not make it through all this alive, but something kept her from acting on the impulse.
Strange, she thought, how one person’s perceptions of another could change so completely over such a short period of time. She’d known Kevin Harte almost her entire life. He’d been in her first-grade class. She’d never much liked him, had always considered him something of a screw-up, but she now felt closer to him than anyone else alive. She trusted him totally.
Maybe life was more like a movie than she’d thought.
On the radio, they heard a reference to Napa. A news report on an AM
talk station out of San Francisco, reporter said that there’d been an accident involving radioactive waste on Highway 29 and that all roads leading into the Napa Valley were closed until further noticejf Radioactive waste?
She looked over at Kevin.
He shook his head. “It’s probably their standard st when they don’t know what’s going on. No one wants come and gawk at radioactive waste. It keeps the! lookeeloos away.” ‘
“How are they going to explain what really happened?““jj Kevin shrugged.
“Biological agents, I suppose. They’ltl say it was something carried on the wind, something half lucinogenic that caused mass hysteria.”
“You think that’ll work? Dionysus‘11 shoot chopper*! out of the sky with lightning bolts if they come to invest tigate. How are they going to explain that?”
“Don’t worry,” Kevin said. “They will.”
They drove in silence after that, looking for a place spend the night, finally ending up here, at this apartment Now she lay alone in the bed, staring up at the dark-|f ened ceiling.
She wondered what would have happene” with her and Dion if none of this had occurred. SI wasn’t naive. She knew that most high school romance did not last long past graduation. And she realized that she and Dion had not known each other that long, did nc know. each other that well.
But the love they’d felt fo each other was strong and real, and she could see then remaining together, going to college together. They we both smart, both good academically, and there was no reason to believe that they couldn’t have gone to the same university.
The only thing that bothered her was the thought thatl their mutual attraction, their feelings for each other, had| been bred into them, genetically engineered, planned. Shel did not know if that made their feelings any less real, buff it tainted them, and gave her the unsettling feeling of have””” ing no control over her Me, having no free will.
Dion would have understood this, though, if she been able to talk to him about it, and maybe the fact thatl they were both aware of the situation would have enabled!
them to bypass the pitfalls and maneuver around the barriers that had been placed in their path.
She found herself thinking of the way he’d looked when she’d first seen him in that cafeteria line. Awkward and nervous, but appealingly so.
Attractive. She remembered how frightened she’d been when he passed out at the fair, the feeling of panic that had shot through her as he’d collapsed, and the way she’d wanted to tend to him and care for him when he�
�d been lying helplessly there on the ground. She thought of the way his voice had sounded, the way his skin had felt.
She began to cry.
She tried to steer her mind toward something else, but she thought of her home, the place she had been born and raised, now burned to the ground, and she cried even more.
There was movement in the darkness, and then a hand was stroking her forehead, Kevin’s soft voice was whispering in her ear. “It’s all right,” he said.“It’s okay. Don’t cry.” , She rolled over, reached out, and put her arms around him, hugging him, and he was there for her, hugging her back, letting her cry into his shoulder.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right.”
They remained like that for a while, until her tears had died and then after. They were still holding each other when she fell asleep.
In her dream, she was in the meadow, on her back in front of Dionysus, legs spread in the air. He was enormous, and she felt as though she was being ripped apart as he entered her, but it felt good too, and she bucked against him, trying to force him deeper inside her.
His orgasm was a violent explosion of molten semen that burned inside her like acid.
A half-human ant creature burst forth from her stomach.
She awoke screaming.
He needed Zeus.
He had never thought it would be difficult to rule. He had often chafed under Zeus’ rules and restrictions, had often suffered as a result of Hera’s caprices, and more than once he had wished that he was in charge of Olympus, that he was the one calling the shots and making the decisions.
But he didn’t have a head for organization or administration. Olympus had always been a loose confederation of free individuals, but he could not seem to abide order to even that extent. He was constitutionally unable to act rationally or logically, to behave responsibly. It was simply not in him.
The strain was starting to show. He felt tired, and the I headaches would not go away. He had killed anything that moved, had fucked everything that walked, had consumed enough wine to poison an army, but nothing had made him feel any better. The responsibility of ruling still hung heavily over his head. And now his stash of wine had been destroyed.
The maenads would make more wine, but that would; take a while. For now they were out of the nectar. Other | wine had been brought in, and he had downed a casket of I it, but it was not his wine and it was not the same. It did I not give him the same kick, it did not possess the same^
power.
He needed to bring the others back.
Yes, that was at the heart of the matter. He had tried to I make a go of it on his own and had failed. Zeus would’ probably punish him for that, Hera would probably bitch-J about it for eternity and forever sabotage his romantic entanglements, but it would be worth it to have them back.
And the other gods as well.
But how was he to resurrect them? Penelope? Penelope didn’t want him.
She had wanted him Before. He had had her Before. But that was when he had not yet been himself. Now she hated him, was afraid of him, wanted to kill him.
He could force her. He could take her and rape her, fill her up with godsperm until she was overflowing. But he did not want to do that.
He was filled with a deep and aching sense of loss.
This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. This was not the way it was supposed to work out.
He looked up into the sky. Dionysus in love? It wasn’t possible. For thousands of years he had not formed an emotional attachment to any of the women he had had.
But this attachment was not his.
It was his.
He looked down. A woman was parading herself before him. When she saw that she had his attention, she bent over and offered herself to him.
He took her, grabbing her shoulders and forcing her onto him.
He began thrusting.
And the woman started to change.
He reveled in what he was doing, he savored every scream, every tortured nuance of her transformation, but he was at the same time horrified by his own cruelty, by his complete lack of feeling for the woman. She was a goat by the time he was through, and he yanked her off him and split her open, letting the hot blood rain down on his hair and course over his forehead and cheeks.
But try as he might, he could not fully enjoy it. Even blood didn’t make him feel any better.
In the morning she felt … better.
It was an odd sensation, but the bleak pessimism of the! night before had fled, replaced by a cautious optimism. It j was as if the tears of last night had washed away her| doubts and fears.
And had brought new insight.
Penelope sat up. Kevin was still asleep, having crawled| back to his own bed sometime during the night, and she;; crept out of bed an dover to the window, where she liftedj one of the blinds and peeked outside. The morning clear, sunny, a rare occurrence, and that made her fe even better.
Throughout everything, she had tried to forget the fa that she was a maenad, had tried to deny and suppres$| that aspect of herself.
But, she realized now, that was exactly what might save them.
It was the maenads who, each fall, tore Dionysus apart 1 in a frenzy of blood lust.
She stared out at the blue sky.
She knew what she had to do.
Kevin awoke an hour or so later.
Penelope turned away from the window, watched him climb out of bed. “You know,” she said, “I never used to like you.”
Kevin recoiled, mock offended. “Moi?”
She smiled. “You seemed so … I don’t know. So^ tough.”
“Tough?” Kevin laughed. The sound was loud, natural, and seemed depressingly out of place in these circum-J
stances. “What, you thought I was some type of gang banger?”
“Not exactly that. You just seemed … I don’t know.”
“You think I’m tough now?”
She shook her head, grinned. “You’re a pussy.”
He laughed again, pulled on his shirt. “So it’s back down to the two of us. What now?”
“We have to kill him.”
He stared at her. “I thought you said he was still Dion, that we can’t kill him, you wouldn’t let us.”
“It’s the only way.” She took a deep breath. “Dion’s not coming back.”
“But—”
“I think he’d want us to do this.”
Kevin thought for a moment. “How could we do it? How could we even get close to him?”
“I think,” she said slowly, “that I need to get drunk.”
“No!”
“Maybe not drunk,” she conceded. “But I think I need to have some wine.
It’s the only way I can tap into … whatever it is.”
“You’ll be—”
“Just like them?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I won’t drink so much that I’ll be out of control. I’ll just drink enough to alter my perceptions a little.”
“But what will that do?”
“It’ll help me be what I’m supposed to be.”
“A maenad?”
“A maenad.”
“And what then?”
“I’ll tear him apart.”
The silence hung between them. Kevin cleared his throat, started to speak, then lapsed into silence.
“I didn’t ask to be born this way,” Penelope said softly. “But it’s what I am. I can fight it, I can ignore it. Or I can use it to our advantage.” She walked over to the bed, sat down next to him. “I’ve been thinking long and hard about this, and it’s the only way. It’s our only chance. It’s what’s supposed to happen anyway. I’m just … speeding things up.”
He managed a small smile. “You’ve been thinking ‘long and hard,’ huh?
I bet you liked that.”
She punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Come on -Let’s scrounge up some breakfast. We’re going to the our energy.”
They’d fo
und an unopened bottle of wine in the back o| one of the kitchen cupboards. The renter of the apartment was obviously no drinker, but someone had apparently given him or her a bottle of wine as a housewarming present, and the bottle, still wrapped with a red ribbon was waiting for them behind a sack of flour.
Penelope pulled it out, read the label. “Gallo,” she said smiling. “Not Daneam, but I suppose it’ll do.”
She had not partaken yet, not trusting herself, wanting to wait until the last minute, until she was ready to use it and it was on the car seat between them as Kevin drove.!
Wine.
She kept glancing at the bottle, feeling anxious, expeclj tant, wanting to open it and drink it all in one swallowjjf That worried her.
She hoped she was doing the right thing.
Their clothes were filthy and smelly from the past sev*j eral days, but clothes at all were unusual here, and she’f made Kevin take off his shirt, had used the scissors turn his jeans into cutoffs. She’d felt him through pants as she’d cut, her fingers instinctively curling around the outline of his erection, and there was a moment whe she considered taking it out and putting it in her mouth,| a moment when he had obviously wanted her to do jus that. But then she had finished with the pant leg and stc up.
She’d ripped her own clothes to make them even more raggedy than they already were, but she still wasn’t satis-f fied that she looked the part. She considered saying some thing light and humorous, turning it into a joke, buf instead turned to Kevin and said simply, “When we gel there, I’m going to take my top off.”
He obviously thought about saying something joking in reply, but he merely nodded, saying nothing.
The street in front of the field was blocked with wreck!
age and debris, garbage and rotting animal corpses, and they parked close to the Avis office where she’d ended up last time. Penelope got out of the car, took a deep breath, then pulled off her shirt. The sun was warm on her skin, but she felt cold and more naked, more exposed than she ever had in her life. She looked down at her breasts, saw that the nipples were erect, and she wanted Kevin to look, wanted him to see her, but he kept his eyes purposely averted, trying not to glance at her at all, looking only at her face when he could not avoid it.
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