DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

She hurried into the kitchen. In the suddenly quiet house she could hear Jack screaming in the bedroom. His screams had been there throughout, a muted background babble, but with the other two outside, the noise seemed somehow louder. Penelope could hear Holbrook and Kevin in the garage, talking as they carried boxes to the car, but she was in the house and they weren’t and right now the policeman’s crazed ranting sounded a lot closer than it should.

And a lot creepier.

She quickly opened the refrigerator, grabbed a can of Coke and a carton of malted milk balls. Sugar. Quick energy.

She had time to notice that Holbrook’s refrigerator was filled primarily with sweets and junk food, but then she closed the refrigerator door and hurried outside to get away from the policeman’s incessant cries.

“So what’s in the boxes?” she asked, walking over to the car.

“Gasoline,” Kevin said. “And rags.”

“And old newspaper,” Holbrook added. “Things that’ll burn.”

She’d been expecting something less slapdash, something more professional, and she was disappointed. “I thought you’d have explosives and stuff.”

“I’m a teacher, not a terrorist.” Holbrook slammed the trunk of the car.

“Come on, get in.”

Penelope looked back at the house. “Should I… you know, lock it? Jack—”

“Just get in. I want to do this quick.”

Kevin opened the passenger door. “Before you lose your nerve?”

“Something like that,” Holbrook said. “Get in. Let’s go.”

The winery was a slaughterhouse.

Even after all Penelope had seen, she was shocked by the extent of the butchery.

They had driven straight to the winery. A few of the streets had been blocked, forcing them to detour, but the blockages had been old. There was no new damage, no new fires, and Napa looked like a ghost town, like a bombed-out city after a war, its inhabitants dead or fled. They’d encountered no problems on the road.

That worried Penelope. They’d seen very few people on the streets in the daytime since Dionysus’ rebirth, but the city had always seemed alive in some twisted, perverted way, the playground of destructive children who were napping and had not yet come out to play.

But the feeling now was one of abandonment, and she could not help wondering if they had moved on, up the valley, or out of the valley, or if they were simply massing around their god, in preparation perhaps for their harvest festival. She thought the latter more likely, and she hoped and prayed that Dionysus stayed on the site of the fair and did not return to the winery. They needed all the breaks they could get.

Dionysus.

She was thinking of him now as Dionysus. Dion was still in there somewhere, but after her encounter with the god, she could no longer think of Dionysus as merely Dion in an altered form.

This was a separate entity, a being that had usurped Dion’s place and incorporated him within itself.

The road to the winery was strewn with garbage and debris, but it was not until they reached the gates of the winery that they started seeing bodies. At first Penelope did not pay close attention to the immobile forms lining the sides of the drive. She’s seen so many bodies the past few days that she was becoming inured to the sight. But even in her peripheral vision the colors jumped out at her: red, green, blue, purple. Something was different here, something was wrong. She looked more carefully at the bodies out the window of the car, and she saw that some of them had been… altered. There was a man with the body of a frog, a woman with the arms of a lobster, a child with an elephant’s trunk and tusks. Many of the bodies were bloody, but an equal number of them weren’t, and these lay curled in fetal positions or positioned in odd angles. She could not help thinking that these people had died in the midst of metamorphosis, that they had died because of what they were becoming.

There was something about dying that way that disturbed her more than murder, and she looked away from the bodies, kept her eyes on the road ahead.

In contrast to that first night, there were not hordes of believers milling about the winery entrance, drinking and partying in the driveway. Save for an occasional staggerer, the narrow road was devoid of life.

Ahead, she could see the buildings of the winery, and she wiped her sweaty palms of her jeans. Holbrook’s plan was frighteningly simple-minded. She was to distract whomever she had to, however she had to, so that he and Kevin could shove their boxes of combustibles in the main winery building and light it on fire. Holbrook was hoping that the blaze would spread quickly enough that the wine, the alcohol, would ignite and engulf the winery in flames before any of the bacchantes realized what was happening. They’d then run back to the car and take off.

It was a dim-witted plan, she thought, a moronic scheme. But she could not come up with a better alternative, and she said nothing.

She looked out the window to the left. On the grapevine stakes, fluttering above the bare branches of the plants, were nailed the scalps of women and long-haired men. On the wires strung between the stakes were tied gaily colored strips of crepe paper.

The meadow now reached the vineyard. It was six or seven times the size it had been. The altar and the stone statue of Dionysus, which had been at the periphery of the meadow, nearly in the trees, were now squarely in its center and could be seen even from here. The trees had not been chopped down, they had been… eradicated. It was as if they had never existed. Meadow grass grew from the edge of the vineyard all the way up to the top of the hill, unobstructed by bush or tree.

And then the revelers arrived.

It was as if floodgates had suddenly opened, triggered by the movement of their car up the drive. A wave of men