DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

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 no 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 with another woman.

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

Penelope stood in the doorway, unmoving, the fear and 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’s big nose. Here was Marty Robert’s close-set eyebrows.

The stench in the corridor was horrible—rot and decay; 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 have been. The shit was bad. And the rot. But the scent of the blood was pleasant, alluring, and below it all she could make out the sweet smell of wine, and she felt a familiar 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 in