DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

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’s 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. In the darkness at the opposite end of the basement he saw trolls: short, hairy creatures clutching pinecone-tipped spears. He squinted into the dimness and saw that the figures 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 out 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 somehow 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 to 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 idling 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 notice.

Radioactive waste?

She looked over at Kevin.

He shook his head. “It’s probably their standard story 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?” Kevin shrugged.

“Biological agents, I suppose. They’ll say it was something carried on the wind, something hallucinogenic that caused mass hysteria.”

“You think that’ll work? Dionysus’ll shoot chopper out of the sky with lightning bolts if they come to investigate. 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 darkened ceiling.

She wondered what would have happened with her and Dion if none of this had occurred. She 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 not know each other that well.

But the love they’d felt for 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 that their mutual attraction, their feelings for each other, had been bred into them, genetically engineered, planned. She did not know if that made their feelings any less real, but it