DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

It was time to get the hell out of here. Family or no family, mothers or no mothers, she did not belong here. Dion had metamorphosed into a monster, her mothers were drunk and completely crazy, and the only thing she could do was run, escape, try to save herself before something happened to her.

Mother Janine’s screech was earsplitting as Dion—Dionysus—pulled out, still spurting. In two amazingly long strides he reached another woman, a younger woman, and picked her up and ripped off her top and laughingly kissed her oversize breasts.

Suddenly Penelope was grabbed from behind. She felt the tip of a stiff erection press against her buttocks and whirled to see Dr. Jones, her old pediatrician, standing there with his pants around his ankles, a look of drunken lust in his eyes. She punched him hard in the stomach and ran, trying to get through the rapidly growing crowd. Many of the men were pulling down their pants, she saw, many of the women taking off their skirts. Still more were ripping off one another’s clothes: snapping bras, tearing panties, yanking briefs.

She had to get out of here. She had to get back to the house.

She pushed through a group of teenagers, skirted a crowd of biker-looking men. From behind her, she heard Dion yell. It was a bellow of lust and triumph, but buried within it was a sound of hurt, confused frustration. She heard the pain in that cry, and it wrenched at her insides, caused her vision to be blurred by tears, but she kept running, hitting the line of trees and continuing on. Vaguely, filtered through leaves and branches off to her right, she saw a line of cars on the road, their headlights visible through the foliage and distance.

In less than a minute, she was at the fence. In front of her, the winery was lit up, seemingly every light in every building turned on. There were people in the drive, in the parking lot, on the roof of the warehouse. She heard amplified music, saw small figures dancing.

There was the sound of semiautomatic rifle fire, and several lights in the main building winked off. Screams were followed by silence.

She could not go back to the house.

It was a long walk back to town, but there were probably cars with keys in them on the road. There were probably cars that were still idling.

People did not seem to be behaving too rationally tonight.

That was the understatement of the year.

She started jogging through the vineyard, toward the street, keeping an eye out for anyone lurking in the rows or running toward her. There were clouds in the sky, jet against the lighter purple darkness, but the moon was uncovered and its bluish light shone down unimpeded.

What had happened? Had her mothers been secretly recruiting people all these years, luring Baptists and Methodists and Catholics and Presbyterians away from Christianity and into their Dionysus worship? It didn’t seem possible, yet there was no other explanation for this… pilgrimage. Why else would hundreds of drunken people descend upon the winery anticipating the return of a long-dead Greek god?

Her head hurt. It was too confusing. Everything she had ever thought or been taught seemed to have been invalidated, proven wrong. Ordinary people—doctors, housewives, clerks, construction workers—had suddenly discarded their mainstream American way of life, abandoning their lifestyle as though it had been merely a mask they had been wearing, and were now drunkenly worshiping a deity that she had studied as a literary creation. Her mothers, who had raised her, whom she had lived with every day of her life, had turned out to be maenads who had mated with a human man in order to give birth to her so she could have sex with a resurrected mythological god.

It would be laughable if it wasn’t so damn horrible.

She reached the fence bordering the road and followed it toward the gates. Ahead, she saw revelers staggering through the entrance and up the drive to the winery, winding their way between the abandoned cars.

Several couples were furiously copulating on the ground to either side of the drive. She knew she could not get through without being seen, but the men and women near the gates were so far gone that they probably wouldn’t care.

She reached the edge of the gate, stepped over a couple on the ground, and quietly slid around the side of the fence.

“I gutted the bitch with my fishing knife,” one man was saying, his voice too loud. “Slit her from tongue to twat.”

“What’d you do with her tits?” a woman asked excitedly.

Penelope hurried onto the road, moving between the parked and idling cars. The odor of wine was strong in her nostrils, and her body responded to it, her mouth drying out, begging for refreshment, but she forced herself to keep moving. She was still visible from the gate, and she figured she’d go down another hundred yards or so, then find a vehicle to escape in.

Escape to where?

She didn’t know. She hadn’t thought it out yet. The police station first, then… She’d figure that out when she came to it.

“PENELOPE!”

Dion.

Dionysus.

“PENELOPE!”

It was a cry and a demand. She could hear it from the road, and it scared her but it spoke to her. It made her want to turn around and run into the woods and throw off her clothes and spread herself before Him.

It made her want to get into a car and keep driving until she reached another state.

A bolt of light shot upward from the trees, a pearly, opalescent beam in which glints of rainbow color could be discerned. She stared at it, feeling the strength in her legs give way. She had not realized until now the scope of the situation she was dealing with. Yes, she had seen Dion’s metamorphosis. Yes, she knew what her mothers were and what he had become. Yes, she had seen the growing numbers of followers. But the extent of it all had