DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

It wasn’t, though. He knew that.

They reached the highway again, and Penelope pulled to the side of the road. She turned off the ignition, slumped forward.

She started crying.

“Hey,” Kevin said. “Don’t cry.”

She began sobbing harder. He sat there uncertainly, unsure of what to do, then scooted toward her on the seat and awkwardly put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said.

Penelope sat up, nodding, and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s just… It’s so frustrating. We keep trying all these roads and they’re all blocked. We’re in a cage here. We can’t get out.”

He moved back away from her. “You want me to drive for a while?”

She breathed deeply, nodded. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” He checked behind the car, in front, to the sides, making sure there was no one around, then got out of the passenger door and ran around the vehicle to the driver’s side, while Penelope slid across the seat.

“There’s one more road we haven’t tried,” he said, getting behind the wheel and locking the door.

“Think it’ll do any good?” she asked.

“No, but I’m obsessive-compulsive, and I have to finish the search.”

She laughed, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes. He turned on the ignition, put the car into gear, and took off.

The road, a winding, hilly route that led through Deer Park to Angwin, was cut off almost at the source by a group of over fifty who were holding some sort of bastardized, impromptu rodeo, taking turns riding what appeared to be milk cows and using broken wine bottles to goad the animals into moving.

“We could try plowing through them,” Kevin suggested.

Penelope started to respond, but the words were choked off in her throat. The color drained from her face.

He thought at first that she was having a heart attack or an epileptic fit. Then he heard the noise. A voice. A voice as low and loud as the rumble of thunder. He could not make out the words, only the sounds, and he followed Penelope’s gaze to the top of the hill to their left. Coming down the hillside, striding purposefully, was a giant man as tall as a billboard. He was naked, his hairy skin stained with blood and wine, and he carried under his arm the limp, dead body of a goat. The unnatural glee in his expression nearly obscured the fact that the basic structure of his face was familiar.

“It’s Dion,” Penelope whispered. “Dionysus.”

“Fuck,” Kevin breathed. “Holy mother of shit.”

A wave of people topped the hill behind Dionysus, following him down.

Many of them fell, tumbling down the steep side, but no allowances were made for the clumsy, and the wave continued on, trampling those who fell before it.

Kevin was already backing up, moving quickly but not too quickly, not wanting to draw attention to their vehicle. They might be able to escape ordinary runners, but there was no way they’d be able to escape Dionysus.

He’d catch up to them before they hit the highway.

Kevin’s mouth was dry, his hands not shaking only because they were gripping the steering wheel. He had been frightened before. He could not have imagined being more frightened than he had been last night on Ash Street. But nothing had prepared him for this. Intellectually, he’d known what to expect. Penelope had described the metamorphosis to him, and he had understood how frightening it had been, had known what Dion had come, but there was no way to convey in words the sheer horrifying alienness of it all. The creature hurrying down the side of the hill was not like a person, not like a horror movie monster, not like anything he had ever seen or read about or dreamed or imagined.

There was a palpable power within the form, a force that could be sensed so clearly it could almost be seen, and the presence of that power skewed all other sensory perceptions in a way that left Kevin feeling not only terrified but disoriented.

Dionysus reached the bottom of the hill, held the goat aloft, and broke off its head, tossing it to his followers while he drank in the spray that shot from the neck. He screamed, a cry of joy that rumbled through the hills like an earthquake, and Kevin forgot all about not drawing attention to the car and floored the gas pedal, sending the vehicle hurling backward.

He swung into a dirt pull-out, shifted the car into Drive, and made a sliding U-turn toward the highway.

“Is he coming?” Kevin asked.

Penelope shook her head.

“Jesus.” Kevin glanced in the rearview mirror, saw nothing, only trees.

“Jesus,” he repeated.

Penelope was quiet. He swerved south onto the highway, back toward Napa.

The obstacles in the road were familiar by this time, and he sped around them, easily avoiding the crashed cars and the debris. “We’re going to be out of gas pretty soon. I don’t know how we’re going to get some more. I don’t even know if any of the pumps still work.”

Penelope said nothing.

“I didn’t realize he’d be so scary.” Kevin’s voice was softer than he’d intended, and more frightened. “I don’t know what we’re going to be able to do against… that.”

“Nothing,” Penelope said dully.

“I think what we have to do now is start thinking about tonight. We haven’t seen a lot of people yet, but I don’t think they’ve gone anywhere. I bet they’re just sleeping. And they’ll probably come out at night. We need to find a place to hole up, get some weapons. There’s a gun store over on Lincoln. We’ll try there.”

The gun store, Napa Rifles, was occupied. Even from the street he could see shadowed forms moving about behind the barred windows. A line of armed, overweight men, wearing sheets that had been fashioned into makeshift togas, were seated on the curb in front of the building.

“Forget it,” Kevin said, catching Penelope’s glance as they sped by the store. “We’ll just have to make do with what we can.”

Penelope leaned forward. “You want to