DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

He shook his head. “Too easy to be trapped. I think we should go to…”

He thought for a moment. “To the tourist cabins over on Coombsville. Napa Hideaway?”

“That slummy motel?”

“A cabin would be easily defensible. We’ll scrounge what we can, hit Big Sporting Goods, raid some houses if we have to.” He pointed at the clock on the dashboard. “If this thing’s right, it’s already afternoon. We’ll need to find some food and supplies and be settled in before dark.”

He was aware that his voice sounded calm and assured, but that word—dark—conjured up images from the previous night and made him tremble inside. He wasn’t sure he’d be strong enough to handle another night like the last one.

“You’re right,” Penelope said, and in her voice was all the strength he lacked. “Let’s find what we need and stake out a camp for the night.”

Her confidence gave him confidence, and he nodded. “Let’s switch. You drive. I’ll go out and find what we need. You wait.”

“I don’t need to sit in the car. I can help you find things.”

“I don’t—”

“—know if you’ll live if I don’t go with you? I don’t either.”

Kevin laughed. “All right.”

They were safely ensconced within Cabin 12 of the Napa Hideaway by four-thirty. They hadn’t been able to find any guns, but Kevin had picked up baseball bats from the supply cage at the Little League diamond, and they’d grabbed butcher knives and cleavers from a kitchen store. The floor of the cabin was lined with Drano and aerosol cans and lighters that they’d stolen from a 7-Eleven. The hammers and screwdrivers they’d scrounged from the janitor’s office of the school were still in the car.

Penelope sat on the king-size bed, watching Kevin finish nailing boards over the windows. She’d already helped him install two extra dead bolts on the door.

The phones were out, but the electricity still worked, as did the water.

The bacchantes were neither organized nor logical enough to try to shut down the utilities, and even television reception was unaffected.

She stood up and walked across the room to change the channel on the TV, switching slowly through the stations, stopping when the familiar anchor team from San Francisco’s CBS news came on.

She watched the entire broadcast. She expected to hear an update on the situation, to learn that the governor was flying in troops, that law enforcement agencies were banding together to converge on the valley, but the situation in Napa was not mentioned at all.

How was that possible?

Her spirits sank as she stared at the television. She and Kevin had been planning to alert outside authorities, but she hadn’t thought they’d be the only ones to do so. She’d assumed that others had escaped to tell what was going on here. And people from the outside must have been trying to contact people in the valley. Relatives, friends, business associates. What about all the people trying to order wine? What about all of the tourists trying to drive into Napa? Hadn’t any of those people complained?

Apparently not.

Maybe they’d been killed.

She tried not to think of that.

Maybe the entire state had been taken over by bacchantes.

That wasn’t physically possible.

Not yet.

Kevin sat down on the bed next to her. “Nothing, huh?”

She shook her head.

“Maybe there’ll be something on the late news.”

“Maybe,” she said doubtfully.

Kevin looked toward the window. She followed his gaze and saw the deepening hues of twilight peeking in between the boards. He stood, turned on the room light, closed the Venetian blinds.

“It’s going to be a long night,” he said, walking back to the bed.

Penelope nodded. “If we live through it.”

He sat down next to her, and the two of them remained there silently, watching the TV.

5

Officer Dennis McComber finished raping the corpse of the chief’s daughter and pulled out, rolling off her. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and reached for the bottle next to him, finishing it off. He was sore and spent and buzzing, and that was exactly how he wanted to feel right now.

God damn, he felt good.

Freedom.

That’s what this new god had brought. Freedom.

It was what he’d been craving all these years, although he hadn’t really known it. As a policeman he was supposed to enforce the law, make sure people followed the rules, but he had never really been interested in that. He had joined the force so that he would be above those laws, so that he would not have to follow those rules. Speeding? He could do it.

But if other people attempted it, he would give them a ticket. Ass kicking? He could do it, but if other people did it, he would arrest them.

It had not been real freedom, though, only a taste, a sample, a whetting of his appetite.

This was freedom.

McComber reached over and touched the chief’s daughter’s cold breast, squeezing the nipple.

He had been afraid before the god had arrived, filled with a nearly debilitating dread that had only been relieved by wine. But His arrival had been anything but dreadful. Indeed, it had been the most glorious event in McComber’s life, and the liberation he had felt as the reverberations of the god’s rebirth had spread throughout the valley had been stronger, purer, and more real than anything he had ever experienced.

He had been born again himself at that moment.

McComber grabbed the chief’s daughter by the arm and rolled her over. He looked toward Goodridge. “You want her next?”

The chief shook his head drunkenly, then fell facedown on the desk.

McComber laughed, his laughter doubling as he saw blood from the chief’s broken nose pool onto the papers spread atop the desk. He threw the bottle against the wall, was gratified to hear it shatter. He nodded toward one of the rookies lined up by the window.

“Next,” he said.

6

They awoke in the morning to the sound of gunfire. Penelope jerked up, disoriented to find herself dressed and sleeping in a strange bed. Then the past forty-eight hours returned in a rush,