DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

Nordstrom’s department store. The Sears building was little more than three-walled ruin. Revelers streamed in and out of open doorways in the center of the mall, dancing and cavorting. Many of them were naked and covered with blood. Many of them were carrying severed body parts. At the parking lot, cars were crashed or overturned, then twisted metal forms gaily decorated with flowers and multicolored streamers.

She was intimidated by the enormity of it all. There were only four of them. There were hundreds of people in the mall alone. How many were there in the entire valley? How could they hope to combat something of this magnitude?

Blood.

And how could they hope to combat something from which they were not immune? She was frightened of this force that had turned all of these ordinary citizens into amoral hedonists, and she hated what was happening, but… but it called to her. She saw these wild, drunken people, and a part of her wanted to join them, wanted to be one of them.

Did it tempt the others as well? She glanced surreptitiously at Kevin and Jack, but could not tell what they were thinking, what they were feeling.

They sped past the mall. On the other side of the street, the supermarket had been looted, all of the front windows smashed, food thrown into the parking lot, and even within the car, the heavy smell of bad wine, spoiled milk, and rotting vegetables was strong, nearly overpowering. Ahead, on the right, a fire was burning unchecked at the site of a Shell station, foul black smoke billowing up into the air and blending with the cloud cover.

This might be the end of the world, Penelope thought. Or the end of the world as they knew it. And it had not been brought about by nuclear war or a biological agent or a threat from outer space but by the resurgence of an ancient religion.

And it had been instigated by her mothers.

“We’ll cruise over to a rich area,” Kevin said. “Doctors, lawyers, those guys always have car phones.”

Sure enough, they found an upscale neighborhood and, hidden in the locked garage of a mock Tudor mansion, a Lexus with a car phone. Most of the other cars on the street had been overturned and burned, but this one had escaped the revelers. Jack used the butt of his revolver to smash one of the back windows of the house, and while Kevin and Penelope waited outside, he foraged through the residence until he found car keys.

They hurried back into the garage to try the phone.

The line was jammed.

They moved the car out of the garage onto the driveway, tried again.

Still jammed.

On the next block over, they found another car with a phone. A Mercedes.

Jammed as well.

“Shit!” Kevin slammed the car door. “What the fuck are we supposed to do now?”

“It was a long shot to begin with,” Penelope told him.

“So let’s find a CB,” Jack said.

Kevin nodded, although clearly whatever hopes he’d harbored of finding a way to communicate with the outside world were dashed. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They traded their car in for the Mercedes, which had a double gas tank, both of which were full. A gang of small children threw rocks and bottles at the car as they drove up and down streets looking for a semi or a pickup that might have a CB radio. At one point a group of naked, obviously menstruating women, wielding homemade spears constructed of broom handles and trowels, chased them for nearly two blocks before the car finally outran them.

After a several false starts they finally found a roofing company truck with keys still in the ignition that had CB.

They turned on the power, turned on the radio.

Every channel was filled with the sound of drunk babbling.

“Hello!” Penelope tried. “Is anybody out there?”

“Is anybody out there?” came the mocking reply.

They sat there for a half hour, taking turns, trying each channel, hoping against hope that someone somewhere—a trucker out of the valley and on the road haps—would hear them and answer, but the only responses they received were the jeering and increasingly obscene replies of the bacchantes.

Finally Kevin hung up the microphone and turned off the CB discouraged. “It’s getting late,” he said tiredly. “Let’s hit the road. We don’t want to be caught out her after dark.”

“You’re right about that,” Jack said.

Penelope nodded, starting toward the Mercedes.

How long would tonight last? she wondered. Tell hours? Twenty?

They drove back to Holbrook’s in silence.

10

April smashed the empty wine bottle against the forehead of the man she was riding, and reached her orgasm as she knocked him into unconsciousness. His fluttering eyes closed, blood gushed from the broken skin, but his organ stayed hard, and she pressed herself all the way down on it until the last shudder of ecstasy passed through her body.

She rolled off him, onto the blood-soaked grass.

The others were going to strike tonight.

She knew of their plans, though they had not told her of them, and while she wanted to be involved, wanted to share in the fun, she did not entirely approve. It was her upbringing, she supposed. She was a maenad, she was one of them, but she had been raised apart, in a considerably stricter environment, and while her true nature had eventually won out, there was still a part of her that sat back and judged, that hated what she had become.

Maybe there was more of her mother in her than her father.

Whoever her mother had been.

Or maybe there really was something to be said for environment in that old environment versus genetics debate.

Of course, everything would have been fine if it had involved only her, if she had been on her own. She would have been having the time of her life, and she’d be jumping into all this with both feet, not looking back, not having any regrets.

But there was Dion.

He’d wanted better.

He deserved better.

She tried to tell herself that there was nothing better,