Dominion

"Maybe--"

"No maybes."

He nodded. "Let's go, then. Let's see what's out there."

Horton stood against the wall as the computer checked the prints against those in its files, watching as the split screens flashed by, the left half containing the print off the bottle, the right showing the prints against which it was being compared. The process was automated but not instantaneous, and he knew that it was going to take a long time to go through all of the prints stored in the machine's memory. In addition to complete sets of fingerprints for all perps arrested in the county during the last ten years, the computer stored the prints of children fingerprinted at birth, individuals who'd undergone voluntary printing, and unidentified prints from other crime scenes. The computer also had the capability of accessing the print files of other departments across the state who were online.

The search had already been underway for nearly twenty-four hours, and according to Filbert, the technician monitoring the machine, it could take twice that long before all fingerprints were compared.

Hell, Horton thought, with his luck the print would probably end up being of someone not even on file.

He took a sip of his coffee, was about to walk back to his office when suddenly the screen stopped moving, the image locking in place. A red light flashed on and off, a small beep sounding. "Lieutenant?" Filbert said, turning around.

Horton moved forward, looked over Filbert's shoulder as the technician pressed a series of keys. The identification of the print owner was superimposed over the bottom Portion of the screen.

Margeaux Daneam.

His mouth was suddenly dry, and he finished off his JJ coffee. He hadn't suspected this, hadn't expected it, but f somehow it did not completely surprise him. He stared at the name and the winery address beneath it. A ripple of cold passed through him.

"Print it," he told Filbert.

The technician pressed a key, and a copy of the screen began printing on the Laserjet adjacent to the terminal.

Daneam.

He rubbed the goose bumps on his arms. It was not the fact that a prominent local businesswoman had been implicated in the brutal rape and murder of two teenagers that spooked him. I was everything else. The peripherals. The rise in DUI's, D&D's, the other murders, his own drinking and everyone else's.

The fact that it was all related.

That was it exactly. He'd been a cop for a long time, had been involved with crimes big and small, but the crimes had always been self-contained. A crime was committed by a criminal or criminals, the case was solved, the perps put away, end of story. But this was different. The drug problem, he supposed, would be the closest analogy to this, but though drugs were related to myriad crimes, the crimes were all separate. Related, perhaps, to a root cause, but individual. They weren't ... like this.

This was spooky.

He thought of Hammond and his wacky theories.

Maybe the detective hadn't been so far off base after all.

Filbert tore off the printed sheet and handed it to Horton.

"Print off a couple more of those," Horton said. "And give 'em to the chief."

Filbert nodded.

"And thanks." Horton opened the lab door and walked into the hallway.

The station was in chaos.

He stood there, stunned, as men ran past him in both directions down the corridor. Those policemen who were not already armed and in riot gear were in the process of becoming so. Several men were shouting at once, and something unintelligible was being broadcast over the RA.

"What is it?" Horton demanded, grabbing a rookie by the arm.

"A riot over on State Street, sir."

"What happened?"

"No one knows. A group of fifteen or twenty people from one of the bars suddenly turned violent and started attacking people who were outside marching in the Halloween parade. Five are reported dead."

"Dead?"

"Yes, sir."

"Jesus shit."

"There might be an officer down."

Horton let go of the rookie's arm. "Go!" he said.

The officer hurried away, and Horton strode through the activity to Goodridge's office. He had a hunch about this, a weird feeling in his gut. He didn't think that the Daneams had started the riot because they knew the police had a fingerprint and had identified k and were about to come after old Margeaux. Not exactly. But he had no doubt that they were involved. He'd stake his career on it. He had never trusted those lezzies. He didn't know if they were putting something into their wine or were practicing witchcraft, but they were somehow behind all of this violence, and he was damn sure going to put a stop to it.

He walked into the chief's office, showed him the printout, told him about the match, and said that he needed a warrant and some men.

"I can't spare anyone," Goodridge said. "Why don't you hold off until tomorrow. Margeaux Daneam's not going anywhere."

Horton stared at him, stunned. "What?"

The chief looked at him coolly. "You heard me. It'll wait."

"We found her bloody fingerprint on the bottle that was used to penetrate and rupture Ann Melbury, and I'm not supposed to arrest her?"

Goodridge opened his bottom desk drawer, drew out a Daneam wine bottle.

"Relax, Horton. You take things much too seriously. Have a drink. Loosen up a little."

Horton stared at the chief, cold washing over him. He turned without speaking and walked out of the office. ?|

"Horton!" Goodridge called after him.

He ignored the chief's cry and continued walking. He spotted Deets in front of the supply room, waiting to be issued riot gear, and he grabbed the young cop. "You're coming with me," he said.

"But I'm supposed to--"

"We matched the print from the bottle. We've got our murderer. I want you in on the collar."

Deets was suddenly at attention. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

Horton frowned. "How many times have I told you about that 'sir' shit?"

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I just got--"

"Get a black-and-white," Horton said. "Bring it around front. I'll meet you there."

"Yes, si-- Okay!" He sprinted down the corridor, against the traffic.

Horton reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, lit it. So they wouldn't have a warrant. No big deal. Phillips would get him one after the fact and back date it. What the chief would do ... That was another story.

He took a long drag on his cigarette, inhaled deeply, then pushed his way past a line of uniforms toward the front door.

They pulled up in front of the winery, parking in one of the visitor spaces. He had expected someone to meet them, since they'd had to announce themselves and somebody within one of the buildings had had to open the gate for them, but the place appeared to be deserted.

He didn't like that.

He was nervous enough already, but Deets seemed not to notice anything amiss. The young officer got out of the car, straightened his belt, then started toward the front door of the main building, stopping only when he realized that Horton was not following.

"Lieutenant?" he called.

Horton lumbered around the back of the vehicle, caught up to Deets. His cop sense was working overtime. He had never before been as flat-out spooked as he was right now, and he wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

He didn't want to be here after dark.

It was pathetic but it was true. His uneasiness had nothing to do with Margeaux Daneam or even the unnatural gruesomeness of the murders she was going to be charged with. It was something more instinctual, more primal, and he did not want to be here when night fell.

Cop's instinct or drunk's paranoia?

He didn't know. But whatever it was, it wasn't shared by Deets. The rookie was striding purposefully toward the main building: a Greek-looking structure facing the parking lot and the drive. Horton followed his footsteps.

"Here!"

The woman's voice came from somewhere off to their left, and Horton turned to see where it was coming from. He thought he saw movement in the late-afternoon shadows that shaded the area between the main building and the structure immediately adjacent to it, but he was not sure.

"Ms. Daneam?" he called.

There was a chorus of wild female laughter, the high, manic sound of several women cackling at the tops of their lungs, and a cold shiver of fear passed through him. Again, he saw movement in the shadows.

"Ms. Daneam? We're from the--"

The door to the adjacent building opened, and for a second, against the interior light, he saw a group of naked women shoving their way inside.

Then the door closed, and the wild laughter was silenced.

What the hell was going on here? He looked over at Deets. The rookie was standing in place, mouth open, an expression of dumb surprise on his face.

"Come on," Horton said, unholstering his gun, his confidence returning with the feel of the heavy revolver in his hand. "Let's go." He started jogging toward the door, gratified to hear Deets' boot steps behind him.

The two of them reached the door simultaneously, automatically positioning themselves on either side. Horton reached over and knocked loudly. "Ms. Daneam?" he. called.

There was no response from inside, not even laughter, and Horton looked at Deets and said, "On three." He nodded at the rookie. "One. Two.

Three."

Deets turned the doorknob and Horton swung out, pushing open the door.

Nothing.

Before them was an empty lighted hallway. There was no sight of anyone, no sound, and they looked at each other and proceeded forward slowly, guns drawn, trying doors as they passed them, though all appeared to be locked.

"They could be behind any one of these," Deets said.

Horton nodded.

"They were ... they were naked," the rookie said.

Horton nodded again.

"Why were they naked?"

"I don't know."

"I don't like this."

That makes two of us, Horton thought, but he said nothing, tried another door. From somewhere ahead, down die hall, he heard a scream, and he looked at Deets and the two of them started running toward the sound.

The hallway turned, forking to the right, and ahead, on the left, one of the doors was open. Horton stopped, hugging the wall next to the open doorway. "Police!" he yelled. "Step out with your hands on your head!"

There was no response, and he moved in front of the doorway in classic firing position.

There was no one in the room.

He quickly walked inside, and the smell hit him almost immediately. It was overwhelming, a powerfully noxious mixture of old wine and older blood, stale sex and violence. He retched, instinctively doubling over, puking on the floor in the corner next to the door.

"Jesus," Deets said behind him, gagging.

Horton wiped his mouth, straightened up. The room was windowless, furnitureless, and in its center was a gigantic empty wine vat, built into the floor and sunken like a hot tub. He walked forward. As he reached the edge of the vat, he could see that it was not empty after all. Glued to the bottom with dried blood were assorted bones and the carcasses of rotting animals.

"Holy shit," Deets said.

Horton started for the door. "Come on. Let's get out to the car and call for backup. I don't like the setup here."

"There is no backup. They're all at the riot."

"They're not all at the riot."

Deets followed him out the door. "What's going on here?"

"I don't know," Horton admitted. He looked down the hall the way they'd come.

And saw the women.

They were crouched near the turn of the hallway. They were dirty and disheveled, some holding spears, others wine bottles, covered with what looked like mud and blood. He stood, unmoving. He was scared. But he was also aroused, and as frightening as the women looked, as threatening as their appearance was, he found himself looking between their bent legs, trying to see their shadowed crotches. This was not the right reaction, he told himself. This was not the way he was supposed to feel. But there was something sensuous in their stances, something provocative in their complete lack of modesty and the pride they seemed to take in their filth.

He smelled alcohol, wine, and he breathed deeply, inhaling the fragrance. He imagined what it would be like to throw himself into that gaggle of women, to feel them strip him and take advantage of him, kissing him, licking him, stroking him, sitting on his lap, sitting on his face. They were all sisters too, weren't they? That would make it even better.

They screamed as one and rushed him.

He was slow to react, nearly stunned into immobility. He staggered backward, pointing his gun at the women but not ordering them to halt, the way he should have.

Deets' reactions were quicker. He moved in front of Horton, both hands on his firearm. "Stop right there!" he demanded.

They took him down.

It happened fast, too fast, and Horton wasn't even sure what exactly occurred. He knew only that tfiey were instantly upon the other officer, screaming, laughing, stabbing with spears, clawing with nails, biting with teeth. How they had reached him so quickly,, why he hadn't fired upon them, how they disarmed him, which one was the first to reach him, he didn't know.

Horton fired a shot over the heads of the women, not wanting to fire into their midst for fear of hitting Deets. The report was thunderous, and he saw a puff of plaster explode outward from the far wall, but the women did not even seem to notice. They continued to claw crazily at the man buried beneath them, and Horton saw blood flying: drops at first, then splashes.

He realized that he could not hear Deets screaming at all. He could only hear the women.

He knew instinctively that Deets was dead, and part of him wanted to stand there and shoot, empty his gun in the women, kill as many of them as he could. But he was more afraid than he had ever been in his life, and his gut told him that if he didn't haul ass now, he probably wouldn't make it out alive.

He ran.

He wished the women had come from the opposite direction so he could've run out the way they'd come in. He had no choice now but to run deeper into the building, hoping that he'd reach the other end and find an open exit.

They were coming. He could hear them, above his breathing and the slapping of his shoes on the concrete, laughing wildly and jabbering in some foreign tongue. He wanted to try some of the doors lining the corridor, see if they were locked, but he didn't have time, and he kept running, following the hallway as it turned and turned again.

Ahead, the corridor ended at a door. He prayed that it was not locked, that it led outside, but then he saw that he didn't have to pray. There was a window in the metal, and through the window he saw the deep purplish orange of twilight.

He'd made it.

He reached the door, turned the handle, and it opened.

He stopped and looked behind him, pointing his revolver. He had no qualms about shooting the women. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that he did not have enough bullets for all of them.

But there weren't that many. He saw only three women running after him.

Hadn't there been more?

Yes.

They grabbed him from behind. They'd split up, some chasing after him, the others sneaking around the outside of the building to trap him, and he'd been so fucking stupid that he hadn't thought ahead, he'd walked right into it.

He deserved to be caught, he thought.

But as the first fingernails sliced into his flesh, as the broken wine bottle cut open his throat, he thought: no, he didn't.

They stood next to the fence, looking into the woods.

The woods.

Even the word seemed ominous, and Dion suddenly wished that they had not come out here alone, that they had brought Kevin and Vella with them.

Or, better still, that they had waited until morning.

For it was night now. The sun had set quickly, brightening an already extant moon, and the woods were dark, the trees silhouettes and shadows, the hills black background. Behind them, on the other side of the high hills walling in the opposite edge of the valley, the world was yellow and orange, a prolonged sunset fading slowly into the Pacific. But here there was only gloom and the pale bluish light of the moon.

He was afraid of the woods, and it had nothing to do with Penelope or her mothers or anything that he had seen or heard or imagined. It was an instinctive reaction to the sight before him, a physical sensation in response to something within the trees that seemed to be calling to him on some subliminal level.

Something within the trees.

He did think there was something within the trees, although he was not sure where, why, or how he had come up with that idea. And it was calling to him. He was afraid of it, but at the same time he felt attracted to it, pulled toward it.

God, he wished he could have a drink right now.

"Dion?"

He looked toward Penelope. She was pale, and he knew it wasn't only the light of the moon that made her appear that way. "Yeah?" he said.

He expected her to say something serious and profound, something that would articulate and explain the complex conflicting emotions he was feeling--that they were both feeling--but when she spoke, her words were disappointingly, disconcertingly mundane: "We should have brought flashlights."

He found himself nodding. "Yeah," he said. "We should've."

They crawled under the fence without speaking--he holding up the barbed wire so she could sneak beneath it--and he grabbed her hand as they started to walk into the woods. Penelope's hand was warm to his touch, her palm sweaty, and he liked that. Her fear excited him somehow, and he felt a stirring in his crotch.

He tried not to think about his feelings, tried not to acknowledge them, but they were as frightening to him as the woods around them. He should tell Penelope, talk to her, let her know that something was wrong not just with this place but with him, but he said nothing, held her hand, continued walking.

The world was silent. Car noises, city noises, did not reach here, did not penetrate, and the woods generated no sounds of their own: no crickets, no birds, no animals. There was only their own breathing, the snap-crackle-pop of their tennis shoes on twigs and gravel. There was something familiar about this lack of sound, Dion thought, something he couldn't quite place.

Penelope's hand stiffened in his. She stopped walking, and he turned to look at her. The woods were dark, the ceiling of trees effectively blocking out the over bright moon. Here and there, individual shafts of moonlight illuminated small sections of ground, but Penelope was in shadow, her pale face barely visible in the murk. "What?" he asked.

"Maybe we should go back."

"I thought you wanted to--"

"I'm afraid."

He pulled her close, put his arms around her. He knew that she could feel his erection, and he pressed forward, pushing it against her.

"There's nothing out here," he said. He didn't believe it and didn't know why he had said it, but he repeated it again. "There's nothing here but us."

"I'm afraid," she said again.

He wished they'd brought some wine with them. A flagon of that stuff in the vat. A few swallows of that and she wouldn't be afraid anymore.

Hell, a few swallows of that and she'd be out of her panties and on her fucking hands and knees, begging for it He pushed away from her, took a deep breath. "Maybe we should go back,"

he said.

"You feel it too."

He nodded, then realized that she couldn't see his face. "Yeah," he admitted.

She reached for him, took his hand again. "Let's--" she began, then sucked in her breath, squeezed his hand. "Look," she said.

"What?"

"Over there." She pulled him to the left, and he saw for the first time what looked like a clearing between the trunks of the trees. A meadow.

He didn't want to go to that meadow, wanted instead to turn back, return the way they'd come, but he allowed himself to be pulled along, and they passed between the trees, reached the edge of the clearing, and stopped.

"Oh, my God," Penelope said. She was breathing heavily, in hiccuping spurts. "Oh, my God."

Dion felt suddenly cold.

The clearing was littered with shattered wine bottles, moonlight sparkling on the tiny pieces of broken glass. Here and there, busted kegs emerged from the sea of smashed bottles like dark whales. Scattered amongst the glass were pieces of bone. The pieces were small-- carpels, tarsels, metatarsels--but there were enough of them distributed just at their feet to let them know that this had been the sight of some major carnage, that the skeletal remains of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people could. be found here.

But it was not the bones which had chilled Dion so.

It was the blood.

Beneath the glass, beneath the bones, the grass and the dirt below the grass were stained a dark blackish red, the residual sediment of a wave or river of blood which seemed to have once flowed through the clearing. Even the trunks of the trees were darker than they should have been, and the small shrubs and wild bushes which grew around the perimeter of the meadow had a distinctly reddish brown tint, as though blood had seeped into their systems through the roots and had usurped the space of chlorophyll in the leaves.

Dion took a hesitant step forward. The soles of his tennis shoes stuck for a second to the ground, pulling out blades of grass as they moved upward, sounding and feeling stickily like the adhesion of wet paint.

"Don't," Penelope breathed, pulling him back.

But he had to move forward, he had to see. He was horrified by the sight before him, he had never seen anything like it ... but something about it seemed familiar. It was not the bottles, not the bones, not the blood. It was the clearing itself, and this layer of detritus that had been overlaid on top of it had successfully hidden what was really there, effectively blocking what he should have recognized.

But why should he have recognized it? He had never been here before.

He walked into the meadow, Penelope at his side, still holding his hand.

It was larger than it had first appeared, and that brought home to him the enormity of what must have occurred here. They tread gingerly over the littered ground, carefully avoiding the bones.

Some of these might be Penelope's father's, he thought.

He said nothing.

The silence grew heavier, the already oppressive atmosphere even more oppressive. Before them, at the opposite end of the meadow, against the trees that fronted the hillside, was a low mound. Bones and skulls, many with bits of dried flesh still clinging to them, were arranged in ancient runic form on the section of cleared ground. From the center of the space rose a stone square about the size of a bed, and atop the square were arranged crude and ancient instruments of death. Grappling hooks hung from thick chains attached to the branches above. In the trees beyond there loomed a dark carved figure, a stone idol of some sort, and as they drew closer, Dion saw that it was the likeness of a god, festooned with what looked like the results of recent kills:

scalps, ears, fingers, penises.

The god had Dion's face.

Penelope's fingernails dug into his palm. "Oh, shit."

Dion backed up. "No," he whispered, shaking his head.

"We have to call the police," Penelope said, pulling him back. 'This isn't something we can handle."

Dion nodded dumbly.

From somewhere, from the woods, from the hill, there were screams and cries, laughter and singing, coming closer, low but getting louder. He looked at Penelope, she looked at him, and though both of them knew that they had to get out of the clearing, neither of them knew where to go.

The approaching noise was coming from an indeterminate direction, and they did not know if they would be moving away from the arriving people or toward them.

There was a chaotic feel to the noise, an impression of anarchic abandonment that Dion found at once frightening and reassuring. These people, these people who were laughing and crying and screaming, they might try to kill him, but he understood them, he knew where they were coming from, whoever they were.

Whoever they were?

He knew who they were.

They both knew who they were.

Penelope's mothers.

Sure enough, a group of figures burst through the trees at the far end of the clearing, from almost exactly the same spot at which they themselves had entered the meadow. Women. Naked women. Penelope's mothers. They carried between them two unmoving policemen.; They were drunk and moving jerkily, several of them! carrying what looked like spears, but they were obviously heading this way, and despite the apparent randomness of their movements, they were moving at a good pace, clearly making a beeline for the altar.

"We have to get out of here," Penelope said.

Dion nodded. He wasn't sure if they had been spotted; yet, but unless they quickly found some cover, they soon;

would be. He took Penelope's hand, pulled her toward the trees to the right of the carved idol.

And they were seen.

A cry went up, the high-pitched wail of five women screaming in unison, and Dion turned to see, over his shoulder, Penelope's mothers dashing madly toward them, still screaming identically at the same pitch, grinning hugely and carrying the unmoving policemen with them.

"Run!" Penelope screamed.

He tried. They both tried. But her mothers were moving fast, and the screams were disorienting, and the trees here were thicker, the underbrush heavier, and ... And part of him wanted to be caught.

That was at the root of it. He was scared out of his wits, more terrified than he had ever been in his life, and he genuinely wanted to escape. But he held tightly to Penelope's hand, started running first one way, then another, and he realized that he not so subconsciously wanted her mothers to catch up to them. He wanted to know what would happen after that. He was frightened, but at the same time he felt strong, strangely energized, and he knew that whatever happened, no matter how freaky it got, he could handle it.

He wanted to handle it.

Her mothers caught up to them a few yards into the trees. Strong hands grabbed his arms, long nails digging into his skin, and he was yanked harshly around to face a leering, drunken Mother Margeaux.

He was not as prepared as he'd thought he was, nowhere near as strong and brave as he'd led himself to believe, and he screamed as the women dragged him back out of the trees toward the square altar on top of the mound. He heard Penelope screaming off to his left, but he could not turn his eyes to see her, and whether she was screaming in pain or fear--or both--he could not tell.

A flagon was shoved between his lips and cool wine forced out. Most of it dribbled down his chin, but some of it ran down his throat, and it felt good, strangely calming.

The he was lifted into the air and slammed down onto the concrete slab.

The breath was knocked out of him, and pain flared in his back and his head, but then more wine was being forced down his throat and the pain disappeared. His strength returned in one odd, cold shiver, and he sat up, or was allowed to sit up, and he saw that Mother Margaret and Mother Sheila were the ones holding his arms. Mother Sheila or Mother Felice? He could not remember which was which.

At the foot of the mound below him, he saw the other mothers laughing hysterically as Mother Margeaux shoved a pine cone-tipped spear into the now exposed belly of the older policeman. Blood pooled outward, not spurting but overflowing from the rent skin, cascading onto the grass.

Penelope was not being held but had been thrown on the grass to the left of her mothers and was attempting to sit up. She saw her mothers whooping and cackling as the younger policeman was stripped and gutted, Mother, Margeaux ripping into the entrails with her fingers after the spears had opened the flesh.

"What are you doing?" Penelope screamed. "What's happening?"

What was happening? Dion wondered. But though he wanted to scream too, though he wanted to cry, he didn't.

Instead, for no reason whatsoever, as he watched the mothers laughing and gleefully playing in the blood, he started to smile.

He is here.

The knowledge burst upon Dennis Mccomber fully formed. The officer rolled down the window of his patrol car and dumped out the coffee he'd been drinking. He reached for die bottle of wine on the seat next to him, popped the half-stopped cork, and allowed himself a long, luscious drink.

He is here.

He thought of the chief's daughter and wondered if that little minx was going to be there as well. She probably would. Hell, of course she would. She'd known about it even before he had.

He thought of the way her head had been bobbing up and down in her boyfriend's lap. Had she taken him all the way into her mouth? Had she deep-throated him? Mccomber was pretty sure that she had. Even if she hadn't, what the fuck difference did it make? She'd deep throat him.

She'd suck him all the way down to the root. He'd make her. He'd fuck that little slut's face so hard she'd be coughing up sperm for a month.

He is here.

Yes, He was here, and it was time to meet Him. It was time to get shitfaced and fuck his brains out for the glory °f his new god.

Amen.

Mccomber took another swig from the bottle and started the car.

Someone unplugged the jukebox, and Frank Douglas was all set to scream at the little pissant, whoever he was, &nd kick him out on his troublemaking ear, when he saw that everyone in the bar had stopped dancing, s moving, stopped talking, and were all staring at him.

"He is here," someone said, whispered, and the voic was like a shout in the silent bar.

Frank felt suddenly cold.

He glanced toward the door, saw that Ted the bouncer | was standing with two of me patrons, a half-finished botf tie of Daneam red dangling from his hand.

What the hell was going on?

He is here.

He knew what was going on. Well, he didn't know, not! exactly, but he knew that the past few weeks had been J building up to this, and he was not surprised that it was occurring now. He looked over the counter at the assembled patrons, jostling one another to the left and the right, shuffling unthinkingly into a line as they continued to stare unblinkingly at him. s He reached under the bar for his shotgun, felt comfort in its familiar heft as he removed it from its perch. He did not look down at the gun, did not look away from the;' crowd, unwilling to give them any edge.

Most of these bastards were loaded, crocked, three sheets to the fucking wind. They might be all tanked up and full of courage, right now, but when it came down to it, when he started; blasting, they'd scatter and run like scared jackrabbits. [

When he started blasting?

He glanced over at Ted, saw the gleeful belligerence hi the bouncer's face.

Yes. When.

For it was going to happen. He had been in fights before, been in more bar brawls than he cared to remember, and there was always a point past which the violence was inevitable. No matter what was said or done, no matter how much talking went on, it was going to happen.

They'd passed that point when the jukebox was unplugged.

The shotgun was loaded, in preparation for an emergency, and in one smooth motion--a motion he had practiced hffront of the mirror and in back of the bar until he could do it the way he'd seen it done in a movie--he swung the weapon up, barrel pointing straight into the center of the crowd.

"Back off!" he ordered. "Back off and get the fuck out of here! Bar's closed!"

A red-haired woman laughed. Frank noticed with shock that her skirt was off--she was wearing only a blouse and panties. As his gaze moved from one person to another, he saw that many of the men and women had clothing that was ripped or missing.

"He is here!" someone yelled.

"Wine!" a woman cried. "We need more wine!"

"The bar's closed!" Frank repeated, shifting the shotgun.

The red-haired woman laughed again.

And Frank blew her face off.

He didn't mean to. Or at least he didn't think he meant to. It happened so fast. She was laughing at him and he was pointing the gun at her and his gaze went from her black panties to the look of black hatred on her slutty face and he hated that look and he wanted her to shut up and before he could even think about it he was pulling the trigger and when he could see again she was down and her face had been blown off.

And the others rushed him.

He had no time to reload, no time to do anything. Ted was in front, and he leaped the bar and yanked the shotgun from his hand, and then others were hopping over the counter. He saw breasts and fists, pubic hair and penises. He went down, punched and poked, scratched and kicked, and he heard bottles being smashed, chairs being thrown. There was laughing and whooping, the smell of newly opened alcohol. Wine spilled onto his face.

Above him, Ted grasped the shotgun like a golf club and lifted it over his shoulder, crying, "Fore!"

Frank did not even have time to scream before the butt of the shotgun smashed in the side of his head.

Pastor Robens cowered in his office, his back to the locked door, listening to what was going on in his church but afraid to confront it and put a stop to it, afraid even to look at the blasphemies that were being perfo under his roof.

Under His roof.

That was the most horrifying thing of all, the utter lackl of respect for God Almighty and His Son Jesus Christ.

They had been there already when he'd returned fromi his nightly visit to the AIDS hospice. They'd broken intoj the church, had smashed one of the side windows to gets in, and they were dancing in the aisles, ten or fifteen of-j them, teenagers and young adults, some sort of horrible rap music blasting from a boombox that had been set up on the dais. There were wine bottles on the carpet, wine bottles in the hands of the dancers, and he'd stormed into, the church filled with rage and righteous indignation, screaming at them to leave immediately. He'd charged to the front of the church, turned off the boombox, whirled to face the revelers And he'd seen the statue.

The statue of Christ, his statue of Christ, the one he had received from the Reverend Morris in Atlanta. It was lying on its side on the front pew, and it had been desecrated, a garish clown's smile painted on the face with lipstick, an enormous clay phallus appended to the crotch.

Standing on the pew next to the statue was a young woman with blond-and-black streaked hair. She was wearing a black see-through bra and a short black skirt, but the skirt was hiked up, and she had on no underwear. She was fingering herself, her hips swiveling in a slow, sensual motion.

There was a topless girl in the midst of the now motionless dancers, a boy with an erection emerging from his open zipper. Two young men, fully clothed, were lying on the floor underneath the broken window, embracing.

The lecture he'd intended to deliver died on his lips. He saw now that there was something hard and corrupt and vaguely threatening in the faces of these drunken teens, a knowing belligerence he had not noticed at first.

His anger faded as he faced the trespassers, replaced by a growing fear.

No one spoke.

Smirking, the young woman on the pew moved to the left, straddled the desecrated statue.

She spread open the lips of her vulva and peed.

There were giggles and chuckles that echoed in the silent church, titters that turned into guffaws. The young people were all still staring at him, but in their faces was not the shame at being caught that he'd expected to see, not the guilty acknowledgment of their wrongdoing that he would have thought they'd exhibit, but condescension and a smug, intimidating contempt.

A ponytailed boy swaggered up to the dais, held a bottle out. "Hey, dude, have some."

Pastor Robens wanted to smack the bottle out of the boy's hand, wanted to grab him by the collar and shake some sense into him, but he stood meekly aside as the boy took a swig of the wine and turned on the boombox.

The other youngsters started dancing again, passing around their bottles, whooping and hollering. The two young men on the floor were now partially undressed. Against the back wall a girl screamed as a boy began beating her breasts with his fists.

Pastor Robens hurried into his office, shut the door, locked it.

He heard a chorus of laughter from the partyers on the other side.

The ironic thing was that he did want a drink. He had never wanted a drink more in his life. He was trembling, his heart pounding with fear.

He had never encountered anything like this before. He had counseled troubled teens, had even worked for a while in a gang-counseling center in downtown San Francisco. But nothing he had ever experienced had prepared him for this. Emotionally troubled youth and violent fledgling criminals, those he could deal with. Those kids had specific recognizable problems. But that group out there ... Something smashed against the door of this office, and he leaned against it, closing his eyes, offering a quick prayer to God that they wouldn't get in.

There was something wrong with them, something deep and fundamental that went beyond the surface problems caused by family or society or even mental instability, something that he sensed but could not see, something that he only partially understood.

Evil.

Yes, that was it exactly. Evil. These kids were evil. Evil not for what they were doing, not for what they were saying, but for what they were.

He had intended to come in here and call the police, but as he pressed his back against the door, as he heard the revelry going on in his chapel, he realized that he was afraid to do so.

There was a furious knocking on the door behind him, a powerful pounding he could feel in his bones.

"I got a big prick for you, preacher!"

He bit his lip, said nothing.

He had been in here now for over two hours. He'd heard screams of pain, cries of pleasure, drunken laughter. There'd been things knocked over, items smashed, windows broken. And through it all, the music, that horribly repetitive rap music, blaring from the front of the church, covering the softer sounds, obscuring the louder ones, making everything chaotic and unintelligible and even more frightening.

And then, all of a sudden ... he heard them leave. The music stopped, the laughter faded, the cries died down, and they were walking, running, staggering, crawling outside. He heard the big doors open, heard the slurred conversations retreating. He wanted to peek through the curtains, through the window, to make sure that what he was hearing was actually occurring, to make sure that they were really leaving, but he was afraid to check, afraid even to move, and it was over an hour later when he finally got up the courage to open his office door and peek into his chapel to see the damage.

"What do you think you're doing?"

Penelope stood in the center of the meadow, screaming at her mothers as they bent over Dipn, smearing him with blood and fat from the gutted bodies of the policemen. Her mothers were obviously very drunk, but the intoxication seemed to flow in waves: they were crazy, frenzied and chaotically wild, one moment; sober, organized, and intensely serious the next. It seemed almost as though they were possessed.

Possessed.

Could that be what was going on here?

Penelope didn't think so. Whatever unnaturalness was at the root of all this, it was nothing new, nothing alien, nothing from the outside.

It came from her mothers.

"Leave him alone!" she screamed.

Mother Janine looked over at her, laughed manically. "He's got a nice dick here! Get it while it's hot!"

Mother Felice slapped her face.

The others laughed. Mother Janine laughed too, but she reached out and grabbed a handful of the wine-stained tunic that Mother Felice was still wearing and ripped it off.

Mother Sheila picked up a handful of blood and fat and threw it at Mother Felice.

"Stop it!" Penelope screamed. She looked from one mother to another. She was scared and confused, and she wanted more than anything else to run, to escape, to get as far away from here as quickly as possible. But where would she run to? Where would she go? The police? That's where she should go, she knew. Two policemen were dead and eviscerated, killed by her mothers. And! God knew how many other people they'd murdered.

Her father.

But she could not bring herself to turn traitor, to turn her mothers in.

She wanted to stop them, maybe even wanted to kill them, but at the same time she wanted to protect them from anyone else who might try to intervene.

Whatever happened, it had to stay within the family.

Which meant that if someone was going to do something, it would have to be her.

Her mothers were still playing in the blood, and all of her instincts were telling her to get out of here, to flee the meadow, to get back to lights, streets, buildings, cars, civilization, to save herself.

Everything she'd ever learned, thought, or believed was telling her to get help. But she realized that she could not do that. Not to her mothers.

Besides, she couldn't leave Dion.

Dion.

He was screaming, fighting, struggling against the drunken women holding him down and smearing him with blood. As Mother Felice broke away from the others and started toward her across the meadow, she could see Mother Janine stroking his penis, massaging it with blood.

He was hard.

Penelope felt sickened. She walked toward Mother Felice. The two of them stopped less than a foot from each other. Her mother smiled, and there was both sadness and triumph in the look. "So now you know," her mother said.

"Know what?"

"What we are. What you are."

She was even more confused than before. And more frightened. What she was?

She suddenly realized that she was not as shocked by all of this as she should have been, not as disgusted as she would have expected to be. It was horrifying, yes, and obviously disgusting, but her reactions were intellectual, not emotional, a recognition of the response the scene would have provoked in other people, not the response that was actually evoked within her. She was reacting to this the way she thought she should react, not the way she really felt.

The fear was definitely there, but it was not a physical fear, not a fear of what might happen to her. It was more a fear of recognition, a realization that these were her mothers and that she was their daughter, that she was one of them.

Anger. That was her overriding emotion. Anger at what they were doing to Dion, at what they were putting him through. It was a focused anger, though, a localized anger, and she wondered if she would have reacted this way rf it had been someone else. Did she even give a damn about the dead policemen?

No.

It was only because it was Dion.

She smelled the wine, smelled the blood, and the mingled scent appealed to her.

She looked at her mother. "What are we?"

"Maenads," her mother said.

Maenads. She knew the word. The madwomen who had worshiped Dionysus in Greek mythology. Women crazed with wine and sexual ecstacy, responsible for brutally killing Pentheus and ripping Orpheus limb from limb in a wild orgy of blood. Representatives of chaos in the otherwise orderly world of the Greek gods. The dark side of ancient religion.

But maenads weren't real. They were mythological figures. Fictional characters.

Weren't they?

"We have always existed," Mother Felice said gently, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. Penelope was acutely aware of the fact that her mother was naked, of the fact that the blood on her smelled sweet and fresh and good. "But people have forgotten us. They have forgotten the old gods."

"No one's forgotten anything," Penelope said. "They--"

"They call it mythology."

Penelope said nothing.

"These are not fairy stories or fantasies. This is not the way primitive people attempted to explain things they did not understand." Her mother touched a finger to the blc between her breasts, lifted it to her mouth. "This is truth."

Behind her mother, Dion screamed, a piercing cry somehow metamorphosed into loud, sustained laughter.

"What are you doing to him?" Penelope demanded.

"Restoring Him." Her mother's voice was low, worshipful, filled with awe. "Calling Him back."

Penelope felt cold. "He?"

"Dionysus."

Again, she was not surprised. She should have been., The idea that her mothers, were rubbing blood all over her ; boyfriend in order to turn him into a Greek god was not: something she could have come up with in a million 5 years. But the events here had taken on a life of their own, and things were flowing together, coalescing, in a way that seemed inevitable, almost natural, and she could only stand by and watch as they unfolded.

"We worshiped Him in the old days," her mother said. "There were no prophets or ministers then, but we served that function. We praised Him.

And He rewarded us." Again, she touched a finger to the blood, brought it to her mouth. "He gave us wine and sex and violence. He participated in our kills, in our celebrations, and everyone was happy.

"The gods were our contemporaries in those days. It was not like Judaism or Christianity or any of these modern faiths. Our religion wasn't made up of stories from the distant past. It was a living religion, and we coexisted with our gods. They took an interest in our lives. They came down from Olympus to be with us, to comingle with us." Her voice faded, and behind her, Penelope heard Dion laughing.

"Then why did your gods disappear?"

"People stopped believing."

"So?"

Mother Felice smiled gently at Penelope. "Remember when you were little and we took you to San Francisco to see Peter Pan! Remember that part where Tinker Bell was dying and the audience was supposed to shout that they believed in her? You were shouting for all you were worth. You wanted so badly to save her life."

Penelope nodded. "I remember."

"Well, gods are like Tinker Bell. They don't need food for nourishment.

They need belief. It's what feeds them, what gives them power. Without it, they ... they fade away."

It was so strange, Penelope thought. So insane. This rational conversation about the irrational, references to her childhood and popular culture used in an attempt to explain ancient evil.

Ancient evil.

Was that what mis was? It was a cliched phrase, a staple of bad horror novels and worse horror films, conjuring up images of vengeful Indian demons and cursed land. But it applied. The events her mother was talking about had taken place centuries ago. The religion to which her mothers subscribed predated Christianity by a thousand years.

"The gods faded away, but we did not. Our survival, unlike theirs, did not depend on belief. We were flesh and blood. But we were also more than human. He had bestowed upon us a gift of divinity, and we continued our rituals, or celebrations, knowing that He would return to us eventually.

"

"The gods will be borne of men,' " she recited. " 'As they went so shall they come. To take again their rightful place on mighty Olympus." "

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

Mother Felice leaned forward until her face was next to Penelope's.

"What do you think happened to the old gods, the true gods? Do you think they just died? Do you mink they flew off into outer space? No. They were weakened by nonbelief but not killed. And Zeus, in His infinite wisdom, decreed that they should take shelter in the flesh of men." She smiled, and there was blood on her teeth. Her left breast pressed against Penelope's arm. 'They hid within us. In our genes. In our chromosomes. In our cells. The other gods took refuge in Dionysus. And Dionysus took refuge in us. And we believed and continued to believe and they did not die. Instead, they were passed down from generation to generation, waiting to be born again."

"But Dion--"

"His mother is a maenad too. She is one of us."

Penelope shook her head.

Mother Felice grabbed her hand, pulled her toward the altar. Dion was standing now atop the raised rectangle, flanked by Mother Sheila and Mother Janine. He was coated with blood from head to toe, looking like a red statue, only the whites of his eyes and his teeth standing out against the darkness. His erection was huge and quivering and looked bigger than she remembered.

It looked good.

Even coated with blood, it looked good.

Especially coated with blood.

No! She pushed that thought from her mind.

Mother Margeaux passed a flagon to Mother Janine, who poured wine into Dion's mouth. He spat it out, but she poured it again, and this time he swallowed.

"Dion!" Penelope yelled.

He did not seem to hear her, did not even acknowledge her.

"Ours is the easiest god to resurrect," Mother Felice explained.

"Dionysus was half man already, the only half human god, and He will bring back the other gods of! Olympus."

"How come he's in Dion? I though he was in you."

"He's in all of us."

"At the same time?"

"He's in you."

"No."

"He's in our genes." She squeezed Penelope's hand.; "We don't just call each other 'sister,' your other mothers \ and I. We are sisters. We all had the same father, although\ our mothers were different. That is the way it has always; been. For generations it was believed that He could only be reborn if the son of a maenad mated with a human woman. It was thought He was in the sperm.

"Until Mother Margeaux. She was the one who discovered that He was in the sperm and the egg. He could not I be brought back by the son of a maenad mating with aij normal woman. He could be reborn only through a maenad born of that son mating with a normal man."

Penelope was lost. Too much was happening too fast, and her mother's crazy explanation sounded suspiciously like a convoluted math problem.

What was spe saying? That she and Dion were related?

Incest No. They couldn't be. She could handle anything but that.

Monsters and, old gods. Blood sacrifices and intergenerational breeding plans. All of it was acceptable.

But she could not be related to Dion.

"How old do you think I am?" Mother Felice asked.

Penelope shook her head.

"I was born in 1920." She smiled. "We all were. Daughters of Harris, son of Elsmere."

"But you can't all be my mother."

"No," Mother Felice admitted. "I'm your real mother. I carried you. I

gave birth to you."

"I knew it--"

"But you have the genes of all of us. You're a maenad too. You might look human, you might act human, but you're not."

"I am!"

Mother Felice smiled slyly. "You like blood, don't you? You like the smell of it, the way it makes you feel. You like wine. When we gave you that taste, you wanted more ..."

It was true and she knew it was true, but she shook her head anyway.

They had reached the altar, and the smell of the blood and the wine was intoxicating. At her feet, in front of the eviscerated bodies of the policemen, she saw the bones.

Mother Sheila saw the direction of her gaze. She laughed drunkenly. "Old parties," she said. "Old celebrations."

The fear was returning. "Who were they?"

Mother Felice shrugged. "Strangers. Drifters, mostly. There used to be a lot more coming through than there are today. Lonely, dirty, hungry young men looking for work or a handout or both. We tried not to celebrate with locals."

"But it wasn't always under our control," Mother Janine chimed in. She smiled. "When the spirit gets a' hold of you ..."

"They're not all people," Mother Felice said. "There weren't always people in the celebrations. Sometimes there were dogs or cats. Or wild animals."

"Wild animals are the best," Mother Janine said. "They put up a good fight."

Penelope shrugged off Mother Felice's hand. She wanted to punch her right now, punch her hard in the gut and shove her to the ground. Even though she was her favorite mother, Penelope hated her at this moment.

She hated all of them. But fighting would not work. That was not the way to go. She might have the element of surprise on her side, might actually be able to knock her mother down, but she was still no match for Mother Janine. And all of her other mothers would be on her in a second.

No, she had to play this cool, try to find some other way out of this.

She caught Dion's eye. She saw fear there, and horror, but also ...

what? Complicity? That made no sense. Dion wasn't the reincarnation of a god. She didn't believe her mothers' story But she did.

Yes, she realized, she did. She believed it. She bought it all.

And the fresh blood on Dion's erection did look pretty damn enticing.

She turned forcefully away, was grabbed by Mother Sheila. "We need you."

"You're one of us," Mother Felice said. "We want you to join us."

She shook her head. "I can't."

"Run!" Dion yelled.

Mother Janine looked up from Dion's feet. "We want you to fuck him."

Penelope's. refusal died in her throat. What? What was this? What were they asking? She glanced from one mother to another, saw no sign that any of them thought this even the slightest bit unusual, saw only support and encouragement.

"We can bring Him back," Mother Felice said. "But only you can bring back the others. He must mate with you."

"Your union will bring forth gods," Mother Margeaux announced.

"Fuck him!" Mother Sheila ordered.

Penelope started crying, unable to stop herself. "No."

Mother Janine grinned. "Look how big his cock is. Don't you want to feel it inside you?

She did, and they knew she did, and that was the worst part of it all.

She was what they were, and they knew it..

Maenads.

"No!" she shouted.

"No!" Dion echoed. But when she looked at him, she saw a lust in his face that mirrored her own.

She turned toward her real mother, Mother Felice. "You can't force me to do what you want."

"No, it's your decision," Mother Felice admitted, and there was a softness in her voice, an understanding that wasn't there in the words or tones of the rest of her mothers. "You don't have to go through with it if you don't want to. There are others waiting for the return of Zeus and Artemis and Aphrodite and the others, but we don't care if they come back or not. We have our god. So it's up to you. Whatever you want to do, we'll stand by you."

Penelope looked over at Mother Margeaux for confirmation. Mother Margeaux nodded.

"You'll want to when you see Him," Mother Margaret promised.

"We'll all want to," Mother Sheila said, and the others laughed.

There was an edge to the laughter that Penelope did not like, that frightened her. She was one of them, yet she was not one of them, and she did not know what was going to happen, how things were going to turn out.

She did not know what she was going to do, and that's what frightened her most of all. Intellectually, she still thought that the best thing was to run and get help, go to the police. Her mothers would let her go.

They would not kill her, would probably not even try to stop her.

But she could not do it. She could not renounce her family, no matter what they had done. And she could not leave Dion here with them alone. Besides, chances werdl that even if she did try to get help, she wouldn't be bacfcl in time to save him. She wouldn't be back before he* changed.

Before he changed.

It was going to happen. She didn't just believe it, she knew it.

They were chanting now, repeating what sounded like the words of a ritual in a language she could not understand. Bottles of wine had appeared from somewhere to supplement the flagons and were being passed indiscriminately from one mother to another. Mother Margaret stumbled over the eviscerated body of one of the policemen, fell to her knees, stood up laughing. Dion, still being held, twisted in the arms of Mother Janine and Mother Margaret as if he were in pain.

Mother Felice took a swig from one of the bottles and handed it to Penelope. The wine smelled good, but Penelope threw the bottle behind her, into the meadow, where it landed on the grass, its contents spilling onto the ground.

"Hey," her mother said. "What'd you do that for?" Her speech was becoming slurred, and she looked at Penelope with a hostility that made Penelope realize that maybe she wasn't as safe from her mothers as she'd originally thought.

She backed up, away from the altar, and glanced quickly around the meadow to determine which way she should run if it came down to that.

It was then that she noticed the others.

Dion still wasn't sure what was going on.

He was on top of the altar. He knew that. And he was naked. And Penelope's mothers were holding his arms and legs and ... doing stuff to him. He tried to call out to Penelope, but his head was forced back and one mother held his mouth open with strong, sinewy fingers while another poured wine down his throat. He felt the hands of the others anointing his body with the blood. He gulped down the sweet, intoxicating liquid, swallowing it so he could breathe. Fingers grasped his penis, stroked it, and against his will he felt himself growing, becoming hard. From somewhere he heard the sound of Penelope yelling.

His head was let go, and he opened his eyes, looked down. His erection was huge, quivering, and covered with blood.

He wished he could shove it in Penelope's mouth and down her throat to gag her and stop all that infernal racket.

No, he didn't.

Yes, he did.

He turned his head around and looked into the trees at the carved god with his face.

What the hell was happening?

More wine was poured into his mouth. That was one thing that was happening: they were trying to get him drunk. He tried to spit out the wine, but it only dribbled down his chin.

God, it tasted good.

They were chanting, the mothers, singing, but he couldn't make out what they were saying. The words were all Greek to him. He giggled. Greek to him. Oh, God, he was already getting drunk. He'd never be able td| get out of here if he didn't concentrate on keeping " wits about him and trying to stay sober His mouth was jerked open again, more wine poured down his throat He gagged, tried to swallow, almost choked, but the warm liquid went down smoothly and he \ was filled with a pleasant lightness.

He understood some of die words the mothers were! saying now. Not all of them, but some of them. They were foreign, but he'd heard them before somewhere. In dreams, perhaps.

He realized that they were praying.

To him.

This wasn't right. This shouldn't be happening. He struggled against the mothers' hold, but they were stronger than he was, their fingers and wrists like iron.

They gave him more wine.

He looked out across the meadow. Others were gathering, appearing at the periphery of the field, emerging from between the bushes and the trees.

They were pale, slack-jawed, and nearly all appeared to be drunk. They were walking like remote-controlled zombies, men and women, some with flashlights, some with knives, some with dead cats or dogs, some only with bottles of liquor.

They saw him, waved to him, called to him.

He was communicating with these people, he realized, acting like some sort of homing beacon. He saw in his mind's eye all of the intoxicated men and women of the valley suddenly cocking their heads to hear an invisible sound, like pod people in a monster movie, suddenly dropping what they were doing to come here, to this meadow, to him.

The mothers let go of him, but he couldn't move. He was like a statue, frozen in place. They'd done something to him, put some sort of spell on him, trapped him here in his body. Mother Janine was still rubbing blood on his toes, but he couldn't feel it. He wanted to kick her, to lash out and smash her face in with his foot, but he was unable to move. Tears of rage and frustration slid down his immobile face.

He tried to scream, but no sound would come out He saw his own mother off to the left. She was naked and obviously wasted, rubbing sensuously against Penelope's Mother Margaret. He wanted to call out to her, to run to her, but he could do neither, and he watched as she stared at him, glassy-eyed, then turned away.

From somewhere deep within him came a rumbling, a low, vibrating seismic sound that echoed in his brain and rose to a roar, he was not sure if it was only within him or could be heard outside as well, but it was the loudest thing he had ever heard, and it overpowered his senses and pushed everything else aside.

The sound became words. His words and yet not his words. His thoughts and yet not his thoughts. An announcement of triumph and an admission of defeat:

I AM HERE

April could feel the desire building, the need increasir_

She was not drunk, but she soon would be, and already! she could smell the blood. It hung thick in the air, lent as the wine, and she was starting to get antsy, ious, wanting only for events to accelerate so she couldff satisfy her lust.

Margaret gave her a long kiss on the mouth, pressing^ her body against April's, and April felt the delicious softness of touching nipples, the wiry scratchiness of rubbed j pubic hair. She could sense Margaret's blood pulsing just| below her skin, and she wanted to rip (hat skin open and'-1 let the blood wash over her.

Margaret pulled away, smiling. "Almost time."

April looked toward the altar, toward where the otherf women were smearing the fat of the policemen on the! body of her son, and her excitement faded. Dion was| struggling against the hard hands that held him, grunting with exertion and pain.

She felt queasy and a little sick. Part of her, the deep part that had always guided her actions but of which she had only recently been made aware, longed for the con- . elusion of the ritual, craved the freedom that the transformation would bring. But another part of her, an equally strong part, the part that had borne and raised and cared for her son, wanted only for Dion to escape.

Dion.

Her son.

She knew now that she had become pregnant, had deliberately tried to get pregnant, so that this could occur. She had had a child specifically to bring about His return, and on some level she had always known that. But she had also loved her son, loved him as a mother, any mother, would. She had wanted him to grow up and go to college, fall in love and marry, be successful. The normal things.

Dion stiffened, froze.

"No!" she cried. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, and she angrily wiped them away.

Wine always made her so sentimental.

The meadow was becoming crowded. People were arriving by the carload, by the van load, running, staggering, crawling across the grass toward the altar. She too heard the voice within her son--His voice--calling out to her, and she understood why everyone was here, but she could not help wishing that she and Dion were alone, that she could help him through this, explain to him what was happening.

She looked over at him, saw the pain in his eyes, looked away.

She took another long drink of wine from the bottle, felt a hand on her buttocks. She turned, saw Margaret.

"It is time," Margaret said. "He is here."

She saw him change.

It was the most horrifying thing she had ever witnessed, and Penelope wanted to run, wanted to turn and flee, but she was rooted to the spot, unable even to look away, wishing with all her might that it would stop, reverse, knowing that it would not.

And he started to grow.

It began with his penis, his erection expanding immediately to more than twice its natural length, the rest of his body a step behind that accelerated pace, his arms, legs, torso, and head only belatedly catching up to the first conspicuous spurt of growth. The skin didn't rip as he grew. It should have. She had touched his skin, had felt it, had rubbed it, and it was normal, average, everyday human skin. But now it was stretching impossibly, like rub^ her , expanding with the elongating bones, the developing muscles.

There was no sound accompanying the change. Dion's mouth was open in a scream, but his voice was silent and the only noise in the meadow was the chanting of her mothers and the drunken babbling and overloud footfalls of the arriving inebriates.

It was a terrifying thing to see, and Penelope felt the down on her arms bristle as she watched his head flop unnaturally back and forth on his strangely extended neck, watched his metamorphosing hands twitch as spurts of growth shot through diem, watched his legs buckle and dance as biologically created rhythms contorted them.

It was frightening, but the most frightening thing of all was the change in his face. It was not his features exactly, though they grew and broadened in such a way that the elements of his appearance, while remaining recognizably his, distorted the original to such an extent that he looked like a different person entirely. No, it was his expression, the way that his screaming mouth straightened into a lustful grin, the way his panicked gaze grew blank, then shifted suddenly into slyness. It was power and a knowledge of that power that settled over him, settled into him. Dion, if he was still extant within that form, was squashed down, and she watched in fear and heart-wrenching agony as he shrunk and shriveled and disappeared, lost within the ever expanding body.

He was now seven feet tall.

Now eight.

Now ten.

There was a ripple in the air, a solid wave of intensified humidity that passed over her and through her, a visibly shimmering undulation that for a second distorted not only the space directly before her, but the ground, the trees, the moon, the stars.

And he spoke: "/ AM HERE."

The words rumbled through the woods, echoed across the hillsides, low and clear and loud enough to be heard even in the center of town. Around her, the gathered people dropped to their knees, weeping and laughing, screaming and praying. Her mothers had taken up spears and were dancing around the altar, around Dion, chanting madly.

Dion?

No, he wasn't Dion anymore.

With one quick, frighteningly well-coordinated lunge, he leapt from the altar and grabbed Mother Margeaux around the waist. He spun her around, then took her bottle, downed it in a single swallow, and tossed both her and the bottle aside. Mother Janine knelt before him, buttocks up, baring herself in orgiastic ecstasy, and he impaled her with his enormous erection. The look of expectant lust on her face turned to pain as he entered her, and she screamed hi agony, trying to get away, but he grabbed a handful of her hair, jerked her head back, and thrust.

Penelope felt sickened.

Things were turning ugly, getting out of control. A do^ bounded across the meadow, and three women she did not'! recognize pounced on it, tearing at its face and fur with their fingernails. To her left, a boy from her math class hit an old lady in the face, then kicked her in the stomach as she slumped to the ground before him.

Everywhere were bottles of wine.

Daneam wine.

Where had they gotten it? she wondered. Where had it come from?

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 ear-splitting 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 diety 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 mytholog-i? . ical 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 1 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 not been brought home to her.

The light, though, the powerful, unwavering beam that extended upward to the heavens and seemed to illuminate the constellations, made her realize on a gut level how powerful Dionysus was. He was not just a monster. She had not witnessed merely a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation.

She had been witness to the rebirth of a god. A real god.

How could she hope to combat or run away from that?

"PENELOPE!"

There were figures now in the opalescent beam, swirling shades that resembled wraiths or Bmpvie ghosts. They flowed upward from the source of the light, coalescing in the sky high above the hills, rearranging positions until they formed a figure.

Her.

She sucked hi her breath. The image was unmistakable. It was white, the same rainbow-flecked white as the rest of the light, but it was clearly visible, a three-dimensional portrait of her that was so perfect in its details that it looked like a photograph.

But it was not a photograph.

It had come from him.

He wanted her.

"PENELOPE!"

She made her way into the center of the road and started to run. Around her, a few stragglers were rooted in place, staring up at her form as it shimmered in the sky.

He wanted them to catch her and bring her back to him.

To her left, on the other side of the road, she heard the loud sound of a mufflerless engine. Blue smoke was billowing from the tailpipe of a riderless Ford pickup.

She dashed across the center stripe to the truck and pulled open the door, hopping in. The vehicle had an automatic transmission, thank God, and she put it into Reverse and backed up. The truck smacked into the bumper of the small car behind it, but she didn't stop to assess the damage. She threw the pickup into Drive and took off, tires squealing as she swerved into the center of the road. She passed the winery gates, but did not look. She kept her eyes straight ahead.

And drove.

There were fires burning throughout Napa. She could see them, both the smoke and the flames, but she heard no sirens, saw no fire trucks. She turned on the radio. On the rock station, a DJ was praying to Dionysus, a drunken ramble that sounded like a plea for forgiveness. On the country station, Garth Brooks"

"The American Honky Tonk Bar Association"

was playing, while a group of people in the studio whooped it up in the background. The all-news station was silent.

She turned off the radio.

The streets of the city seemed curiously abandoned. There were few other cars on the road, and not many people on the sidewalks. She saw what looked like a dead body in front of the gas pumps at a Texaco station, saw a lone looter in the windowless Radio Shack, but that was about it.

Where was everyone? There were a couple of hundred, maybe a thousand people back at the winery and in the woods, but that was a small fraction of the city's population. What had happened to everyone else?

She turned onto Soscol, the street that led to the civic center and the police department.

And slammed on the brakes.

The street was filled with celebrants. Police cars and fire trucks blocked off large segments of several blocks, and between them wall-to-wall people danced and drank as though it was Mardi Gras. Many of them were wearing masks or makeshift togas. Many of them were naked.

She saw sparklers and fireworks fountains, champagne bottles and beer cans. Here and there fights had broken out, and partially uniformed policemen were happily beating people into submission with night sticks.

Broken Daneam bottles littered the roadway, and as Penelope started to back out, off the street, she heard the sound of glass smashing as the pickup rolled over one. Before she had even finished swinging around the corner, the left rear tire of the truck was flat, the vehicle listing badly, the steering wheel suddenly intractable in her hands.

She got out of the pickup and hurried down Third Street, away from Soscol. It was obvious that she wasn't going to get any help from the police. Two of their own were dead in the woods, eviscerated, and they were partying.

Where would she go now?

She didn't know. She had still not had time to figure out an alternate plan, and her mind was a blank. The best thing to do, probably, was to find another car and drive down to San Francisco, tell the police there, let them figure out what had to be done.

But would they be able to handle it?

Would the National Guard even be able to handle it?

She thought of that beam of light shooting upward into the heavens and shivered.

Vella.

Yes, Vella. Why hadn't she thought of that earlier? If she could get to Vella's house, she could use her friend's phone and call for help. Then they could use Vella's car to escape.

But what if Vella's parents had been converted?

What if Vella had been converted?

She'd cross that bridge when she came to it.

Her friend's house*was only a couple of blocks from school, and school was only a mile or so away. If she could She saw him at the far end of the street.

He was in front of the Mobile station, towering above the hordes of drunken revelers accompanying him. He moved strangely. Not jerkily, like a figure in a stop motion animation movie, but unnaturally. More fluidly perhaps than ordinary movement, but oddly, eerily. He glanced first one way, then another, his head swiveling in a way she had never seen before, and she quickly ducked into the doorway of the donut shop next to her. She trie the knob, but the door was locked, and she closed eyes and hoped that he and his followers would not < this way, would not come down the street.

He bellowed what she would have guessed from tone of his voice was an order.

But it was not an order.

It was her name.

He was looking for her.

"PENELOPE!"

She pressed harder against the door, as if that would I make her more invisible.

She had never been scared by Godzilla or Rodan or any § of those oversize Japanese monsters. They were so large| as to be comical, their threat so grossly magnified that it was entirely impersonal. She had always found quieter,^ more intimate horror more frightening. She could identify I with unseen whispers in a haunted house. She could not identify with a resurrected nuclear-radiated dinosaur that stomped on houses.

But this was like one of those outrageously exaggerated Japanese things, a ridiculous, parodic manhunt. And she was utterly terrified.

"PENELOPE!"

His voice echoed off the walls of the buildings, caused^ windows to shake in their frames.

Could he sense her? He obviously wasn't omniscient, I but perhaps he could feel her presence. Perhaps he had] the power to locate where she was. How else could he have gotten so close to her so fast?

"PENELOPE!"

He was moving away.

He did not know where she was! He could not pinpoint her location using some godlike power. He was flying blind, guessing, trying to anticipate where she'd go, what she'd do.

He might know that she'd go to Vella's house, might try to meet her there, but she didn't mink so. She was pretty sure he didn't know where it was, and she could not see the great god Dionysus stopping by a phone booth to look up an address in die white pages.

She grinned at the image, imagining all of his drunken disciples waiting around while he looked up an address. The smile grew broader and gave her confidence. Where there was humor there was hope, and she took a tentative peek around the side of the doorway, saw only the tail end of his contingent lurching and staggering around the corner of Jefferson.

She moved out of the doorway and hurried across the street, intending to take Vernon to Sandalwood, and Sandalwood to Vella's.

Her mouth was even drier than it had been earlier. God, she was thirsty.

She quietly cleared her throat. A glass of chilled wine sounded good.

A bottle sounded even better.

She had to get a grip. She couldn't let herself be influenced by any of this shit that her mothers had brought about. She had to keep a clear head, maintain her reason amidst this chaos. It was the only way of getting out.

She sprinted down Vernon. To her right, adjacent to the sidewalk in a small neighborhood park barely bigger than a yard, was a picnic table and a drinking fountain, and she ran over to the fountain and took a long drink of cool water. It bubbled up from the faucet, flowed smoothly down her throat, soothing, and she drank until she could feel her stomach sloshing. Water had never been so welcome or tasted so good, and she felt instantly stronger, revitalized. She straightened up and started running again. She had to take it slower since her stomach was full, but that was just as well. She didn't want to tire herself out unnecessarily. She might need her strength later.

Once again the street seemed deserted. She was jogging through a residential neighborhood now, and the houses around her were dark, the only illumination offered by the moon and the evenly spaced streetlights. There were no cars, no other pedestrians.

Again she wondered: where had everyone gone?

Three blocks later, she stopped jogging, slowed to a walk, then finally stopped to catch her breath. She glanced uneasily around. The emptiness of the street suddenly seemed much more threatening. Running, she had not had time to notice the pockets of shadow around trees and bushes, the unsettling blackness of the windows looked onto the street. But now she was no longer passir by, traveling through the neighborhood. She was in neighborhood, and it gave her a creepy feeling.

She was still breathing loudly, tired from running, bu she forced herself to start walking again. Underneath he exaggerated breath and the overloud slaps of her sneake on the concrete, she thought she heard other sounds,! cracking, snapping sounds that could have been boot!

steps, could have been twigs snapping. She quickened her J pace. She could see in front of her and there was nothing! there, but she was afraid to look behind her, afraid she! would see someone or something creeping through the-* shadows toward her.

Once again she broke into a jog. Her heart might burst from the exertion, but she'd rather take a^ chance on that;*; than on being attacked.

She heard no more sounds, felt no hands on her shoulders, saw no one leap at her from the darkness, and two streets later, she reached Sandalwood.

Here there were people. Students mostly. Kids from school. Several of them appeared to be drag-racing at the far end of the street, but the competition was haphazard, disorderly, with no apparent rules, and she saw Wade 5 Neth's red Mustang sideswipe a white Corvette and careen onto a house's lawn while a blue '57 Chevy crashed^ into a parked Jeep.

The onlookers lining the street cheered wildly. Bottles were thrown onto the asphalt, smashing into irregular shards. Someone set off a string of firecrackers.

Directly in front of her, four drunken members of the school's football team were having a pissing contest-- with Mrs. Plume, the band teacher, as the target.

Mrs. Plume didn't seem to mind.

Penelope turned away in disgust, looking down the street in the opposite direction. There were people here, but fewer, and the school a block away appeared to be deserted.

Vella's street was only a few blocks down.

She started walking quickly.

There was a scream behind her, a sudden earsplitting screech that made her jump. She whirled around to see a topless girl attack a young man with an ax in the middle of the street. The wedged blade lodged in his chest, and then he began screaming as the blood spurted and she pulled the weapon out and swung again. In an instant everyone was screaming, members of the crowd, dozens of them, converging as one on the combatants. Penelope saw other weapons, saw splashing blood.

She ran, away from the melee, toward the school. There were a few people here, on the sidewalk, on the street, on the lawns of the houses, but not many. Again, most of them were kids from her school. She recognized some, but they did not seem to recognize her and for that she was grateful. She sped past them, hoping to make it to Vella's without incident.

"Penelope!"

She stopped cold at the sound of the voice, glancing quickly around. It was a human voice--it was not his voice--but the fact that someone was calling her name at all jolted her.

"Penelope!"

She recognized the voice now. Kevin Harte. But where was he?

There. Across the street, in the shadow of a tree, kicking an old woman who was lying on the sidewalk, clawing at his ankles. He looked over at Penelope. "Over here! Help!"

She paused only for a moment, then ran across the street to where he struggled to free himself from the woman's clutches.

"Grab something!" he said. "Hit her!"

The woman looked like a zombie. She was naked save for torn, dirty panties, and she was drooling, cackling crazily as her nails dug into Kevin's legs. Penelope looked around for a branch or a stick or a broom, something she could use as a weapon, but there was nothing in the street, on the sidewalk, or on the lawn of the adjacent house. She wasn't sure she'd be able to hit the woman anyway, but at least she could provide Kevin with a weapon he could use.

"Kick her!" Kevin yelled.

But at that moment he broke free from her grip kicked her hard in the chest. Her cackle turned into wheeze, and he grabbed Penelope's hand and pulled with him down the sidewalk.

"What the fuck's going on?" he said. "The whole < world seems to have snapped."

"It's a long story," she told him.

He turned toward her, though his pace did not slow "You know what's going on?"

"I'm part of it."

He stopped, his hand tightening on her wrist. "Wait minute. You're--"

"It's a long story. I'll tell you later. Let's just get Vella's so we can call for help."

"There's no one to call. The pigs are all out partyii I tried them."

"I know. I meant call for someone outside. The National Guard or something. The San Francisco police. Ij don't know."

"Where does Vella live?"

"On Ash." Penelope gestured down the street. "A few| blocks past school."

Kevin's face paled. "Don't go there."

Chills surfed down Penelope's arms at the fear in his voice. "Why? What is it?"

"Don't go there. I've been there."

"What is it?"

"You don't want to know."

He was right. She didn't want to know. She had seen tool much already, had heard too much, had experienced too| much. Her limit had been reached. She wanted only to : away and escape, to have troops come in here and clean aul this up, and to return in the daytime when it was all over.

"Do you think Vella is ..." She could not finish thefj sentence.

"If she was at her house, she's dead." He looked up and down the street.

The area from which she'd come was f coming even more crowded. Others were joining the frayl the fight spreading. In the yellowish glow of the street-1 lights the silhouettes of unmoving bodies could be seenl on the asphalt. "School," he said. "It was abandoned when I went by earlier. We can go there."

"And do what?"

"Hide. Find a classroom, lock ourselves inside, and wait for morning."

"I don't know ..."

Kevin smiled thinly. "Dion won't care. He knows he can trust me."

Penelope blinked. He didn't know about Dion. Tears seeped out from between her eyelids-and down her cheeks, and she wiped them angrily away, willing herself not to cry. She had not had the luxury of experiencing her feelings, and as far as she was concerned, that luxury was still not yet available to her. She would have time to wallow in her misery later. Right-now she had to act. She had to keep herself alive.

And away from Dion and her mothers.

Kevin saw her wipe away the tears. Their eyes met, and he looked away, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," he said. "Dion's dead?"

"No."

"He's all right, then?"

"Not that either."

"He's one of them?"

She shook her head. "It's a long story. Let's find a room. I'll tell you there. We'll have a lot of time to kill."

Kevin nodded. "I was thinking Sherwood's history class. It's on the second floor, facing the street. We'll be able to see anyone coming."

Penelope nodded tiredly. "Fine with me."

They hurried, side by side, down the rest of the block, checking first to make sure no one was around before dashing across the faculty parking lot to the classroom building.

The front doors were locked.

"Come on," Kevin said. "Around the side. We'll break a window and crawl in. Too much exposure here."

Kevin took off one of his boots and used it to break and clear out the window glass of one of the science rooms. He crawled in first, then grabbed her arms and helped her in. They waited a minute, listening, ready to jump back out and escape if necessary, but there were no alarms, voices, no sounds within the building at all.

They exited the science room, walked down the hall-l way and upstairs to the history classroom. It was unlocked, and they had no trouble getting in, but ther seemed to be no lock on the door at all. Kevin wanted try another room, maybe the teachers' staff room, some! place that would have a lockable door, but Penelope like the idea of being able to see the street, and they pushe the teacher's desk against the door, then sat on two of thej students' desks and stared out the window.

There were fires and searchlights, mobs of people passed in front of the street, going first one way and then the other. In the still air, sounds were amplified, distorted.! Everything sounded close. Gunshots. Car crashes. Laughter. Music. Screams.

A lot of screams.

Kevin fell asleep a few hours later, after she had told 2 him of Dion and her mothers. It was a wild story, but I questions he'd asked made it sound as though he believe it.

Why wouldn't he after everything he'd seen?

She couldn't sleep, though. She stayed awake, staring] out at the city above the rooftops and the trees. The gun| shots stopped, as did the crashes. The laughter died. The| music faded.

Only the screams remained.

And they continued throughout the night.

In the morning, she could almost believe that none of it had happened, that it was a normal world, that she and Kevin had merely stayed late in the classroom to study and had fallen asleep, or even that they were rebellious teenagers in love who had snuck into the building for a romantic rendezvous and had spent the night together.

Anything was easier to believe than the truth.

Getting up quietly, Penelope walked across the cold tile to the window and peeked through the closed slats of the blinds. The street outside looked the same as it always did. There were a few cars parked next to the curb, and the houses across the way were early morning still. The weather was gloomy and cold, the air touched with a tinge of fog.

Only there was no traffic on the street. Not a single car drove past, not a single pedestrian walked by.

In the center of the parking lot she saw empty, broken wine bottles.

Dion, she thought.

She felt a sickening twinge of nausea as she recalled Mother Janine bending over in front of Dion, baring her sex to him. What had happened to her mother after that? Had she been ruptured by his enormous organ?

Had she died from hemmorhaging or internal bleeding?

Penelope hoped so.

No, she didn't.

Maybe she did.

She took a deep breath. She wasn't sure. The truth was, she didn't really know what she felt Her thoughts and emotions were still in a state of shock. She peered through the blinds, at the hillside above their winery on the opposite side of the city. She thought of the orgy in; the meadow last night, and though the remembrance hot-j rifled and frightened her, it was at the same time ... enticing.

She moved away from the window. The pull was strong. There was no denying that. It was only strength and willpower that had kept her from succumbing, that| had allowed her to overcome the base desires of herl blood.

Blood.

That was the most frightening thing about it all. The fact that she wanted to be part of it, that she knew she should be part of it.

But how long could her mind hold out against her body \ and her emotions?

She moved away from the window. There was a telephone mounted on the wall to the side of the blackboard. She hadn't noticed it last night, but she saw it now, and she walked across the room and picked it up.

No dial tone.

The phone was dead, but that didn't really mean any| thing. The line just went to the switchboard in the office. If she could get to a phone on one of the outside lines, she might be able to call for help.

She walked over to the door, started pulling on the < of the teacher's desk to move it away. There was a loud screech as one of the desk legs scraped across the floor.'!

Kevin awoke with a start, practically leaping to his feera from the position on the floor in which he'd fallen asleep.| He was instantly awake and on the alert, glancing quickly! from the door to the windows and back again, before fn! nally letting his gaze settle on Penelope.

"What are y doing?" he demanded.

"I was going to look for a phone, see if we could c; for help."

"You were going to sneak out on your own?"

She looked away, embarrassed. "I didn't want to w you up."

"Shit." He shook his head. "I guess you can't trust an one."

"And just what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"It means I thought we were in this together. It means that since we seem to be the only two normal people left in the whole fucking valley, I thought we were going to stick with each other and not sneak around behind each other's backs."

She looked at him apologetically. "Sorry."

He was silent for a moment. "So where were you going to call from?"

"A phone in the office. Or the pay phone by the gym if that didn't work."

"Who were you going to call?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "The police in Vallejo, maybe. Or Oakland.

Or San Francisco."

He nodded. "Sounds like a plan. But I'm coming with you."

"Okay."

Together they moved aside the desk and chairs they'd used to block the door. Kevin put his ear to the door for a moment, listening to make sure no one was out there, before opening it.

The hallway was deserted. And dark. It was morning, but no windows opened onto the hallway, and, save for theirs, the doors to all of the classrooms were closed. The lights were off.

Penelope had never seen the school like this, and somehow it seemed creepier than it had last night. Buildings were supposed to be dark at nighttime, but this daytime gloom was unnerving.

They walked slowly down the hallway toward the stairs, not speaking, treading softly. There were no sounds other than their own, but instead of reassuring her, the silence made her feel uneasy, on edge. Someone could be lying in wait for them right now, hearing their every move, listening to their progress, preparing to leap out from behind one of these closed doors ... They made it safely to the stairway, started quietly down.

It was not as dark downstairs. A row of thin windows high above the lockers let in a dusty version of daylight. There was no noise, no indication that anyone else was Present, but Penelope still felt tense.

They should have brought weapons, she thought. They were stupid. If some*| one attacked them, they had nothing with which to fighls back.

They walked toward the office. It was weird being ia| here like this.

Usually, the corridor was crammed with! students rushing to and from classes, sorting through theirl lockers, talking and laughing with one another. Butjl empty, the hallway seemed not only sad and lonely but, Jf under the circumstances, ominous.

The office door was locked, but the door to the staff lounge next to it was open, and Kevin walked in, Penelope following. There was a phone on a battered table in front of an old sofa, and they hurried over to it.

Kevin picked it up, put it to his ear. His expression said everything.

It was dead.

He jiggled the dial tone button, then dropped the receiver disgustedly into the cradle.

"Shit," he said.

Were all the phones in the city dead, or only the ones in the school?

Penelope didn't know, but she did know that she had to go outside and find out for herself. If telephone service had been cut off, then they'd have to try to find someone to help them, or get a car themselves and drive out of the valley.

Kevin had obviously been thinking along the same lines. "The phones are down," he said. "But maybe it's only the school. I'll go out and see if I can find a phone that works."

"No, you won't."

He blinked. "What?"

"You can't go out there. They'll kill you. I'D go."

He glared at her. "The fuck you will."

"The fuck I won't."

"Oh, you're going to go traipsing around the city to save us? What do you expect me to do? Sit in here all day?"

"Yes."

"Shit!" He kicked the table, and it flew onto its side with a loud crash. He hurried to pick it up, instantly realizing his mistake, hoping no one had heard the sound.

"Look," she said, "just calm down. You're going to have to lay low for a while. I'll go out there and try to find a phone or someone who can help us--"

"You won't go out there and do anything."

"They won't hurt me."

"Who?"

"My mothers."

"What about Dion?"

"I'll deal with him if I see him."

"You'll be easier to spot in the daytime."

"They want me to join them. They won't harm me. You're nobody. They don't care what happens to you. They'd toss you to the wolves in a second."

Kevin was silent for a moment. He nodded. "You're right," he said. "I

may be an asshole, but I'm not a moron." He looked toward the blurred glass window at the far end of the staff lounge. "So where are you going to go? You can't go to the police station. We already know the cops won't help."

"Fire stations, churches ... I don't know. I'll find somebody. If not, I'll steal a car."

Kevin nodded excitedly. "Yeah. A car. That's what we need to do. Get a car and get the hell out of here." He thought for a moment. "You need a weapon, though. Something you can use if you get attacked."

"If I get attacked, there probably won't be a whole lot I can--"

"You're not going out alone without something."

She heard the seriousness in his voice, understood me sense of what he was saying, and nodded. "We'll both get weapons."

"That's the idea."

She followed him down the hallway. If this had been a movie, she thought, he would have taken her hand. It would have been the first hint that xomance would eventually bloom between them. But they had not touched, had not come anywhere close to touching, and for that she was grateful. All those fictional depictions of two people thrown together by circumstance in the midst of a great disaster and finding accelerated love had always seemed like a load of bull to her, and she was glad to I cover that she had been right.

So why was she thinking about it?

Inside the custodial office, they found everything the needed and more:

hammers, screwdrivers, shovels, rake litter spears, hedge clippers, scissors. Penelope chose long Phillip's screwdriver and a pair of scissors, both which she tucked into the waistband of her pants.

"Be careful how you bend," Kevin said, grinning.

"Thanks."

Kevin grabbed several screwdrivers, a hammer, clippers, and a litter spear.

"If Rambo was a gardener ..." Penelope said.

Kevin laughed.

That was a good sign, she thought. They could still laugh about the situation. They could still joke. That gavel her confidence. The fact that they were able to retain theirf sense of humor despite the situation made it all seem a; little less ominous. Humor somehow erected a barrier be-y tween themselves and the horrors and served to keep everything else at bay.

"Do you have a watch?" Kevin asked.

Penelope shook her head.

"Here, take mine." He unfastened the band at his wristf and handed his watch to her. "Since we don't havisj walkie-talkies or anything and can't keep in contact wit&fj each other, we need to set up a specific time for you to| meet me back here. If you're not back by that time, I'll! know something's wrong and I'll come after you."

Penelope nodded as she fastened the watch to her wrist."

"What time is it now?"

She looked. "Seven-twenty. I'll be back by nine."

"Okay."

They walked back down the hall, toward the front entrance.

When they reached the front door, they stopped, looked at each other.

"Be careful," Kevin said.

"I will."

Penelope took a deep breath, opened the door, and peered out. The air was cold, punctuated with a slight chill breeze. From north of town, from the direction of the wineries, she could hear the faint sounds of screaming, cheering. This far away, it sounded almost benign, like people having a party.

She looked to the left and then to the right, making sure there was no one around. The coast was clear, and without looking back at Kevin, she ran across the parking lot to the street. She heard the door shut behind her.

She reached the sidewalk. Now she could see some of the damage that had not been visible from the classroom. Up the street, a pickup was overturned and still burning, two bodies discarded on the asphalt next to it like limp rag dolls. Beyond that she saw movement. A small group of obviously armed, obviously intoxicated people prowling the neighborhood. Half of them were naked. They moved on, heading down another street, but another group crossed an intersection farther up, and she knew she'd probably run into others. She glanced around. Under a tree on the easement was an unbroken wine bottle, still a third full, and she quickly ran over and dumped the contents on her head and shoulders, rubbing the wine into her hair and skin so she would smell as though she was drunk, as though she was one of them. She opened her blouse, exposing a breast.

She was ready.

But where would she go? Not the winery, certainly, and not to the police station.

The fire station. That's what she'd said to Kevin, and that's where she would go. Even if the firemen had been overpowered or converted, there would still be communications equipment there. Last night's destruction hadn't been purposeful, planned. It had been random and wanton, the ignorant rampage of inebriated ... what? Dionysian revelers?

Yes.

She shook her head, trying to clear it.

Maenads.

Why had she never heard that word before? Her mothers were maenads.

Hell, she was a maenad. You'd think they would have told her a little about it, hinted around something.

Maybe they had.

She remembered the stories they'd told her as a child, 1 the fairy tales of chaos and blood lust and rethroned kings. She recalled one favorite story involving a young princess who had to drink a magic elixir to become strong enough to kill a pack of wolves who had captured her father.

Maybe they'd been trying to prepare her.

She stared down at the empty bottle on the grass. The wine on her skin smelled good, and a part of her wished she'd saved a few swallows to drink.

No!

Blood.

She had to be strong, had to keep from being sucked in. She looked back toward the building, toward the classroom. The blinds were closed and she couldn't tell if Kevin was watching her, if he was even back up there yet, but she surreptitiously waved to him anyway.

She hoped he could see her breast. This was going to be harder than she thought.

She began walking down the sidewalk, away from the burning truck, working on her stagger, prepared to appear drunk if she ran across anyone. She wasn't sure where the closest fire station was, but she thought it was a few blocks over, toward the downtown area, and she figured she'd head in that direction.

The street was littered with debris. Torn scraps of clothing, newspaper pages, pieces of packages, smashed bottles, and crumpled cans were strewn about the road. On the lawn of one of the houses, a nude man was lying atop the bloody body of an old lady. Penelope wasn't sure if either or both of them were alive, so she hurried past, walking on the strip of grass next to the street rather than the sidewalk to avoid making noise, her hand on the screwdriver in her waistband, ready to pull it out and use it if either of them moved.

She continued down the street. The overpowering dread she'd felt last night was gone, replaced by a more subtle tension. The light of day had removed her fear of being jumped and ambushed in the shadows, but she was still uneasy, and it still felt to her as if something was waiting to happen. The street was calm, nearly empty, only traces remaining of last night's debauchery, but it was as if the city was holding its breath--and waiting to exhale.

This felt to her like the calm before a storm.

Or the eye of a hurricane.

She turned the corner, started walking toward the downtown area.

Where was Dion?

Dionysus.

That was the big question. Had he gone back to the winery, to the meadow? Was he crashed out somewhere in the city? Or was he still on the prowl, looking for her?

She shivered. The screams from the north had not stopped, had continued all along as a constant sub-noise that she'd already started to filter out, and she thought that he was probably there, at the winery. Or at one of the other wineries.

She smiled wryly. Maybe he was taking the tourist's tour of the wine country.

She looked to the right and to the left as she crossed a small street and saw, a block down, a stoplight. Hanging from the light was a red fire xing sign.

A fire station. She was in luck.

She hurried down the street, her right hand clamped against the screwdriver as she ran. She'd try the phone first. If that didn't work, she'd try to figure out how to work whatever other communication equipment they had.

She slowed as she neared the station. She was not alone. There were other people here as well.

Children.

She stopped on the sidewalk in front of the station. The big doors were open, and ten or twelve kids, all of them preteens, sat or stood atop the fire truck, smoking hand rolled cigarettes, drinking from bottles. A

kid of seven or eight lay passed out on the driveway in front of the truck. On the small lawn in front of the closed office, young boys and girls were loading and unloading guns.

She was not sure what was stronger, her rage or her fear. What the hell was wrong with these kids' parents? How could they allow this? Even if they had been converted to Dionysus worship, how could they abandon all responsibility for their children?

This was more than merely conversion to a different re-1 ligion, she knew. This was more than simple mass hystej ria. This was something totally different, totally new, ai sea change, a complete shift in the fabric of previously accepted reality. The Judeo-Christian assumptions upon which lives and society had been based were no longer true.

A young girl wearing a visible diaper under her ripped pink dress pointed a handgun at Penelope and grinned as she pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty cylinder. The other kids burst out laughing.

Maybe they'd killed their parents.

Penelope turned away hurrying back the way she'd come. Fuck trying to call for help. Fuck trying to contact the outside world. She wasn't going to sit here like a dummy and wait to be rescued. She'd find a goddamn car, go back for Kevin, and the two of them would get the hell out of the valley and not look back until it was all over.

There were cars in many of the driveways she'd passed on the way over, and though she didn't think any of them had keys in the ignition, keys were probably in the houses.

It hadn't looked like any of the owners were home.

She looked behind her. She wasn't being followed. None of the kids were coming after her. She scanned the driveways in front of her, saw a van at the next house over, saw a Lexus two houses up from that. Glancing across the street, she saw a Toyota of some kind in the driveway directly across from her.

The door to the house was wide open.

She hesitated. If the door was open, something was wrong. Maybe the owners of the house were all dead in there. Maybe they were alive--and waiting.

Fuck it. Something was wrong at the house? Something was wrong all over the goddamn city. She started across the street. She'd rush in, grab the keys, rush out. If someone was inside, she'd run if she could, or, if not, she'd fight.

She pulled the screwdriver from her waistband, adjusted the scissors so she could grab them more easily should the screwdriver be knocked from her hand.

She slowed as she reached the driveway, peering into the open doorway before her, looking for any sign of movement within the dim interior of the house.

Her grip on the screwdriver tightened as she passed the front of the car.

She saw no movement inside the house, heard no sound, and she took a deep breath and forced herself to walk through the doorway.

The house was empty. There were no dead bodies, no attackers lying in wait. She walked from the entryway to the living room to the kitchen, where a ring of keys was lying atop the counter next to the stove. She grabbed the keys, hurried outside.

The first key she tried fit the car door.

She smiled to herself. This must be my lucky day, she thought.

Five minutes later, she drove into the school parking lot. Pulling into the principal's spot in front of the main building, she was about to honk on the horn when Kevin hurried out the front door. She looked around to make sure there was no one nearby, then pressed the button that automatically flipped open the Toyota's locks.

Kevin pulled open the passenger door, jumped in, and slammed the door shut behind him.

"Well?" he said.

She locked the car doors again, put the Toyota into gear.

"What's the plan?"

"We leave," she said. "We get the hell out of here."

April awoke on the grass, a rock pressing painfully against her left breast, her mouth tasting of blood. She hurt all over, and it took her fogged mind a moment to remember where she was.

Dion.

She sat up quickly. Too quickly. Agony flared behind her forehead, almost causing her to fall back down. She closed her eyes against the pain, waiting until it subsided to a dull throb, then slowly reopened her eyes.

She was still in the meadow, as were hundreds of other people, but Dion and the other maenads were gone. She remembered them leaving rather early in the proceedings, and vaguely recalled wanting to go with them, but she could not seem to recollect where they had gone or why she had stayed here.

Next to her on the ground was the half-eaten remains of a goat. She stared down at the animal's bloody chest cavity, at the snaking entrails, the deflated sac-like organs, and felt a warm tingling between her legs. She bent down, picked up a quivery piece of liver, bit into it.

Wine.

She needed to wash it down with wine.

Glancing around, April saw a partially filled bottle clutched tightly to the chest of a sleeping woman. She walked over to the woman, lay down next to her, kissed her on the lips, and gently removed the bottle from between her oversize breasts. She finished off the wine, then carefully replaced the bottle.

She sat up, stood up. The headache was almost entirely gone now, and she looked more carefully around the meadow. Her gaze alighted on the altar at the opposite end. Immediately, a sharp stab of guilt shot through her. She remembered the way her son had screamed as the other maenads had anointed him. She should've come to his rescue. How could she have allowed them to do that?

How could she not?

Her intellect and her instincts were at odds on this one. Well, maybe not her intellect. Her upbringing. No, not that either, really.

Her sexual desires and her maternal instinct.

That was more like it.

She wondered where Dion had gone.

Dionysus.

It was still hard for her to think of her son as her god. She smiled wryly. Had it been this hard for Mary?

Someone groaned nearby, then started yelling: "My leg! What happened to my leg!"

April turned toward the voice. An obviously hungover man was sitting up on the grass, staring at the bloody, half eaten remains of his right leg. She smiled at him, then walked over, pushed him down, and sat on his face. Immediately, his tongue snaked inside her.

She stared at the red remains of the leg as she squirmed on top of the man's head. For the first time in her life she felt totally free, totally unfettered.

Happy.

She just wished that it hadn't come at the expense of her son.

It was again as it should be.

Times had changed, the world had moved on, but he was here, the females were here, the wine was here, the celebrants were here.

Woman and grape.

These things were eternal.

Dionysus strode across the hillside, the dry grass rustling pleasantly beneath his bare feet. His "maenads were singing to him. He could hear them even from this far away, their song a paean to his lust, his power, his generosity, his greatness. They had welcomed him back last night, hosting a celebration that had not stopped until dawn.

It was again as it should be.

But he was not the same as he had been. He had another past now, another history, another life, and it was his as well ... only it wasn't. He shook his head. It was all so confusing, and he didn't really want to think about it. He wanted to drink again and celebrate Ms. return, wanted to kill some men and rape some women.

But the exhilaration and anticipation he should have felt in contemplating the sating of his desires seemed to be tempered. He felt uncomfortable, ill at ease, not himself, as if his new physical limitations were affecting his thoughts. He was joined with this other, trapped inside this too small form, mired in this overly literal body like an animal trapped in tar. He had never had the freedom of Apollo or Artemis or Hestia, had never been as ephemeral as the others, had always been tied to the flesh, and he had liked that. It was what had set him apart from the others, his ability to enjoy earthly pleasures, and he would not have given it up for anything.

This, however, was different.

He was not himself.

He was himself and this other.

He stopped walking, inhaled deeply. The scent of grape was on the breeze. It permeated the air, the redolent fragrance providing a promise of intoxication, and it made him feel calmer, more relaxed. He strode to the edge of the hill, looking down and surveying his dominion. He could see the burnings at either end of the valley, the crashed cars on the roads, the bands of revelers prowling the city in search of more fun.

Sounds came to him as well, below the singing of his maenads: breaking glass, laughter, cries of joy, cries of terror, cries of pain.

It was a wonderful morning to be alive, the beginning of a beautiful day. There was no reason for him to be brooding on the inconveniences of resurrection.

To his right was a log, and on a sudden whim he strode backward, away from the edge, got a running start, and leaped atop the log. The momentum carried him forward, and then he was surfing down the hillside, laughing with glee as he leaned to the left to steer away from a tree, bumped over a series of half-buried rocks, and then crashed to a halt at the bottom of the hill.

He tumbled head over heels, then stood, brushed the dirt off his body, and willed shut the cuts that he'd gotten from the fall. He was standing before a connected corral and horse stable that backed against the side of the hill, and the sight of the worn wooden fences triggered a memory within him, a memory that despite his best efforts remained naggingly below the surface of his conscious mind.

There was something missing in this new world. He had not been aware of it before, had not had time to be aware of it, but the corral and the stable had A pair of horses wandered into the fenced corral from behind the low building.

Centaurs.

He smiled. Yes, that was it. That's what he hadn't been able to remember. Centaurs. He walked forward. He missed those randy creatures. They were a bother sometimes, but they knew how to enjoy themselves, and they were always up for a celebration. Besides, they'd like it here. The cool weather, the plentiful wine. This was their kind of place. He looked back up the hill. He would like centaurs in his new dominion. He strode into the corral, then walked around the side of the stable. A small herd of horses was shying against the opposite fence, and he spotted an acceptable filly and called the horse to him, making her back up against his sex.

"Pretty girl," he said, grabbing her haunches. "Pretty girl The horse bucked and kicked, trying to get away, but he held tight. She whinnied in pain as he mounted her.

Kevin said nothing as they drove down the empty streets, on the lookout for one of the roving bands. Here and there he saw people packing station wagons in garages and carports, surreptitiously trying to leave. He even saw one man mowing his lawn as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Could it be that some people were totally unaware of the events of the night before? It didn't seem possible.

There was no sign of the revelers. Nor any sign of their victims. There were broken bottles on the road, torn pieces of clothing, overturned cars and bicycles, occasional dead cats and dogs, but there were very few human bodies on either the streets or the sidewalks.

He supposed he should be grateful for small favors.

Kevin glanced over at Penelope, who stared grimly ahead as she drove. He would have suggested that they stop and get together with some of these other people who were leaving, but he knew that she would not go for it.

Penelope had seen something when she'd gone looking for the car, something she didn't want to talk about, something that had profoundly affected her, and he knew that she was not in the mood to approach strangers right now, no matter how safe they might be.

He thought about what he had seen last night on Ash Street, and he shivered.

He knew exactly how she felt They pulled onto Third Street. Downtown was a shambles, the destruction more random and wanton than anything he had ever seen in any post-apocalyptic movie, the rubble more awkwardly strewn about and nowhere near as aesthetically pleasing as the precisely arranged disorder found in films. The old building that had housed Phil's Photo had burned to the ground, and the blaze had spread to the vacant lot next door before apparently burning itself out. Clothes, electrical equipment, and food from the other nearby shops littered the roadway, making it nearly impossible to drive. Penelope slowed to a crawl, carefully maneuvering around the sharper, bulkier objects, trying to drive only on the garments and foodstuffs.

Ahead, Kevin could see that the Mcdonald's had been razed. And sitting atop the still Ik golden arches were two police lights.

Nipples.

The fast-food joint's trademark had been turned into a pair of monstrous breasts.

Kevin stared at the upcoming sign. The purposeful vahdalism that it represented scared him far more than, the chaotic destruction around it, and he realized that until this moment he had not entirely believed Penelope's story. He'd bought the specifics of it--he'd seen enough horrors last night to know that what she had described had no doubt happened--but he had not been able to completely buy the idea that Dion had been turned into a mythological god.

The nippled arches somehow brought that truth home to him. He did not know why. The vandalism was certainly no worse than other things he'd seen. He supposed it was the juxtaposition of such a solidly rational symbol, such a perfect example of normal American life, with this lewd sexuality, this drunken crudeness, that made him realize exactly how far things had gone.

And made him realize that Penelope was obviously telling the truth.

He wondered where Dion was now.

He wondered what his friend looked like.

The emotional impact had not yet hit him, and he supposed it was because everything was happening so fast, because he had been simply reacting to everything that was going on and had not had the luxury of reflection.

He would miss Dion, he knew. Although they'd known each other only since the beginning of the school year, Dion was his best friend. It was going to be a hard loss to take.

He was already assuming that there would be a loss.

That Dion would have to be killed.

The street cleared a little past the Mcdonald's, and Penelope speeded up. Kevin stared out the window, saw an old lady on her hands and knees licking up what appeared to be a puddle of wine on the sidewalk. It was inevitable, wasn't it? These things always ended that way. If good was to win and triumph and all that good shit, there was no other possible ending to the situation.

He was surprised that he didn't feel sadder at the thought, more affected, but in his mind Dion was already dead, replaced by this ...

god, and so the leap wasn't that great.

It was amazing how fast the mind could adjust.

They turned onto Monticello, heading toward the highway, and Kevin sat up straighter in his seat. They would be passing his neighborhood, his house. He glanced over at Penelope. Should he ask her to stop?

He had to.

He cleared his throat, spoke. "My house," he said. "It's down Oak."

Penelope turned toward him. Her mouth was still a thin, grim line, but there was confusion in her eyes, and what looked like sympathetic understanding beneath the rage and hurt.

"Do you want to ... stop?" Her voice was quiet, tentative.

"I have to check," he said. "I have to know."

Penelope nodded. She slowed as they reached the corner of Oak Avenue.

"Which way?" she asked. "Left or right?"

"Right."

She maneuvered the car onto the street, and he pointed toward the third house on the left. His heart was pounding as she parked the car next to the curb. The lawn was littered with empty wine bottles. A pair of ripped and bloody panties hung from the branch of a bush.

The entire street was silent, and that seemed ominous.

Their driveway was empty, the car gone, but the front door was open, the screen door ripped and hanging off its hinges, and as Kevin looked through the dark doorway into the dim interior of the house, his stomach did flip flops. He felt as if he were about to throw up.

He turned toward Penelope. "Wait here."

"No. I'm coming with--"

"Wait here," he ordered. "Keep the doors locked and the engine running.

If I'm not back in five minutes, or you hear or see anything strange, take off. Don't wait for me."

Her mouth tightened as though she was about to argue, but then she looked into his eyes and nodded slowly. Her expression softened. "Okay,"

she agreed. "I'll wait here."

Kevin opened the car door and got out, hearing the locks click behind him. He was nervous, anxious, scared, and he wanted to run inside the house yelling, "Mom! Dad!" but he walked forward slowly, cautiously, going up the driveway one step at a time. The living room window was broken, he saw as he approached the house, and as he walked up the porch steps he prepared himself for the worst.

Inside, the house was dark. And silent. The dead air smelled of something sickly, sweetly rotten, something he did not want to think about. The living room had been ransacked, lamps and tables broken, chairs and couch overturned, but there were no bodies. His parents weren't here. He passed carefully through the living room, stepped slowly around the corner into the dining room.

Nothing.

He continued on into the kitchen. The refrigerator was open, its contents spilled onto the tile floor, lettuce rotting in milk and runny yogurt, salsa blanketing hot dogs and leftover spaghetti. He clenched his fists tightly to keep his hands from trembling. Until this point he had been more worried than frightened, but now the balance had started to shift. He hoped his parents were alive and unharmed, but if they were, he knew he didn't want to meet up with them.

He walked out of the kitchen into the hall and almost tripped over a teenage girl's head.

His scream was so raw and uncontrolled, expelled with such force, that his throat hurt. But he could not stop screaming, and he continued to scream as first his mother and then his father staggered out of their bedroom. Both were naked, both were drunk, and both were smeared with dried blood.

Both grinned at him lasciviously.

He ran out of the house, bumping against furniture, stumbling over debris. He leaped the porch steps and sprinted across the yard. Penelope was already revving the engine, and she unlocked the doors as he approached. He yanked open the passenger door, jumped into the car, and they took offt speeding down the street. He turned to look through the rear window as they fled, but he could not see if his parents had come out of the house after him.

He faced forward, heart pumping, arms shaking.

Penelope's expression was hard. "What happened?"

He took a deep breath. "My parents."

"Alive or dead?"

"Alive."

Penelope nodded. He did not have to say more.

They turned left on the next street, then left again until they hit Monticello.

"Even if we get help, even if we get the police or National Guard or whoever out here, what are they going to do?" Kevin asked. "How are they supposed to put a stop to this?"

Penelope shook her head. "I don't know."

"Maybe there's nothing they can do. Maybe they--"

"We're high school kids! Shit. How are we supposed to know how to solve this? That's their job. They'll know how to do it They'll figure out something."

Kevin's voice caught in his throat. "I don't ... I just don't want anything to happen to my parents."

"I know," Penelope said softly.

"Yeah, they're drunk and crazy and everything. But I don't want the cops shooting them."

"I know how you feel."

Of course she did. She was in exactly the same position. Her mother--her mothers--had not only been caught up in all this, they were the cause of it. They were the ringleaders. If anyone was going to be shot and killed, it would be them.

Penelope had to be feeling even worse than he did.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She tried to smile. "You have nothing to be sorry for."

Monticello hit the highway, and Penelope continued south. The highway was in better shape than the streets had been, the piles of debris fewer and farther between, and she took the car up to sixty.

There was no one else on the highway, no vehicles traveling in either direction, and Kevin found that unsettling. The valley seemed to have emptied of people during the night, leaving only the victims and their victimizers, with he and Penelope caught in between.

The highway curved around the side of a small hill --and Penelope slammed on the brakes. The car skidded, fishtailing, before finally coming to a lane-straddling halt. The highway before them was blocked, littered with stacked cars, demolished trucks and burning bodies.

Kevin, still bracing himself against the dashboard, stared through the windshield in dumb horror. The bodies had obviously been torn apart in last night's craziness and had later been separated according to part:

arm, leg, head, torso. Five individual bonfires were burning, and around them danced linked circles of nude revelers, all of whom had identically blank stares on their enraptured faces.

Someone tapped on Penelope's window, and she screamed.

He jumped at the sound of her cry, looked immediately over. An old woman, face smeared with patterned blood that had been applied like war paint, laughed loonily. She breathed deeply, inhaling the thick, foul-smelling smoke. "Nose hit!" she said. "Contact high!"

"Back up," Kevin said softly. "Get us out of here before the rest of them see us."

Penelope nodded, threw the car into Reverse. As they sped backward, away from the woman, she began screeching, pointing, and several of the naked celebrants broke away from the nearest circle--the leg bonfire--and began chasing after the car.

Kevin's heart was pounding with fear, and he watched the men and women run after them, breasts and erections bouncing as legs pumped unnaturally fast. The blank expressions on their faces had been replaced by intimidating looks of grim determination, and he was suddenly certain that the revelers would catch them. They'd be yanked out of the car and torn apart, their body segments burned in the appropriate bonfire as drunken partyers danced.

Then Penelope slammed on the brakes, spun the car around, and they were off, speeding back down the highway the way they'd come, their pursuers fading into specks behind him.

Kevin coughed. The smoke from the bodies had seeped into the car, and it was nauseating. He pinched his nostrils shut, trying to breathe only through his mouth, but he could taste the horrid smoke in his throat, and he started to gag.

Penelope reached over, turned on the air conditioner. "It's pretty bad,"

she said.

But she wasn't having a hard time breathing, he noticed. The smoke didn't seem to have affected her at all.

He breathed in the cold, filtered air, and his nausea passed.

The car slowed as they reached the intersection at which they'd gotten on the highway. "What now?" Penelope asked.

"I don't know," he said. "We could try going north, but I bet both ends of the valley are blocked off."

"Then we're trapped here. We can't get out."

"How about one of the back roads?" Kevin suggested. "What about sneaking through Wooden Valley and circling back to Vallejo? Or taking Carneros into Sonoma?"

"We could try it," she said. "But I don't think we should hold our breath."

"If not, what then?"

She shrugged. "Hike out? I don't know. We'll figure something out when we get to that point."

They were both right. The highway was blocked by another pileup of vehicles just above Calistoga, and both the road to Sonoma and the various westbound side roads they attempted to navigate had been turned into heavily guarded obstacle courses.

"These people may be wasted," Kevin said after they'd narrowly avoided an ambush on the road to Lake Berry essa, "but they're organized."

"It's Dion," Penelope said. "He doesn't want me to leave."

The hairs prickled on the back of Kevin's neck.

They were both silent after that, driving back down to the highway, on the watch for attackers and pursuers. What was Dion like now? Kevin wondered. Would he recognize their previous relationships with him?

Would he let them go if he caught them because of that past association?

Or was all that forgotten history? Was Dion gone completely, entirely overtaken by ... Dionysus?

God, that sounded stupid.

A demon he could understand. The spirit of an old murderer even. But a mythical god? It seemed so ludicrous.

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 rming 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. Intellect ally, he'd known what to expect. Penelope had descrit the metamorphosis to him, and he had understood how frightening it had been, had known what Dion had b&-| come, but there was no way to convey in words the sheeifi horrifying alienness of it all. The creature hurrying downl 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 f 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 ~i 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^io 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 go back to the school?"

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 5 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 after noon.

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 thef| Napa Hideaway by four-thirty. They hadn't been able tof find any guns, but Kevin had picked up baseball bats from 1 the supply cage at the Little League diamond, and they'd^ grabbed butcher knives and cleavers from a kitchen store. j| 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.

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.

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, and she looked around the dim room until her eyes found Kevin crouched in front of the boarded window, peering through the slats of the Venetian blinds.

She tiptoed over to where he sat crouched, ducking down next to him.

"What is it?" she whispered.

He shook his head, put a finger to his lips.

She looked at him, on his knees, tightly holding his baseball bat, doing his best to defend them though he was obviously frightened. A tingling feeling passed through her. She should reward him, maybe. Give him a blow job while he waited there.

No!

She inhaled, exhaled. What the hell was she thinking about?

Blood.

Raising herself to the level of the window, Penelope spread apart two of the slats, peeked through the blinds, between the boards. Outside, in the middle of the street, a migrant farmworker had been surrounded by a group of gun-toting women dressed in motley rags. They were passing around a bottle, taking turns shooting at his feet to make him dance. Or shooting at what was left of his feet. For he was attempting to cavort now on what looked like bloody stumps as the women called out the names of various dance steps, laughing.

"Lay low!" Kevin whispered, grabbing Penelope's shoulder and pulling her down. "Don't touch those blinds! They'll see the movement!"

She nodded, followed his lead, peering at an angle through the slats without touching them. The women on the street were shooting again, dancing and whooping as the farmworker fell screaming to his knees.

Their intoxication seemed to come as much from the violence as the alcohol, and the scary thing was that Penelope knew exactly how they felt.

She sat on the floor, facing away from the window, listening but not looking.

She had awakened in the middle of the night with a craving for wine, the smell of fresh blood in her nostrils. She had gotten a drink of water instead and had forced herself to fall back asleep. The blood, she thought now, had come from the bathroom. The woman who'd stayed here before them had probably been menstruating at the time.

How could she smell that, though?

Her senses were becoming heightened.

That was a frightening thought, and she pushed it away.

What were her mothers doing now? she wondered.

Or her mother and her aunts.

That was one thing good that had come out of all of this. She had finally confirmed what she'd known all along--that Mother Felice was her biological mother, her real mother. Despite everything else that had happened, that knowledge made her feel good. The last time she'd seen her mother, she had been naked and covered with blood, but Penelope still had the feeling that after this was all over and done with after the rest of her mothers were dead ~

--the two of them would be together, and it would be different, better, than before. They would be a real family, a regular family, a normal family, and whatever difficulties they might have, whatever problems they might come up against, would be normal problems.

Outside the cabin, there was a shot, a scream, and wild laughter.

Penelope turned toward Kevin. "They killed him," he whispered. "They shot him in the head."

She closed her eyes, feeling sick, seeing in her mindj| the farmworker's bloody, stumpy feet as he tried to danced on the asphalt.

"They're leaving." Kevin remained at the window for a*;i moment, then slumped down, exhaling deeply. "Fuck." >

"What could we have done if they'd come after us?" I Penelope asked, still whispering.

Kevin shook his head. "Pray."

A half hour later, they were clean and combed and had finished their breakfast, such as it was. Kevin was still keeping watch on the window, but the women had not come back and the street outside remained empty save for the corpse of the farmworker.

Penelope forced herself to smile. "So what are we going to do today?

Have a picnic? Hit the mall?"

"We should try to get out of here," he suggested. "Out of the valley."

"We tried," she said. "We failed."

"Well, we can't just sit here and wait and ... and hope that someone comes to rescue us."

"We could find someone to help us."

Kevin snorted. "Yeah. Right." He was silent for a moment, thinking, then a look of hope passed over his features. He turned toward Penelope. "Mr.

Holbrook. He knows about things like this. We could find him, see if there's any way he can help us. His address is probably in the phone book."

Penelope blinked dumbly.

"He knows a lot about Greek mythology," Kevin continued. "Maybe he can figure out something that can get us out of this."

She shook her head. "I don't want to see him. I don't like him. He's creepy."

"Creepy or not, we don't have much choice. And he can't be any creepier than the other shit we've seen."

"If he's still here," she pointed out. "Or if he isn't one of them. Or dead."

Kevin was obviously excited. "We'll wait a little while longer, make sure no one else is out there, then we'll haul out to the car and get out of here." He started opening the dresser drawers, looking for a phone book. "Start packing our stuff.

We need to be ready to roll."

Penelope thought of arguing, then nodded, saying nothing. She walked into the bathroom, where she began filling up empty sports bottles with tap water. She stopped after the second bottle, looked at herself in the mirror above the sink.

Holbrook.

Logically, it sounded good, but the thought of going out to look for the teacher gave her an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wished she could be as optimistic about this as Kevin was, but the idea didn't sit well with her. She told herself that she was being stupid and paranoid, but she knew that she wasn't, and the worry showed on her face. The face staring back at her looked scared.

She glanced away from the mirror, picked up another bottle, filled it up.

Outside, there was a different feeling in the air, a different emotional atmosphere. Both of them felt it. It was subtle, indefinable, but there, a tangible presence, not merely her own altered perception. She felt nervous, anxious, as though there was a wildness within her struggling to break out--or, more accurately, a wildness without her that was struggling to break in. There were still no people on the street, but the sense that there were no rules of behavior, no boundaries, that everything was acceptable, anything goes, was alive and well and struggling for supremacy with the ordinary values inside both of them.

She could see it in Kevin's face, could feel it in herself.

In the sky above, an airplane, a jumbo jet, flew from east to west, toward the ocean. It was strange to realize that everything that was happening down here was merely a two-second blip on the ground to the people in the airplane. If they blinked, they'd miss the valley. While she and Kevin were desperately trying to escape the hellhole that Napa had become, those people would be served free drinks from the stewardess as they settled in to watch their in-flight movie in air-conditioned comfort.

But how long before all this spread? How long befo it affected Sonoma?

Vallejo? San Francisco?

She didn't want to think about it.

They loaded their supplies in the trunk of the car, thenfj got in, Kevin driving.

He looked down at the page he'd torn out of the phonel book. "Palmer,"

he said. "That means we'll have to go| through downtown." He glanced over at Penelope. "Don't | worry. We'll make it."

Penelope looked out the windshield of the car at the bloody body of the footless farmworker. "I hope so," she; said.

He started the ignition, put the car into gear, and pulled onto the street. "I just hope he's there and alive and not one of them."

Holbrook's house was a nondescript crackerbox on a street of small, identical subdivision houses.

Kevin was not sure what he had expected, but it had not been this. Hell, Holbrook's house was even shittier than his own. He thought of Holbrook lecturing at the front of the class, giving grades, meting out punishment, and it was hard to reconcile that figure of authority and respect with a man who lived in this small, slightly rundown home.

He parked the car by the curb in front of the house and got out, leaving the engine on. He grabbed one of his screwdrivers from the storage space on the side of the door. "Same deal," he told Penelope. "Be ready to take off. I'll go up and check things out, and if something's wrong, I'll speed back, hop in, and we'll haul ass."

Penelope smiled. "You don't want me to take off without you this time, huh?"

"Fuck no!" He grinned. "I must've been crazy."

"There's a lot of that going around."

They both laughed.

"Okay," Kevin said. "I'm--"

"What are you doing out there in the street? Get inside!"

Kevin looked up, startled by the sound of the voice. Over the roof of the car, he saw Holbrook standing in the open doorway of his house, holding a shotgun.

"Get your asses in here!" the teacher roared.

Penelope looked toward Kevin, panicked.

"Now! Before they see you!"

She opened the door of the car and got out, hurrying across the lawn toward Holbrook. Kevin sped around the front of the car and passed her, clutching his screwdrive ... just in case. Holbrook's fear and concern indicat< that he was probably all right, but they couldn't afford to| take any chances.

The teacher raised the shotgun to his shoulder, andl Kevin's heart lurched in his chest--it was a trap! the basf tard was going to blow them away!--but he stopped in front of the stoop, screwdriver outstretched. "Are youf drunk?" he demanded.

Holbrook lowered the shotgun, smiled grimly. "Well, I guess that answers that question. I think we're all okayij here." He moved to the side, holding the door open. "Get; inside. Quickly."

Penelope moved up the stoop and past him, into the; house. Kevin started to follow, then realized that the car's"; engine was still running. He turned, sprinting back out to : the street.

"Hey!" Holbrook yelled.

"The car!" Kevin yelled back. He reached the vehicle, opened the door, threw himself across the seat, and switched off the ignition, turning and pulling out the key. Closing the car door behind him, he hurried back to where Holbrook stood frowning.

The teacher grabbed his arm as he started to walk into the house. "What were you doing? You could've been killed."

Kevin yanked his arm out of the man's grasp. "There's no one on your street. And that running engine was a red flag to every psycho out there. Besides, I don't want anyone stealing my car." He looked into Holbrook's eyes. "I'm going to need it."

"Get inside."

Penelope was standing just inside the living room, looking uncertainly around. Holbrook closed the door, locked it, started throwing a series of dead bolts. Kevin wished that Penelope had grabbed a weapon before leaving the car.

Holbrook put down his shotgun, resting it against the wall next to the door. He turned toward Penelope. "The Daneam women brought back Dionysus, didn't they?"

Kevin stared at him, shocked, "How--" he began.

"They're meanads."

"I know that," Kevin said. "But how did you know that?"

Holbrook ignored him. "Did you help them?" he asked Penelope.

She shook her head.

"Do you know how they did it?"

She looked away, looked toward Kevin, didn't answer.

"Come on, then," Holbrook said. "I have something to show you." He walked past them, through the living room into a short hallway. He opened what looked like a closet door next to the bathroom to reveal a narrow staircase leading down. "Down here."

Kevin followed the teacher, Penelope behind him. He caught her eye as he turned around, saw her trepidation. He felt more than a little apprehensive about going in here himself, but he continued down the stairs, following Holbrook.

The narrow stairwell opened into a room that was easily half as big as the entire house above.

"Jesus," Kevin said. He looked around. The entire basement was filled with ancient artifacts and poster sized photos of friezes. Graphs and charts had been tacked up next to photographs of Greek ruins and historical sights, and everywhere were piles of books and papers.

Against the far wall was what looked like a Greek shrine, or a high school drama department's conception of a Greek shrine. It was rough and amateurish, its pillars made of grey papier mache, and appeared to be only half finished.

Holbrook walked over to a desk on which a battered computer terminal was flanked by two giant stacks of notebooks. He picked up the top notebook, fished a pen out from under the papers that covered the rest of the desk, and turned toward Penelope, opening the notebook to a blank page.

"It's Dion, isn't it? Dion Semele?"

She nodded. "Tell me how it happened. Tell me everything you know. Start from the beginning."

She did.

Kevin had heard it before, but the story was just as horrifying and unbelievable the second time. Holbrook listened silently, intently, scribbling furiously in his notebook.

"Fascinating." The teacher continued to write after Penelope had finished talking. "So the gods hid inside genes and chromosomes. In DNA." He shook his head, smiled to himself. "This could be the origin of Jung's conception of the universal archetype, the collective unconscious. Perhaps this is where the concept that God is to be found within us got started--"

"Write a paper later," Kevin said. "Jesus, there are people dying out mere. We don't have time to sit around playing little mind games."

"These 'little mind games' are what's going to save your ass." Holbrook turned back toward Penelope. "You don't know what they were chanting when they were anointing Dion with the blood?"

She shook her head. "Not really."

"That's too bad. If you did, we might be able to reverse the process. As it is ..." He trailed off.

"Can he be killedr Kevin asked.

Penelope looked from Holbrook to Kevin. "Killed?" she said, her voice rising.

Kevin could not meet her eyes. "Can he?"

The teacher nodded slowly. "I think so. But I don't know for sure. I

suppose we should be thankful that the first god to come back is a god of flesh. It increases our odds greatly. Dionysus is also a cyclical god. Like the other agricultural gods which sprang up in his wake, his life parallels the cycle of nature, in his case, the grape, the vine. He lives and blooms, withers and dies, is reborn again next season."

"Then he should be dying pretty soon," Kevin said. "The season's over for this year, I think." He glanced toward Penelope for confirmation, but she would not look at him.

"Perhaps not." Holbrook walked to the other side of the basement and from between two piles of books produced a Mcdonald's cup in which a twig was half immersed in water. He brought the cup over, pointed at a sprout of green on the side of the otherwise brown twig. "Look at that," he said. "What do you see?"

Kevin shrugged. "A bud."

"Yes. A grape vine. Blooming. In the late fall. Do you know what that means?"

Kevin shook his head.

"The cycles have changed, to coincide with Dionysus' rebirth." He put the cup down on the desk. "I don't know how far this phenomenon extends, whether it's only here in the valley, whether it's everywhere, but the vine is supposed to be dying now, to be reborn in spring." He stopped, staring into space for a moment, then began writing in his notebook again. "I never thought of that before. Dionysus and Siva."

"What?"

"Siva, or Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and regeneration. Siva has many parallels with Dionysus. Maybe they're the same god, different name."

"Who gives a shit?" Kevin said. "Jesus. We came to you for some help."

Penelope cleared her throat. When she spoke, her voice was quieter than it had been before. "How will he die?" she asked.

Holbrook looked at her. "He'll be torn apart."

"Oh, God."

"Maybe we can speed up the season somehow," Kevin suggested. "Once he's dead, maybe the rest of them'11--"

"What are you talking about?" Penelope demanded. "That's Dion! Your friend!"

"It's not Dion," Kevin said. "Dion's dead."

"No, he's not. He's in there. Trying to get out."

Kevin shook his head, resigned. "It doesn't really matter anyway, does it? Even if we kill him, he'll only be reborn again next season."

"Then he'll be dead. Dionysus might be reborn, but Dion won't. If we kill him now, we'll be killing Dion."

Holbrook closed his notebook. "You're right. You're both right. It's possible that Dionysus can't be permanently killed. But the form he has taken can be. And if he was driven into dormancy for thousands of years, he can be driven so again."

"How?" Kevin asked.

"I don't know yet. But for all these centuries Dionysusl has been like a seed waiting for the right soil. And that! soil was Dion. If we can destroy this incarnation, it mig be centuries before another compatible host can be foundi again."

Kevin took a deep breath. He realized that his hands were shaking, and he slipped them into the front pockets of his jeans to steady them.

"What about God? Our God? What's He doing? Why doesn't He do something about this? Have we been worshiping the wrong god all this time? Was He something we just made up?"

Mr. Holbrook shook his head. "God's real. At least, / think He's real.

But I also think that we can't and shouldn't count on Him for help. He doesn't intervene in wars, He doesn't stop natural disasters, He doesn't halt the spread of disease. These are all problems we must deal with ourselves. And I think this is the same way. You know, we refer to Dionysus and the other Old World dieties as 'gods,' and perhaps to us they are. But I don't think they're gods in the true sense of the word.

I don't think they're omnipotent. The myths, in fact, tell us that they're not. I think they're beings or creatures with powers greater than our own, but I do not think that their power can be measured against that of a true god, against ... well, God."

"So they're, like, demons. Monsters."

"Yes."

For the first time since entering the basement, they were all silent.

Kevin watched Holbrook as he put his notebook back on the desk. Penelope was right, he thought. There was something creepy about Holbrook, something secretive and unsettling. And though he didn't doubt that the teacher was on their side in all of this, that he was one of them and not one of them, he didn't feel comfortable being down here alone with the man. He wished there was another adult around. Or at least another male. Penelope was fine, but, sexist as it was, he'd feel a hell of a lot better if there was another guy here with them.

She'd probably kick him in the nuts if she knew he thought that.

He smiled to himself, then glanced over at Penelope. She did not smile back at him, but she did not turn away this time, and the look that passed between them told him that she was not angry with him, that everything was okay.

Once again he found himself glancing around the basement. His gaze alighted on a large urn, a carved marble vessel on which nymphs and satyrs frolicked between Doric columns. He turned toward Holbrook, about to ask about the photos, the artifacts, the shrine, this whole strange Grecophile basement, but Penelope beat him to it.

"So what," she asked, gesturing around the room, "is all this?"

Holbrook looked up. "All what?"

"All this ... Greek mythological stuff."

Mr. Holbrook smiled proudly. "I knew this day was coming. I was preparing."

Kevin snorted. "Boy, you're a regular Sherlock Holmes, aren't you?"

Penelope ignored him, faced the teacher. "You knew this was coming? What made you think so?"

"Dion's last name. Semele. That's why I asked you about your name and your mothers and your wine. Semele was a Theban princess, the daughter of Cadmus, who was consumed by fire when she beheld Zeus in all his glory. Dionysus is the son of Zeus and Semele."

Penelope stared at him incredulously. "And that was what made you think this might happen? Dion's last name?"

"Your last name. 'Daneam.' It's 'maenad' spelled backward."

Penelope was silent. She obviously had not noticed that.

"So?" Kevin said.

"This didn't come out of nowhere. They've been preparing for this for centuries." He paused. "As have we."

Kevin's uneasiness increased, and he moved next to Penelope. "We?"

The teacher stood straighten "The Ovidians." He looked at them proudly.

"Mankind's protectors against the gods."

Kevin looked at Penelope, but her eyes remained fixe on Holbrook.

"Our order was originally formed to prevent gods meddling in the affairs of men. In ancient Greece, during the time of the gods, they were always raping our woe playing with us, using us to combat the boredom of imf mortality. We attempted to put a stop to that."

"Godbusters," Kevin said.

"If you like."

"Ovidians," Penelope said. "After Ovid?"

"Yes."

"I thought he was the one who wrote down the myths -j and, you know, saved them for posterity."

"He was a Latin chronicler of the gods, but he thought ^ it was all nonsense. We'd been around a few hundred* years by that time, but we didn't really have a name for j ourselves. It was Ovid's disparagement of the gods, his insistence that these were fictional tales, not factual recountings of actual events, that further weakened people's already waning belief. We named ourselves after] him. He wasn't one of us, but he furthered our cause."

Kevin looked at the teacher. "You guys wanted to get I rid of all of the gods? There weren't any of them you liked?" ;

Holbrook leaned forward. "They're evil. All of them.": He gestured around the basement, at the pictures on the walls. "People think that the ancients lived an idyllic life in a golden age, that they were enlightened, intelligent men who lived happily amidst their temples and oracles. But do you know what horrors the gods perpetrated on men? We were slaves. They were masters. And they enjoyed that They thrived on it Our order grew out of the resistance to them."

"So you're the ones who killed them off?"

Holbrook shook his head. "I wish I could say we were, but no. We tried to foster disbelief, and it was disbelief that eventually weakened them to the point that they were forced to go into hiding and protect themselves before they faded away entirely. Ovid was a big help with that. But no, it was probably the emergence of Christianity, more than anything else, that caused people to stop believing in the old gods."

"But your group kept on?" Penelope said.

"We knew they'd be back. We didn't know how, didn't know where, didn't know when, but as long as the maenads and the other believers survived, we knew the gods weren't dead."

"So was, like, your dad an Ovidian?" Kevin asked. "And his dad? All the way back?"

"No. I mean, yes, my dad was, but his dad wasn't. Being an Ovidian is not a hereditary thing. You're not born into it. Usually we recruit."

Holbrook sat down on the swivel chair in front of his computer terminal.

"We keep in touch through an online network." He reached around to the back of the machine, turned it on.

"But the phone lines are down ..."

"Yes. We can't communicate now. But I'm sure they know what's happening.

Right now I'm trying to access the Ovidian database. I knew this would happen, so last week I down loaded everything I thought I'd need."

Holbrook's smug, I-knew-this-was-going-to-happen attitude was really starting to irritate the shit out of him, and Kevin nudged Penelope. She did not turn to look at him, but nodded as though she understood why he had elbowed her.

"The other gods," Holbrook said to Penelope. "You did not say how the other gods will be revived. Or how long it would take."

Penelope cleared her throat. "My mothers said that the other gods ..."

She trailed off, redness rushing to her face. "They said the other gods are in Dion too. And that if I had sex with him, I could give birth to them."

"Dionysus is supposed to father the others?" Holbrook smiled. "We may have gotten a break here."

"Why?" Kevin asked.

"He was always something of an outcast on Olympus. The other gods loved order and symmetry. Dionysus loved chaos. He might not be so willing to bring the others back." He typed something on his keyboard. "Dion's mother is a maenad too, right?"

Penelope nodded.

"Same parents as your mothers?"

"Same father. Different mothers."

He raised his eyebrows. "Father. That's new. yob wouldn't happen to know this name, would you?"

"My mother told me, but I ... I can't remember."

"Think."

"She said ..." Penelope thought for a moment. "Harl ris," she said finally. "Harris. Son of Elsmere. Whateve that means."

"Harris," Holbrook repeated, typing. "Elsmere." He| pushed a series of keys, then leaned back to wait. Therel was a moment of clicking and humming before a fullf page of text appeared on the screen. "Harris Naxos," read, scanning the display. "He was found murdered inl his town house in New York, torn apart, along with the| bodies of four women who'd been drowned in his base-f ment. The women had been chained up and had all recently given birth, although none of the infants well&ij found. Harris' mother, Elsmere, was a known maenad^f Emigrated from Greece. We knew about her, apparently^ but since she'd given birth to a son, not a daughter, wej concentrated our efforts at that time on keeping track of the maenad Ariadne and her children in Athens.*!

Holbrook looked up from the screen. "If we'd known alf| this then, we could have killed Harris. And the babiesf too."

Kevin was chilled. He glanced at Penelope. Her facef was pale. "You would have killed the babies?"

"Maenads, as we have always advocated, need to be! eradicated. Only then will the threat of the gods' return bej ended. We haven't always been able to manage it, ofj course, but when we can ..." His attention returned to the; screen. "We got Ariadne. And her children when they grew up."

"What about me?" Penelope demanded angrily. "Do Ij need to be 'eradicated' too?" She grabbed the back of his| chair, swung it around until he was facing her.

He shook his head. "Of course not. You're more us! than them. And as long as you don't procreate--"

She backed away from him.

"No, no. I'm not saying that we would automatically have to kill your child--"

"Shut up," Kevin told him. "Just shut your fucking mouth." He put an arm around Penelope, drew her close to him. Her body was stiff, her muscles tense, but she allowed herself to be maneuvered.

They were silent for a while, Holbrook reading the information on his computer screen, Kevin holding Penelope.

"So what about your buddies?" Kevin asked. "Are they flying in to help us?"

"No."

"No? I thought you said--"

"They don't know anything's wrong. I didn't have time to warn them before communications were cut off. They may figure it out on their own, but it might take a while." He paused. "It might be too late then."

"Are there any Ovidians in Napa?" Kevin asked. "You guys are spread out all over the world, but is there anybody here in the valley besides you?"

"Of course. This is one of the locations we've been monitoring."

"Then what are. we doing here? Get off your lazy ass and find them."

"They're dead."

"How do you know?"

"We were supposed to meet here if anything happened. It's been two days.

No one's showed."

"They might've--"

"They're dead."

The flat certainty of the statement cut off Kevin in mid sentence, hanging heavily in the air between them.

"So what's your plan?" Kevin asked finally. "What are we going to do now? How are we going to get out of this?"

"We'll have to think of something."

"You'll have to think of something?" Penelope said, her voice rising.

Kevin glared at him. "You mean to tell me that your little group's been around for centuries and your sole purpose is to put a stop to this--and you never came up with a plan?"

"We have ideas--"

"Ideas? Shit! You should have plan A, B, C, D, all the way to fucking Z!

You've certainly had enough time to think about it. Did you think that just knowing it was going to happen was enough? You'd just wing it from there?"

Holbrook was not on the defensive. "Actually, we had planned to prevent the resurrection from occurring."

"Well, you totally failed at that. Did you think that asking Penelope for a bottle of wine was an attempt to stop it?"

"You're right. I should've killed her mothers years ago, when I first found out."

Penelope sucked in her breath.

"I should have killed Dion the first day of class."

Penelope whirled around, strode out of the basement, stomped up the stairs. Kevin hurried after her, only a second or two behind.

Downstairs, at his desk, Holbrook laughed.

The two of diem stopped in the living room, unsure of where to go or what to do.

"I always knew Holbrook was an asshole," Kevin said. "But I never knew he was so ..."

"Weird?" Penelope said.

"Crazy."

She nodded. "You don't think about what teachers are like in their real lives, what they do at home, on the weekends, with their families."

Kevin gestured back toward the basement. "Now we know."

Penelope shivered. "I think we should leave. I think we'd be better off on our own."

Kevin nodded toward the shotgun, still leaning against the wall next to the door. "He's better armed than we are."

"That won't mean shit."

"Then what do you suggest we do?"

"I don't know."

"He knows more than we do," Kevin said. "Maybe he can figure something out."

Penelope snorted. "Yeah."

"The basement's a good hiding place."

She shook her head. "You don't understand ..."

"What don't I understand?" Kevin said.

She sighed. "It doesn't matter."

"I think we should stay here. At least for now. Until we figure out a plan. It's better than being out there on the streets."

Penelope sat down heavily on the couch. "Whatever," she said.

The earth rumbled beneath their feet, a low, sustained vibration that was more than a sonic boom but less than an earthquake. Downstairs, Holbrook cried out as something crashed.

"What was that?" Kevin asked, frightened.

"Power." Penelope's mouth was set in a thin, grim line. "The power of the gods."

He dreamed of Penelope.

They were in school, the two of them, in a classroom, though the teacher and the other students were vague, misty figures and he could not see them. He saw only Penelope. She was talking to him about a movie she'd seen on television the night before, and he was listening happily, glad merely to be there with her, to be able to enjoy these simple everyday pleasures with her.

Dionysus awoke, tears streaming down his face.

What was wrong with him?

Hangover.

That had to be it, although he had never gotten hangovers in the old days. That physiological inconvenience had been reserved for humans. He had been immune.

Not anymore, apparently.

He wiped his eyes. One of his maenads one of Penelope's mothers --was sleeping between his legs, her hands wrapped around his organ. He thought of pissing on her, but he knew that she'd like that, so he pulled up his leg and kicked her hard in the midsection. She went flying across the grass, landing on an old couple entwined with a goat. He was gratified to hear screams, to hear the crack of old bones.

He stood, strode over the strewn bodies on the grass, and jumped into the river. The cold water felt good, refreshing, "and he washed off the grape stains, washed off the blood. He bent down, dunked his head, let the water clean the tears from his eyes, then stretched to his full height, shaking out his hair.

He looked down at his body. He was smaller than he should be, closer to a human than a god. Before, he had been bigger.

But this new skin was tight, confining. Even his brain felt small. He ran a hand through his hair, looked up into the overcast sky. His thoughts too were confined. He seemed unable to think clearly.

And he was not himself.

That was the most difficult adjustment to make. He knew things that he should not have known, felt things he should not have felt, thought things he should not have thought. He knew this new language, knew this new culture. He had memories of this existence. He had been reborn, but the rebirth had not happened the way he'd thought it would. He closed his eyes. The others would not have this problem. They would be reborn pure, as themselves. He was the only one who would have to suffer this dual existence.

And it was not fair.

It had always been thus. He was forever the outcast, Zeus' whipping boy, forced to endure humiliation after humiliation merely because of the fact that he was half human.

And the fact that he preferred wine to ambrosia.

Those self-important elitists never could understand sensual pleasures, the wonders of the flesh. Or perhaps they could, on a purely intellectual level. But they could never feel it.

He could.

And they were jealous of that.

And they took it out on him.

He walked out of the river, back onto the bank. He was supposed to mate with Penelope, who would bring forth from her golden womb the remaining gods. He desperately wanted to mate with her--a combination, he knew, of his own sexual desires and Zeus' subliminal prodding --but he was not at all sure that he wanted to share this world with the others. This was his world now, his alone, and he liked it that way. There was no reason he should share. He was as powerful as the other gods and more versatile in a lot of respects. He could assume their duties. He could take over Poseidon's role as ruler of the seas. That was a part-time job to begin with. And Ares?| Who couldn't wage war? A moron could handle that.

What about an underworld? That was a much bigger re-1 sponsibility.

Could he maintain that?

There was only one way to find out.

He looked around, finally focusing his attention on the < land across the river. Drawing upon the power within,: him, he loosed a withering blast of heat and fire at the location. The land scorched, burned, and was changed. In place of the trees and bushes, lawns and houses, there was charred earth and burnt air. The perfect environment for the dead.

But how to effect the dead's transition?

He glanced about him. To his left, on a slab of concrete, was the mutilated body of a young man, someone's used plaything. Grinning, Dionysus walked over and picked up the man's corpse, raising it to the level of his face. He held the body and concentrated.

The man's glazed eyes blinked, his mouth worked silently. His stiffened limbs moved slowly, with effort, the jelled blood in his joints flowing slowly across the cold skin.

Yes.

He could maintain an underworld too.

He threw the corpse across the river. It bounced against a burnt tree, cracking a branch, then stood awkwardly. The dead man remained unmoving for a moment, then shambled dumbly into the smoke away from the water.

Fuck the others. Fuck Zeus. Fuck Hera. Fuck Athena. Fuck Apollo. Fuck all of them! This was his world now. He did not need them.

He would not bring them back.

The clocks had stopped. All of them. Penelope thought at first that it was merely electric clocks that were not working, but battery-powered watches, wind-up alarm clocks, every timepiece in the house was now functionally dead.

Power had gone out sometime last night, although the water was still on.

Thank God. She didn't relish the idea of not bathing, of not having a toilet that flushed.

But power? Water? Those were minor inconveniences.

The clocks worried her.

She might have imagined it, but last night had seemed unusually long, much longer than it should have, and she could not help wondering if Dion Dionysus --had somehow affected time, had somehow altered the normal laws of physics. She thought of the bolt of power she'd seen shooting into the sky from the meadow that first night, and she had no trouble believing that he could do it.

Maybe he was planning to shorten the days, lengthen the nights. Maybe everything here in the valley would happen in the rest of the world's split second.

There was a sharp knock at the front door.

She glanced quickly toward Kevin, who was lying on the floor, reading a mythology textbook. He scrambled to his feet, looking as panicked as she felt.

Holbrook came rushing out of the kitchen, motioning for them to lay low.

He grabbed his shotgun. "Stay down!" he ordered.

There was another series of knocks.

Penelope hit the floor, crawling next to Kevin as she watched Holbrook first peek through the closed living room curtains, then hurry over and open the front door.

"Jack!" the teacher said. He ushered in another man, a short-haired, stern-faced, well-built, middle-aged man wearing the tattered remnants of a dark blue suit. The two of them gave each other what looked like some sort of secret handshake, a ritualized greeting that involved twisting thumbs and touching elbows.

Another Ovidian.

Penelope rose to her knees, then stood, as did Kevin.

Holbrook led the man into the living room. v "Jack, these are two of my students: Penelope Daneam and Kevin Something-or-other."

"Harte," Kevin said.

"Daneam?" Jack's eyebrows went up.

"Their daughter."

"And you are?" Kevin said.

"Jack Hammond. Napa P. D."

A cop! Penelope smiled, filled with relief and a buoyed sense of hope.

"Thank God you're here."

"Are you a maenad?" Jack asked her.

The relief died as quickly as it had flared. There was a flat coldness in the cop's eyes, a studied detachment in the way he looked at her that made her extremely uneasy.

"She's one of us," Holbrook said. "I think we can use her to get him."

Use her.

She moved closer to Kevin. She didn't like the way this conversation was going.

"So where are the rest of you?" Kevin asked. "Is this "I it?"

Jack nodded, and the coldness in his face fled, replaced by a weariness that looked closer to exhaustion. She suddenly noticed that there were bruises on his skin, dull splashes of dried blood on his torn suit.

"I couldn't get here right away," he said. "So I holed up in the H. Q."

"Were any of the others there?" Holbrook asked.

"They were all there. They'd been slaughtered. Mike was naked and drenched with wine--it looked like he'd been trying to pass--but he'd been killed just like the rest of them." He took a deep breath. "Their heads had been switched."

"Bastards," Holbrook breathed.

"They were still outside, and I only had one round in my revolver, so I

stayed there, hid. This was the first day I thought it was safe to come out."

Penelope was extremely uncomfortable. She wasn't sure if Jack--or Holbrook and Jack--blamed her in any way for what had happened, but she felt guilty nevertheless, as though she was a spy in the enemy camp.

She wasn't a spy, though. She was on their side.

She was a traitor.

"Did you save your toga?" Holbrook asked.

Jack shook his head. "Nothing."

"That's okay. I have an extra one for you. Come on."

The two of them walked down the hallway to the basement door, started down.

Penelope looked at Kevin, standing next to her. He shook his head.

"Somehow, I don't think that, in this instance, two heads are better than one."

"Maybe we should get out of here," she suggested.

"And go where? Did you see the way that guy was beat up? And he's a cop!" He shook his head. "It's dangerous out there."

"Holbrook said they could 'use' me."

"I didn't like that either," Kevin admitted.

"What do you think they plan to do?"

"From everything I can tell, they don't have any plans at all."

"What are we going to do?"

Kevin shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know."

Jack didn't turn out to be all that bad.

He was a cop, of course, a conservative, hard-nosed kind of guy, but that cold steeliness she'd sensed in their first meeting seemed to have been the result of stress and hunger and lack of sleep. Rested, fed, and relaxed, he seemed nicer than Holbrook and infinitely more human, and she and Kevin found that they were able to get along with him quite easily.

She glanced over at Jack, curled up on the coucl sleeping. Kevin was sitting on the floor, leaning agains the opposite wall, reading one of Holbrook's texts. Thej teacher, as always, was down in his basement.

They were all starting to get a little stir crazy, starting! to act a little funny, and Penelope wondered, not for the J first time, if it might not have been better if they'd stayed"! outside, roamed around in the car, and not holed them-;f selves up in here. She thought of all of those shut-ins who received their impressions of the world solely through television. They watched the newscasts, watched the news magazines, watched the based-onatrue-story made-for-television movies, they saw shootings and rapes and robberies, an they were convinced that the world outside their doors was filled with danger, that violent death lurked around every corner. Paranoia fed upon itself, and she wondered if they weren't doing the same thing here, blockading themselves in Holbrook's house as they talked and worried about and demonized the frightening outside world.

But it was hard to demonize a world that had real demons in it.

Or gods.

What was Dionysus exactly? God? Monster? It was more comforting to think of him as some sort of monster or demon. She could imagine going up against that.

It was harder to think about fighting a god.

Kevin put down his book, stood, stretched. He glanced over at Jack sleeping on the couch, then silently motioned for Penelope to follow him into the kitchen.

She looked again at the stopped clock above the dead television, then, walked out of the living room. Kevin was already peeking through the curtains that covered the window above the sink. "Anyone out there?" she asked.

He shook his head.

There had been earlier. A gang of wasted teenagers, dressed only in the bloody skins of domestic animals, had chased a herd of naked old men down the street using pistols and bullwhips. One old man had tripped and fallen, and they'd whipped him and trampled him, the last two kids in the pack picking the old man up by his legs and dragging him behind them as they disappeared from sight.

His head had left a bloody streak on the pavement.

Kevin turned away from the window. "I'm tired of being cooped up in here."

Penelope shrugged. "Who isn't?"

"I feel like I'm wasting my time, like I should be doing something." He waved toward the world outside the window. "You know things aren't slowing down out there."

"No," Penelope admitted.

"We need to do something before it's too late."

"It's probably already too late." She walked over to the cupboard, got out a can of warm 7-Up, sat down at the kitchen table.

Kevin sat next to her. He was silent for a moment. "So what were they like?" he asked finally.

"Who? My mothers?"

"Yeah." He paused. "Before."

She shrugged. "All right, I guess. I don't ..." She shook her head apologetically. "I don't really know what you mean."

"I mean, were they, like, good parents? Did they read your report cards?

Did they go to Open House? Did they make sure you brushed your teeth and ate properly?"

"Yes," she said. "They were good parents." And felt an involuntary twinge of sadness at the thought.

"Were they, like, radical lesbians?"

Penelope felt heat rush to her face.

"Was it 'herstory' instead of 'history' and all that?"

"No. Besides, those words come from different roots. 'History' is not 'his story.' It comes from the Greek 'historia,' which means 'inquiry."

"His' isn't even Greek. It comes from 'he,' which is Old English."

He looked at her, surprised. "Where'd you learn that?"

She licked her lips nervously. "I don't know," she admitted.

They were silent for a moment. "You're a little spooky yourself sometimes," Kevin said.

Penelope nodded. "I know."

They looked at each other across the table, and for the first time Penelope felt as though she was in one of those movie situations. He looked as though he was about take her hand, or reach over and hug her. And she ized that she would let him.

Jack walked through the door.

"Hey," he said.

"About time," Kevin told him.

The mood was broken. If it had been there at all. Peneml ope picked up her 7-Up, took a sip.

They needed to get out of this house. If they spentl another day in here, all four x)f them would end upjj fucking each other in one huge daisy chain.

She closed her eyes, tried to push the thought out of he head.