Bentley Little - Dominion

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.