Bentley Little - Dominion

"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."