Bentley Little - Dominion

Holbrook snorted. "All be over? What are they going to do? Bomb Napa?

Shoot Dionysus down like Godzilla? We're the minority here. Most of the people are with him. Do you know how long people like that can hold out?

Look at Bosnia The siege of Leningrad. Hell, history is riddled with stories of small groups of true believers who were able to outlast the attacks of the majority."

"What if my mothers find out we're here?" Penelope asked. "What if they discover where we're hiding? Where I'm hiding?"

There was a note of grim satisfaction in Holbrook's voice. "I'll blow those bitches away."

"Why wait for them to come here?" Kevin asked. "Why don't you go out and hunt them down?"

"I've been thinking that's exactly what we should do," Holbrook said.

They were silent after that, and Penelope heard first Kevin's, then Jack's, and finally Holbrook's breathing shift into the regular rhythms of sleep.

It was a long time before she herself drifted off.

She woke up thirsty. It was still dark out, still night, and the others were dead asleep around her. Her mouth was dry, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she desperately needed a drink of water.

Carefully, quietly, she drew the covers off her and slipped out of bed, tiptoeing around Holbrook's sleeping bag and Kevin's mattress on the floor, using the wall to feel her way out of the room and into the hall.

Still touching the wall, she reached the doorway of the bathroom. She was about to walk in, shut the door, and turn on the light in order to get a drink out of the sink when she heard noises from the front of the house.

Pounding.

And laughing.

People were at the door, trying to get in.

She stopped moving, held her breath. There was no sound from the bedroom, the others were still asleep. She knew she should go back, wake them up, but she thought of Holbrook shooting first, asking questions later, and she decided to take a peek herself first, just in case. Maybe these were people like them, victims.

Then why were they laughing?

Her eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, and she walked slowly out toward the living room. She knew she was being stupid. This was what she complained about idiot characters doing in horror movies--going off to search for the monster by themselves--and though logically she knew that it was a foolish thing to do, it seeme normal, felt natural.

The laughter was calling to her, she realized, beckoning her. She should be worried about that, but she wasn't. She was scared, she was frightened, but she wasn't worried, j She walked into the living room.

The laughing was! louder here. She could hear the door being pounded uponf by several sets of hands, and the noise chilled her. The! living room was dark, and she could see only the vague? outlines of furniture.

Unthinkingly, almost against her!

conscious will, she walked across the carpeted floor toll the door.

Why weren't the others waking up?

She thought of screaming to get their attention, but she j didn't. She thought of picking up the shotgun next to the! door, but she didn't.

She reached for the first dead bolt.

The laughter was constant, at once feminine and masculine, innocent and knowing, and it remained the same as it traveled from one voice to another. It was like a melody almost, the pounding on the doof like a rhythm.

She opened the door.

She did not even have time to react.

Mother Sheila punched her hard in the stomach as Mother Janine grabbed her by the hair and shoved a hand over her mouth. She was yanked through the doorway and pulled down the front walk to where Mother Margaret waited in front of a brightly painted xvan.

As she was shoved headfirst into the rear of the vehicle, she heard the door to the house slam loudly shut behind her.

Penelope was gone.

Kevin paced the living room as Jack sat silently on the couch. Holbrook remained cross-legged on the floor, cleaning his shotgun.

Where could they have' taken her?

She had been kidnapped. No doubt about that. Holbrook had started to suggest that she had gone with them on her own, that the acorn doesn'f fall far from the tree, but Kevin had threatened to punch him out if he said anything more, and Holbrook had shut up.

It felt weird threatening a teacher, but any ties Holbrook had to respect and educational authority had long since been worn through, and Kevin felt neither guilty nor regretful.

Jack had stayed out of the confrontation entirely.

They were assuming that Penelope's mothers had taken her, or, if they had not done so themselves, that they were behind the people who had. It had been a surgical strike; Penelope had been kidnapped and the rest of them had remained untouched. If it had been a random attack, they all would have been taken. Or killed.

Which meant that Penelope was still alive.

He hoped.

He had no idea where they had taken her, though. That was the most frustrating thing. They could be anywhere "The winery," Jack said.

Kevin stopped pacing, turned toward the policeman. "What?"

"They probably took her home."

Of course. He should have thought of that himself. He stared at Jack.

Had he been thinking aloud?

Or had the policeman just ... known what he was|

thinking? He was being stupid. There was enough to worry about I without reading meaning into coincidence. They had just!

been thinking the same thing at the same time, that's all."

Under the circumstances and given the subject, it wasn't|

unlikely.

"We'll go there," he said. "We'll rescue her."

"How?" Holbrook asked.

Kevin looked down at the teacher. "What?"

"How are you going to rescue her? Walk into that crowd, pass by her mothers, grab her by the arm, and walk out with her?"

"I'll figure out something," Kevin said defensively. "You'd better figure it out ahead of time or they'll rip you to shreds."

"Well, why don't you help then?" Holbrook grinned. "I thought you'd never ask." Kevin faced him. "You have a plan for once?" Holbrook laughed. "That I do," he said. 'That I do."

Penelope awoke on the grass. Her mothers were nowhere to be seen, and she sat up, stood. Her mouth tasted like wine, but, thank God, she was still fully dressed. And there was no blood on her. Whatever had happened, it couldn't have been much.

She smelled sex, though. On the air, in the breeze, on the grass.

And it smelled good.

She turned her head, looking around. She was not in the meadow, in the woods behind the winery, as she would have expected. Her mothers had taken her to the field where the fair had been, leaving her at the perimeter farthest from the road.

She yawned, feeling groggy, dumb, slow. She was not sure what had happened. She could not remember being hypnotized or drugged or knocked out, but her memory of last night seemed to have stopped at the point where her mothers shoved her into the van. She could not recall anything after that.

A leather-clad woman rode past on the back of a nude man fitted with a harness and stirrups. The woman carried in her right hand an assortment of paint brushes, and Penelope watched as she galloped over to a man whose skin had been dyed blue. She handed him the brushes, and he passed them out to a group of children who were helping to paint a monstrous stone phallus that had been embedded in the ground.

Penelope looked around the enormous field, her gaze moving from one grotesque tableau to another. He had organized them. The drunken chaos of the previous days was gone, replaced by an institutionalized insanity, a harnessed altered consciousness. The people she saw were obviously intoxicated, obviously behaving crazily, but there was an overriding rationality behind their individually irrational acts.

And there were thousands of them.