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 mythologi? . 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 st
reet, 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—”
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