Dominion

by Bentley Little

  fell. There was a group of ants in front of me, on the asphalt, and he turned the ants into men, into warriors. Like the Myrmidons.”

  Holbrook paled. “Myrmidons? But that was Zeus …”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “This is a horse of a different color. I’ve been basing everything on the premise that he is Dionysus and that he suffers from that god’s weaknesses, attributes, and limitations.” He grew silent, thinking.

  “Maybe …” he said finally, “maybe because he has all of those others within him, he has their powers too.”

  “Maybe,” Penelope said.

  “Only I don’t think he knows it. At least not yet. Otherwise, he would have been stretching himself, making use of all of the powers at his disposal.”

  “Maybe he has only limited powers. Maybe he has a little bit from each god, but not everything.”

  “Perhaps,” Holbrook conceded.

  “Maybe I do too.”

  Kevin shook his head. “What?”

  She turned to face him. “Maybe I have power too. I’m the one who’s supposed to give birth to these gods. It’s half him and half me. I’ve been bred for the same thing he has. Maybe I have some of that power in me as well.”

  “But how do we figure out how to use it?”

  The two of them looked toward Holbrook.

  “I don’t think that’s something we should count on,” the teacher said..

  “You haven’t exhibited any unusual abilities yet—”

  “I can smell things I didn’t used to be able to smell,” she said. “My sense of smell seems to have doubled in power. Or tripled.”

  “Hardly a godlike power,” Holbrook said dryly. “Be sides, your mothers apparently performed some sort of ritual with Dion. They didn’t with you.”

  She looked down, nodded. “That’s true.”

  “And, to be honest with you, I wouldn’t know how to bring about your transformation. Assuming you wanted a transformation. Our knowledge is geared more toward protecting humans from gods, not helping people turn into gods.”

  “And you’re doing a fine job,” Kevin said.

  Holbrook glared at him. “You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. And at least I’m not like Jack. Oh, I forgot. He’s an Ovidian too, isn’t he?”

  The teacher’s voice was uncharacteristically quiet. “I made a mistake there.”

  “So what is your plan?” Penelope asked. “How were you planning to rescue me?”

  “It was a catch-22,” Kevin said. “We’d have to kill Dionysus to get the others to stop partying, and we’d have to kill the others in order to get to Dionysus.”

  “So what were you going to do?”

  “Kill your mothers,” Holbrook said.

  Penelope shook her head. “No.”

  “Yes. They’re his cheerleaders. Take them out and the others will fall apart.”

  “But how did you plan to—?”

  “We were going to burn your fucking winery.”

  Penelope was silent.

  “They’d try to save it. Luckily for us, those bitches and all their pals are too drunk to think clearly. They’re not up to using firearms. We are. We’d hide in the bushes and pick them off one by one.”

  Penelope tried to imagine her mothers being shot, tried to imagine bullets hitting them … where? In the head? In the chest? The images in her mind were all too clear. What would happen to them at the last second? What would flash through their brains? Would they think of her?

  She wanted them dead, or at least a part of her did, but she did not want them killed. And she particularly did not want them killed by her mythology teacher.

  And she wanted Mother Felice spared.

  “You can’t kill them,” she said.

  “They might not be human, but they can be killed.”

  “I don’t mean you can’t kill them. I mean, I won’t let you kill them.”

  “Then we either join them or die.”

  “Even if we join them, we might die,” Kevin pointed out. “They have no problems with killing their own.”

  “Maenads do not follow patterns or use reason or act logically. They are completely instinctual, living ids.

  They—”

  “They’re my mothers. They won’t kill me.”

  “But they’ll kill us.”

  “Maybe Kevin’s idea would work. Maybe we could sober everyone up.”

  Holbrook looked at her disdainfully. “And how do you propose we do that?”

  “We cut off their supply of wine.”

  Kevin snorted. “In Napa? Be serious.”

  “Daneam wine. It’s the only wine that matters.” She looked at Holbrook.

  “Right?”

  The teacher nodded reluctantly.

  “You guys were going to set fire to the winery anyway. I say we go ahead with it. They can’t have been thinking logically enough to set aside a separate supply.”

  “She has a point,” Holbrook admitted.

  Kevin stood. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s do it.”

  “Not so fast,” Holbrook said.

  “What do you mean ‘not so fast’? We were just going to go over there and do exactly the same thing.”

  “But we were going to take out her mothers.”

  “This is even better. It’s simpler. We set the place on fire, and we don’t even have to kill anybody.”

  “It’s after noon. Maybe we should wait until tomorrow.”

  “There’s another thing you should probably know,” Penelope said quietly.

  “Everything’s speeded up. A lot more than we thought. There were vines, new vines that they’d planted, and the grapes looked almost ready to harvest.”

  “It’s only been a few days!” Kevin said.

  “Harvest,” Holbrook said. “That was the time of a major festival.”

  “And they’d be able to make more wine,” Kevin added.

  “I can get in there,” Penelope said. “I can light the fuse or whatever it is I have to do. They … trust me. They seem to think I’m one of them. They leave me alone.”

  “All of them?”

  “I don’t know about all of them, but …” She breathed deeply. “I’m a maenad. They can sense it.”

  “Didn’t you say you thought your mothers drugged you or something when they kidnapped you? They obviously knew you weren’t one of them.”

  “I could take a few sips. Pretend to be drunk. It might fool them.”

  “I don’t know,” Holbrook said.

  “We have no alternative.”

  “The grapes grew in two days?”

  Penelope looked at the teacher, nodded.

  “Then we’d better do it.” Holbrook started toward the front door. “Let’s finish loading the car.”

  “Get some food,” Kevin said to Penelope as he moved to follow the teacher outside. “Get something to drink.”

  She smiled wryly. “Got any wine?”

  “Not funny,” he said, walking out the door.

  She hurried into the kitchen. In the suddenly quiet house she could hear Jack screaming in the bedroom. His screams had been there throughout, a muted background babble, but with the other two outside, the noise seemed somehow louder. Penelope could hear Holbrook and Kevin in the garage, talking as they carried boxes to the car, but she was in the house and they weren’t and right now the policeman’s crazed ranting sounded a lot closer than it should.

  And a lot creepier.

  She quickly opened the refrigerator, grabbed a can of Coke and a carton of malted milk balls. Sugar. Quick energy.

  She had time to notice that Holbrook’s refrigerator was filled primarily with sweets and junk food, but then she closed the refrigerator door and hurried outside to get away from the policeman’s incessant cries.

  “So what’s in the boxes?” she asked, walking over ta| the car.

  “Gasoline,” Kevin said. “And rags.”

  “And old newspaper,” Holbroo
k added. “Things that‘11 j burn.”

  She’d been expecting something less slapdash, something more professional, and she was disappointed. “I thought you’d have explosives and stuff.”

  “I’m a teacher, not a terrorist.” Holbrook slammed the trunk of the car.

  “Come on, get in.”

  Penelope looked back at the house. “Should I … you know, lock it?

  Jack—”

  “Just get in. I want to do this quick.”

  Kevin opened the passenger door. “Before you lose your nerve?”

  “Something like that,” Holbrook said. “Get in. Let’s go.”

  The winery was a slaughterhouse.

  Even after all Penelope had seen, she was shocked by the extent of the butchery.

  They had driven straight to the winery. A few of the streets had been blocked, forcing them to detour, but the blockages had been old. There was no new damage, no new fires, and Napa looked like a ghost town, like a bombed-out city after a war, its inhabitants dead or fled. They’d encountered no problems on the road.

  That worried Penelope. They’d seen very few people on the streets in the daytime since Dionysus’ rebirth, but the city had always seemed alive in some twisted, perverted way, the playground of destructive children who were napping and had not yet come out to play.

  But the feeling now was one of abandonment, and she could not help wondering if they had moved on, up the valley, or out of the valley, or if they were simply massing around their god, in preparation perhaps for their harvest festival. She thought the latter more likely, and she hoped and prayed that Dionysus stayed on the site of the fair and did not return to the winery. They needed all the breaks they could get.

  Dionysus.

  She was thinking of him now as Dionysus. Dion was still in there somewhere, but after her encounter with the god, she could no longer think of Dionysus as merely Dion in an altered form.

  This was a separate entity, a being that had usurped Dion’s place and incorporated him within itself.

  The road to the winery was strewn with garbage and debris, but it was not until they reached the gates of the winery that they started seeing bodies. At first Penelope did not pay close attention to the immobile forms lining the sides of the drive. She’s seen so many bodies the past few days that she was becoming inured to the sight. But even in her peripheral vision the colors jumped out at her: red, green, blue, purple. Something was different here, something was wrong. She looked more carefully at the bodies out the window of the car, and she saw that some of them had been … altered. There was a man with the body of a frog, a woman with the arms of a lobster, a child with an elephant’s trunk and tusks. Many of the bodies were bloody, but an equal number of them weren’t, and these lay curled in fetal positions or positioned in odd angles. She could not help thinking that these people had died in the midst of metamorphosis, that they had died because of what they were becoming.

  There was something about dying that way that disturbed her more than murder, and she looked away from the bodies, kept her eyes on the road ahead.

  In contrast to that first night, there were not hordes of believers milling about the winery entrance, drinking and partying in the driveway. Save for an occasional staggerer, the narrow road was devoid of life.

  Ahead, she could see the buildings of the winery, and she wiped her sweaty palms of her jeans. Holbrook’s plan was frighteningly simple-minded. She was to distract whomever she had to, however she had to, so that he and Kevin could shove their boxes of combustibles in the main winery building and light it on fire. Holbrook was hoping that the blaze would spread quickly enough that the wine, the alcohol, would ignite and engulf the winery in flames before any of the bacchantes realized what was happening. They’d then run back to the car and take off.

  It was a dim-witted plan, she thought, a moronic scheme. But she could not come up with a better alternative, and she said nothing.

  She looked out the window to the left. On the grapevine stakes, fluttering above the bare branches of the plants, were nailed the scalps of women and longhaired men. On the wires strung between the stakes were tied gaily colored strips of crepe paper.

  The meadow now reached the vineyard. It was six or seven times the size it had been. The altar and the stone statue of Dionysus, which had been at the periphery of the meadow, nearly in the trees, were now squarely in its center and could be seen even from here. The trees had not been chopped down, they had been … eradicated. It was as if they had never existed. Meadow grass grew from the edge of the vineyard all the way up to the top of the hill, unobstructed by bush or tree.

  And then the revelers arrived.

  It was as if floodgates had suddenly opened, triggered by the movement of their car up the drive. A wave of men and women flowed into the meadow, from over the hill, from between the trees at the far end. She’d thought there’d been a lot of people at the site of the fair, but that was nothing compared to this. Her heart began pounding at the sight so many individuals, instinctively recoiling before the intimidating size of the oncoming horde.

  She’d thought that the revelers had come for them, had been sent by Dionysus or her mothers to tear them apart and protect the winery. But she realized as the human wave slowed, then stopped, that the people did not even know that the three of them were there.

  They had come for the festival.

  Harvest.

  Even the word had resonance within her. They were going to celebrate the fruition of the crop, were going to pick and then crush the grapes. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she did, and a part of her wanted to join them.

  The car stopped just before the parking lot as Holbrook pulled to the side, executed a three-point turn, and parked the vehicle underneath a tree, facing the street so they’d be able to make a quick exit.

  The teacher opened his door, got out. “Let’s make this quick,” he said.

  Outside, she could hear the singing. Thousands of voices blending and harmonizing. She stood next to the car, rooted in place, staring toward the vineyards and the expanded meadow beyond as Holbrook and Kevin began unloading the trunk.

  From this vantage point it looked almost like the scene of a rock concert, a massive cross-generational Woodstock. The feeling was like that too, she thought. Thousands of people singing in joyful camaraderie, their happy voices blending beautifully as they sang in union the words to an ancient Greek ode, a song that her mothers had sung to her when she was young. Lines of people, arms around one another’s shoulders, swayed to the music.

  Only … Only directly in front of the crowd and off to the sides were small spots of red, the eviscerated bodies of recent kills, bloody carcasses of men, women, children, and pets that had been strewn haphazardly about, forgotten and ignored, as though they were merely the by-products of such a large gathering, like empty paper cups and sandwich wrappers.

  On the top of the hill, several silhouetted women were tearing apart what looked to be the remains of a dead horse.

  The singing stopped. As one, the crowd was silenced. It was as though they were listening to something, although there was no audible sound.

  Holbrook was right, Penelope realized. The people took their cue from Dionysus. His mood determined theirs. They not only worshiped him, they were connected to him in some way, their feelings and emotions an extension of his own.

  Movement began again, increasingly frenzied activity that spread outward from the center of the gigantic gathering.

  People began moving into the far rows of the vineyard.

  “We need some help here,” Holbrook said. “Stop staring and grab a box.”

  He had seen it too. There was fear in his voice, and as she moved to help, she noticed that Kevin was quiet, his face pale.

  She wanted to reassure them, to tell them not to worry, to tell them that they would not be torn apart if they were caught, but she knew that was not true. They would be killed.

  She would not.

 
; She was one of them.

  They left half of the boxes in the open trunk and hurried silently up the last few yards of the drive to the parking lot. She wanted to feel nervous and anxious, wanted some of Holbrook’s sense of urgency transferred to her so that she would move as quickly as she needed to, but she felt no tension, no nervousness, and she hurried only because her brain told her to do so, not because her emotions deemed it necessary.

  Holbrook stopped at the edge of the parking lot, ducking next to an overhanging tree. Kevin and Penelope followed suit. Ahead, between two of the buildings, next to the warehouse, was a line of four transport trucks. The vehicles were being loaded with cases of Daneam wine, and she found herself thinking of a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers where trucks were being loaded with seed pods for distribution to other cities, other states. Was that what was happening here? Were they trying to spread the debauchery elsewhere through the wine? To San Francisco? Los Angeles? Phoenix? Denver? Chicago? New York?

  Yes, she thought. It made sense.

  She was just surprised that they had been logical enough to think of it and sober enough to do it.

  Mother Margeaux, she thought.

  “We can go around,” she said to Holbrook. “There’s a sidewalk around the side of the house that leads to the main building, the one where we produce the wine, and it can’t be seen from the warehouse.”

  “The warehouse? That would be better,” Holbrook said. “That’s where it’s all stored.”

  “That’s where they’re loading the trucks. I don’t think we can get in there without someone seeing us.”

  “Then I hope the fire spreads to the warehouse.”

  “Come on,” Penelope said. She led them around the edge of the parking lot, trying to stay behind vehicles, out of sight of the truck loaders.

  They passed behind the back of an overturned mini-van, and she stopped.

  The box she was carrying was getting heavy, and she put it down for a second.

  “What are you doing?” Holbrook hissed.

  “My arms are tired.”

  “Here,” Kevin said. “Switch. Maybe mine’s a_ little lighter.”

  “Are you sure this is going to be enough?” Penelope asked as they traded boxes. “It doesn’t seem like this’ll start much of a fire.”