She breathed deeply, nodded. 'Yeah.'
'Okay.' He checked behind the car, in front, to the sides, making sure there was no one around, then got out of the passenger door and ran around the vehicle to the driver's side, while Penelope slid across the seat.
'There's one more road we haven't tried,' he said, getting behind the wheel and locking the door.
'Think it'll do any good?' she asked.
'No, but I'm obsessive-compulsive, and I have to finish the search.'
She laughed, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes. He turned on the ignition, put the car into gear, and took off.
The road, a winding, hilly route that led through Deer Park to Angwin, was cut off almost at the source by a group of over fifty who were holding some sort of bastardized, impromptu rodeo, taking turns rming what appeared to be milk cows and using broken wine bottles to goad the animals into moving.
'We could try plowing through them,' Kevin suggested.
Penelope started to respond, but the words were choked off in her throat. The color drained from her face.
He thought at first that she was having a heart attack or an epileptic fit. Then he heard the noise. A voice. A voice as low and loud as the rumble of thunder. He could not make out the words, only the sounds, and he followed Penelope's gaze to the top of the hill to their left. Coming down the hillside, striding purposefully, was a giant man as tall as a billboard. He was naked, his hairy skin stained with blood and wine, and he carried under his arm the limp, dead body of a goat. The unnatural glee in his expression nearly obscured the fact that the basic structure of his face was familiar.
'It's Dion,' Penelope whispered. 'Dionysus.'
'Fuck,' Kevin breathed. 'Holy mother of shit.'
A wave of people topped the hill behind Dionysus, following him down.
Many of them fell, tumbling down the steep side, but no allowances were made for the clumsy, and the wave continued on, trampling those who fell before it.
Kevin was already backing up, moving quickly but not too quickly, not wanting to draw attention to their vehicle. They might be able to escape ordinary runners, but there was no way they'd be able to escape Dionysus.
He'd catch up to them before they hit the highway.
Kevin's mouth was dry, his hands not shaking only because they were gripping the steering wheel. He had been frightened before. He could not have imagined being more frightened than he had been last night on Ash Street. But nothing had prepared him for this. Intellect ally, he'd known what to expect. Penelope had descrit the metamorphosis to him, and he had understood how frightening it had been, had known what Dion had b&-| come, but there was no way to convey in words the sheeifi horrifying alienness of it all. The creature hurrying downl the side of the hill was not like a person, not like a horror| movie monster, not like anything he had ever seen or read f about or dreamed or imagined.
There was a palpable power within the form, a force that could be sensed so clearly it could almost be seen, ,-and the presence of that ~i power skewed all other sensory perceptions in a way that left Kevin feeling not only terrified but disoriented.
Dionysus reached the bottom of the hill, held the goat aloft, and broke off its head, tossing it to his followers while he drank in the spray that shot from the neck. He screamed, a cry of joy that rumbled through the hills like an earthquake, and Kevin forgot all about not drawing attention to the car and floored the gas pedal, sending the vehicle hurling backward.
He swung into a dirt pull-out, shifted the car into Drive, and made a sliding U-turn toward the highway.
'Is he coming?' Kevin asked.
Penelope shook her head.
'Jesus.' Kevin glanced in the rearview mirror, saw nothing, only trees.
'Jesus,' he repeated.
Penelope was quiet. He swerved south onto the highway, back toward Napa.
The obstacles in the road were familiar by this time, and he sped around them, easily avoiding the crashed cars and the debris. 'We're going to be out of gas pretty soon. I don't know how we're going to get some more. I don't even know if any of the pumps still work.'
Penelope said nothing.
'I didn't realize he'd be so scary.' Kevin's voice was softer than he'd intended, and more frightened. 'I don't know what we're going to be able to^io against ... that.'
'Nothing,' Penelope said dully.
'I think what we have to do now is start thinking about tonight. We haven't seen a lot of people yet, but I don't think they've gone anywhere. I bet they're just sleeping.
And they'll probably come out at night. We need to find a place to hole up, get some weapons. There's a gun store over on Lincoln. We'll try there.'
The gun store, Napa Rifles, was occupied. Even from the street he could see shadowed forms moving about behind the barred windows. A line of armed, overweight men, wearing sheets that had been fashioned into makeshift togas, were seated on the curb in front of the building.
'Forget it,' Kevin said, catching Penelope's glance as they sped by the store. 'We'll just have to make do with what we can.'
Penelope leaned forward. 'You want to go back to the school?'
He shook his head. 'Too easy to be trapped. I think we should go to ...'
He thought for a moment. 'To the tourist cabins over on Coombsville.
Napa Hideaway?'
'That slummy motel?'
'A cabin would be easily defensible. We'll scrounge what we can, hit Big 5 Sporting Goods, raid some houses if we have to.' He pointed at the clock on the dashboard. 'If this thing's right, it's already after noon.
We'll need to find some food and supplies and be settled in before dark.'
He was aware that his voice sounded calm and assured, but that word--dark--conjured up images from the previous night and made him tremble inside. He wasn't sure he'd be strong enough to handle another night like the last one.
'You're right,' Penelope said, and in her voice was all the strength he lacked. 'Let's find what we need and stake out a camp for the night.'
Her confidence gave him confidence, and he nodded. 'Let's switch. You drive. I'll go out and find what we need. You wait.'
'I don't need to sit in the car. I can help you find things.'
'I don't--'
'--know if you'll live if I don't go with you? I don't either.'
Kevin laughed. 'All right.'
* * *
They were safely ensconced within Cabin 12 of thef| Napa Hideaway by four-thirty. They hadn't been able tof find any guns, but Kevin had picked up baseball bats from 1 the supply cage at the Little League diamond, and they'd^ grabbed butcher knives and cleavers from a kitchen store. j| The floor of the cabin was lined with Drano and aerosol; cans and lighters that they'd stolen from a 7-Eleven. The hammers and screwdrivers they'd scrounged from the janitor's office of the school were still in the car.
Penelope sat on the king-size bed, watching Kevin finish nailing boards over the windows. She'd already helped him install two extra dead bolts on the door.
The phones were out, but the electricity still worked, as did the water.
The bacchantes were neither organized nor logical enough to try to shut down the utilities, and even television reception was unaffected.
She stood up and walked across the room to change the channel on the TV, switching slowly through the stations, stopping when the familiar anchor team from San Francisco's CBS news came on.
She watched the entire broadcast. She expected to hear an update on the situation, to learn that the governor was flying in troops, that law enforcement agencies were banding together to converge on the valley, but
