the situation in Napa was not mentioned at all.
How was that possible?
Her spirits sank as she stared at the television. She and Kevin had been planning to alert outside authorities, but she hadn't thought they'd be the only ones to do so. She'd assumed that others had escaped to tell what was going on here. And people from the outside must have been trying to contact people in the valley. Relatives, friends, business associates. What about all the people trying to order wine? What about all of the tourists trying to drive into Napa? Hadn't any of those people complained?
Apparently not.
Maybe they'd been killed.
She tried not to think of that.
Maybe the entire state had been taken over by bacchantes.
That wasn't physically possible.
Not yet.
Kevin sat down on the bed next to her. 'Nothing, huh?'
She shook her head.
'Maybe there'll be something on the late news.'
'Maybe,' she said doubtfully.
Kevin looked toward the window. She followed his gaze and saw the deepening hues of twilight peeking in between the boards. He stood, turned on the room light, closed the Venetian blinds.
'It's going to be a long night,' he said, walking back to the bed.
Penelope nodded. 'If we live through it.'
He sat down next to her, and the two of them remained there silently, watching the TV.
Officer Dennis Mccomber finished raping the corpse of | the chief's daughter and pulled out, rolling off her. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and reached for the bottle next to him, finishing it off. He was sore and spent and buzzing, and that was exactly how he wanted to feel right now.
God damn, he felt good.
Freedom.
That's what this new god had brought. Freedom.
It was what he'd been craving all these years, although he hadn't really known it. As a policeman he was supposed to enforce the law, make sure people followed the rules, but he had never really been interested in that. He had joined the force so that he would be above those laws, so that he would not have to follow those rules. Speeding? He could do it.
But if other people attempted it, he would give them a ticket. Ass kicking? He could do it, but if other people did it, he would arrest them.
It had not been real freedom, though, only a taste, a sample, a whetting of his appetite.
This was freedom.
Mccomber reached over and touched the chief's daughter's cold breast, squeezing the nipple.
He had been afraid before the god had arrived, filled with a nearly debilitating dread that had only been relieved by wine. But His arrival had been anything but dreadful. Indeed, it had been the most glorious event in Mccomber's life, and the liberation he had felt as the reverberations of the god's rebirth had spread throughout the valley had been stronger, purer, and more real than anything he had ever experienced.
He had been born again himself at that moment.
Mccomber grabbed the chief's daughter by the arm and rolled her over. He looked toward Goodridge. 'You want her next?'
The chief shook his head drunkenly, then fell facedown on the desk.
Mccomber laughed, his laughter doubling as he saw blood from the chief's broken nose pool onto the papers spread atop the desk. He threw the bottle against the wall, was gratified to hear it shatter. He nodded toward one of the rookies lined up by the window.
'Next,' he said.
They awoke in the morning to the sound of gunfire. Penelope jerked up, disoriented to find herself dressed and sleeping in a strange bed. Then the past forty-eight hours returned in a rush, and she looked around the dim room until her eyes found Kevin crouched in front of the boarded window, peering through the slats of the Venetian blinds.
She tiptoed over to where he sat crouched, ducking down next to him.
'What is it?' she whispered.
He shook his head, put a finger to his lips.
She looked at him, on his knees, tightly holding his baseball bat, doing his best to defend them though he was obviously frightened. A tingling feeling passed through her. She should reward him, maybe. Give him a blow job while he waited there.
No!
She inhaled, exhaled. What the hell was she thinking about?
Blood.
Raising herself to the level of the window, Penelope spread apart two of the slats, peeked through the blinds, between the boards. Outside, in the middle of the street, a migrant farmworker had been surrounded by a group of gun-toting women dressed in motley rags. They were passing around a bottle, taking turns shooting at his feet to make him dance. Or shooting at what was left of his feet. For he was attempting to cavort now on what looked like bloody stumps as the women called out the names of various dance steps, laughing.
'Lay low!' Kevin whispered, grabbing Penelope's shoulder and pulling her down. 'Don't touch those blinds! They'll see the movement!'
She nodded, followed his lead, peering at an angle through the slats without touching them. The women on the street were shooting again, dancing and whooping as the farmworker fell screaming to his knees.
Their intoxication seemed to come as much from the violence as the alcohol, and the scary thing was that Penelope knew exactly how they felt.
She sat on the floor, facing away from the window, listening but not looking.
She had awakened in the middle of the night with a craving for wine, the smell of fresh blood in her nostrils. She had gotten a drink of water instead and had forced herself to fall back asleep. The blood, she thought now, had come from the bathroom. The woman who'd stayed here before them had probably been menstruating at the time.
How could she smell that, though?
Her senses were becoming heightened.
That was a frightening thought, and she pushed it away.
What were her mothers doing now? she wondered.
Or her mother and her aunts.
That was one thing good that had come out of all of this. She had finally confirmed what she'd known all along--that Mother Felice was her biological mother, her real mother. Despite everything else that had happened, that knowledge made her feel good. The last time she'd seen her mother, she had been naked and covered with blood, but Penelope still had the feeling that after this was all over and done with after the rest of her mothers were dead ~
--the two of them would be together, and it would be different, better, than before. They would be a real family, a regular family, a normal family, and whatever difficulties they might have, whatever problems they might come up against, would be normal problems.
Outside the cabin, there was a shot, a scream, and wild laughter.
Penelope turned toward Kevin. 'They killed him,' he whispered. 'They shot him in the head.'
She closed her eyes, feeling sick, seeing in her mindj| the farmworker's bloody, stumpy feet as he tried to danced on the asphalt.
'They're leaving.' Kevin remained at the window for a*;i moment, then slumped down, exhaling deeply. 'Fuck.' >
'What could we have done if they'd come after us?' I Penelope asked, still whispering.
Kevin shook his head. 'Pray.'
