Something was wrong. He didn't;
know what it was, but he could sense it, and he suddenly felt uneasy.
'Jack,' Penelope said, as if reading his mind.
That was it.
The policeman had stopped screaming.
He stood up. It could be coincidence. Jack could be sleeping it off, getting over it. But Holbrook had been downstairs a hell of a lot longer than the promised minute, and Kevin had the feeling there was something seriously amiss.
He turned toward Penelope, who was also standing. 'Where are the keys?'
he asked. 'The keys to our car, the Mercedes?'
'In my pocket.' She met his gaze.
'Be ready,' he said.
They started toward the hallway, walking quietly, listening. There were no sounds at all, and that frightened him. He had been planning to ask Penelope to go outside and start the car, to be ready to take off instantly if something had happened to Holbrook if something else was down there --but he was not brave enough to go into the basement alone, and he did not object to her coming along.
They reached the door to the basement.
The lights were off downstairs.
'Holbrook!' he called.
No answer.
He looked to his left, toward the end of the hall, and noticed for the first time that while the door to the back bedroom appeared to be closed, it was not There was a crack of orangish late afternoon sunlight between the door and the doorjamb.
Jack had escaped.
'Jack!' he called.
No answer.
'Let's get out of here,' Penelope whispered.
Kevin reached around the doorframe to turn on the basement light. The switch was already up.
'Enough proof for me,' he said. 'Let's bail.'
Downstairs, someone moaned.
They looked at each other. 'One of them's hurt or it'jj a trap,' Kevin said. 'There's only two choices here.'
'What do you want to do? You call it.'
He looked down into the darkness, took a deep breath| 'Start the car,'
he said. 'Be ready to roll.'
She nodded. 'Don't wait. If there's something wrong get out.'
He smiled at her. 'I have no problem with that.'
Penelope sped down the hall, and Kevin gathered his courage and started down the steps. 'Holbrook!' he called. 'Jack!'
The moan came again.
He hurried down the stairs, stopping at the bottom. Inj the darkness at the opposite end of the basement he saw| trolls: short, hairy creatures clutching pine cone-tipp spears.-He squinted into the dimness and saw that the fig-j ures were not trolls after all.
They were Penelope's mothers.
As one the naked woman rose from their collective;! crouch. They were filthy, covered with mud and bloody grime and wine. Their ratted, uncombed hair stuck outj wildly in all directions, and it was this that in the darkness had given them that hairy, inhuman look.
He would have known better how to react had they not! been human, had they really been monsters. But somehowj this revelation was even more frightening, and he found himself unable to act, rooted in place by shock.
On the floor behind them was a pulpy red mess that had| to be either Jack or Holbrook.
Or both.
The women laughed, jabbering in some foreign language.
He went through his options quickly: he could try tol find a weapon, he could try to fight them, he could run.|
He ran.
He took the steps three at a time and sped down the hallway with the sound of the maenads screaming in back of him. He ran outside, slamming the front door behind him, and rushed to where Penelope was waiting in the idlj ing car. 'Go!' he screamed.
They took off.
They sped down the street, Penelope accelerating so fast that he was thrown back into the seat before he could get his safety belt on. 'Where to?' she asked.
He was still breathing heavily, his heart pounding, and he could not speak. He shook his head.
'Don't worry,' she said. 'We'll find something.'
Penelope lay in the darkness, staring upward.
They were holed up in a small apartment at the north end of the city, in the last unit of a single-story complex that faced away from the street.
Kevin's screwdriver had still been in the car, but everything else had been left behind at Holbrook's and they'd been unable to find any other weapons save a couple of butter knives and a pair of scissors.
'Do you think we're down to the last days?' Kevin had asked as they'd driven around, looking for an easily defensible place to spend the night. 'Do you think we're going to make it?'
'Of course we'll make it,' she said. But it was the phrase 'last days'
that stayed with her, and despite her outward optimism she was not at all sure that they would survive.
Which was why she'd considered raping him.
She hadn't done it, hadn't been able to go through with it. It would not even have been rape because he so obviously wanted her--she could see the bulge of a permanent erection in his pants--but it hadn't felt right to her. Part of her wanted to reward him for the past few days, to let him experience sex at least once in his life, in case they did not make it through all this alive, but something kept her from acting on the impulse.
Strange, she thought, how one person's perceptions of another could change so completely over such a short period of time. She'd known Kevin Harte almost her entire life. He'd been in her first-grade class. She'd never much liked him, had always considered him something of a screw-up, but she now felt closer to him than anyone else alive. She trusted him totally.
Maybe life was more like a movie than she'd thought.
On the radio, they heard a reference to Napa. A news report on an AM
talk station out of San Francisco, reporter said that there'd been an accident involving radioactive waste on Highway 29 and that all roads leading into the Napa Valley were closed until further noticejf Radioactive waste?
She looked over at Kevin.
He shook his head. 'It's probably their standard st when they don't know what's going on. No one wants come and gawk at radioactive waste. It keeps the! lookeeloos away.' '
'How are they going to explain what really happened?''jj Kevin shrugged.
'Biological agents, I suppose. They'ltl say it was something carried on the wind, something half lucinogenic that caused mass hysteria.'
'You think that'll work? Dionysus'11 shoot chopper*! out of the sky with lightning bolts if they come to invest tigate. How are they going to explain that?'
'Don't worry,' Kevin said. 'They will.'
They drove in silence after that, looking for a place spend the night, finally ending up here, at this apartment Now she lay alone in the bed, staring up at the dark-|f ened ceiling.
She wondered what would have happene' with her and Dion if none of this had occurred. SI wasn't naive. She
