Penelope's expression was hard. "What happened?"
He took a deep breath. "My parents."
"Alive or dead?"
"Alive."
Penelope nodded. He did not have to say more.
They turned left on the next street, then left again until they hit Monticello.
"Even if we get help, even if we get the police or National Guard or whoever out here, what are they going to do?" Kevin asked. "How are they supposed to put a stop to this?"
Penelope shook her head. "I don't know."
"Maybe there's nothing they can do. Maybe they--"
"We're high school kids! Shit. How are we supposed to know how to solve this? That's their job. They'll know how to do it They'll figure out something."
Kevin's voice caught in his throat. "I don't ... I just don't want anything to happen to my parents."
"I know," Penelope said softly.
"Yeah, they're drunk and crazy and everything. But I don't want the cops shooting them."
"I know how you feel."
Of course she did. She was in exactly the same position. Her mother--her mothers--had not only been caught up in all this, they were the cause of it. They were the ringleaders. If anyone was going to be shot and killed, it would be them.
Penelope had to be feeling even worse than he did.
"I'm sorry," he said.
She tried to smile. "You have nothing to be sorry for."
Monticello hit the highway, and Penelope continued south. The highway was in better shape than the streets had been, the piles of debris fewer and farther between, and she took the car up to sixty.
There was no one else on the highway, no vehicles traveling in either direction, and Kevin found that unsettling. The valley seemed to have emptied of people during the night, leaving only the victims and their victimizers, with he and Penelope caught in between.
The highway curved around the side of a small hill --and Penelope slammed on the brakes. The car skidded, fishtailing, before finally coming to a lane-straddling halt. The highway before them was blocked, littered with stacked cars, demolished trucks and burning bodies.
Kevin, still bracing himself against the dashboard, stared through the windshield in dumb horror. The bodies had obviously been torn apart in last night's craziness and had later been separated according to part:
arm, leg, head, torso. Five individual bonfires were burning, and around them danced linked circles of nude revelers, all of whom had identically blank stares on their enraptured faces.
Someone tapped on Penelope's window, and she screamed.
He jumped at the sound of her cry, looked immediately over. An old woman, face smeared with patterned blood that had been applied like war paint, laughed loonily. She breathed deeply, inhaling the thick, foul-smelling smoke. "Nose hit!" she said. "Contact high!"
"Back up," Kevin said softly. "Get us out of here before the rest of them see us."
Penelope nodded, threw the car into Reverse. As they sped backward, away from the woman, she began screeching, pointing, and several of the naked celebrants broke away from the nearest circle--the leg bonfire--and began chasing after the car.
Kevin's heart was pounding with fear, and he watched the men and women run after them, breasts and erections bouncing as legs pumped unnaturally fast. The blank expressions on their faces had been replaced by intimidating looks of grim determination, and he was suddenly certain that the revelers would catch them. They'd be yanked out of the car and torn apart, their body segments burned in the appropriate bonfire as drunken partyers danced.
Then Penelope slammed on the brakes, spun the car around, and they were off, speeding back down the highway the way they'd come, their pursuers fading into specks behind him.
Kevin coughed. The smoke from the bodies had seeped into the car, and it was nauseating. He pinched his nostrils shut, trying to breathe only through his mouth, but he could taste the horrid smoke in his throat, and he started to gag.
Penelope reached over, turned on the air conditioner. "It's pretty bad,"
she said.
But she wasn't having a hard time breathing, he noticed. The smoke didn't seem to have affected her at all.
He breathed in the cold, filtered air, and his nausea passed.
The car slowed as they reached the intersection at which they'd gotten on the highway. "What now?" Penelope asked.
"I don't know," he said. "We could try going north, but I bet both ends of the valley are blocked off."
"Then we're trapped here. We can't get out."
"How about one of the back roads?" Kevin suggested. "What about sneaking through Wooden Valley and circling back to Vallejo? Or taking Carneros into Sonoma?"
"We could try it," she said. "But I don't think we should hold our breath."
"If not, what then?"
She shrugged. "Hike out? I don't know. We'll figure something out when we get to that point."
They were both right. The highway was blocked by another pileup of vehicles just above Calistoga, and both the road to Sonoma and the various westbound side roads they attempted to navigate had been turned into heavily guarded obstacle courses.
"These people may be wasted," Kevin said after they'd narrowly avoided an ambush on the road to Lake Berry essa, "but they're organized."
"It's Dion," Penelope said. "He doesn't want me to leave."
The hairs prickled on the back of Kevin's neck.
They were both silent after that, driving back down to the highway, on the watch for attackers and pursuers. What was Dion like now? Kevin wondered. Would he recognize their previous relationships with him?
Would he let them go if he caught them because of that past association?
Or was all that forgotten history? Was Dion gone completely, entirely overtaken by ... Dionysus?
God, that sounded stupid.
A demon he could understand. The spirit of an old murderer even. But a mythical god? It seemed so ludicrous.
It wasn't, though. He knew that.
They reached the highway again, and Penelope pulled to the side of the road. She turned off the ignition, slumped forward.
She started crying.
"Hey," Kevin said. "Don't cry."
She began sobbing harder. He sat there uncertainly, unsure of what to do, then scooted toward her on the seat and awkwardly put a hand on her shoulder. "It's okay," he said.
Penelope sat up, nodding, and wiped her eyes. "I'm sorry. It's just ...
It's so frustrating. We keep trying all these roads and they're all blocked. We're in a cage here. We can't get out."
He moved back away from her. "You want me to drive for a while?"
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.