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."
A half hour later, they were clean and combed and had finished their breakfast, such as it was. Kevin was still keeping watch on the window, but the women had not come back and the street outside remained empty save for the corpse of the farmworker.
Penelope forced herself to smile. "So what are we going to do today?
Have a picnic? Hit the mall?"
"We should try to get out of here," he suggested. "Out of the valley."
"We tried," she said. "We failed."
"Well, we can't just sit here and wait and ... and hope that someone comes to rescue us."
"We could find someone to help us."
Kevin snorted. "Yeah. Right." He was silent for a moment, thinking, then a look of hope passed over his features. He turned toward Penelope. "Mr.
Holbrook. He knows about things like this. We could find him, see if there's any way he can help us. His address is probably in the phone book."
Penelope blinked dumbly.
"He knows a lot about Greek mythology," Kevin continued. "Maybe he can figure out something that can get us out of this."
She shook her head. "I don't want to see him. I don't like him. He's creepy."
"Creepy or not, we don't have much choice. And he can't be any creepier than the other shit we've seen."
"If he's still here," she pointed out. "Or if he isn't one of them. Or dead."
Kevin was obviously excited. "We'll wait a little while longer, make sure no one else is out there, then we'll haul out to the car and get out of here." He started opening the dresser drawers, looking for a phone book. "Start packing our stuff.
We need to be ready to roll."
Penelope thought of arguing, then nodded, saying nothing. She walked into the bathroom, where she began filling up empty sports bottles with tap water. She stopped after the second bottle, looked at herself in the mirror above the sink.
Holbrook.
Logically, it sounded good, but the thought of going out to look for the teacher gave her an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wished she could be as optimistic about this as Kevin was, but the idea didn't sit well with her. She told herself that she was being stupid and paranoid, but she knew that she wasn't, and the worry showed on her face. The face staring back at her looked scared.