Penelope rose to her knees, then stood, as did Kevin.
Holbrook led the man into the living room. v "Jack, these are two of my students: Penelope Daneam and Kevin Something-or-other."
"Harte," Kevin said.
"Daneam?" Jack's eyebrows went up.
"Their daughter."
"And you are?" Kevin said.
"Jack Hammond. Napa P. D."
A cop! Penelope smiled, filled with relief and a buoyed sense of hope.
"Thank God you're here."
"Are you a maenad?" Jack asked her.
The relief died as quickly as it had flared. There was a flat coldness in the cop's eyes, a studied detachment in the way he looked at her that made her extremely uneasy.
"She's one of us," Holbrook said. "I think we can use her to get him."
Use her.
She moved closer to Kevin. She didn't like the way this conversation was going.
"So where are the rest of you?" Kevin asked. "Is this "I it?"
Jack nodded, and the coldness in his face fled, replaced by a weariness that looked closer to exhaustion. She suddenly noticed that there were bruises on his skin, dull splashes of dried blood on his torn suit.
"I couldn't get here right away," he said. "So I holed up in the H. Q."
"Were any of the others there?" Holbrook asked.
"They were all there. They'd been slaughtered. Mike was naked and drenched with wine--it looked like he'd been trying to pass--but he'd been killed just like the rest of them." He took a deep breath. "Their heads had been switched."
"Bastards," Holbrook breathed.
"They were still outside, and I only had one round in my revolver, so I
stayed there, hid. This was the first day I thought it was safe to come out."
Penelope was extremely uncomfortable. She wasn't sure if Jack--or Holbrook and Jack--blamed her in any way for what had happened, but she felt guilty nevertheless, as though she was a spy in the enemy camp.
She wasn't a spy, though. She was on their side.
She was a traitor.
"Did you save your toga?" Holbrook asked.
Jack shook his head. "Nothing."
"That's okay. I have an extra one for you. Come on."
The two of them walked down the hallway to the basement door, started down.
Penelope looked at Kevin, standing next to her. He shook his head.
"Somehow, I don't think that, in this instance, two heads are better than one."
"Maybe we should get out of here," she suggested.
"And go where? Did you see the way that guy was beat up? And he's a cop!" He shook his head. "It's dangerous out there."
"Holbrook said they could 'use' me."
"I didn't like that either," Kevin admitted.
"What do you think they plan to do?"
"From everything I can tell, they don't have any plans at all."
"What are we going to do?"
Kevin shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know."
Jack didn't turn out to be all that bad.
He was a cop, of course, a conservative, hard-nosed kind of guy, but that cold steeliness she'd sensed in their first meeting seemed to have been the result of stress and hunger and lack of sleep. Rested, fed, and relaxed, he seemed nicer than Holbrook and infinitely more human, and she and Kevin found that they were able to get along with him quite easily.
She glanced over at Jack, curled up on the coucl sleeping. Kevin was sitting on the floor, leaning agains the opposite wall, reading one of Holbrook's texts. Thej teacher, as always, was down in his basement.
They were all starting to get a little stir crazy, starting! to act a little funny, and Penelope wondered, not for the J first time, if it might not have been better if they'd stayed"! outside, roamed around in the car, and not holed them-;f selves up in here. She thought of all of those shut-ins who received their impressions of the world solely through television. They watched the newscasts, watched the news magazines, watched the based-onatrue-story made-for-television movies, they saw shootings and rapes and robberies, an they were convinced that the world outside their doors was filled with danger, that violent death lurked around every corner. Paranoia fed upon itself, and she wondered if they weren't doing the same thing here, blockading themselves in Holbrook's house as they talked and worried about and demonized the frightening outside world.
But it was hard to demonize a world that had real demons in it.
Or gods.
What was Dionysus exactly? God? Monster? It was more comforting to think of him as some sort of monster or demon. She could imagine going up against that.
It was harder to think about fighting a god.
Kevin put down his book, stood, stretched. He glanced over at Jack sleeping on the couch, then silently motioned for Penelope to follow him into the kitchen.
She looked again at the stopped clock above the dead television, then, walked out of the living room. Kevin was already peeking through the curtains that covered the window above the sink. "Anyone out there?" she asked.
He shook his head.
There had been earlier. A gang of wasted teenagers, dressed only in the bloody skins of domestic animals, had chased a herd of naked old men down the street using pistols and bullwhips. One old man had tripped and fallen, and they'd whipped him and trampled him, the last two kids in the pack picking the old man up by his legs and dragging him behind them as they disappeared from sight.
His head had left a bloody streak on the pavement.
Kevin turned away from the window. "I'm tired of being cooped up in here."
Penelope shrugged. "Who isn't?"
"I feel like I'm wasting my time, like I should be doing something." He waved toward the world outside the window. "You know things aren't slowing down out there."
"No," Penelope admitted.
"We need to do something before it's too late."
"It's probably already too late." She walked over to the cupboard, got out a can of warm 7-Up, sat down at the kitchen table.
Kevin sat next to her. He was silent for a moment. "So what were they like?" he asked finally.
"Who? My mothers?"
"Yeah." He paused. "Before."
She shrugged. "All right, I guess. I don't ..." She shook her head apologetically. "I don't really know what you mean."
"I mean, were they, like, good parents? Did they read your report cards?
Did they go to Open House? Did they make sure you brushed your teeth and ate properly?"
"Yes," she said. "They were good parents." And felt an involuntary twinge of sadness at the thought.
"Were they, like, radical lesbians?"
Penelope felt heat rush to her face.
"Was it 'herstory' instead of 'history' and all that?"
"No. Besides, those words come from different roots. 'History' is not 'his story.' It comes from the Greek 'historia,' which means 'inquiry."
"His' isn't even Greek. It comes from 'he,' which is Old English."
He looked at her, surprised. "Where'd you learn that?"
She licked her lips nervously. "I don't know," she admitted.
They were silent for a moment. "You're a little spooky yourself sometimes," Kevin said.
Penelope nodded. "I know."
They looked at each other across the table, and for the first time Penelope felt as though she was in one of those movie situations. He looked as though he was about take her hand, or reach over and hug her. And she ized that she would let him.
Jack walked through the door.
"Hey," he said.
"About time," Kevin told him.
The mood was broken. If it had been there at all. Peneml ope picked up her 7-Up, took a sip.
They needed to get out of this house. If they spentl another day in here, all four x)f them would end upjj fucking each other in one huge daisy chain.
She closed her eyes, tried to push the thought out of he head.
"So who do you want to play you in the movie?" Jacfclf asked, leaning against the sink.