Kevin opened the passenger door. "Before you lose your nerve?"
"Something like that," Holbrook said. "Get in. Let's go."
The winery was a slaughterhouse.
Even after all Penelope had seen, she was shocked by the extent of the butchery.
They had driven straight to the winery. A few of the streets had been blocked, forcing them to detour, but the blockages had been old. There was no new damage, no new fires, and Napa looked like a ghost town, like a bombed-out city after a war, its inhabitants dead or fled. They'd encountered no problems on the road.
That worried Penelope. They'd seen very few people on the streets in the daytime since Dionysus' rebirth, but the city had always seemed alive in some twisted, perverted way, the playground of destructive children who were napping and had not yet come out to play.
But the feeling now was one of abandonment, and she could not help wondering if they had moved on, up the valley, or out of the valley, or if they were simply massing around their god, in preparation perhaps for their harvest festival. She thought the latter more likely, and she hoped and prayed that Dionysus stayed on the site of the fair and did not return to the winery. They needed all the breaks they could get.
Dionysus.
She was thinking of him now as Dionysus. Dion was still in there somewhere, but after her encounter with the god, she could no longer think of Dionysus as merely Dion in an altered form.
This was a separate entity, a being that had usurped Dion's place and incorporated him within itself.
The road to the winery was strewn with garbage and debris, but it was not until they reached the gates of the winery that they started seeing bodies. At first Penelope did not pay close attention to the immobile forms lining the sides of the drive. She's seen so many bodies the past few days that she was becoming inured to the sight. But even in her peripheral vision the colors jumped out at her: red, green, blue, purple. Something was different here, something was wrong. She looked more carefully at the bodies out the window of the car, and she saw that some of them had been ... altered. There was a man with the body of a frog, a woman with the arms of a lobster, a child with an elephant's trunk and tusks. Many of the bodies were bloody, but an equal number of them weren't, and these lay curled in fetal positions or positioned in odd angles. She could not help thinking that these people had died in the midst of metamorphosis, that they had died because of what they were becoming.
There was something about dying that way that disturbed her more than murder, and she looked away from the bodies, kept her eyes on the road ahead.
In contrast to that first night, there were not hordes of believers milling about the winery entrance, drinking and partying in the driveway. Save for an occasional staggerer, the narrow road was devoid of life.
Ahead, she could see the buildings of the winery, and she wiped her sweaty palms of her jeans. Holbrook's plan was frighteningly simple-minded. She was to distract whomever she had to, however she had to, so that he and Kevin could shove their boxes of combustibles in the main winery building and light it on fire. Holbrook was hoping that the blaze would spread quickly enough that the wine, the alcohol, would ignite and engulf the winery in flames before any of the bacchantes realized what was happening. They'd then run back to the car and take off.
It was a dim-witted plan, she thought, a moronic scheme. But she could not come up with a better alternative, and she said nothing.
She looked out the window to the left. On the grapevine stakes, fluttering above the bare branches of the plants, were nailed the scalps of women and longhaired men. On the wires strung between the stakes were tied gaily colored strips of crepe paper.
The meadow now reached the vineyard. It was six or seven times the size it had been. The altar and the stone statue of Dionysus, which had been at the periphery of the meadow, nearly in the trees, were now squarely in its center and could be seen even from here. The trees had not been chopped down, they had been ... eradicated. It was as if they had never existed. Meadow grass grew from the edge of the vineyard all the way up to the top of the hill, unobstructed by bush or tree.
And then the revelers arrived.
It was as if floodgates had suddenly opened, triggered by the movement of their car up the drive. A wave of men and women flowed into the meadow, from over the hill, from between the trees at the far end. She'd thought there'd been a lot of people at the site of the fair, but that was nothing compared to this. Her heart began pounding at the sight so many individuals, instinctively recoiling before the intimidating size of the oncoming horde.
She'd thought that the revelers had come for them, had been sent by Dionysus or her mothers to tear them apart and protect the winery. But she realized as the human wave slowed, then stopped, that the people did not even know that the three of them were there.
They had come for the festival.
Harvest.
Even the word had resonance within her. They were going to celebrate the fruition of the crop, were going to pick and then crush the grapes. She didn't know how she knew this, but she did, and a part of her wanted to join them.
The car stopped just before the parking lot as Holbrook pulled to the side, executed a three-point turn, and parked the vehicle underneath a tree, facing the street so they'd be able to make a quick exit.
The teacher opened his door, got out. "Let's make this quick," he said.
Outside, she could hear the singing. Thousands of voices blending and harmonizing. She stood next to the car, rooted in place, staring toward the vineyards and the expanded meadow beyond as Holbrook and Kevin began unloading the trunk.
From this vantage point it looked almost like the scene of a rock concert, a massive cross-generational Woodstock. The feeling was like that too, she thought. Thousands of people singing in joyful camaraderie, their happy voices blending beautifully as they sang in union the words to an ancient Greek ode, a song that her mothers had sung to her when she was young. Lines of people, arms around one another's shoulders, swayed to the music.
Only ... Only directly in front of the crowd and off to the sides were small spots of red, the eviscerated bodies of recent kills, bloody carcasses of men, women, children, and pets that had been strewn haphazardly about, forgotten and ignored, as though they were merely the by-products of such a large gathering, like empty paper cups and sandwich wrappers.
On the top of the hill, several silhouetted women were tearing apart what looked to be the remains of a dead horse.
The singing stopped. As one, the crowd was silenced. It was as though they were listening to something, although there was no audible sound.
Holbrook was right, Penelope realized. The people took their cue from Dionysus. His mood determined theirs. They not only worshiped him, they were connected to him in some way, their feelings and emotions an extension of his own.
Movement began again, increasingly frenzied activity that spread outward from the center of the gigantic gathering.
People began moving into the far rows of the vineyard.
"We need some help here," Holbrook said. "Stop staring and grab a box."
He had seen it too. There was fear in his voice, and as she moved to help, she noticed that Kevin was quiet, his face pale.
She wanted to reassure them, to tell them not to worry, to tell them that they would not be torn apart if they were caught, but she knew that was not true. They would be killed.
She would not.
She was one of them.
They left half of the boxes in the open trunk and hurried silently up the last few yards of the drive to the parking lot. She wanted to feel nervous and anxious, wanted some of Holbrook's sense of urgency transferred to her so that she would move as quickly as she needed to, but she felt no tension, no nervousness, and she hurried only because her brain told her to do so, not because her emotions deemed it necessary.