“It’s in the handbook: the senior maenad decides who drives the truck.” Dionysus Liber Amoungios spoke patiently into his phone, strangling the urge to roar like a wounded bull. Human employee training was like housebreaking a puppy. Anger—especially the helpless grieving rage tearing him apart—only got in the way.

“But Gini drives like a maniac!” maenad trainee Missy Gunnels wailed in his ear.

He glanced at the muted television on the other side of his office in a former Petaluma bank. The harried anchor segued from a clip of the inferno consuming the Inn at Blue Oak to an aerial view of traffic fleeing the Glass Fire. Dionysus’ chest contracted painfully. The sprawling wood and stone resort had been his Napa Valley home and base of operations since he arrived in a bald-tired VW bus in the summer of ‘67, fifty-three years before.

“Gini won’t be speeding anywhere today. One-Oh-One is bumper-to-bumper all the way to the bay,” he rasped. His throat felt as tight as his chest.

“You didn’t see her driving the bike lanes on the way to the bottling plant. What if a cop caught her? She can’t flirt her way out of everything, you know.”

Don’t bet on it, he thought. “Don’t worry about what-ifs. Focus on the job. The future of Liberami Winery depends on getting that hand sanitizer to San Pablo by three this afternoon. Do you really think Gini would jeopardize that?”

“Noooo.” Missy admitted in a small voice, stretching the negative into four distinct syllables.

He heard them all. He shouldn’t have. If Missy was calling from inside Santa Rosa’s Verdeante Bottling plant, she would’ve been talking over the whirr-whirr clack-clack of the production line. Outside, she would have been competing with the shouts and beeps of loading cargo. But all he heard was Missy.

“Where are you calling from?”

“The truck.”

Liberami’s cool trucks were top-of-the-line three years ago, but they weren’t soundproofed. He side-eyed his phone. “Where in the truck?”

“The back. It’s the only place I can hear myself think. But you know what? It’s kinda nice. It’s like seventy degrees in here, and with the rear door pulled down, you can’t smell the smoke. Solid too.” He heard rapping, presumably her knuckles on the insulated chamber wall. “I bet this is the safest place in the whole truck. You know, if I rode back here, I wouldn’t have to see Gini’s driving.”

“Stop right there.”

“But it’s the perfect solution—and safe! I secured those pallets myself.”

“I don’t care. You’re not riding to San Pablo in the back”—because my insurance doesn’t cover puppies…people riding in the back of the truck—“because I need you in the cab. Gini’s a good driver. But she does like to speed. I don’t want her treating the fire traffic as a challenge. I’m depending on you to make sure she doesn’t get pulled over. I know it’s asking a lot, but if we don’t get the cash from San Pablo to Goldhen Trust by five, I’ll lose Liberami, and the vineyard association will go down with me. Thousands of people could lose their jobs. In the middle of a pandemic.”

“Thousands?” She squeaked. In addition to her puppy-like enthusiasm, the twenty-three-year-old still retained her youthful idealism. And he was a god, not a saint. He had no scruples about playing on her sympathies for the greater good.

“Thousands,” he assured her. His desk chair creaked beneath his bulk as he leaned back to catch the gust of cool air blowing from the overhead vent. “Between the smoke and the chemicals they’re throwing on the fires, the grapes that survive won’t be fit to press. The growers need a new product, one that capitalizes on the organic methods they’ve instituted over the past twenty years. If the sanitizer deal falls through, wineries will go bankrupt. Owners will be forced to sell and speculators will move in. You know what that means.”

Well, somebody did. As soon as he said it, the lights went out, taking the AC with them. Horns blared outside the bank.

“Power’s off,” he said, interrupting her reply. He moved to the window and nudged aside the blinds. No lights glowed in the stores on the other side of the parking lot. The black-out extended to the neighboring street. Not good. Garden variety, conservation outages didn’t start until late afternoon. It was half past ten. The fires must be getting worse. His thoughts flew to his family. Were they all okay? Were they safe? When he talked to his wife a half hour ago, she told him everyone had evacuated and was sheltering with relatives or in motels closer to San Francisco. But she was as closely affined to the Napa terroir as he was. What if she’d decided to go back?

Worst case scenarios buzzed in his head. Missy bleated in his ear. His office phone trilled, its buttons bright in the gloom. Ariadne?

“Hang on. Got another call.” He hit the desk phone’s speaker button. “What’s up?”

His assistant Pia Jose caroled, “Get your mask on, Denny. You got company: Emily Ulmaker from Maxwell Ernes.”

“Maxwell Ernes?” He repeated, certain he’d heard wrong. “Ernes as in the hedge fund?”

“Yep.”

“What’s an Ernes rep doing here?” In the middle of a fire zone. In the middle of a pandemic. Not that he didn’t need capital stat, but… “I don’t know anybody at M.E.”

Pia didn’t answer. He didn’t expect her to. Puppies survived on cute. Experienced assistants routed all their calls through their headset, so nobody heard their bosses flail. Meanwhile, Missy babbled as if “I got another call” meant something different in her world.

“Not now,” he told her. “I’ll call you back.”

“No!” she yelped as he disconnected. He tossed the phone on the soil reports stacked next to his inbox. Missy would be fine even if Gini did drive off in a huff. They both had phones. The doors to the cargo compartment had emergency latches. She wouldn’t freeze either. The sanitizer didn’t need to be chilled. They were only using the cool truck to protect it from overheating and windblown cinders.

“Denny?” Pia asked.

Hedge fund. Right. He scraped a hand over his hair. He needed to make nice to the money person. He owed it to Ari and everybody else depending on him.

He hoped his wife was all right. She had to be all right.

“Give me a couple minutes,” he said. “And see if you can get in touch with Ari. I’m worried about the black-out.”

“On it.”

He hadn’t cleaned up this fast since his current incarnation was a bachelor. By the time Pia reached his sanctum door, the blinds were angled to lighten the gloom without losing the shade. The messy altar of his desk was almost tidy, with yesterday’s depressing yield projections safely buried in his inbox under his closed laptop. A Liberami-branded cloth mask—superfluous to a god who couldn’t get sick or transmit disease but necessary for appearance’s sake—covered his nose and mouth. His purple Hawaiian shirt and ratty deck shoes stayed. As much as the fox ears and tutus worn by his street maenads, his laid-back style was part of the Liberami brand.

“Come in,” he said, rising from his chair.

An expensive blonde wearing a gray mask blazoned with crystal-beaded dollar signs strolled into the room. Champagne-colored highlights polished her sleek hair. Her tailored suit was ivory silk. A slim folio case of gray kidskin dangled from her left hand. Matching high heels magnified the swagger of her stride. But the pricey packaging failed to disguise the pissoir taint of old paper and ink, the bloody tang of pennies pried from a broken hand or the rotten egg taste of sulfur coating his tongue. An iceberg the size of Greenland settled in his gut.

Pia made socially distanced introductions from the threshold and exited, closing the door behind her. Abandoning all pretense of civility, Dionysus dropped into his chair without inviting his guest to do the same. “Mammon,” he said.

An infernal gleam sparked in the blonde’s gaze, overlaying human blue eyes with the image of sideways pupils bisecting yellow orbs devoid of white. “Dionysus,” Mammon responded in an incongruously pleasant soprano. “Long time no see. How’s the wine business?”

He flicked a thumb at the windows. “Check it out. We’ve got people lined up around the block for four-shot wine flights and curbside pick-up. Our contactless tastings have made headlines from Seattle to LA. And we still sell no wine before its time.”

“That slogan was cheesy when Orson Welles used it fifty years ago.”

“Shows what you know. Welles was a genius. He was a great actor, a great director, and the first Golden Age movie star to leverage his celebrity into an income stream.”

“Is that what this is about?” A French-manicured forefinger twirled a circle encompassing his graying—tarnished silver—hair and the spade-shaped beard jutting below his mask.

This was about being too busy trying to salvage some profit from a plague year to visit a barber. But he’d bite off his tongue before admitting it to Mammon.

“Just following Aristotle’s advice,” he said, “emulating the qualities of someone I admire.”

“An aging fat man perpetually strapped for cash? I arrived just in time.”

She—since the god currently presented as a woman, the feminine pronoun seemed apt—scanned the drab room. Liberami had leased the bank and its double-barreled drive-thru bays to move inventory normally sold in bars, restaurants, and winery tastings. The customer-facing teller windows and outside kiosks boasted a certain retro charm. But the backroom office space was furnished with Blue Oak cast-offs. Now they were all that remained of his home. Loss gutted him all over again.

The only exceptions to the utilitarian vibe were the console table under his TV and the high-backed armchairs in front of his desk. Crafted from thick, ancient grapevines salvaged from the wreck of an estate that previously bordered Blue Oak, their twisted limbs served as a constant reminder of his purpose and connection to Mother Earth.

Satisfied he wasn’t hiding anything better, Mammon perched on the seat of the grapevine chair closest to the door. Dionysus’s mobile beeped as she arranged the leather case on her lap. He glanced at the screen, hoping it was Ari. It was Missy. Again.

Mammon repositioned his nameplate to the side and centered a sheaf of carefully aligned official-looking papers on the desktop. Her oddly formal gestures recalled temple offerings from ages past. An offering from Mammon? Fat chance. He crossed his arms.   

She stiffened. “As currently structured, Liberami is underfunded and undervalued. I can fix that. Sell to me today and you’ll retain full control over all production deriving from your terroir. I’ll even add a provision designating you corporate spokesman. That way you can make all the commercials you want.”

Dionysus laughed, a deep ho ho ho. He was trying for a rolling Welles-ian bass, but even inside his head, it sounded more like Santa Claus.

Mammon pinned him with her double-exposure stare.

“You’re serious,” he said. “In all the centuries we’ve known each other, when have I ever sold you anything but booze? I’ve seen how an investment winery operates. The first thing they do is replace all the old vines with ruler-straight rows of immature grafts. They replace people who’ve worked the land for generations with migrant labor who can’t tell red berries from green. They foul the soil. They kill the bees. Then they try to fix everything by pouring more chemicals down those damned straight rows and poison everything in their path.”

Golden goat eyes twinkled at his snarl. “So you sued over the damage to your southern terrace. You still had to buy the owners out—admittedly at a bargain price. But then you went and sank all that money in an artisanal brandy venture.”

“You make it sound frivolous. If I hadn’t taken those bastards to court, they would have destroyed Blue Oak and a dozen other vineyards besides. As for the brandy, those stills are this year’s MVPs. You can make high-proof alcohol out of any organic material, including smoke-tainted grapes.”

It was Mammon’s turn to lean back. “You’re mortgaged up to your old man’s hairline, and the last quarter payment on your loans is due today. In cash.”

“What’s it to you?”

“An opportunity. The sale of Goldhen Trust to Maxwell Ernes was finalized yesterday and I am Maxwell Ernes. Your bank belongs to me. So do your loans.”

“Is that supposed to scare me?” He snorted. “You forget, I’ve dealt with pirates before. Your ransom will be delivered in full to Goldhen’s Petaluma branch by closing time.”

“Only if you deliver a full truckload of organic hand sanitizer to the San Pablo National Wildlife Refuge no later than three.”

“Covered.”

He couldn’t see her smile, but he felt it, like an antelope feels the rushing wind of a leopard’s leap. His body responded like prey. His heart sped. Hairs lifted across his nape.

His phone rang, breaking the spell. He glanced at the screen. Gini’s number, not Ari’s. Shit. She and Missy must have gotten into a fight.

“You want to answer that,” Mammon purred.

He wanted to let it go, but she sounded too damn smug. He raised the phone to his ear. “Yeah?” “Denny,” Gini cried, “thank God you picked up. The truck’s gone!”

…

Read the rest in The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity from Zombies Need Brains, LLC.