Virtual Virgin dspi-5

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Quicksilver and I had never been spotted.

  Apparently the military mind was the least vulnerable to—or most prejudiced against—Millennium Revelation influences, just like Ric’s foster father, the retired military man.

  “Good thing,” Tallgrass said when I mentioned that. “Official forces have to obey orders at once, without hesitation. The brass doesn’t want unhuman hocus-pocus distracting them from their mission.”

  “So the destroyed zombies they find are—?”

  “Opposing cartel fighters their flamethrowers and handheld missiles really bent out of shape,” he answered with a chuckle.

  At the motel, he hauled Ric into our room and installed him in the single sleeping bag on the floor without comment. When Tallgrass bid me good night, Quicksilver followed him to the door and then sat on the floor and moved no farther.

  Someone had lost a roommate.

  “Lock up good, Miss Delilah,” Tallgrass told me, giving me a forefinger salute before shutting the door behind him.

  IN THE MORNING I drove the Jeep across the international bridge.

  Tallgrass insisted Ric and I cover our clothes with camos. That and some official military personnel papers Tallgrass produced got our party through the border stations with only a cursory inspection of the vehicle.

  Quicksilver following every move of the border officers with eyes and slightly open jaws speeded up the routine considerably. As for the duffel bags harboring any suspect items, I assumed the guys’ weapons were buried deep in the desert with the femicides.

  Me, I was just glad that I didn’t have to produce a passport. Even if I’d taken Ashley Martinez’s passport, its theft had surely been reported by now.

  When we got to the El Paso garage where I’d parked Dolly, Ric and I stripped off the camos to our street clothes. Quicksilver jumped out to inspect Dolly’s chassis from chrome bumper bullets to rear Cadillac insignia on the trunk.

  “This where I say adios,” Tallgrass told me and Ric. “I got a short walk to a shortish flight to Wichita. You good for the long drive, amigo?”

  “I did it solo and can again,” I was quick to point out.

  “I know, Del,” Ric said with a flash of returning humor. “Make a guy feel redundant, why don’t you?”

  I stepped close to rub my thumb under his lower lip and feel the rasp of that sexy three-day smudge of beard growth. “No worries. I just like to feel this guy.”

  Tallgrass cleared his throat.

  “Ric, there may still be some . . . lingering presence of El Demonio out there and after you,” he warned us. “Losing any confrontation just makes his type of supernatural more vicious if he shifted into another form, so be careful.”

  Ric nodded, clasping forearms with his one-time mentor.

  Tallgrass tipped his straw Western hat to me. “You let that dog take care of you, Miss Delilah, and you’ll never go wrong.”

  “I take care of him.”

  “You think.”

  He turned and left us beside Dolly. We listened until the echo of his cowboy-booted amble faded entirely. Quicksilver whimpered.

  “I drive first,” I said, not looking at Ric.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered in mock military tones. “Just as long as I drive last.”

  FUNNY, IT DIDN’T work out that way. I guess raising a killing field of zombies can wear a guy out. Not to mention what I put him through before and after in that sleeping bag.

  I never thought seeing the neon fireworks of the Vegas Strip quivering like the aurora borealis on the night horizon would make me feel the relief of coming home.

  From a distance, the place didn’t look infested by werewolves, vampires, and even completely human corporate-greed moguls.

  “Okay if I drop you off at home?” I asked Ric, who was stretched out in the roomy Caddy passenger seat, dozing. Quicksilver did likewise on the rear seat.

  I felt good about handling the last leg of the trip while my guys slept. The bad taste in my memory of being left behind like a girl had evaporated.

  “Makes sense,” Ric murmured. “Then we both have wheels in the morning.”

  Another bad taste in my memory had not faded. I knew I’d have to do something about it. That would be my showdown in the Valley of the Virgin, but it could wait.

  Meanwhile, Ric was reviving nicely. He pushed himself upright.

  “You feeling okay?” I asked. “No remaining pain from your hands, the impact of Torbellino’s magic bullets?”

  “I’m coming back fast, chica. It was a good sign that the showdown with El Demonio took place in the Valley of Guadalupe. We had the blessing of the Virgin, who visited and comforted me during my childhood enslavement.”

  “But . . . but that’s not what unreeled in the cloud cover over Juarez.”

  “Sure it was, Del. You saw it too. Haven’t you ever seen a holy card of the Virgin of Guadalupe?”

  That comment stunned me. “Remind me again how the Virgin manifests herself. She was the first and last Latina manifestation of the Virgin Mary, I know.”

  I also knew that, while driven by El Demonio’s whip to raise zombies in the Mojave Desert, the child Ric was sure the Virgin of Guadalupe had visited him in the goat pens at night. So he ought to recognize her when he saw her.

  Hmm, Irma mused. You do also recall that his last vision of the Virgin coincided with a vampire bat bite and the photo of a female hottie from one of the zombie-runners’ dirty magazines? Hello, first wet dream. Bye, bye Our Lady of Guadalupe. Until now?

  I glanced at the passenger seat. Ric’s narrowed eyes were fixed on the gleaming towers of Vegas growing closer. His face broadcast pleasure as he consulted his memory.

  “I saw this beseeching . . . compassionate female face of transforming beauty. Our Lady of Guadalupe folds her hands before her. Her form in its heavenly blue cloak of sky is hallowed with golden rays. She comes with the scent of roses in the desert, which she let tumble from her cloak for the peasant Juan Diego.”

  “The guy who was secretly Zorro?”

  “That was Don Diego.” Ric looked over and saw I’d been teasing. “Okay, chica, maybe only my subconscious conjured her when I was a prisoner of Torbellino and his gang, but it helped keep me sane. She’d told Juan Diego she was ‘Entirely and Ever Virgin and your compassionate Mother,’ so Mexicans have prayed to her for protection from all evil for more than five hundred years.”

  “And they need it now more than ever,” I warned. “Your psychologist foster mother would tell you that if ever there was a kid’s wish fulfillment fantasy, an exploited child’s patron saint, it would be that paradox of endless virginal purity and boundless maternal love.”

  “Yet fate sent me an aging virgin,” he said with a wink.

  “Not that old, Montoya!”

  “Modern rationalizations like yours don’t work nowadays. I was a child when I first saw the Virgin of Guadalupe. What I saw in that cursed place in Juarez tonight, above those hundreds of unmarked graves of violated girls, was like the Virgin, but pale-skinned, Anglo not Mexican, more a peasant Joan of Arc, who was also a warrior woman and a saint. This figure of the clouds and the moon didn’t look modern, with her simple gown and hair. She seemed an ordinary young woman, yet her encompassing arms sheltered a horde of cowering children.”

  I recognized the Good Maria from Metropolis, of course, but I kept my mouth shut. Like a virgin.

  “That vision,” Ric said, “gave me the strength to drive my nails into my palms until the blood flowed and the dead returned, like roses springing up in the desert, alive again and lethal to evil.”

  I’d seen a lot of bizarre and terrifying and impossible things since the Millennium Revelation had sprung a whole new supernatural dimension of life on earth on us all. Just before he’d raised the femicides, I’d thought Ric had gone mad.

  Afterward, Quicksilver’s healing tongue had erased the stigmata on Ric’s palms. Most people would say he’d been hallucinating, except I’d shared his sky-born
e vision.

  Only I hadn’t seen Metropolis’s saintly working-class girl, Maria, obviously a Virgin Mary stand-in, begging the heedless rich to pity and help the poor children.

  Silent now, I let my brain attempt to superimpose the Virgin Mary over the drive-in movie screen-in-the-sky image I’d seen . . . the virtually nude, jewel-draped, pastie-wearing pagan goddess-cum-Folies-Bergère chorus girl, the Whore of Babylon from Revelations in the bible, another face of the same actress from the same film. Brigitte Helm.

  Just as the dancing girl Maria seduced from a stage upheld by the Seven Deadly Sins, her sky-cast image had transfixed Torbellino’s hundreds of human cartel “soldiers” in suspended motion to be mowed down by Tallgrass’s bullets and the resurrected femicides’ power to avenge.

  What had really happened there?

  All other CinSims were the image of the actor and the role. The Silver Zombie had many roles and a silver metal face and form to hide her true intentions behind.

  Ric’s religious vision of the Virgin Mary made more sense and soothed the savage soul he’d had to resurrect to destroy El Demonio and his human and unhuman armies.

  I’d never forget that swarm of avenging Amazons, hundreds of brutalized girls rising strong and whole, clothed not in the “sun and stars” of the Virgin Mary but in the piecemeal Joan of Arc armor of the shattered Silver Zombie as she drew on the might of machine to vanquish the demonic lord’s robotic male zombies and also used the hypnotic succubus powers of the Eternal Feminine to destroy brutal human men and the demon who commanded them.

  In my mind’s eye, our insubstantial savior had been one hot mama with the sensual, paranormal power of a succubus gone CinemaScope. That’s what I’d seen Ric animate with the gaze of his silver iris, magically, without resorting to dowsing rod or blood, as he always did.

  So the three faces of Maria in the film still lurked in the sky above and haunted and worried me. When she was good, she was very good. When she was bad, she was catastrophic. And when she was the link between the Good and the Bad, the anatomically correct sexy silver robot destroyed at the film’s end—and the tool of somebody else—she was badder than anything.

  Those thoughts jerked me out of my speculations. I had my own secret moments of being badder than anything, especially if they involved Snow.

  During the duel in the sky, Ric had unconsciously drawn on both sides of Maria, saint and succubus. The Seven Deadly Sins’ featured appearance, however, could have only been sent by the resident power at the Inferno Hotel, Cocaine, who played the lead deadly sin of Pride in the rock group’s lineup and was my Silver Zombie.

  Snow.

  El Demonio Torbellino, or whatever remnants of him that might still be circling out there like a mist of evil struggling to take physical form, was not sitting down for a debriefing with me, but I could certainly put Snow to the question.

  He always enjoyed destroying my illusions about my world, and myself. In this town, that meant that he was also the best thing that passed for truth.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  “GODFREY,” I SAID.

  He stood at my Enchanted Cottage front door, as formal as usual in white tie and black morning coat, but held a most unusual silver salver in one hand. His pencil-thin mustache took a stern downward turn.

  I wasn’t dressed for company, wearing my Betty Boop sleep shirt and a bedhead.

  “Miss Delilah, a personal invitation for you was delivered to the main house. I saw early this morning that your Miss Dolly was parked aslant in the driveway and her normally shiny black coat was dulled with dust. I took the liberty of assigning an individual named Woodrow, who was idling about the area, to have her seen to.”

  “Oh, you didn’t, Godfrey.”

  “I just told you I did.”

  “Woodrow is a yard troll. If it’s green and growing, or, uh, brown and dirty and in need of picking up, he will do that, the brown part very reluctantly. Dust in any form is not on his duty roster.”

  “Apparently he found some unemployed pixies to handle the chore. Miss Dolly is her usual self again. I’m afraid I can’t say the same about you.”

  I’d slept about sixteen hours and stumbled down to the kitchen for a hearty breakfast of sliders and McDonald’s fries from the kitchen witch. Apparently she was annoyed with me as well. Quick and I were about to make short work of the fast food when the doorbell had rung.

  I gazed again at the salver. At least somebody wasn’t. A large square envelope was centered exactly on its center, held in place by a slender Mexican quartz letter opener.

  “You say that’s for me?”

  “If you are Miss Delilah Street and not some unkempt pretender.”

  “Can it, Godfrey. I’ve had a rough road trip to Mexico and back.”

  With that I snatched the letter opener and pushed it through the heavy rag paper so hard I got a jagged edge instead of a neat slit.

  I pulled out an embossed card on pristine white stock and read the wedding invitation script very slowly, because it was so ornate it was almost unreadable.

  Christophe invites you to be his special guest

  at a private party at 8:00 p.m. tonight

  for the unveiling of a dazzling new Las Vegas landmark.

  The Penthouse, Inferno Hotel and Casino on the Strip

  Black Tie

  “Nerve incarnate,” I complained. “Not even an RSVP, as if he was certain I’d come running. Who delivered this?”

  “A most unique individual from a messenger service.”

  I believed I’d received something from just such a messenger once before, the silver familiar.

  I looked at my wrist, which was . . . watchless. Godfrey lifted his left arm, shook down his formal white cuff, and offered his round-dialed wristwatch for my perusal.

  “Four fifteen? Must be p.m.,” I mumbled.

  A nearby whimper made me wake up even more to spot Quicksilver beside me, presenting Godfrey with a furry and furrowed brow.

  “Master Quicksilver, good afternoon,” Godfrey said. “Thank you for the heads-up. Miss Delilah, you’re exhausted. Why didn’t you say so? Do sit down. There’s a clever little bench just inside the door.”

  I took his advice, surprised that my knees were a bit wobbly. No food in sixteen hours will do that to my metabolism. For some reason Godfrey was reluctant to cross my threshold. I didn’t know if it was because a proper butler would never do that, or because, as a CinSim, he wasn’t chipped to roam that far.

  “May I see?” Godfrey extended a hand. It did not cross the threshold.

  I handed the card over it.

  “I see,” he murmured after a couple moments. “Rather formal for a piece of public relations ballyhoo. Are you going?”

  “Of course not.” I pushed a hand through my hair. Hornet’s nests would be more manageable. “It’s unspeakably rude.”

  “Certainly on inexcusably short notice.”

  “As I said, rude.”

  “Inarguably.”

  “And I could never get ready that fast.”

  “The last straw.”

  “That’s right, Godfrey. The cardinal sin against Miss Manners. How could I possibly attend a formal affair tonight? Last night I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of a fleabag motel in the murder capital of the world. The night before that I was up to my knees in rattlesnakes and lizards and tarantulas, big ones, Godfrey, running behind an army of desert dust devils and—”

  “Please.” Godfrey’s palms were raised. “No more sordid confessions of the great outdoors. I am an urban animal, Miss Delilah. However, if your emergency is of a social nature, I’m your man. I’ll return to the main house to organize the troops and arrange for a car to pick you up at seven thirty.”

  “Dolly’s all bathed and polished, you said—”

  “A lady does not drive herself.”

  He was gone before I could set him straight on that. My head was whirling. Food. That’s right. I sleepwalked through the front parlor, past
the high-tech office/home theater to the kitchen.

  Where Quicksilver was wolfing down the last of the sliders and fries.

  “Quick!”

  The microwave tinged. A heavenly scent of beef bourguignon filled the air. I got it. The fast food had gone cold. I took out a savory, steaming dish and headed, salivating, for the kitchen table.

  A martini in a chilled glass sat beside my empty place with the sterling silver tableware.

  Apparently the kitchen witch had undergone a change of menu.

  My cell phone rang. I couldn’t remember where I’d left it, but Quick dashed out of the room and returned with it in his mouth, smiling around the case.

  “Uh, thanks.” I eyed the screen. Ric? Ric!

  “I just got this crazy-assed invitation,” he began.

  “Me too. Who brought yours?”

  “I’m going to sound like I’m hallucinating. A little green man.”

  “Did he wear silver sandals and have hairy hammertoes?”

  “I don’t check out feet and shoes first, Del. He was some kind of benign troll with rubbery green skin, in matching lederhosen.”

  “That’s Mercury Express, Homegrown Delivery Service. A lot of the Strip joints use them around town.” And one in particular from my previous experience.

  “You mean enterprises on the Strip.”

  “That’s what I said. I’m still tired as hell, but I’m also as curious as hell.”

  “You game? I haven’t gotten my tux out in year.”

  “You own a tux?”

  “Yeah. Business reasons.”

  “I love men in tuxes.”

  “Down, chica. I am not the Godfrey type. No little bow ties playing peekaboo under my five-o-clock shadow. It’s more actors at the Oscars style. Regular tie, a little black satin here and there.”

  “Like your sheets. Yum. Oh, and don’t shave off all that bandito beard-growth you cultivated in Mexico.”

  “So you’re into black satin and beard burns, huh?”