Silver Zombie dspi-4

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Some would say this was the most classic film ever done by the German expressionist director, Fritz Lang. The studio and censors had hacked the film apart even before it was exported to the larger world. The Nazis would embrace the mechanized super-city as their own, making Lang loathe the product of his own genius. No complete authorized edition existed to this day. A rumored one found a few years ago in Rio had proved fraudulent.

  “Snow,” I breathed, “what do you have here? Not the complete lost footage? That would be … priceless.”

  His sunglassed gaze remained fixed on the screen. “I didn’t say ‘Holy Grail’ for nothing. Yes. Somehow the foot of the Oz rainbow pointed to the archives of a restored Wichita-area Art Deco movie palace, the Augusta, and this lost, rare, impossible footage. That’s what I want here. That’s what I’ll take back to the Inferno Hotel, an entire new wing built around this vintage futuristic vision. I’ll call it the New Metropolis Towers and Condominiums and maybe, if you treat me right, you’ll have visiting privileges.”

  I was so freaking sold. “Imagine guests living in this vintage film city of the future. So the subterranean Nine Circles of Hell aren’t playground enough for you? You’re reconstructing the film world’s Art Deco Tower of Babel in Vegas? You realize those biblical Babel builders blasphemed?”

  “You realize,” Snow said, “that ‘blaspheme’ is a pretty archaic concept? Especially in Vegas? Just tune in to your film fanatic mode, Delilah. I must say having you sitting here in that seriously anti-Code evening gown much enhances my viewing pleasure.”

  “I would wear a green clown suit for the privilege of seeing Metropolis uncut.”

  Snow chuckled, returning his hidden gaze from the screen. “I knew you’d appreciate this.”

  It’s hard to overstate how rare this film was. The Holy Grail of vintage films indeed. Remembering it was twelve years from the grim but luminous black-and-white futuristic robotic fable of Metropolis to the hypercolorized, deceptively happy fable of The Wizard of Oz shows how fast the art of film developed—by leaps and bounds—and so had its audience.

  I rapidly scanned my all-things-vintage memory bank.

  Metropolis was a dark antitechnology tale of Maria, a sweet, loving girl who became the movie’s model for the ultimate roboticized worker-drone. The “manufactured” robot queen bee built on Maria in Metropolis had inspired George Lucas to create the shiny gold C-3PO robot in the Star Wars film saga, but a more recent descendent was Seven of Nine, that sexy mechanical Borg female “construct” of nineties Star Trek television.

  Now I stared at the moments of heroine Maria’s on-screen re-creation, a human woman being made into a silver-metal superwoman, perhaps the most powerful image of feminine power since the Neolithic fertility goddesses. Only this dame wore body armor.

  She stood on platform soles of solid metal. She packed it at the hips like a gunslinger, and don’t we all, a little? I was reminded of the secondhand cop duty belt I wore for action expeditions. Her metal-gloved hands curved out from the sides of her thighs. Like a gunslinger’s.

  Her torso was covered by a stiff metal “stomacher” bodice Queen Elizabeth I (no monarch to mess with anywhere, anytime) would wear.

  Her breastplate was topped off by steel cannonballs, size 36C. Her shoulders stood up high and rounded too, and her neck sinews combined something of the swan with something of the suspension bridge.

  Her face was sculpted in perfect symmetry, but blank of eye, taut of lip, and dominated by a nose that soared into a delicate pillar to the top of her head, which wore a smooth metal bonnet. She looked like she’d never had a bad hair day, having no visible hair. She also looked like she could kick Alien ass or take down Billy the Kid. Or both at the same time. She was eternal. And she was awesome.

  So was the visionary film world that had created her.

  I watched, mesmerized, aware that Snow alone had the chutzpah to reconstruct this vanished apocalyptic vision of Metropolis in Las Vegas. Of course, in the film, the robotic superwoman had been destroyed. That would not happen again, from the rapt way Snow’s sunglasses fixed on the screen. She would escape pre-WWII Germany and get her full second round in post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas.

  “Why are you showing this to me?” I asked, hardly noticing the time until the 153-minute film had burst like a bubble on the dark screen and vanished. But my absinthe glass was empty.

  “You always want answers, Delilah Street,” Snow said, stretching out his white ostrich-skin boots and lacing his hands behind his neck in a way that showcased his long, dramatic frame. “The mysteries Wichita holds for you are far more serious than my being here. But … the film I’ve just acquired is a lost treasure few would appreciate. I simply wanted to show it to somebody.”

  Unsaid was the fact he wanted to show it to somebody who understood what a rarity it was, that he needed my mind and companionship. For an instant, I actually felt sorry for him. It must be lonely at the pinnacle.

  And then I got one of my intuitive glimmers. “How did you find this here in Wichita? Through the Augusta Theater restoration, but only you knew what it was, didn’t you?”

  His long, white, lazy fingers reached out to touch the silver bracelet I hadn’t realized had made a green circle of thorns on my wrist. The familiar morphed again into a green-enameled silver garter snake, reared a tiny scaled head, and hissed at him.

  He laughed, but withdrew his hand.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve hired what the antique dealers call ‘pickers’ to look for it for decades. The Augusta is a 1935 movie theater on the National Register of Historic Places. It was never a huge urban film palace, but it is pure Art Deco, rather similar to how you’re looking now, Delilah, all green and silver and black, like your sterling serpent. It’s been restored on a shoestring by devoted locals, and no one was more surprised than I to find that an uncut version of Metropolis numbered among their souvenirs. Of course, they had no idea what they had.”

  “Of course,” I told him. “I just didn’t understand why you’d share the find of several lifetimes with me.”

  “Is that all you want to know after seeing Metropolis? Come on, Delilah, you can be cheekier than this.”

  I studied my host, an enigma who was as ancient as a same-named medieval Christophe … as modern and deadly as Cocaine … as cozy-familiar and icy as Snow.

  I held my breath while Irma bit her tongue. My tongue wasn’t so easy to harness.

  “Why aren’t you giving the Brimstone Kiss after your shows anymore?” I asked, not having planned to go there.

  He braced his elbows on the theater seat arms and again ran his albino fingers into the hair at his temples as if he had a nagging headache. Me, I hope.

  “Why?” I demanded. “The fabled Brimstone Kiss was your signature. Did I … use it up?”

  I was thinking that maybe he … it had only one life to give …

  Jeez, that sounded like the title of a long-gone soap opera.

  He turned to face me, the unreadable sunglasses burning like coal into my anxious regard.

  “Nothing to do with you, Delilah. Sorry.” A slight smile lifted his lips. “I can’t be tied down to a concert schedule anymore, you see. That’s why I moved the Seven Deadly Sins to Vegas.”

  He stood and opened his arms like a showman, an albino Buffalo Bill doffing his hat and taking a bow. “A CinSim, of course, is doing my show tonight.”

  I stood too.

  “A CinSim of yourself? How?”

  “Simplicity itself.” Snow shot his cuffs, enjoying his Green Room showman’s suit, revealing the new Technicolor emeralds in his white-gold cuff links. “I had myself recorded on vintage black-and-white film, then ordered the CinSim from the Immortality Mob.”

  “One can do that?”

  “They’re the mob. They fill orders for anything from anyone with the money.”

  “And your … zombie CinSim can’t bestow the Brimstone Kiss?” I asked to be certain.

  “Why wou
ld it? The Brimstone Kiss is extremely personal.” He moved closer, his voice softer. “Hadn’t you noticed? Oh, that’s right. You never got the multiorgasmic effect. You were too busy, as usual, Delilah, detesting the easy O and sacrificing yourself to a Judas kiss to save your own true love. You’re much like Maria, the worker’s champion who was made into the emotionless über-robot in Metropolis. You, too, believe ‘the heart must mediate between the head and the hands.’ But the heart harbors all the seven deadly sins, Delilah. Anger, Greed, Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Lust. …” He listed all the members of his Seven Deadly Sins rock band but himself.

  His cool right hand slid around to the small of my back and my entire spine tingled. I was right. It was naked. My back. So was his palm.

  I froze in shock and defense.

  “Have I forgotten one?” he asked.

  “Pride, I believe.”

  “And Pride.” He named his own role in the band so softly that I turned my head to hear it even as he stepped closer.

  Pride made me hold my ground.

  By turning my head aside, I’d put us into a perfect tango position, tightly together but facing in opposite directions.

  I tried to insert my hands between us, between his chest and mine, to push him off.

  Who are you kidding, kid? Irma was nattering nervously in my head. This guy’s got the ripped body of that giant white marble statue of David at Caesar’s Palace. That Michelangelo sure knew how to do guys. Wink. Who knew an Old Testament sheep boy could be so hunky? What else here of interest do you think might be giant?

  Shut up, I ordered her. I can’t think.

  That’s the point, baby. … Irma’s voice faded.

  I really did need to think, to put all sorts of incidents and innuendos in my life together. Item: the lightningstrike scars I’d seen on Snow’s chest in his performance catsuit. Item: the new star-shaped scar on Ric’s neck that so needed my attention.

  This wasn’t just about sex, but life and death, which made sense. Risk. Love. Hate. Hope. I was beginning to put all the mysteries within an enigma together and started to say it aloud, step by step, to Snow, of all people.

  “The Brimstone Kiss became the Resurrection Kiss in the Hell underneath the Karnak,” I told him, my voice more breathless than I liked, catching the frantic rhythm of Irma’s heated running internal commentary.

  “I was there,” he reminded me. “I warned you.”

  “It became something else in the hotel bridal suite you so ironically donated as Ric’s recovery room.”

  “When I became your proxy whipping boy, you mean?”

  I wet my lips, nervous and ashamed. I instantly knew the moment he’d seen that gesture of weakness, because he pulled me closer, forcing contact, forcing confession.

  “I didn’t want you as a whipping boy,” I told him hotly. “I never would have tolerated owing you for that. I was simply healing Ric.”

  My self-defense sounded lame.

  “So Grizelle reported,” Snow said, “when her fury permitted her human speech after it was all over.”

  “Did you call her off me?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You wanted to save your revenge for yourself?”

  “Or I just wanted to save you … for myself.”

  I was not going there. “Grizelle didn’t tell you how I healed Ric?”

  In the extended silence, I saw there was something I knew and he didn’t.

  Finally!

  My hands stopped fighting his custody. Now I knew what buttons to push where. His Brimstone Kiss had affected me and mine beyond belief. For good or ill? I didn’t know yet. Could I return the “favor”? Did remnants of his Brimstone Kiss still linger on my lips? Was he as vulnerable to me as I was to him? Would he hate that as much as I had? A coward wouldn’t want to know.

  I did.

  “Here’s how I heal, and in your case, hurt,” I said, feeling breathlessly bold.

  My rogue fingers slipped the middle mother-of-pearl buttons on his shirt open. So easy with silk. Almost an “easy O.” No big surprise, except I could feel a tiny tremor of shock as my warm fingers touched Snow’s supercool flesh. His or my shock, I didn’t know. Or care.

  I leaned away to—why the hell not?—wrench the shirt open. Snow’s strong hands at my back kept me from over-balancing, accommodating my attack. He would.

  “Delilah, do you know what you’re doing?” he asked. Softly.

  “Yes. Do you? I don’t think so.”

  Having bared the center of his albino chest, I stared at the lightning bolt scar tissue, shiny and silver, meeting from all four corners of his torso at the breastbone above those abs of stone and below those pecs of marble.

  His white leather performance catsuits cut to the navel flaunted these anti-ink tattoos onstage for all and anyone to see. Who or what had inflicted them. Real lightning? A fire? Torture, even? Fiery torture?

  “A great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch.” He had just quoted an ancient mystic to me. Was the great star not just Cocaine of the Seven Deadly Sins rock band, but a true falling angel? Even Lucifer himself, which means “light”? And the “wormwood” was regret for all that was lost? Heaven exchanged for the Inferno Hotel and the Nine Circles of Dante’s Hell beneath it?

  I knew what I needed to do. I brushed my parted lips over the solid center where the lightning-strike scars met, over his heart, if he had one, and then repeated the gesture with my tongue. It was like licking frost from a steel pole in a Wichita winter—an icy, tingling shock.

  Well, he wasn’t a vampire. That was a dead issue. I felt his heart stumble and then jackrabbit under my palm.

  Did he feel the pleasure effect, though? Or just shock?

  “Second Circle of Hell, woman,” he muttered, his voice soft but so deep in his chest that my hands sensed its breath-catching vibration.

  Oh, he did feel it. I had what every woman in Vegas and beyond wanted. I had Snow in the palms of my hands.

  My heart was beating pretty wildly by then. Triumph almost felt like erotic excitement. I was the puppet master here.

  I ran my lips and tongue diagonally across his chest from rib to opposite nipple. His audible intake of breath tautened his pec for my attack. His hands were digging into my shoulder blades, pulling me closer.

  That was ballsy, Irma gasped.

  She was right. The scars made a giant X on his torso, but the nipples weren’t part of the zone. I just couldn’t resist payback for how he’d pulled my gown down to my waist so unnecessarily during the Brimstone Kiss.

  This really was rather fun, salving my conscience while driving a sex symbol crazy. Any way you want it …

  I opened the one button on his blazer and unclasped some way-too-Texan silver belt buckle courtesy of the Emerald City makeover attraction.

  I was expecting his knees to buckle at any moment, but no such luck.

  “Pleasure,” I pointed out rather redundantly, “for pain. I can offer it in equal parts. Have I made up for one whiplash yet?”

  He was breathing hard, but still able to speak. “Oh, Delilah,” he said putting his mouth on the hair covering my ear. “Do you think I’d be crazy enough to let you cut my hair, or tell you that?”

  I’d heard that rumble with my cheek and ear pressed against his chest.

  “Do you feel like this onstage?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like they’re all in the palm of your hand?”

  His soft laughter stopped when I applied my tongue again and ran it down to his navel.

  “How far do these lightning scars go?” I asked, parting the zipper on his pants.

  “From Heaven to Hell and back again. How far are you going to go?”

  He sounded amused now, and more in control than I wanted, but his breath was coming quick and shallow.

  I took stock. My cheeks burned and my lips tingled. It was either go down, to Hell, or up, to Heaven. Low road or high road.

  I’d proved my th
eory. The silvered tissue of scarred skin was subject to my healing, soothing, and even surreal sexual influence. So I’d also proved that I could undo Snow as much as he had undone me. We were tied at the moment. His hands shifted to the top of my shoulders, ready to assist me in sinking to a new level of competitive sensuality.

  Instead, I surprised us both and went up, my fingers ripping open his top shirt buttons and pulling the string tie loose and his collar agape to tilt my face sideways and suck vampire-hard at the hollow of his throat.

  Who was helpless and exposed now? I wanted to ask as his head reared back. He would have spoken, maybe even objected, but I breathed—or hissed—shhhh without missing a beat. So he let me have my way with him.

  Only … his hands fanned on my bare lower back and tilted my strong, silver-laced, satin-clad pelvic bones against his.

  To feel every throb of his climax.

  That forced me to break my punishing kiss and stumble back to establish my balance in every way. I kept my head tilted at an inquisitive angle. “One? Maybe two lashes paid for now, would you grant me that?”

  Snow had let himself sink onto the narrow hard arm of a theater chair, his clothes still split open a provocative smidge down the middle, from the pulse visibly galloping in his throat to Gehenna. Not a bad look. I’d have been a killer GQ advertising director too.

  So.

  Delilah, the small and meek, had just had a very personal peek behind the façade.

  The Great and Powerful Snow was just another man behind the curtain in need of a really good blow job.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  AFTER THIS PIECE of impromptu performance “art,” I was more than ready to retreat behind the closed door of the suite’s powder room off the entry hall.

  The last time I’d made a pit stop on the way out of a major hotel-casino’s penthouse suite, it had been to wash off blood spatter after ridding werewolf mobster Cesar Cicereau of a reanimated victim at the Gehenna Hotel in Vegas.

  Now, I just wanted to avoid Snow for a while.