Silver Zombie dspi-4

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “My money!” Sheena wailed, running to the wreckage to claw at the remains.

  “Will she ruin her perfect manicure clawing for those burnt bills?” I said to Quicksilver. “Money is the root of all evil.”

  I ran to the station portico to jump behind Dolly’s steering wheel as Quicksilver took the passenger side, having done his business and being ready to leave. I tried to call Ric, but my cell phone had been fried. Better it than me or Quicksilver.

  “And I think your whole perfect storm is going south,” I yelled to Sheena as we sped down the exit road.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  I HAD TO watch for the broken glass in the station driveway, so it wasn’t until we were almost at the street that I looked up at the sky again. I glimpsed Emerald City’s towers coated in heat lightning, the highest point practically touching the threatening storm clouds.

  Without the weather witches adding harassing phenomena to the storm, it had boiled down to a fixed, churning vortex spinning fog and lightning and darkness around the Emerald City towers, which were being swarmed by climbing hordes of El Demonio’s zombies, swinging like disintegrating apes up the glittering slick green sides on thin steel guy wires. Talk about flying monkeys.

  When had El Demonio and his crew besieged Emerald City?

  I may have disabled the broadcast tower, but Emerald City was WTCH-TV now, threatened by an evil new power, and there was no longer any coaxial cable to fall victim to Quicksilver’s bladder magic.

  By going to the ground to take out the WTCH-TV tower, I’d put an unbridgeable gulf between myself and my stranded allies in the Emerald City towers.

  I drove up to the deserted parking lot with despair in my soul.

  The storm was so ferocious and high.

  I was so isolated below.

  There were so many fierce, hungry zombies in the many stories between.

  I needed to rejoin Ric in Snow’s suite. I had a lobby to cross and an elevator to get into, with dog. I parked Dolly away from any trees that could fall on her, in a dark part of the Emerald City lot.

  Slipping around the side of the building, I noticed that the storm-green light distorted colors, making what was dark blacker, what was sickly yellow-green paler. So I was glad for the dark navy shoes and suit I wore and only wished I had pants. Even Quicksilver’s crisp gray and cream coat looked jaundiced, like a … an absinthe-toned CinSim.

  I peeked in the first lobby window. Had the chupacabra come back?

  No, it was El Demonio himself lounging on a visitor’s chair, sending tremors down his thirty-foot bullwhip so it twitched like an impatient tail. The light gave his clothing and skin a greenish reptilian cast. His squinty black eyes were bloodshot enough to match the chupacabra’s. I wondered if the man who’d been surnamed Torbellino had disappeared entirely into El Demonio over the past twenty years, if the Millennium Revelation had brought out a true demon in him.

  The lobby bodies had been piled in a corner, where a few limbless zombies chewed frantically on the remains. I suspected they had fallen during the assault on the towers and had broken off too much to keep going at anything but devouring, so they’d been relegated to the “clean-up” crew.

  Other thugs sat around with the head man, drinking from liquor bottles. An empty one of Old Crow rolled back and forth on the floor as the storm shook the building.

  Toto came skittering through the ruins, sniffing for the yellow brick road. A thug pulled out a semiautomatic, but although the bullet sprayed green splinters from the recycled glass floor, the small black flash disappeared behind another chair.

  “Where is that vicious little dog?” a woman’s shrill voice demanded. “I’ll show that Dorothy.” Almira Gulch came stomping through in her old-maid dress and ridiculous crushed black straw stovepipe hat, a basket over her arm. “That dog needs to be put away.”

  “You got it, lady,” drawled one of Torbellino’s men.

  She turned on the boss man after stepping daintily over his bull-hide tail. “You, sir, look like a man of authority. I want you to put that dog in a cage and that stupid girl Dorothy who let it bite me in jail.”

  The thug who’d shot at Toto lifted the gun, but Torbellino raised a lazy hand.

  “Don’t waste your ammunition. These things aren’t real.”

  “They’re real nuisances,” the guy answered, taking a bead on Miss Almira Gulch’s hat.

  “I said, don’t,” Torbellino ordered through gritted teeth. “This isn’t a carnival shooting gallery. This is our Armageddon, ass. Either grow or die, and those snoops on our Kansas drug-drives are threatening my operation going international. We’d be outa here with our prize if some damned necromancer hadn’t turned all the elevator wires to silver.”

  “But, boss, you want this silver thingamajiggy.”

  “I want the power of the ultimate Silver Zombie. I’ve had these cheap Mexican models for the digging up, sure, for decades. But the Silver Zombie would be able to find and dig up whole armies of new undead meth-heads. I’d be King of the Zombies. I could run this continent. Hell, I could run this hemisphere with that one heavy-metal piece on the crime game board.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “You don’t need to. If the weather witches’ storm doesn’t knock those holdouts out of their pretty glass tower, our zombie cattle-drivers will finally reach the top and throw them off. It’s just bad luck some rich guy made off with the Silver Zombie before we did.”

  “Won’t all this throwing off and knocking off lose you the Silver Zombie?”

  “Nope. No more than your bullet can kill these kinky CinSims running around here. They’re zombies too and already dead.”

  “But they … look normal and talk and wear clothes and don’t eat anybody’s brains. That one there acts just like my Aunt Clara and I’d really like to clean her clock. One shot, boss, please?”

  Almira was heading through again, like the clockwork CinSim she was and would be until she became a full-fledged hotel-casino attraction and some of the actress underneath her, Margaret Hamilton, a perfectly nice lady, came out to soften the film persona.

  “Shut up,” El Demonio shouted, “or you’ll end up in my local body farm and get raised to run with the cattle, like these stupid zombies. Don’t push me. I really need a better grade of zombie.”

  Thanks to the broken door, I’d heard everything. I parted my Green Room–permed hair and pulled it forward into two pigtails. The silver familiar obligingly split and clipped each tail into place.

  I played director and gave Quicksilver a short but key nonspeaking role.

  The moment Miss Gulch vanished, I nodded at my dog.

  Quick padded silently through the broken door and slunk around the furniture so he could appear right behind El Demonio’s chair.

  Toto zipped out again, thanks to Miss Gulch’s absence. While the men’s eyes were automatically drawn to the streaking little dog, I eased on down the lobby’s trashed yellow brick road and into the armed thugs’ view.

  Interacting with them at just the right level was the biggest difficulty.

  “Where has my little dog gone?” I said sadly. “That awful witch in the even more awful hat wants to take him away to be killed.”

  “Say, are you Dorothy?” one guy asked. “You came through here before. You should be in the storm shelter.”

  “Oh, dear, I’ve got to find my dog first. And then I’ll go.”

  By now I had edged over and past Torbellino’s whip and was even with his chair.

  Quick whisked out from behind the chair and ran into the hall.

  “There he is,” I cried, dashing after him.

  “Hey, boss,” the dazed thug was saying. “This whole scene looks more like that Alice down the rabbit hole thing, only with dogs.”

  I heard the real Toto following our trail, arfing all the way.

  “Say I can shoot this one, please.”

  No one or no thing guarded the elevator bank. I pressed a button and hope
d.

  “You, there. Dorothy. I want that dog!”

  Miss Gulch didn’t seem to notice Toto had added a hundred and forty-six pounds. Or that Dorothy had added a bust and a business suit. Like feral zombies, feral CinSims seemed to degrade. I was getting a whole new insight on CinSims, but probably wouldn’t live long enough to come to any conclusions but my own.

  “Shaddup in the hall,” came from the office area. This order was followed by a sharp crack of a whip.

  “I’m not Dorothy,” I told Almira, “and your hat is horrible.”

  “Well, of all the nerve, you young whippersnapper. You’ll be sorry.”

  The elevator doors opened … on another CinSim, garbed in checked pants, brocaded vest, and black hat.

  “Almira Gulch,” he said, “you’re a mean, wicked woman. I’ll see Dorothy home before the big storm turns into a tornado. You’d better find your bicycle and ride like Hell for home yourself. Come on, Dorothy, and your big dog too. There’s no time to be lost.”

  Professor Marvel grabbed my arm to hustle me into the elevator car, with Quick behind me turning to snap at Almira Gulch to stay behind.

  “This is very kind of you,” I told my CinSim escort, “but I hear the elevator cables don’t work.”

  “Not for their kind. I’ll have you know, young lady, I have been to Kansas City in my travels, where everything is up-to-date, and have ridden in these new-fangled things called elevators for years. Oh my, I have ridden in even more exciting aerial transportation, my dear. Now. Up, up, and away.”

  We did indeed whoosh upward in a working elevator.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  A PERFECTLY SOUND Ben Hassard awaited us in the penthouse suite entry hall, although he wore a roomy Asian robe over his trousers.

  “I’m so relieved that you and the dog made it past those vicious criminals, Miss Street,” Hassard said. “Who’s this guy?”

  “No one to worry about at all,” said Professor Marvel, sketching a bow. “I must leave now. I’m expected in a storm cellar. Or was it a storm?”

  The doors automatically closed on him. The future Wizard of Oz was running out on me, just as he had on Dorothy, at the end.

  “Another CinSim,” Ben, er, marveled. “I must say they do put on a show, popping up here and there. Glad you look hale and hearty. Tallgrass and the other FBI man and Mr. Christopher are conferring in the screening room.”

  “Screening room? What are they doing there?”

  After my impulsive exit, I’d expected a warmer welcome back.

  I followed Quicksilver into the main room and saw the storm churning like the contents of a giant blender outside the glass doors to the balcony. It sounded as loud up here too.

  Ben Hassard followed, apologizing. “There’s something wrong about the film I sold Mr. Christopher. I’m afraid it’s the source of all my troubles. That demonic mobster wants something on it. Perhaps some hidden material that’s incriminating.”

  I had no time to disabuse Hassard of his relatively safe and normal worldview as I headed for the home theater, opening the double doors so all three could enter at once, Hassard, Quicksilver, and I.

  The movie was unreeling, but standing silhouettes obscured most of the screen.

  “So I get it’s a priceless piece of film history,” Ric was arguing. “Am I supposed to believe you just wanted it as a collector? A little something the Mexican drug cartels were so hot to have they’d torture and kill for it?”

  Snow’s powerful stage voice sounded weary, as if Ric had been grilling him for a long time.

  “I’ve told you, Montoya. I’m planning to model the centerpiece of my billion-dollar Inferno Hotel and Casino expansion on the look of this film. It cost almost three million dollars to produce in 1927, a phenomenal amount for the time, and I plan to reproduce the sets in reality at a phenomenal amount for our time. The film is a guide, but also the crown jewel of my new multientertainment facility. I have no idea why an international thug like Torbellino would want a cultural icon such as Metropolis.”

  I could hear Ric’s exasperated sigh from the doorway as he turned back to view the silent film. “There must be something in the film that will make El Demonio richer and more powerful. Nothing else motivates him.” I saw his profile turn toward Snow’s. “Or Vegas moguls like you.”

  Snow’s silhouetted shoulders shrugged. I recognized the lines of his jacket, but wondered if Ric had seen his albino throat bearing the telltale bruise—in his case—of an angrily returned paranormal kiss.

  Oh, gosh. Did lips leave recognizable prints too? I’d left enough Midnight Cherry Shimmer on Ric during this trip for him to recognize the pattern, if so.

  Tallgrass was sitting in one of the aisle seats actually watching the film, so Quicksilver trotted down the shallow stairs to sit beside him.

  Ric turned back in a flash. “Delilah? You’re safe and back.”

  He strode to the doors to embrace me. “We saw the lightning fizzle out, so I figured you and Quick were all right even though we couldn’t reach your cell phone. The WTCH tower is down?”

  “Still standing but shorted out. Dead. The tornado the broken coven summoned is still threatening Emerald City and so is the Wendigo. And Tallgrass, you might want to look into Lili West at the local Sunset City, when this is all done. I think she’s the head weather witch around here.”

  Ric laughed and pulled me closer as Tallgrass looked on, shocked.

  “You did some A-one detecting on your solo day in town, Del. And El Demonio and his men in the lobby? How’d you get past them?”

  “By being born Black Irish and passing for a CinSim. They’re not too tuned into the vintage motion-picture world. They mistook Quick and me for Dorothy and Toto, who are still running loose down there.”

  Snow’s brief bark of laughter startled us.

  “What’s funny about Delilah being trapped between a supernatural storm and a horde of zombies, Christophe?” Ric demanded.

  “This ‘Demon’ of yours, like all brutal and greedy humans, is also stupid. What would he do with a piece of rare film like Metropolis? He’d be too ignorant to even exploit its characters as CinSims, and the only truly valuable one, the only commercially sexy one, so to speak, is the woman-made-robot.”

  I resented Snow making light of the monster who’d controlled Ric’s childhood. I had to say something.

  “El Demonio lives to torture and kill, with drugs and drug money and with his own hand. I think you can imagine what more than three hundred strokes of his bullwhip would feel like.”

  “Ah.” Snow left the shadows to come and face me. “You make that experience so very vivid, Miss Street. Thanks for educating me.”

  Sunglasses don’t offer much eye contact, so I stared at his throat. A white silk aviator scarf, like those he gave away at the end of his rock concerts, concealed the place my mouth had bruised.

  Oh, this was awkward.

  That’s what you get for confusing sex with revenge, Irma twitted me. You owe him again. That look is so dashing young Howard Hughes on him, don’t you think?

  She couldn’t have repulsed me more, which got my brain in gear.

  “Snow’s right, though,” I said, walking past him and Ric to face the movie screen. “I can see that Torbellino would like the same things the Nazis did about this film. The jerky, robotlike workers slaving away belowground like zombies twelve hours a day. The masters lording it in their gleaming towers like Vegas moguls. It’s El Demonio’s hidden zombie empire, in a way.”

  “He didn’t covet this film for sentimental reasons, Miss Street,” Snow said. “It isn’t as if he’d need an Oscar award for Best Exploitation of Humankind he could display on a shelf.”

  Oscar. Hollywood’s prized golden statuette.

  The movie screen even now was revealing the passionate young girl and worker’s salvation, Maria, being “processed” by the masters into a gleaming, unemotional robot, the triumph of scientific method over humanity, losing her life and h
er heroic young lover. Speaking of which …

  “Ric.”

  “Here, Delilah.” He stepped to my side. “What is it?”

  “Did … you turn the elevator cables silver so the zombies couldn’t climb them inside the Emerald City towers?”

  “Silver has much mojo,” Tallgrass said, his voice definitive in the darkness as the unwinding film flickered over all our faces. “Dog has silver on his collar. Delilah Street wears silver. Mi amigo has been reborn with the Silver Eye.”

  “I think silver controls zombies,” Ric said. “At least it seems to since I’ve acquired the vision.”

  “Silver killed vampires in the old lore, as well as were-wolves,” Snow mused, as if contributing to the campfire ghost stories.

  I was feeling as weary as he sounded. “And black-and-white film used enough silver nitrate that many classic movies were destroyed to strip the silver from them. Is there any way El Demonio could—”

  I noticed, in the meantime, that Ric had begun moving slowly down the shallow stairs toward the movie screen, as if in a trance.

  “This is one of the most luminous films I’ve ever seen,” he said. “No wonder no complete versions could be found. They would have yielded too much silver to save. And the robot, she’s a moon goddess for a technological age. Look at her. She’s all silver, an armored Joan of Arc. Think of the concentrated aura her image would have on the black film strip. She’d be blinding. An angel of light.”

  He walked right up to the screen as if hypnotized, or hypnotizing.

  And the silver robot moved to meet him where pixel or plasma met flesh and blood. Ric reached out a hand and a robotic arm lifted to touch a silver gauntlet to his fingers.

  The theme of the film was what Lilah West had said about work and art and passion: “The heart lies between the hand and the head.”

  Ric’s hand guided the silver robot as if leading her in a gavotte as she stepped out of the film and into the room, jerkily glancing around like Frankenstein’s suddenly alive bride. Life-size, like a real girl.