We all watched, stricken to stone by Silver Screen lightning.
I knew Ric had found and raised zombies since he was a toddler.
Now he’d raised the first CinSim never touched by the Immortality Mob, or bonded to any imported human corpse. One only and wholly itself. Herself. The Eve of zombies. The Silver Zombie supreme. The supernaturally scientific creature El Demonio must have wanted to conjure himself, that he could somehow use to raise and control and master a worldwide zombie empire.
“Master?” she said in a flat, dead tone viewers of the silent film had never heard.
To Ric.
Oooh, Irma bemoaned in my ear. We have got one hot little Roomba robot vacuum cleaner on our hands. Master? I wonder if she does dudes. Kiss your romantic aspirations good-bye.
Chapter Thirty
“NOW,” SAID SNOW, “that we know what Torbellino wants, we have the key to a battle plan. Mr. Tallgrass.”
We had adjourned to the living room.
“Yes?” Tallgrass advanced, Quicksilver by his side.
Snow said, “I can project the image of the Silver Zombie face ten stories high on the black storm clouds.”
“That’ll be just a shadow of the real thing,” I objected. “Will it project any silver power on its own?”
“Some,” Ric thought.
“It doesn’t matter,” Snow decreed. “It’ll have the power to amaze and distract the drug lord’s forces. If I banish the weather witches’ circling tornado,” Snow asked Tallgrass, “can you turn back the Wendigo?”
“Possibly. With Quicksilver’s help.”
“Montoya?” Snow asked.
Ric shook himself back into sober reality and stepped forward, shadowed by his glitzy robot handmaiden.
Snow posed a second question. “You called the Silver Zombie to life. Do you have the power to banish El Demonio from the lobby and his Alpine zombies from the Emerald City walls?”
“My pleasure to try,” Ric said.
“What about me?” I asked, feeling a very selfish Dorothy confronting a contrary wizard.
“Your choice,” Snow said. “You can soar in the storm clouds with me or fight in the basement barricades with Montoya and friend.”
“Delilah’s coming with me,” Ric said.
I couldn’t argue. We had the silver mojo, no matter how iffy it was at the moment. And I still had to figure out exactly what the robot Ric had seduced off the screen was.
Quicksilver had padded over to lick my wrist. I hadn’t noticed until then that I’d scraped the skin raw in the battle to cut the WTCH coax cable. It healed as I watched.
“Good dog. I hope our efforts to get Kansas skies back to the clear blue color of your eyes work,” I told him. “Is Tallgrass shaman enough to keep you safe?”
Quicksilver shifted from foot to foot like the Cowardly Lion being bashful. I realized he wanted to convey, modestly, that he was accompanying Tallgrass to protect him, as I intended to protect Ric.
Who, I wondered, would ever dare to protect Snow?
THERE WAS NO question that Ric’s silver elevator cables worked for our party, if not zombies. Escorting the robot was like moving an automated department store mannequin to another floor.
When we didn’t move, she didn’t move. When we did, she marched in our wake.
What I found Mister-Spock “fascinating” was that I could see the climbing zombies loosen their grips on the guy wires and plummet to the ground as our see-through glass elevator car on the inside came even with them on the outside.
Maybe that’s why Marriott Hotels favored glass lobby elevators and open atria. To keep the zombies down.
By the time we reached the lobby, the attacking zombies, or what was left of them, were converging with us on Torbellino and his occupying minions.
Maria might be a zombie lord’s magnet, but now she was a zombie repellent.
They circled the lower floor and the yellow brick road still speckled with blood. Their skeletal jaws shivered and chattered with anticipation, but either Ric or Maria broadcast a vibe that kept them outside an invisible circle of sorts.
Unfortunately, El Demonio was inside it. He wore the same black leather hat that had shaded his sinister features in the WTCH parking lot sunshine. Here, the unblinking narrowed black eyes and slit vertical nostrils over mercilessly thin lips accentuated his resemblance to a snake despite his solid, stocky body in an expensive, but sleazy shiny suit.
He was smoking a long, fat cigar and the air reeked.
He uncoiled from his cushy lobby chair, standing and drawing the whip butt to his right side.
Ric stepped forward to confront him.
I waited for the familiar to fill my hands with the twin whip butts it had produced on occasion, but it was … AWOL. Maria and I and all our silver mojo were suddenly no more than witnesses to the gunfight at the OK Corral.
Men! That’s why they drive us nuts.
Torbellino lifted his right arm and the great long whip arched up to strike. The thing seemed as long as the Loch Ness monster, loops of braided leather that a rippling tidal wave of motion could propel until its distant, delicate tongue struck and seared flesh like a razor’s edge.
Ric stared at the stirring serpent that seemed an extension of El Demonio’s arm and hand. Under Ric’s gaze, the dark braided leather so like scales lightened in color to shining silver. As the color lightened, the long whip grew heavy. El Demonio’s arm started trembling while the whip’s increasing weight dragged it down along his leg to the floor. He’d become a Midas whose gift was his curse.
A thirty-foot silver whip is far too heavy to wield.
Ric had no trouble walking up to his panting, disbelieving enemy and wresting the whip butt from his palsied grasp.
He cracked the whip against his leg, not lifting the ponderous silver train, but sending a psychic shiver that reached the end to lick out like a tongue and slash the huddled zombie bodies devouring each other into smaller and smaller pieces of bone and leathery skin and shreds of hair and lacerated eyeball.
El Demonio curled into himself like a cobra in a basket, all passive body and lethal, poisonous black eyes.
“You’re done here in Kansas,” Ric told him. “You’ve lost. You’ve lost the bulk of your zombies and your most murderous human underlings. Taking over the weather witches has exposed their petty crimes of abusing the weather for financial gain. Their national council and the local law will shut them down. The U.S.-Mexican drug cartel task force will track and bust all your smuggling operations from here to whatever hell you run home to in the southern hemisphere.”
“They’ve been trying that for years, hijo,” Torbellino answered. “Law enforcement will never shut down the drug and zombie traffic. People want that. I’ll have another zombie army in no time. I don’t need just you to raise them, as when I started out. El Demonio is King of the Zombies.”
“You don’t understand,” Ric said. “I’m taking your title, and your zombies. I’ve raised the Silver Zombie to help me do it.”
“That shiny wind-up toy?” He pointed behind me to Maria. “Once again you work for me, goat-boy. You raised her without my having to pay the Immortality Mob for it. I always knew you’d be useful someday; that’s why I let you live. She has quite a silver suit of armor, but beware the demon within. Only I can bring it to proper life, and when I do … The Millennium Revelation has taught me a few more tricks since I brought you up, hijo, and I can bring you down again.”
“Same here,” Ric said calmly.
El Demonio seemed to turn purple with impotent rage and puff up like some venomous variety of snake. “I will kill you now.”
“I’m not sure you can. That anyone can. I’ve been to death and back.”
“I am death. Kill me, then,” he ordered. “See if you can.”
“Maybe. Sometime. When you’ve lost everything and it suits the world to be rid of you. For now I’ll let you live. You may be useful someday. And you taught me that waiting is worse
than death.”
“Then wait some more, hijo.”
He took a last puff on the cigar, the exhaled smoke swirling around and around him, magnifying into a stifling cloud of fumes.
For a moment the smoke lifted to reveal a sated, red-eyed chupacabra puffing on El Demonio’s cigar.
And then even the smoke was gone, leaving behind the sulfurous stench of a chupacabra.
I held my breath and darted to retrieve my frivolous bag of precious cargo from under the chair. The monster had been sitting right over it. Maybe the ruby slippers weakened his mojo.
Ric eyed it.
“Emerald City souvenir,” I explained. “Girly stuff.”
I gazed at the reeking spot still wreathed in smoke wisps.
“Magician or shape-shifter?” I asked.
“Or demon, finally living up to his name,” Ric said with a shrug. “I’m more interested in stopping his operations than catching him. I could use some pure Kansas air.”
Ric turned and went into the dark and, okay, stormy night.
I followed. And that damn Silver Zombie came tagging along right after us.
THE BATTLE FOR Bloody Kansas, 2013-style, was a good ole Fourth of July fireworks show in the sky over Wichita. Ric and I heard it heating up and looked overhead as if we were viewing a predicted eclipse of the moon, only we witnessed the clash of myths and monsters.
“Is that Christophe out on the balcony?” Ric asked. “Or Tallgrass?”
From this distance it was hard to tell who or what the wind-whipped figure was. I saw the figure’s arm scatter something on the wind, a golden dust that blew away in expanding circles, like a whirlwind growing shape and form and gilt scales until the winged dragon Gargouille from a Paris distant in time and space was born again as a bright gold spiraling sunrise against the dark clouds.
Of course. I’d seen Snow strew these same ashes into the air beneath the Karnak Hotel to raise the French river dragon to aid in Ric’s rescue. A mote of white reflected lightning near the dragon’s great, lashing, metal-scaled head. Guess I’d missed a hell of a bucking dragon ride.
The dragon breathed fire against ice, warmth into cold and the Wendigo’s scowling cloud-face. A vee of smaller bright-winged forces also shot through the blue-black darkness. Could it be? Gargoyles in formation from Our Lady of the Lake? And down the dark and twisting clouds came a foggy stream of running wolves with luminous eyes, Quicksilver at their forefront, snapping at the head of the Wendigo, biting it away in airy fangfuls.
And there? Did I see Almira Gulch and Lili West caught up in the twister, riding a tandem bicycle, and a longhorn steer spinning over and over with a chupacabra? My old bungalow tumbling like a die on a gambling table, and the huge glass bubble of a snow globe falling with a Wicked Queen in its icy heart?
Or was my subconscious just putting forms on phantasms of the mist?
The storm clouds dissipated into smoky tendrils as we watched and the moon shone through the fading shreds of storm, as silver and serene and blank as the face of Maria’s robot.
RIC AND I strolled out to the far edge of the empty lot, where I checked to see that Dolly was still safely parked.
“Christophe owns this thing, doesn’t he?” I asked Ric as Maria shadowed us. “I’m sure he’ll be happy to take her off our hands.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Ric said. “I called her into 3-D being.”
“So she’s just another Zobo you have to take responsibility for?”
He put an arm around me. “Not personally. It’ll take an army to keep her out of the hands of the Immortality Mob, or your CinSim-obsessed landlord, Hector Nightwine, or El Demonio when he gets over losing Kansas and comes for Nevada.”
“You had the bastard cornered.”
“Not enough. The Silver Zombie holds some powerful potential for him we don’t know about. I didn’t kill him.”
“Why couldn’t you?” I asked.
“Is death good enough for your betrayers?”
“Maybe not, but it will come for them, with or without me.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“We’ve done enough this trip,” I said.
“This trip,” he agreed, “but the journey never ends.”
Chapter Thirty-one
I TURNED FROM the green-mirrored penthouse suite bar, pleased to have seen only my reflection.
My gown’s emerald-satin bias-cut skirt swirled around my legs as it wafted to display my ankles and the demure ruby red slippers I wore. So I was a bit Merry Christmas-y for summer, so sue me. This was my last personal appearance at Emerald City and I wanted to make it an occasion.
I craned my neck to see who had just committed a wolf whistle when my admittedly bare back was turned.
I faced a full house of suspects, so to speak.
The penthouse suite’s long green leather sofa now seated three men, Ric, Leonard Tallgrass, and Ben Hassard.
Snow lounged in an emerald-velvet club chair and I was even less sure now that either he or Ric qualified simply as a man.
Quicksilver lounged in front of Tallgrass on the grass-green carpeting in his “Sphinx” position, belly down and forelegs extended. I knew he wasn’t simply a dog.
The row of human male eyes were still dazzled from eyeing my gownless back with the silver familiar forming a long supple diamond dividing line down my spine. Even the familiar was putting on the dog tonight. Usually it was content to morph into rhinestones or Austrian crystals, since I was no jewelry snob.
Snow, of course, was seeing everything through very dark sunglasses.
I held up a tall, stemmed glass.
Finally. A little male attention that wasn’t focused on the Silver Zombie standing at robotic attention behind a seated Ric. She sure did shine.
Normally, I’m not a show-off, but my new cocktail creation deserved a dramatic introduction. It flouted the Emerald City color scheme, being an opaque, faintly blue silver color, whereas absinthe was opaque green. A dash of vivid blue curaçao at the bottom made it something of a Tequila Sunrise in a blue mood and reflected a circle of electric blue at the cocktail’s top rim.
“Gentlemen, and lady,” I said. “Introducing the latest entry in Delilah’s Darkside Bar Book of Paranormally Phenomenal Cocktails, I give you … the Silver Zombie.”
The applause and whistles still didn’t give away the lone wolf among them.
Snow wouldn’t whistle even onstage. Ric had a mischievous streak but had been acting too possessive lately to draw other men’s attention to me.
Leonard Tallgrass cultivated a poker face, but just might be up to it. Ben Hassard, patched up and very grateful to me, might have been unable to quell his enthusiasm.
Quicksilver had a lot of wolf in him, but was a howler by nature. And Maria, the Metropolis robot, lacked the necessary moving mouth parts.
We really must get this metal maiden a jazzier name, Irma said. “I’ve Just Met a Robot Named Maria” won’t burn out any lights on Broadway.
Irma was right. She needed an updated name. Maybe Brigitte, for the teenage German actress who’d played both human and robot roles. Darn, sounded too sexy.
“What’s in the drink?” Ben Hassard wanted to know.
“Three chilled ounces each of Fuse blueberry raspberry water champagne. An ounce of José Cuervo Silver tequila, an ounce and a half of lime vodka, an ounce of Alizé Bleu brandy, fruit and vodka mix, and a dash of blue curaçao dribbled down the inside of the glass so it sinks to the bottom.”
“That sounds like enough goodies to make a zombie out of me,” Ben said. “I’ll drink to that.”
So I gestured to the line of four Silver Zombies on the malachite bar top behind me.
Maria surprised me by being the first to approach, eerily noiseless for a silver metal woman. Actually, the film robot’s likeness had been constructed from a new material, plastic wood, painted silver and bronze. Brigitte had to act as her own body double and wear the modern suit of armor even durin
g nonspeaking camera shots, although it cut and bruised her body. How ironic it was, but not unlikely, that a film about abused workers would abuse its lead actress.
And that’s when I realized that Maria was already a true CinSim. She had a built-in zombie body, that of the dead actress, Brigitte Helm. That is what—who—Ric had raised. How mind-bending was that? I thought I’d keep that insight to myself for a while.
Maria turned and, doing her C-3PO routine, brought a glass to … Ric.
The poor futuristic thing still thought like an Old World body servant. I was probably the only one in this room who knew that CinSims could “grow” beyond their original film personas, so I hoped this one got wise to the imprisoned superstar future Snow had in mind for her sooner rather than later.
Did the Inferno Hotel honcho somehow read or guess my rebellious wish?
Snow stood abruptly to claim two glasses from the bar and present them to Tallgrass and Hassard, now rising from their seats to accept them.
Snow stepped back to the bar, leaned against it, and took the last glass. Of course, from that strategic position he could better view his favorite part of my anatomy and simultaneously remind me of what I owed him. Three hundred and twenty-two bottles of beer on the wall … the paraphrased drinking song ran through my head. I’d never dreamed that stupid verse would have an erotic connection.
Heck, honey, Irma pointed out, they all can eyeball your naked back with that mirror behind the bar. She giggled. Except your skin looks almost Wicked Witch of the West green. It matches your gown, but it’s your least favorite color, and you’re even wearing her shoes. Remember, Dorothy got the ruby slippers from the WWW’s dead body through the Good Witch Glinda’s intervention. Any message for the future in those facts?
Maybe for Lilah West back in Vegas’s Sunset City, I told Irma. She’d always wanted to play Glinda. Perhaps she finally did somehow, seeing to her wicked sister’s coven of weather witches fall from grace here.
“A toast,” Ben Hassard announced to those present, which did not include Irma.
He lifted his Silver Zombie. “To Emerald City’s booming future, to the destruction of all my immortal enemies, and to the good fortune of all my unsuspected friends.”
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