Silver Zombie

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Chapter Nine

   

  THAT NIGHT AT Cold Creek Motel did us all a lot of good.

  The water was hot, the sheets were flannel, and Ric slept like a baby while Quicksilver roamed the night and I lay awake trying to figure out the connection between my silver familiar, old film, Ric’s new silver iris, and the raising and rescuing and slaying of zombies, offscreen and on.

  I also mused for a while on two far distant kids with bizarre backgrounds, the boy turned man by a vampire bat bite and the girl turned off on womanhood by the threat of boy-vamp bites.

  I decided all these issues deserved to be interred with film-phantom zombie bones, and finally went to sleep.

  DRIVING DOLLY BACK on the highways that had taken me out of Kansas to Las Vegas felt like a time trip. It had only been a couple of months but—oh, my Auntie Irma—how things had changed.

  The golden daylight felt a world away from the night’s dark silver-nitrate depths.

  Having Ric along, commenting on windmills and shimmering fields of wheat in west Kansas and eagerly anticipating our last big town before Wichita, Dodge City, opened my eyes to scenery and history I’d always taken for granted. It seemed so normal.

  “Dodge’s Wyatt Earp Boulevard is no more exciting than Sunset Road in Vegas,” I cautioned him. “Yes, Boot Hill is here, smack dab in the downtown area, but it’s pretty touristy tame these days. ”

  “Maybe on the way back we can stop and do all the tourist shtick,” Ric suggested, eyes still glued on his phone screen as it jumped from one hokey website to another. A boy and his remote, on the road.

  “Sure,” I promised like a parent would, not really meaning it, but open to being bullied into something later if I had to be.

  Ric was into the second week of his second life, so I tried to be tolerant.

  “No more replays of the Cold Creek Drive-in zombie jamboree,” I warned him. “That was gross. ”

  “That was a little … weird,” he conceded, “but fascinating. I don’t know if your silver familiar or my sterling new iris drew or repulsed the zombie attack. Maybe my revamped eye is too powerful for supernaturals, and I’ll have to wear sunglasses all the time, like your new Vegas posse, Snow and Sansouci. ”

  “Lord, you three all in shades would make a freaky Blues Brothers trio for the new millennium. And those two guys aren’t my posse. They’re my … frenemies. ”

  “You seem to be a fan already,” Ric teased me, referring to my tales of Chez Shezmou while he was driving. “You can’t deny you keep running into Christophe and Cicereau’s main man. ”

  And vice versa.

  Ric had reason to bring that up. Two months ago, I leave Wichita an old maid of twenty-four with an orphaned past and an allergy to intimacy. I get to Vegas, meet my own true love in the first twenty-four hours, and then start tangling with potent paranormals who suddenly find me highly flirtable material.

  I guess falling in love and becoming sexually active gives a girl a glow other dudes might want to warm their hands on. Oddly enough, we were all four on the same side, intermittently. The three guys did sometimes feel like a backup group for the female empowerment identity quest: my super-trio and me, not counting the canine member who provided the falsetto howling.

  At least Shezmou regarded me as only a liberating goddess, nothing personal.

  While I mulled my sudden popularity with the opposite sex and my dismal record with my own, including my elusive mirror double, Ric moved on to serious topics that he faced.

  “Delilah, I’ve got to figure out what’s happening with my offbeat eye and my dead-dowsing skills,” he said, pushing his sunglasses up on his forehead.

  It was hard to decide whether to gaze besottedly into his hot chocolate-dark brown eye or to catch tiny glimpses of myself in the iris of his new silver one.

  “Your vision remains twenty-twenty in both eyes?” I asked.

  “As far as I can tell. It’ll be good to try some things out here in the boonies. ”

  “Wichita isn’t a small city, Ric. ”

  “I know. I read the chamber of commerce site. Two hundred thousand ‘pop. ’ We’ll meet my local contact about fifteen miles outside of town. Place called Augusta?”

  I nodded. “Famous for hiking trails. Not for Dolly to negotiate. She doesn’t rough it. ”

  “Don’t worry. We’re hooking up outside the park at some fast-food restaurant named Red Ryder Ranger Station. A fellow ex-FBI agent will be our native guide. ”

  “You and I hooked up in Sunset Park,” I reminded him. “Who’s our third here? Some hot wench from your unbridled yet privileged D. C. prep school romantic past, no doubt. ”

  Ric shrugged with a disarming grin. “Can I help who my friends are?”

  His answer made me even more suspicious. Ric usually slipped into Spanish when mentioning friends, but doing so now would clearly have to indicate gender. Amigo or amiga. He’d just been twitting me about rival Vegas guys. Maybe I really was going to meet an old FBI flame of Ric’s.

  I touched the silver familiar on my chest, still posing as an art-gallery-class piece of turquoise-embedded Native American jewelry.

  “That silver shape-shifter sure knows how to complement your eye color,” Ric said as he noticed my gesture.

  Quicksilver barked in the backseat.

  “Your baby blues too, Gray Shadow,” Ric twisted around to tell my dog.

  “This is awfully Southwest style for Kansas,” I said doubtfully, fingering the familiar, which warmed to my touch. “Although Coronado did mosey this far north hundreds of years ago, searching for silver. ”

  “Coronado? The conquistador?” Ric sounded sharply surprised.

  “Ooh, say that again. It sounds so sexy with the proper accent. ”

  “Coronado?” Ric repeated in an are-you-nuts tone.

  I wasn’t about to confess that his authentic pronunciation of the lovely rolled r and soft d of the Spanish language was quickly becoming my instant aphrodisiac.

  “No. Conquistador, hombre,” I cooed.

  “Don’t flirt so hard when you’re at the wheel, Delilah. Dolly might end up in the ditch. ”

  I laughed, feeling good about going back to Wichita for the first time.

  Now you’re getting it, Irma said. We’ve got nothing to fear here but fear itself.

  She was right. Wichita was my home, “sour” home. It housed my orphanage and group homes, my fancy private high school on scholarship, my old job, the empty lot of my destroyed rented bungalow, and my old enemies. All “former. ”

  “Take this next exit,” Ric said.

  “Are we heading for the horse pasture or the cow pasture?”

  “Neither. I hope we stay on the road. We’re aiming at the state highway junction with the county road, where the ‘gas’ and ‘grub’ signs tower. I didn’t know Kansas looked so Western east of Dodge City. ”

  “Millions and millions of longhorn cattle have been herded over this earth since the mid–eighteen hundreds. We are in ‘bleeding’ Kansas, city boy, the Free State that started the Civil War over the slave issue. ”

  “Then it fits that vampires should show up here early and often after the recent millennium meltdown. All that historic blood spilled. ”

  “Interesting point. I never thought of those greaser vamp gangs that hassled me in the group homes before puberty—mine—as early adaptors. ”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Ric said, redonning his sunglasses. “To give you new insight on your unhappy childhood history. You’re not the only bleeding heart in this car. ”

  I slowed Dolly to take the exit ramp, again wondering if I wanted to know more about a past that included repeated assault attempts and some unknown event or events that had made me too paranoid to ever lie on my back again.

  “Rape survivor” wasn’t a convincing piece of personal history I wanted to claim. I shivered in Dolly’s sun-warmed red leather interio
r. Usually she felt womblike, and—after I’d met Ric—sexy. Now, she just felt damn bloody. Like Kansas.

  RIC AND I sat outside at a wooden picnic bench, slurping giant paper cups of root beer, soaking up early summer sun. I’d bought a corny straw cowboy hat inside the Red Ryder Ranger Station to shade my face.

  “You put on your high-SPF sunscreen this morning?” Ric asked, eyeing my blazing white forearms.

  “Yes, dear. Gallons of it. Isn’t that citified silk-blend blazer hot without Vegas air-conditioning to duck into?” I asked in turn.

  “Yes, dear. I’ll dress down for the job later. ”

  I looked around, hearing an oncoming horsy clickety-clank and then spotting a bleached-blond-maned woman in gold lamé spikes and bun-hugging capris, heading into the restaurant. She was layered in brass jewelry—on neck, wrists, and ankle.

  Hardly a Fed.

  Unless … she was a CI, a confidential informant. Maybe she was a gangster’s wife in the witness protection program. In her place, I sure would want Ric for a contact agent on that detail.

  Me too, would-be mob honey, Irma said.

  Ric’s sunglasses were not following her tail, but aimed at other ones in the adjoining pastures. Grazing cows don’t do much for me, though I find a mare and foal pretty to watch.

  In a bit, my eyes spotted and followed a tall, lean man with a kick-ass belt buckle holding in a faded denim shirt over a significant belly. He bent through the wooden fencing to amble his Justin boots across the road to the restaurant asphalt.

  When he got to our table, Ric stood in his pale Vegas suit and held out a dark hand glinting with bleached golden hairs. “Good to see you again, amigo. ”

  The man wearing the straw cowboy hat that made mine look like a kid’s model nodded in my direction. “This your amiga?”

  “Wichita girl, born and fled,” Ric said. “Delilah Street. ”

  I stood to shake hands, that not being necessary socially, since I’m a lady. Something about the man required standing.

  “Leonard Tallgrass,” Ric introduced him.

  Tallgrass’s sunburned skin was darker than Ric’s. The black eyes in a seamed face with broad cheekbones told me Ric’s ex-FBI buddy was pretty pure Native American– born.

  Exactly what tribe would be hard to guess. The Cheyenne and Kiowa fought the Long Knives here, and almost every tribe in North America had been moved to Kansas after the Indian Wars before most of them were finally moved to Oklahoma. That left contemporary Kansas with a trio of tiny reservations of Kickapoos and such in the state’s northeast corner. Most of its Native American population lived all over the lower forty-eight, and beyond.

  “Mr. Tallgrass,” I said.

  “Miss Street. You look even better in person. That was a real interesting TV piece you did on the mutilated cows a couple months back, but there was no follow-up. ”

  “I left the station rather unexpectedly. ”

  He nodded, giving me that Western scout squint. Leonard Tallgrass had been living up to that cowboys-and-Indians cliché with a tongue in his seamed cheek for a long, long time.

  “That anchorman did give it a lame mention later,” Tall-grass said. “Reported it was found to be teenage mischief. You must have known him, the paleface with the lipstick. ”

  I swallowed a smirk. “Undead Ted is an up-to-date media vampire. Apparently they prefer a vivid background for their bleached canine fangs on TV. ”

  “Speaking of canines—” Tallgrass turned to squint at Dolly. “That your ride?”

  “Yes, sir. ”

  “That your dog in it?”

  Quicksilver heard, of course, and sat up in the backseat to establish his presence, front paws braced on the open window rim, looking seriously protective.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “What’s this dead-dowsing young amigo of mine doing in such fine company? And that is not a dog, Miss Street; he is Brother Wolf, and a member of my tribe. Why isn’t he dining with you?”

  “He guards Dolly and Ric guards me, and I guard both of them. And the food here sucks, Mr. Tallgrass. ”

  “Then we’ll all go to my place. ” He turned away, then turned back. “Miss Dolly is the Cadillac?”

  I nodded.

  “She is prime. Follow me. ”

  LEONARD TALLGRASS’S RIDE was a new but mud-crusted hybrid black Ford 350 pickup, and his “place” was an apartment in a complex with a soaring fountain in the courtyard. Inside, an art gallery of weapons ancient, new, and unknown to me decked the walls. So much for “prairie squint. ”

  “I like that necklace,” he said when we were seated in his dining alcove digesting his walnut and blue cheese chicken salad with lemongrass and extra-virgin olive oil. “It’s not an authentic native design, though. ”

  “It’s not an authentic necklace. ”

  He slouched onto his blue-jeaned tailbone. “Mi amigo Ricardo has found an extremely interesting young lady. I’ve already made contact with a series of your social workers. ”

  My sass went south.

  “Those folks mean well,” he added, “but your job clearly was to survive them, and you did. They’re still here in Wichita, and you’re not. You have a much better ride than any of them, and a better class of company. ”

  “I assume my ‘classy company’ includes you. I don’t remember any social workers. ”

  He nodded. “They were pretty forgettable. An ungrateful job. Almost as ungrateful as ours sometimes was, eh, Ricardo?”

  Ric nodded.

  Tallgrass took a new tack. “That cow mutilation story of yours, Miss Street, was an important one. ”

  “Call me Delilah. The station barely deigned to run it. ”

  “Don’t call me Leonard. Tallgrass will do. Was it the usual stupidity? Or a cover-up?”

  “I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. ”

  Tallgrass eyed Ric. “We should check out the site. You a movie star now?” He directed his formidable squint at Ric’s sunglasses.

  There was a long, long pause. I knew enough not to say a word. Quicksilver stood defensively, which made Tall-grass lilt a shaggy eyebrow.

  Ric finally doffed his sunglasses. He hated wearing the brown contact lens and obviously hadn’t anticipated an indoor meeting. So his silver eye winked like a built-in monocle.

  Tallgrass observed, mulled, and finally nodded. “You’ve become an even more interesting young man. I think Miss Street—Delilah—should liberate that film she got on the messed-up cows from WTCH-TV. ”

  I opened my mouth to unreel a string of reasons why that was unnecessary, humiliating, and impossible.

  “While,” Leonard Tallgrass went on, “mi amigo takes me to that field and Mr. Quicksilver does a thorough nose job on it. ”

  I objected. “Quicksilver isn’t a drug-or bomb-sniffing dog, and he certainly isn’t a cadaver dog. ”

  “I told you the moment we met, Miss Delilah. He isn’t much dog, but he’s a lot of something else. ”

  At that point, Quicksilver went to Leonard’s chair and sat, after glancing his agreement at me.

  My necklace shrunk into a plain, career-woman circlet at the base of my throat that wouldn’t protect me from a mosquito bite, much less a vampire fanging.

  It was The Three Amigos (like the movie) and an animated hair against my self-respect.

  Guess who won?

  I programmed the cow pasture directions into Ric’s GPS and revved up Dolly for our return to Wichita. At least she wouldn’t be getting her undercarriage dusty on unpaved country roads.