Silver Zombie dspi-4 Read online

  “Why are the zombies escaping the film?” Ric asked me.

  “I’m not the zombie expert,” I shouted back.

  Then I blinked at his face. “Your brown contact lens is missing.”

  He put his fingers to his cheekbone. “I bumped into the cheesy screen door frame leaving the food stand with all the boxes in my hands. That must have jolted the contact out. I’ve got another dozen packed in Dolly’s trunk.”

  “Did you—did your naked silver eye—call the zombies off the screen? Have you got a brand-new way to dowse for the dead?”

  “These things aren’t real,” Ric said. “They’re figments of old film.”

  “So are CinSims, and they’re solid enough to dance cheek-to-cheek with casino customers. Where’s the projection booth?”

  “I’ve never raised anything without a dowsing rod,” Ric objected, still working out the phenomenon.

  “Eyes have ‘rods’ in them, don’t they? Aren’t there millions that control the black and white part of vision?”

  “That’s anatomy in miniature, not … not a piece of wood or metal from the real world.” Ric’s hands fisted in a balked desire to hold a physical Y-shaped implement.

  “Don’t rationalize. Something’s going on here, and even if we didn’t start it, we have to stop it.”

  Quicksilver’s protective instincts had realized that. He was leaping into the oncoming zombies, giving them gnaw-for-gnaw. They ignored him, shrugged him off, even though his teeth gritted to tear off what little clothes and, in some cases, flesh, were left on them.

  Not my fave movie monsters, and now they were coming right for us. Luckily, they were vintage zombies, very, very slow and shambling.

  Dolly’s trunk levitated behind me like a large shiny laptop screen opening. Ric must be going for his contact lenses … no, for his licensed Glock semiautomatic, our only serious weapon besides my cop duty belt.

  I tossed the paper cups, closed the glove compartment, and grabbed the metal Club on the passenger side floor that locked Dolly’s steering wheel in iffy locations, like near the Vegas Sinkhole. It made a better weapon than a wooden billy club.

  As Ric slammed the trunk lid shut, a woman rushed past him, screaming, “He must be one of them. That glass eye gleams like solid ice.”

  By now we were playing dodgem cars with our bodies, slipping between the few high-riding elderly SUVs the Gas Wars had left on the road to hide from the suddenly animated horde of screen zombies.

  I heard the scrabble of claws on metal. Quicksilver leaped to the ground beside us, a disgusting bone in his teeth. I had no idea if the bone belonged to friend or foe but ordered, “Quick! Leave kitty.”

  Ric rolled his oddly colored eyes.

  I think even the oncoming zombies paused to mill about in confusion at hearing that command. I’m sure they assumed a tasty tidbit to gnaw was nearby.

  I saw the whites of Quick’s baby blues as he reluctantly dropped the big, juicy bone that now was in living color. Was it a prop, or part of a 3-D zombie? I knew he wouldn’t gnaw on a victim. He was K-9 to the core.

  Come to think of it, some of the fleeing moviegoers had vivid red scratches on their faces and arms.

  Oh, shoot, I thought, just as Ric shot his automatic into the air. I noticed that his pockets were stuffed with extra ammo, not candy bars from a food mission to the snack shack.

  Speaking of snack shack, I heard bones cracking and splintering all around us.

  “We’ve got to reverse this film,” I shouted at Ric. “Where’s the projection booth?”

  “In front of the concessions building,” he answered. “And it’s built like a bunker. We’re going to have to mount an assault. I bet the projectionist is quaking among his reels in there.”

  “That’s just what we have to get away from him. This movie must stop before the cast devours the audience.”

  “Okay. You run for the building. You see it over there?”

  “The zombies have almost reached it.”

  “I’ll follow, shooting. Beware of spraying bone chips.”

  “And Quicksilver will lead,” I muttered, as the dog loped into the open, hurling his hundred and fifty pounds on fragile zombie shoulders and bringing these skeletal remnants down, even as they clawed their way forward on their bellies.

  Shack to shack and jelly to jelly, it’s a zombie jamboree.

  Was that Irma jiving me, or my own mind in over-drive-in?

  Since Quicksilver had committed his bone and blood to the zombie attack, I ran after him, swinging my steering wheel security device right and left. It cracked on so much moving sagging flesh and bone that I didn’t have to look very hard to see what effect I was having.

  I heard Ric pounding behind me, letting off single, on-target but sadly ineffective shots.

  Ric and I shouldered against the projection room’s locked wooden door, hearing the loosened film strip snapping like a playing card in the wire wheels of a fifties Schwinn. Why else did they call them “Bicycle” playing cards?

  Ric kicked open the door.

  Quick dodged inside the squat structure as Ric and I slammed the door shut just behind Quick’s long wolfish tail and right on a couple of clawing arm bones aimed at joining us.

  “Aiiiii,” the farm boy projectionist was chattering.

  I recognized those dungarees and that plaid shirt from my previous life in Wichita and wanted to sit down beside the young guy to reassure him.

  Ric brandished his sinister matte-black firearm, jerked the boy away from the old-fashioned Mickey Mouse–eared projection machine, and threw him to the dirt floor. He was a lot safer there.

  Outside, the clawing sound of fleeing human and hunting zombie beat a tattoo on the crude wooden door. Soon it would be toothpicks and we would be on the zombie menu. I guess they liked to serial snack on a night out too.

  As Ric and I stared through the lit square that cast the film images larger than life on the massive screen, we saw writhing human and zombie silhouettes looming large on the rural landscape.

  My silver familiar, meanwhile, had lost the charms and was looping itself around and around my wrist in lengths of thin but hindering chain.

  Before I could draw Ric’s attention to this, the familiar leaped like an anorexic boa-constrictor-turned-bicycle-chain onto the film projector, wrapping around the shiny silver nitrate surface.

  The reaction resembled a diamond saw blade mating with an oil slick.

  The turning reels ground and squealed, and then the film strip came splintering off its track, glittering with a silver aura that reached the screen and set white lightning dancing across the moving black-and-white images of predator and prey.

  In the projection booth, the splintered film, bleached to white, coiled around and around on the floor, an endless maggot, while the boyish projectionist sobbed with horror.

  “Stop it,” he gasped out. “Please stop it. I’m killing them. I’m killing the customers.”

  “Not you,” I said, squeezing a hand on his shoulder. “They’ll be all right. Every one of them. This is all just a real scary feature at the drive-in.”

  Ric disabled the projector with the butt of his gun, watching the young guy to make sure he’d know the demonic machine was dead and gone. Ric rolled the unreeled film into a fire-hose thickness around his forearm.

  I winced at one more vintage film destroyed, even if it was from the sunset of black-and-white.

  Only zombies were left ranging around the deserted cars, including Dolly.

  “This bunch have escaped the film forever,” I said. “We’ve got to … destroy them.”

  We ventured outside for a wide-screen view of the situation.

  Ric set his teeth in the moonlight. “I haven’t got enough ammunition, or time, to shoot all of them to writhing bits. They’ll be on us in a couple minutes.”

  Quicksilver was still barking himself hoarse trying to round up these monsters as if they were merely feral Zobos.

  “Ric.”
I put my hand on his arm. “I can’t call him back. ‘Leave kitty’ won’t cut it. He knows better. I won’t leave Quicksilver.”

  “Where’s your familiar?” he asked suddenly.

  I lifted my arms. “I don’t know. I could use a pair of silver whips right now.”

  Ric grabbed my left wrist. A lightning-bolt-shaped cuff bracelet twined my forearm.

  “Huh? Pretty … but pretty useless,” I complained. “‘Into the valley of darkness,’” I began, pushing forward.

  “No.” Ric was eyeing the scene, calculating the fan of zombies ranging farther and farther from the screen. “We need to go back to the projection hut.”

  “The projector’s broken,” I protested, but he grabbed and dragged me along.

  I spotted the unreeled old-fashioned film flapping on his arm. In front of the hut’s pathetic little darkened window, he stopped.

  “All right. We’re at the last row of sound poles. Grab an end of the film and move to the nearest pole on your right. I’ll take the left.”

  “This is not square dancing,” I shouted.

  The damned zombies growled, drowning out normal speech. I saw cadaverous, nauseating faces and bodies, all rotting, coming into far too sharp a focus. At least Quick was backing up toward us now, belly down and barking.

  “Grab the pole, Delilah,” Ric yelled.

  Somewhere, very far behind me, Irma giggled insanely.

  I grabbed, he grabbed, and the film between us suddenly snapped and went luminous. A coat of speeding mercury covered the aluminum-painted poles and raced among them left and right and forward and back, creating a buzzing, snapping grid of some sort of electric power the zombies walked, relentlessly and slowly, right into. They winked out like cinders at a barbecue.

  By then, Quicksilver had retreated almost back to us. He took a fast look-see to make sure we were still standing, then had to dart forward to sniff each former-zombie hot spot.

  “They did something like this to stop The Thing,” I told Ric. “Now that was classic horror movie. No mindless sleepwalking and gnawing. I think it was scientific stuff, not paranormal.”

  “I don’t know what this was,” he said.

  “Do you suppose some silver nitrate remained on that unreeled film?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe some of your silver familiar. I just know you’re not going to believe where I got this silver network idea.”

  “Yeah?”

  He glanced at the jagged lightning bolt form of my forearm band.

  “The familiar was trying to tell us something. Use conductivity—whether electric, metallic, or magic, I don’t know—but it worked.”

  A few fading zombie ghost-images were still circling the drive-in fringes when Ric burned the film in the deserted snack shack’s hot-dog turning machine and— zombie by zombie by bone by bone by blood by blood— they each went up in flames in turn.

  Vehicle engines were coughing into life all over the parking lot, choking, and then turning and grinding through the maze of aisles leading from the drive-in lot. Folks had crept back to claim their cars. I saw the half-moon, its hard center line softened to a blur, reflecting off Dolly’s generous dollops of chrome. She looked fine.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ric said.

  “First, I need to wash my hands.”

  “You want to visit that no-woman’s-land again?”

  “I can’t touch Dolly with these hands, much less Quicksilver.”

  “Delilah. Your dog is a carnivore too. He was good to go.”

  “I’ll never understand males. I’m going to freshen my face, all right? And then we get out of this hell-forsaken retro-ghouls-gone-wild scene. Got it?”

  Ric shrugged. I think Quicksilver, standing beside him with legs braced and hackles still up, shrugged too.

  I just wanted to wash my hands and face and apply some fresh Lip Venom gloss to my desert-dry lips. The familiar had morphed into a Swatch telling me it was half past the witching hour. Everything looked okay inside the women’s restroom. The concrete-floored sink area was deserted; the black-spotted mirrors above the dripping sinks were blurry and misted. Nothing to fear in them.

  I pulled out my Lip Venom tube, shaped like a high-octane bullet, and slicked it over my lips. Ric and I still had to get to a motel room for the night.

  That’s when I heard the whimpering from the stalls around the cinder-block corner.

  Yes, it smelled like a urinal in here. Where a lot of the guys had also been suffering from periods, or just bleeding out. No, I was not going to leave the Cold Creek Drive-in without a civilized touch on my lips and libido and self-respect.

  I turned when the whimpering and lap-dog noises got overpowering.

  Quicksilver would never go into a girl’s bathroom.

  Oh.

  Crawling out on the unspeakably wet concrete floor came terrified humans of both sexes. They’d found safety huddling in the women’s bathroom.

  Not even the zombies would go here.

  I was so going to personally “liberate” the next male john I came across.

  Or the next male, who was the usual suspect and who wasn’t twenty feet away.

  “Come on, Lassie,” I told the familiar, “we have fifteen more miles to a motel room tonight. I hope there’s only cable.”

  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 orphane
d 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.