“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.”