Silver Zombie dspi-4, Page 2

  Quicksilver couldn’t trot away from the parked Ranger fast enough. We were two of a kind, urban creatures, especially when that citified outpost was Las Vegas, the capital city of all things spectacular and supernatural in 2013.

  Inside the fence I saw the usual barn, horse corral, and bunkhouse.

  The three rag-suited Zobos were being tended by four of their ilk, this set wearing Lee jeans, work boots, and plaid cotton shirts with pearlized buttons.

  Quicksilver whined behind me, whether from confusion or outraged fashion sense, I couldn’t tell.

  The brown leathery look of the Zobos’ visible skin evoked human cowhands who worked outdoors in the desert. Ric could even open a dude ranch with these guys. The Lazy Z.

  “This place looks like the Louisiana Hayride TV show set,” I commented. “What do feral zombies eat? I suppose these guys haven’t worked their way up to brains.”

  “That’s a bad rap. They eat nothing … yet. Right now they just feed and water the horses. These are the sleepwalking dead. Since drops of my blood animated them, they have to obey me. I don’t know if the Immortality Mob exists, but I do know somebody’s learned to exploit zombies.”

  “We need a word out of earshot, Montoya,” I told him. How sharp were Zobo senses, or brains, anyway?

  We moved to lean against the crossbars of the corral fence, watching the half-moon reflected in the darks of large equine eyes. As a coyote howled in the distance, the horses did an uneasy soft-shoe over the desert floor.

  “Other than your obsession to leave no zombie wandering unclaimed,” I told Ric, “what’s the point of collecting the ones you raised at the werewolf mob’s Starlight Lodge? They were all likely other gangsters who got in Cesar Cicereau’s hair.”

  “To find dead bodies, I simply have to dowse for them with a forked piece of wood or wire, like dowsers do for water. To raise them, drops of my blood have to ‘baptize’ the dowsing rod. In a sense, those zombies are my blood brothers now.”

  “Despite being hoodlums and criminals in life?”

  “The werewolf mob also ran down and killed a lot of unlucky innocent bystanders over the decades. Even you were on their menu just a couple months ago.”

  “True. I guess whoever the Zobos were, they’re blank slates now.”

  “Right,” Ric said. “And anybody can round them up … to use and abuse them.”

  “Especially the mysterious Immortality Mob you and Hector Nightwine obsess over.”

  “People talk about the Immortality Mob, but nobody knows what or who they really are. That’s worth an obsessive interest.”

  “Somebody has to handle leasing the CinSims to the Vegas attractions.”

  “Human lawyers,” Ric said. “And technicians go public to service the CinSims’ location chips if any wander off their prescribed territory, but they’re mere hirees. Whoever masterminded the process of overlaying the Hollywood personas on zombie bodies remains a mystery. No one knows if it’s weird science, or magic, or the intervention of some as-yet-unknown paranormal entity.”

  “Brrr,” I said, as the night wind riffled the horses’ manes and chilled my spine. “I doubt Vegas or me can stand any more ‘unknown paranormal entities.’ The Karnak Hotel’s ancient vampire empire is evil enough under the ground. Don’t you have a way to de-raise these Zobos?”

  “Doesn’t work like that, Delilah.” Ric watched a palomino colt side-dance toward us. “There’s no easy way to kill a zombie. The reanimated dead can’t die again. That’s what is so evil about raising them in the first place.”

  “Then why were you born with that gift?”

  “Because it’s a curse? Every paranormal ‘gift’ is a power waiting to be corrupted.”

  “My mirror-walking too?”

  “Look what it’s brought you. You’re afraid to use mirrors now that you’ve imprisoned Cicereau’s ghostly daughter in that mirror-world.”

  “Point taken.”

  Mirror-world seemed to work like a fey origami box. It could stretch in all directions or take a quirky left turn and have you suddenly facing your worst enemy. I wasn’t going there again—unless forced—until I figured out its rules and regulations.

  “Where did the bodies you raised years ago end up,” I asked Ric, “with the Immortality Mob?”

  “There wasn’t one yet. They went where the live illegal aliens went. They were smuggled across the border as cheap labor on ranches and in factories. CinSims came later.”

  “Why raise only Mexicans for CinSims?”

  “Maybe because border crossings are myriad, and expected. My native country is full of people yearning for a better life in the U.S.”

  “Los desperados y los desaparecidos,” I said in his native Spanish. “The outlaws and the disappeared.”

  I’d been studying my English-Spanish dictionary since meeting Ric, particularly the slanguage edition for any naughty words he might use in the heat of lovemaking. Of course, Spanish is a Romance language. Its musical lilt to an Anglo ear can make even a whispered obscenity sound sweet, not that I’d caught Ric using anything but impassioned prose on the flattering level of, oh, the Song of Solomon, say.

  His Latin blood made him muy expressive. A night with him was a better self-esteem enhancer for a girl than winning the Miss Universe contest.

  Um-mm, Irma seconded me. Although I’d always locked her down during the main event, she still had a front-row seat for the warm-up rounds, like now.

  “Excellent pronunciation, paloma.” Ric nuzzled my cheek as the palomino whinnied approval. His lips whispered against mine between a string of soft kisses interspersed with nips. “You know your mouth drives me loco when it speaks my native tongue.”

  That one sentence had taken a full minute to articulate between the lip-lock action, and it drove any sense of night chill from my bones. Ric’s mouth pulled back to let me speak against the caressing pad of his thumb, which only prolonged the dizzy desire.

  I was melted Velveeta cheese in deep need of a … breadstick. Men love to prove they can drive every thought out of even the most coolheaded woman. They had a point.

  Get a room, Irma moaned in my vacant mind. Please!

  “Amor,” I whispered to Ric over her mental whimpering, “a Zobo roundup isn’t my idea of a rendezvous. Have mercy and tell me more about the current social and political situation in your native land.”

  He laughed, easing off the romantic pressure to answer my grad school question. “You’re a hard woman to shake off an inquiry. I hesitate because I don’t enjoy acknowledging the brutal state of lawlessness in the land that birthed me.”

  “You care, even though you were enslaved there as a child?”

  “Especially because of that. Think. Mexican soil near the U.S. border is a no-man’s-land thick with unclaimed corpses. Thousands perished trying to cross the border and were left in shallow graves. Others were undiscovered victims of the drug cartel wars or, like the hundreds of murdered women in Juarez, the white slave trade. The dry desert landscape preserves corpses. Look at the Egyptian mummies.”

  “No more mummies for quite a while, please,” I said with a shudder. The dry desert landscape also cooled off plenty at night.

  Ric absently put an arm around my shoulders to warm me. “The desirable CinSim zombies only come from the Mojave and Sonora deserts that reach into California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, not the Chihuahuan that straddles the Tex-Mex border. Something in the Mojave and Sonora sand is a prime natural preservative. Perhaps that’s why the Egyptian vampires immigrated here via their underground River Nile centuries ago. You got a good look at these latest guys from Cicereau’s Murder Inc. lodge?”

  “Yeah, they appear pretty whole for having been werewolf pack bait. With some plastic surgery on their death wounds, they could pass as live.”

  “How do you think the Immortality Mob, whoever they are, get such clean canvases for their Cinema Simulacrums? You can’t show a fine film on a scratched movie screen.”

&n
bsp; “I don’t like to think of my CinSim friends in Vegas as hitchhiking on gussied-up corpses.”

  “Why not? They probably had cosmetic procedures when alive and acting.”

  “So your Zobos can be rehabbed?”

  “That’s the idea. If they can be used by the baddies, why can’t they be employed for their own good, at least?”

  “And you own this … arid land.”

  “I own a thousand acres of it.”

  “I didn’t know the FBI paid that well or that you were with them that long.”

  “Consulting pays a lot better. These acres are too far from everything, even Area 51, to cost much.”

  “Don’t remind me of ‘alien’ issues,” I complained as a joke.

  Ric grinned. “California isn’t the freakiest state in the nation anymore, Nevada is.”

  “You haven’t seen Kansas yet.”

  “I will soon,” he said, brushing a kiss across my temple. “I can’t wait to start our road trip back to where you grew up. It’ll be a change of scene and a chance to put your ghosts to rest.”

  I agreed. Ric needed a change of scene after what Vegas had dished out to us recently. I wasn’t sure my past was any place to find R & R, but I kept quiet.

  He reached over to pat a white-blazed horse forehead farewell. “Seven Zobos corralled tonight is a good start,” Ric said. “They’ll probably attract their former in-ground buddies. We need to get back to civilization, get a shower, some sleep.”

  A horse whinnied agreement. We must reek if the livestock wanted us washed.

  “Most girls are horse-crazy at some stage.” Ric nodded at the restless half-dozen mustangs and purebreds, bracing a motorcycle boot heel on the lower crossbar. Somehow that didn’t do the trick of turning him into Clint Eastwood.

  “Not me. I was fighting off vamp boys at that age.”

  He grinned. “You make me wish I was a vamp boy. You look tasty in the moonlight—mother-of-pearl skin, sapphire eyes, ebony hair.”

  Okay, I was about to blush. What girl believes she’s good enough looking, deep down? And I’d had a head start at self-loathing nobody around me had bothered to head off or even see, except Ric.

  But I was a piker.

  Ric had been through hell and back, maybe even the literal one, since childhood, and recently he’d been vamp-drained of almost every last drop of blood. My Snow-assisted kiss of life had restored his heartbeat, and the docs had declared him fine, but I’d regarded making love as therapy ever since. I was tiring of playing therapist and ready to pronounce him normal again, relax, lose my protective instincts, and enjoy the ride.

  So if me in the moonlight brought it on, I was willing to stand there gooey-eyed and sop it up. Looking at Ricardo Montoya had never been a chore for me, either. Girls aren’t supposed to wax verbally enthusiastic about how guys look—unless they’re Dan Brown’s wife describing the dimple in Robert Langdon’s chin—but Ric was the disgustingly tall, dark, and handsome Hispanic edition, only he now had one silver iris to add an exotic air. An eye patch would look dashing too.

  I stared into that silver eye, unguarded by a brown contact lens for this night-work, and saw my face reflected, tiny and shiny, exactly as he’d described it. His left iris was a reflective silvery surface, a miniature mirror, but I doubted I could dive into and through it with anything but my mind’s eye.

  “You never got this mushy before your eye turned,” I said more throatily than I’d expected. “Maybe I just look better through it now.”

  There you go, Irma objected. Putting us down again.

  Ric mock-growled back and kissed me like yesterday, today, and tomorrow rolled into one mega-moment. His lips slipped along my cheek and under my ear, nibbling.

  “Back to my place, then, for all that jazz.”

  By then Quicksilver had finished checking out the perimeter and even he was growling. His tolerance for sloppy sentiments was lower than mine.

  “We do leave the motorized critter behind?” I asked.

  Ric glanced over his shoulder at the ATV. “’Fraid so. You’re gonna be my only ride tonight.”

  Um, frisky. Irma approved. Quit worrying, girlfriend. The man had a blood count of zero for a couple days there. Even vampires need a fresh feed to get it up.

  I do so not want to think about that, I told her. You are getting a time-out, girlfriend, starting now.

  Chapter Two

  “WHY THE SMIRK?” Ric asked, swinging an arm over my shoulder. Navigating the shifting sands made us swagger toward the road, bumping hips and weapons systems.

  I was not about to convey Irma’s saucy thoughts to my guy.

  “Look at Quicksilver,” I told him instead.

  As usual, Dolly had her top down, and Quick had raced ahead to jump into her backseat. “He’s ready to roll.”

  The wolf-spitz family dominated the wolfhound in Quicksilver’s looks, so he was a “smiley” dog, with the perked ears and grinning face that looked ever so friendly. It was hard to tell when he was just happy to see you, or ready to attack. His paler beige face showed a gray lupine widow’s peak, but his eyes were a lovely “spacious skies” shade of blue, a trait that came from a rare wolfhound gene.

  “Do zombies make him nervous?” Ric asked. “Any ordinary dog wouldn’t know whether to attack or bury ’em like a bone. These Zobos rambling out here like Xanax addicts must really confuse the issue.”

  I patted Quick between the ears before working the car keys out of my duty belt and going around to Dolly’s driver’s seat while Ric stowed my night vision goggles in the trunk.

  Ric imitated Quick and bounded over the convertible’s closed front door into the passenger seat, just to prove he was fully recovered from the Karnak Hotel mob vampire attack.

  I was hoping he was out to prove something else tonight.

  “When we go to Wichita, we share the driving,” Ric said, glancing at the luminous dial of his seriously multi-function watch. As a former FBI agent, he knew where to get all the latest paramilitary gizmos.

  I’d never let anyone else drive Dolly before. Well, except for the Inferno and Karnak Hotel demon parking valets, and those occasions had been emergencies. Dolly had been my BFF since I bought her at a Kansas farm sale five years ago, when I’d been nineteen. Her looks were electric. Licorice-black body paint, channel-stitched red leather interior, and white convertible top. I didn’t lightly let other hands curl around her extra-large pizza-size steering wheel.

  “Sure,” I told Ric, meaning our road trip. “We go halves all the way to yellow-brick-road country. I don’t know why you’re so keen to leave Vegas for the boonies right away.”

  By then I had Dolly’s three hundred and sixty-five vintage horses kicked in and we—slowly—moved through the abrasive sand-drifted road toward the highway.

  “You do let her stretch out all her horses on the freeway, right?” Ric asked.

  “Actually, I don’t like state highway patrol stops.”

  “No problem. You just gotta know where they typically lie in wait.”

  “You do?”

  “First thing you figure out in the FBI. We didn’t like local cop stops, either.”

  I heaved a dramatic sigh. “I’m installing a fuzz buster before we go anywhere, speed demon.”

  Ric’s grin in the moonlight was as white as Quicksilver’s. “What a waste of money when you’ve got an inboard one riding shotgun.”

  His hand stroked my nearest inner thigh. “Any Navy Seal would salivate to have this Inferno Hotel battle suit. As impenetrable as Teflon, you say, yet the surface feels as smooth as velveteen.” His strokes became longer and Dolly swerved a bit. “No steel studs here, chica? You’d think Snow of all … people would know how much vamps like femoral arteries and would have ordered the fang-repellent studding everywhere.”

  By now I was mucho glad the suit was also waterproof. Did I even remember the naïve virgin who’d thought she was getting her period the first time she’d met Mr. ex-FBI smoothie in Ve
gas’s Sunset Park a mere couple of months ago? I kept my eyes on the rough road and parted my totally armored thighs a teasing bit more. Sex in a high-tech wet suit was suddenly looking really hot.

  Too bad Ric didn’t realize this was just necessary physical therapy.

  Yowsa! Irma managed to get in as she broke out of solitary for a weak moment—mine.

  “This is going to be quite a road trip, Montoya,” I muttered.

  Behind us, Quicksilver stopped the heavy doggy panting and gave a sharp yip, like a basso coyote alert. Was he jealous of me getting all the petting or …

  “Holy smoke!” I yelled, choking my grip on the steering wheel.

  As we neared the lonesome gray of the interstate, a black hedge of fog had materialized from the concrete pavement, rolling toward Dolly’s chrome front bumper like a solid wave of storm cloud.

  “Flash flood?” I murmured uncertainly.

  “That’s no flash flood,” Ric shouted, grabbing the fifteen-shot automatic from the very visible shoulder holster over his racing suit.

  I looked hard. Yes, the wave was more solid than water … and sported moonlit fangs.

  I accelerated. Dolly’s bumper bullets plowed through a fender-high onslaught of furred shoulders and snarling, snapping maws.

  “Quicksilver, no!” I shouted as the gray tide flowed around Dolly’s red taillights into the desert beyond.

  The dog was already over the rear door and on the desert floor, giving chase.

  “Quicksilver, no!” I shouted again. I’d recognized the pack’s breed, and mere werewolves would have been an improvement.

  “Quicksilver, come back.” Yeah, like a locomotive would spin on a dime and jump its tracks.

  “Quicksilver, leave kitty!” I screamed at the top of my lungs in as deep and commanding a voice as my female vocal cords could manage.

  I squealed Dolly into a too-rapid right onto the empty highway to look for results.

  Ric regarded me as if I was insane.

  By then I’d roughed up Dolly’s brake shoes, but had avoided a fishtail as the car stopped. To my surprise, I saw Quicksilver’s form lofting into a long leap over the trunk and into the backseat.