Carole Douglas - Virtual Virgin

“Smart.” I heard the crack of thunder in the distance. “I was afraid Torbellino and his bull whip were involved.”

“They may be,” Ric said. “He’s certainly not falling for wasting his forces against the two warring cartels while they slaughter one another, as Washington hopes. That action is way north of here.”

“You told them,” Tallgrass muttered, “that wouldn’t work.”

I had one question. “If all the action is moving north, who’s going to take on Torbellino’s gang of zombies on speed?”

Ric lifted his bone-seeking night vision goggles and pulled them down to his neck. I could see he wasn’t wearing a concealing contact lens over his single silver iris.

He focused beyond the ridge, facing the dark and the distant lightning.

“Me.”

“NOW YOU SEE,” Tallgrass said to me.

Did I ever.

Ric was sweeping his unprotected gaze over the legions of teeming beetles and spiders and lizards and snakes and scorpions like an invisible searchlight while I watched through the binos.

I gasped as their scales and carapaces and even fuzzy black tarantula legs changed in a dazzling wave to sheer silver. The wave reversed course, sinking down the slope on our side and cresting the opposite ridge of the gash, overflowing onto the flat desert plain beyond.

Ric followed them down like a shepherd, a dull mottled figure behind the sparkling living metal.

I watched Quicksilver slink around the edges of the mechanistic silver wave, forcing the components into tighter formation. If Quick could herd the robot vermin, Ric could perform more wonders to stop Torbellino.

Tallgrass stood slowly, but he’d kept his high-tech goggles on. “He’s just letting his new powers out to play. The vermin was massing to escape the action that’s agitating their territory. They sense it’s more than the gangs or the cartel hitmen using their range to bury the latest bodies.”

As I watched Ric herding the silver tide south, he explained. “The military honchos thought Ric and I’d serve best as guides, Ric because he knows this terrain from his childhood indenture to El Demonio, me because I have Native American tracking blood as well as FBI creds.”

“Kinda stereotyped expectations.”

“Kinda dumb. The border crime and military types never believed us when we said El Demonio was more than a power-mad cartel king who used superstition and gory rituals to control his men and the Mexican authorities and population.”

“They’re still in denial about the Millennium Revelation?”

“So are these cartel drug warriors. They’re so busy being bad they think they can conquer anyone or anything. What we have here is uptight military might versus gangster ignorance. The human cartel bosses fell for the trap.”

“The inhumanly cruel cartel bosses.”

“Ric and I never figured on El Demonio Torbellino doing anything but hanging in the wings and offing anyone who was left and taking over everything. That leaves us to stop him.”

“And this will happen when?”

“Tomorrow night. Now we have the lay of the land. Ric has been testing his new powers.”

“Gained through me.”

“Maybe so, Miss Delilah, but he needs to know he can use them solo. This is the one chance he has to put down Torbellino forever, on the turf where their dance of death began years ago.”

I looked at the silver-armored army Ric was scattering into the brush, the shining effect fading as the myriad tiny components separated. I had no doubt he could call up all these slithering toxic beasties any time he needed them.

“Ric somehow . . . contracted . . . my affinity for silver,” I told Tallgrass. “Maybe that’s why I feel so responsible for him.”

“You feel responsible for him because you love him, Miss Delilah.” Tallgrass touched my elbow. “Let’s get down to the Jeep so we’re ready to get out of here when Ric’s done seeding the desert with his allies.”

His hand gave me the slightest of shoves, but it got my feet moving and then momentum took us both down the steep rise until the ground was flat and the sagebrush was about my height.

Tallgrass’s scuffed boots crunched cactus until we reached a certain clump. He began pulling camouflaging masses of sagebrush aside. They lifted and rolled away, just tumbleweeds. A standard open Jeep painted camouflage colors awaited passengers. I scrambled into the back while Tallgrass took the Quicksilver seat. With city lights out of sight, moonlight poured down on us, as if the moon, pregnant and almost at the full, had broken its water.

I trusted Ric’s ability to safeguard himself out here, believe it or not, and Quicksilver was just another guarantee of my judgment.

“Ric is seriously angry with me,” I told Tallgrass, leaning forward as he twisted in the front seat to face me. “He’s never . . . we’ve never—”

Tallgrass’s palms came up, patting the air and me into silence. “This is between you and him. I am not Dear Abby.”

I blinked. He’d echoed Sansouci’s exact words to me. Was I looking that in need of counseling these days?

“No, but you’re an objective witness,” I said. “Since our battle with the elements in Wichita, my silver powers have blended with Ric’s ability to dowse for the dead. You’ve seen the Silver Zombie he raised off the Metropolis screen.”

“Yeah,” Tallgrass grunted. “I find it hard to relate to such a piece of . . . sorcery. To me, a mechanized creature born of a mechanized process hails from the alien realm of automated beings and figments of film. My culture roots its power in nature. We’ve never embraced the age of machines as a people. Torbellino harnesses demons to do his evil work, but they too are creatures of spirit, or the unclean undead, not robots.”

I had to admit the Metropolis CinSim robot was inhuman, but she was also the silver loving cup that held the spirit of the film’s virginal heroine, Maria, as well as the now-dead Brigitte Helm, the actress who’d worn the Art Deco Joan of Arc suit of armor. Much as I sympathized with and liked the Vegas CinSims, that silver metal woman freaked me out.

“The Silver Zombie is more unnatural than even the most bizarre CinSim,” I agreed, “such as Frankenstein, though they both were ‘brought to life’ in laboratories. Partly it’s because she thinks—if she thinks as we know it—that Ric, having raised her from the screen, is her master.”

I hated that concept. And, if I was honest with myself, maybe the competition. The Silver Zombie existed in a 3-D reality beyond all the rules of making CinSims that the mysterious Immortality Mob had perfected. Who could she be, what could she become?

Tallgrass seemed to understand my concerns.

“A century ago,” he said, “my people believed a photograph stole and imprisoned a soul. They refused to pose for pictures, like the aborigines in Australia. I’ve studied this belief, because nowadays ‘souls’ are ‘stolen’ every second, and the photographs posted all over the World Wide Web. The native people’s fear of photographs is based on the mystical properties of mirror.”

I audibly caught my breath but kept my mouth shut. Tallgrass had no need to know about my mirror-walking powers.

“You are not unfamiliar with such marvels, I think.” He lifted a hand, waved it at a space beyond my shoulder. “I see you with a slight double vision. I can’t quite focus on you, Delilah Street. Never could. Ric doesn’t see that.”

“He knows, though. So you studied up on mirror images because I’m involved with your former protégé?”

Tallgrass laughed. “Protégé. No such fancy word for it. I was teacher, he the student. Now perhaps that is reversed. Such is the way of life . . . and death. All things reverse. And nowadays, it’s a two-way street. Death and dissolution can result in life and restitution.”