Carole Douglas - Virtual Virgin

“A monster it is,” I agreed, “and mythical for too long. The real ones had a great cover all these years. Cheesy tabloids kept producing what people found and called chupacabras, dead coyotes ravaged by mange. You’d think they’d realize that creatures reputed to suck the blood out of goats and other stock had to weigh more than thirty pathetic pounds.”

“People want to believe folktales that look safe and are in somebody else’s backyard,” Tallgrass said. “The more lethal and unkillable the monster, the less we want to believe it’s really out there.”

“Some of the worst monsters aren’t supernatural.”

“That’s for sure. Look at these cartel mobsters.”

“And we call unhumans inhuman.” I surveyed our immortal enemy on his throne.

El Demonio’s thick bull whip draped the car’s front seat, windshield, and long, shiny hood before it coiled down to the desert floor. The last three feet of thirty—which Ric had often felt the slash of—swayed upright, an animated leather cobra ready to strike. Torbellino was a demon with an exterior tail.

And with every sway of the hypnotically moving whip end, lightning sizzled and danced in the sky, obscuring the stars and stabbing at the moon.

Ric marched closer to the drug lord’s battle line, Quicksilver nipping at the sides of the silver wave to shape it into an advancing U-shape.

“Great strategy,” Tallgrass observed. “We need to move to the ridge Ric left, pronto.”

He slung his bulky new rifle over one shoulder and sent sand chunks tumbling as he hurtled down with a sideways gait.

I followed his example, stumbling and having to abrade my fingertips on the sand a time or two. Getting up the last ridge was easier, and we lay just under the crest, breathing hard.

Apparently it was going to be a battle of words before action.

“How do you like my wheels?” El Demonio’s basso voice jibed across the barrier of stalled silver desert life.

I followed Tallgrass in sticking my head above the ridge to hear the cartel boss’s rant.

“JFK bought it in this car. Jackie crawled where I’m sitting. The conspiracy nuts thought it was the mob, but they had the wrong mob in mind.”

“Wrong,” Ric shouted back. “That car’s a museum piece far away and you soon will be too.”

“Hola, mi niño pequeño,” he taunted in tones of false fondness. “How you have grown. Every inch of height you gained must have stretched the welts from my whip on your back.”

The crude Kennedy car reference had made my blood boil and now it boiled over. I scrambled to my feet and used my strongest voice from when I was at the back of a noisy press conference.

“Those evil marks are gone, you monster,” I shouted. “What monsters make can be unmade.”

“Ah. The Wichita bruja . Maybe the marks on the flesh can fade, but never those on the soul.”

I knew that bruja meant “witch”—and didn’t I wish I had those powers!—but I could use the ones I did own.

I shook out my spread arms. I felt the familiar stretch across my shoulders under my two layers of clothing as it streaked down both arms to escape the big, ugly camo shirtsleeves. Butts of solid silver filled my leather-clad palms with sleek and icy metal power.

Tallgrass muttered in his native tongue to see me holding twin braided silver whips, twelve feet long.

I raised my arms high and gestured sharply down, like a conductor. Narrow whip ends touched earth and snaked up again toward the sky, conjuring an arch of snapping, sizzling blue lightning above us. An electric branch of storm lightning fanned out a hundred and fifty feet in the air from the ends of each one, surprising even me. My familiar was rising to the challenge.

“Now Ric has some flashy Vegas neon backup,” I told Tallgrass.

El Demonio seemed to welcome my showy defiant gesture. His right arm lifted far back before snapping down. The long, heavy whip arced high, poising for an instant right over Ric before snaking into its natural curve to curl down toward his back.

Ric held his ground, but lifted his right arm.

I’d expected his gesture to repel the whip. Instead it summoned a heavy gust of wind that spun the desert surface into dancing legions of swirling silver insects and reptiles. The hissing, spitting, biting toxic dust devils numbered almost as many as the massed and leashed zombies.

The last ten feet of the demon drug lord’s whip curled into a spiral, caught in the mini tornadoes’ eddies. Through the dancing dervishes of dust, I glimpsed the zombie chains falling to their feet. They were loose and rushing forward into a semicircle to hem us all in.

Tallgrass squinted through the eerie, murky yellow light the dust devils cast, then ran down the last ridge, his heavy hip-held rifle spitting rapid rounds through the dust, blasting the limbs and heads off the frontline zombies.

I snapped my arms in unison again, my silver whips lashing lightning straight at El Demonio’s car, striking a chupacabra on each side. They curled into smoking remnants the whirlwinds spun away.

My next target would be the demon himself. I shook my arms but my hands were empty. I shook my arms again in frustration.

The damn silver familiar was now a spiked left forearm guard, useful only for hand-to-hand combat. By the time it rent any Torbellino henchman at the rear, I’d be downed and gnawed to death by oncoming zombies.

I looked to see how many I might be confronting and how soon.

An agile gray form advanced and retreated from the forward zombie force, Quicksilver gnawing legs off to create a fallen wall of zombies. It was like any other war since time began: the others just marched over their fallen comrades’ disintegrating forms.

Tallgrass, still shooting zombies, backed up in the shifting sand. I called Quick to join us, but the wind whirled my voice away.

“Why aren’t you shooting?” Tallgrass yelled at Ric and the similar weapon slung over his shoulder.

Ric shook his head. “No need. The dust devils are vacuuming up the front lines. They’re thinning out the zombie noose even as El Demonio tightens it on us.”

He gazed up at the sky. The moon had broken through clouds, painting them into a silver sea above the agitated dust storm below.

A full moon had always reminded me of Bing Crosby’s face crooning ba-bub-bub-boo , like a fairy godfather about to bibbity-bobbity-boo a barrel cactus into an escape carriage and lizards into snorting steeds with a desert fox for a driver.

“Don’t shoot through the dust,” Ric ordered Tallgrass. “I think . . .”

And then the moon’s size enlarged and lengthened like the melting diamond pendant in the thorn forest.

I tried to decipher the face I saw in it now, for it was different. . . .

The moon grew so bright we lifted our arms to fend off the pain to our eyes, at least Tallgrass and I did. Quicksilver came bounding around the line of dust devils, joining us to sit and lift his throat to the sky and bay at the swelling moon.

Distant coyotes joined in as the rasp of insect legs and wings from our barrier wave surged louder. If sheer noise would repel zombies, we had it made.

Most of them didn’t have ears, though. The smaller parts are the first to rot.

Even now the gap was closing.

Meanwhile, Ric was moon-gazing into the blinding light.

I ran to shake him out of his trance, but he turned eerie eyes on me that had Quick leaping to my side. Ric lifted his fists, nails digging into the palms until I saw blood running. Then he spotted the jagged spikes of the silver familiar on my arm and wrapped his hands around it.

“No!” I screamed, looking wildly for Tallgrass, who had lowered his weapon in confusion.