Carole Douglas - Virtual Virgin

Blood was pouring from Ric’s hands as he released them from the familiar. I gazed down at my forearm guard to see bright scarlet tipping every point. Then the silver melted like the moon and slithered up my arm in a network of fine chains, leaving my forearm bathed in nothing . . . except Ric’s blood.

I looked to heaven for help, for hope, and was horrified.

The swollen face of the moon was the visage of the false Maria from Metropolis . Her slanted eyebrows and pouting lips and halo of a headdress were the face of the Whore of Babylon performing for the male patrons of the elite and decadent nightclub, who’d been hypnotized by her bared breasts and undulating pelvis, frozen by lust.

I needed more than this sky-borne CinSim from Metropolis to counter real evil. El Demonio’s cartel killers and zombie forces didn’t freeze at beauty bare.

Unlike the men in the nightclub, I could tear my eyes from the sky-borne seductress. I noticed the clouds on the horizon piling into the shape of the pillars supporting her hooch-koochy dance stage. The crouching hills beneath them became . . . the film’s Seven Deadly Sins.

The Sins below her crouched on their haunches, supporting the platform the movie-screen succubus danced upon. Five robed men and two women, they were all as massive and muscular as Atlas upholding the world and now they stood and advanced as one. Their ghostly gray robes resembled a huge thunderous fog bank rolling across the land.

Behind them strode the stormy blue-black hooded figure of Death, its silver-bladed scythe sweeping left to right.

The creepy film figures—actual, not SinCims—rose to the top of the sky, and rolled over the human cartel killers at Torbellino’s back. Guttural screams choked under the heavy tread as storm troopers of Envy, Anger, Greed, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, and Pride found and crushed the human bodies that harbored them.

That shattered Torbellino’s ranks to the rear. What about the forefront of the army massed just behind El Demonio and his rolling thunder car and crackling lightning whip?

Oh, God!

Ric had turned to face the undead army, putting his arms straight out like a zombie from a corny old movie. Or like Frankenstein’s monster.

He moved toward the meeting walls of dust devils and zombies. With El Demonio watching through binoculars from atop his black Lincoln, Ric’s extended hands dripped fresh scarlet in his own tracks.

Quicksilver gave a blood-thickening howl and hurtled around the outside edge of the dust devils to lead their advance. Tallgrass had somehow come beside me, holding me prisoner in his iron-armed embrace as I lunged forward to help.

“Look!” he shouted in my ear, but I could barely hear. “Look at the ground behind Ric.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes from Ric’s vanishing figure as a curtain of dust devils and the evil yellow light obscured him. Tallgrass’s big hand grabbed my head and pointed it like a gun where he wanted me to look, in Ric’s sandy desert wake.

Bloody hands were breaking through the sand that had spun into the dust devils. Human fingers stretched out like fans of playing cards, reaching up into the dust until they became arms and then facial features broke through the shifting sands behind them . . . foreheads, noses, open mouths frozen in silent screams.

Ric was zigzagging back and forth among the wind-eddied rows, a shadow I could barely see. I was reminded of a farmer sowing seeds or a harvester of the dead or Death itself on another stately but implacable rampage.

“Tallgrass!” I screamed into the wind. “Let me go! Ric and Quicksilver, I can’t lose them.”

He pressed my head against his chest and I smelled ironed cotton. Crazy! It was blood and bone and guts all around us. I should have smelled rotting mortality. He ironed his shirts? Such a weird detail to circle in my brain, but maybe I needed to cling to any shred of normality.

“Have faith.”

I heard Tallgrass’s voice gusting away from me even as his words sifted through to my dust-bedeviled mind. I struggled to break the ex-FBI man’s grip, but it was as implacable as Ric’s methodical progress, every stride taking him a precious two feet farther away from me.

“You look but don’t see,” Tallgrass shouted in my ear.

I looked again, through the sandstorm tears blurring reality into a fun-house mirror.

And I saw naked female forms undulating upward from the bloody sand, a bizarre bony, ragged forest raised by blood and sucked free of the earth by the dust devils. They were mere pieces of people, not visibly rotting like the zombies, but bruised, mutilated, burned, and broken. I wanted to turn my eyes away in pity and revulsion.

But I couldn’t. The silver familiar had formed a thick high collar on my neck, forcing me to watch the end of all I loved as man and dog vanished into a meeting wall of sand and cloud, earth and sky, dead and undead.

And . . . it had become impossible not to watch the resurrection before me.

The rising female bodies spun as the light enveloped them, clothed by the dust and blood into glowing orange figures as fierce as fire.

The light brightened and purified until it seemed they danced in an eddy of moondust . . . they one by one became whole as burnished silver metal replaced the ruined and missing pieces . . . a breastplate here, a jawbone or forearm or thigh-piece there, all elements of the Metropolis robot.

They’d been reborn into a patchwork robot zombie army, gathering speed, hurtling like the silver wave of desert reptile and insect life toward El Demonio’s command post.

A shrill scream shattered the desert night.

The army of femicides Ric had raised swept over the zombies that fell into blackened ashes at their passage and beyond to the murdering human men behind them.

Ric and Quicksilver were standing together behind them, dark shadows against the light that seemed a bloody silver sunrise on the western horizon. I stumbled forward.

Tallgrass was running with me, his—I finally remembered the damn name—M249 SAW assault rifle braced on his hip spitting ammo.

Torbellino’s devil whip lashed once against the advancing fire and dust.

I cracked my left arm and the familiar finally took a single whip form to meet it, shaking Ric’s blood off itself into a circle of seething acid that shriveled the Demon’s horrible weapon into a dried length of brittle leather.

This close we had to advance over zombie bones.

“El Finado, El Finado,” I heard the cartel men cry as they turned to run but fled into the ensilvered embrace and grinning skulls of the risen corpses. These slavers and rapists and murderers were hailing their own deaths.

They were finished. Finado .

Torbellino was standing in his parade car, his eyes scarlet, his empty whip arm pointing a clawed forefinger at Ric. Demonic gunfire blasted from his being in the form of a fiery hail of bullets stitching the air as it took whip form.

I watched Ric jerk and spin in that immaterial onslaught of power, my own body shuddering with sympathetic pain.

But as he turned in that circle of torment and death, his head swung left and then right and left again. A luminous silver-blue lash like a laser cut through El Demonio’s neck, severing his head from his body, and then back again, cutting his torso in two.

Like the whip and the chupacabras, Torbellino shriveled and blew away into fading smoke. In the desert behind him his followers went down, their forlorn cries of “El Finado” dying with them.

Ric had sunk onto his knees in the sand, Quicksilver’s sturdy shoulder beside him the only force holding him up.

I ran to him, sliding onto my knees beside him, grabbing his hands and once again surveying the price of his dead-dowsing powers. His own blood. I madly patted the bloody camouflage jacket to find the deadly on-target wounds from El Demonio’s very being. He’d been strafed before my eyes by weapons both physical and supernatural.