Carole Douglas - Virtual Virgin

I also knew that, while driven by El Demonio’s whip to raise zombies in the Mojave Desert, the child Ric was sure the Virgin of Guadalupe had visited him in the goat pens at night. So he ought to recognize her when he saw her.

Hmm, Irma mused. You do also recall that his last vision of the Virgin coincided with a vampire bat bite and the photo of a female hottie from one of the zombie-runners’ dirty magazines? Hello, first wet dream. Bye, bye Our Lady of Guadalupe. Until now?

I glanced at the passenger seat. Ric’s narrowed eyes were fixed on the gleaming towers of Vegas growing closer. His face broadcast pleasure as he consulted his memory.

“I saw this beseeching . . . compassionate female face of transforming beauty. Our Lady of Guadalupe folds her hands before her. Her form in its heavenly blue cloak of sky is hallowed with golden rays. She comes with the scent of roses in the desert, which she let tumble from her cloak for the peasant Juan Diego.”

“The guy who was secretly Zorro?”

“That was Don Diego.” Ric looked over and saw I’d been teasing. “Okay, chica, maybe only my subconscious conjured her when I was a prisoner of Torbellino and his gang, but it helped keep me sane. She’d told Juan Diego she was ‘Entirely and Ever Virgin and your compassionate Mother,’ so Mexicans have prayed to her for protection from all evil for more than five hundred years.”

“And they need it now more than ever,” I warned. “Your psychologist foster mother would tell you that if ever there was a kid’s wish fulfillment fantasy, an exploited child’s patron saint, it would be that paradox of endless virginal purity and boundless maternal love.”

“Yet fate sent me an aging virgin,” he said with a wink.

“Not that old, Montoya!”

“Modern rationalizations like yours don’t work nowadays. I was a child when I first saw the Virgin of Guadalupe. What I saw in that cursed place in Juarez tonight, above those hundreds of unmarked graves of violated girls, was like the Virgin, but pale-skinned, Anglo not Mexican, more a peasant Joan of Arc, who was also a warrior woman and a saint. This figure of the clouds and the moon didn’t look modern, with her simple gown and hair. She seemed an ordinary young woman, yet her encompassing arms sheltered a horde of cowering children.”

I recognized the Good Maria from Metropolis , of course, but I kept my mouth shut. Like a virgin.

“That vision,” Ric said, “gave me the strength to drive my nails into my palms until the blood flowed and the dead returned, like roses springing up in the desert, alive again and lethal to evil.”

I’d seen a lot of bizarre and terrifying and impossible things since the Millennium Revelation had sprung a whole new supernatural dimension of life on earth on us all. Just before he’d raised the femicides, I’d thought Ric had gone mad.

Afterward, Quicksilver’s healing tongue had erased the stigmata on Ric’s palms. Most people would say he’d been hallucinating, except I’d shared his sky-borne vision.

Only I hadn’t seen Metropolis ’s saintly working-class girl, Maria, obviously a Virgin Mary stand-in, begging the heedless rich to pity and help the poor children.

Silent now, I let my brain attempt to superimpose the Virgin Mary over the drive-in movie screen-in-the-sky image I’d seen . . . the virtually nude, jewel-draped, pastie-wearing pagan goddess-cum-Folies-Bergère chorus girl, the Whore of Babylon from Revelations in the bible, another face of the same actress from the same film. Brigitte Helm.

Just as the dancing girl Maria seduced from a stage upheld by the Seven Deadly Sins, her sky-cast image had transfixed Torbellino’s hundreds of human cartel “soldiers” in suspended motion to be mowed down by Tallgrass’s bullets and the resurrected femicides’ power to avenge.

What had really happened there?

All other CinSims were the image of the actor and the role. The Silver Zombie had many roles and a silver metal face and form to hide her true intentions behind.

Ric’s religious vision of the Virgin Mary made more sense and soothed the savage soul he’d had to resurrect to destroy El Demonio and his human and unhuman armies.

I’d never forget that swarm of avenging Amazons, hundreds of brutalized girls rising strong and whole, clothed not in the “sun and stars” of the Virgin Mary but in the piecemeal Joan of Arc armor of the shattered Silver Zombie as she drew on the might of machine to vanquish the demonic lord’s robotic male zombies and also used the hypnotic succubus powers of the Eternal Feminine to destroy brutal human men and the demon who commanded them.

In my mind’s eye, our insubstantial savior had been one hot mama with the sensual, paranormal power of a succubus gone CinemaScope. That’s what I’d seen Ric animate with the gaze of his silver iris, magically, without resorting to dowsing rod or blood, as he always did.

So the three faces of Maria in the film still lurked in the sky above and haunted and worried me. When she was good, she was very good. When she was bad, she was catastrophic. And when she was the link between the Good and the Bad, the anatomically correct sexy silver robot destroyed at the film’s end—and the tool of somebody else—she was badder than anything.

Those thoughts jerked me out of my speculations. I had my own secret moments of being badder than anything, especially if they involved Snow.

During the duel in the sky, Ric had unconsciously drawn on both sides of Maria, saint and succubus. The Seven Deadly Sins’ featured appearance, however, could have only been sent by the resident power at the Inferno Hotel, Cocaine, who played the lead deadly sin of Pride in the rock group’s lineup and was my Silver Zombie.

Snow.

El Demonio Torbellino, or whatever remnants of him that might still be circling out there like a mist of evil struggling to take physical form, was not sitting down for a debriefing with me, but I could certainly put Snow to the question.

He always enjoyed destroying my illusions about my world, and myself. In this town, that meant that he was also the best thing that passed for truth.

“GODFREY,” I SAID.

He stood at my Enchanted Cottage front door, as formal as usual in white tie and black morning coat, but held a most unusual silver salver in one hand. His pencil-thin mustache took a stern downward turn.

I wasn’t dressed for company, wearing my Betty Boop sleep shirt and a bedhead.

“Miss Delilah, a personal invitation for you was delivered to the main house. I saw early this morning that your Miss Dolly was parked aslant in the driveway and her normally shiny black coat was dulled with dust. I took the liberty of assigning an individual named Woodrow, who was idling about the area, to have her seen to.”

“Oh, you didn’t, Godfrey.”

“I just told you I did.”

“Woodrow is a yard troll. If it’s green and growing, or, uh, brown and dirty and in need of picking up, he will do that, the brown part very reluctantly. Dust in any form is not on his duty roster.”

“Apparently he found some unemployed pixies to handle the chore. Miss Dolly is her usual self again. I’m afraid I can’t say the same about you.”

I’d slept about sixteen hours and stumbled down to the kitchen for a hearty breakfast of sliders and McDonald’s fries from the kitchen witch. Apparently she was annoyed with me as well. Quick and I were about to make short work of the fast food when the doorbell had rung.

I gazed again at the salver. At least somebody wasn’t. A large square envelope was centered exactly on its center, held in place by a slender Mexican quartz letter opener.