Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

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 Vegas’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.

“ Good dog, good boy,” I said in that exaggerated praising tone deluded dog “owners” use.

Ric was still watching me as if I was nuts. “‘Leave kitty ’?”

“It’s the one command he’ll obey for our walks in Sunset Park.” I shrugged apology. “If it’s late and deserted I let him off leash. Of course that’s when the cats come out.”

“So the only way you can call back Killer Dog is to scream ‘Leave kitty’ for all the world to hear?”

“It did work. And it’s not easy to turn a hundred-and-fifty-pound half-wolfhound from prey.”

“Nor a hundred-and-eighty-pound man,” Ric added with a mock ogle. “Did you have to call out the hounds on me? Where’d they all go?”

I turned with Ric to eye Quicksilver’s “aren’t-I-really-good-to-listen-to-you?” smiling mug and the desert beyond.

A bright flash of gold was moving across the valley floor, the darker mountains looming behind it.

“What on earth?” I asked. “Some moonlight phenomenon, like the purported green flash at sunset?”

“What under the earth,” Ric said, stretching out of his seat to see. “Holy smoke is right. Picture a tomb painting writ large.”

“My God. It’s not—” I looked again.

Now I saw the smoky flowing cloud that had rushed us was racing to meet the flash of moving moonlit gold that led an army of shadows over the sere ground. A solid-gold royal chariot. Behind that spectacular artifact came the Karnak Hotel’s hidden horde of ancient Egyptian vampires taking a run behind their desert steeds, with hyenas serving as their pack of hounds.

“I never noticed these mountains looked like pyramids, from a distance,” I breathed. “The royal hyenas just flowed right through us.”

Ric nodded as we watched the distant spectacle.

“I never saw the critters personally, but from your description and what we’ve just seen, the hyenas may have a spirit or ghostly existence as well as a way-too-physical one. They’ll sic the Karnak royal vampire chariot corps on us now that we’ve had a close encounter. Better floor it.”

“And Quicksilver just chased them! That dog would tackle Godzilla.”

Not to mention a six-hundred-pound white tiger. No way was I telling Ric that Quick had faced off Snow’s security shape-shifter, Grizelle, while I was busy erasing Ric’s childhood whip scars in the Inferno bridal suite.

Long story, for both of us. Ric hadn’t totally recalled his ordeal as mass vampire bait and I was still acting as his lover-cum–private nurse, protecting him as he thought he protected me. Maybe that was love, or maybe it was fooling yourself.

Whatever, I’d discovered even natural hyenas are really ugly customers, more weirdly related to felines than canines, with jaws that can snap and grind bones like the cannibal giant lurking up Jack’s fairy-tale beanstalk. The thought of even their spectral forms cozying up to Dolly’s paint job … ick. Hyena ectoplasm must resemble the wet cheesecloth fake mediums spit up in séances.

I was still shaking my head as I revved Dolly down the blessed ribbon of smooth concrete that would take us away from this prickly desert of cacti and khaki-colored carnivores, live and undead.

Ric frowned at my speedometer until I pushed the needle up to ninety. Then he tuned the radio full up on a Spanish-language station, so that trumpets and five-string guitars hailed our return to civilization.