Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

Hickory tried to grab me again and take me with the CinSims, but I slipped from his custody as Tallgrass pushed him into the stairwell and slammed the metal security door with its exterior lock shut.

I breathed a sigh the strength of a snow-globe tornado. The Wizard of Oz was as much about hands, head, and heart as Metropolis . My hands, head, and heart were happy to have all the Kansas farmyard folk and critter CinSims tucked away in the Emerald City’s high-tech sub-basements. They’d have lots of room to roam, although the chickens and pigs and horses could be seen ranging through the outer offices in confusion.

Then my panicked Scarecrow brain got ticking again.

Where was Dorothy? And Toto? And Professor Marvel?

And, most of all, where the hell was Almira Gulch?

“Is everybody unreal we can get our hands on stowed safely below?” Tallgrass asked.

“Some major players are still out and about,” I admitted, “but the same thing happened to them in the opening scenes of the movie, so we can’t expect to totally override their conditioning.”

Tallgrass frowned at me. “You Vegas people live in a fantasy world, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“So do we Plains people,” his confidential rasp whispered. “Millennium Revelation,” he pronounced with a Quicksilver-worthy snort. “Not new to us. My people and your people may yet save Wichita, and all our asses.

“All right, ‘Dorothy.’ You’re the white man’s lucky charm, but clearly also the key to the entire puzzle we’re all facing now, filmed and real, past and present.

“You take us on that corny yellow brick road to the heart of Wichita, Emerald City edition. Got it? How are you going to do that?”

How could I ever explain Snow to Leonard Tallgrass? Maybe as a … wizard. Or a shaman. How would I ever explain to Snow why everyone in our ragtag party and everything evil in Wichita seemed to have a serious stake in his prize vintage movie? I sure didn’t know.

“Well?” Tallgrass prodded me.

“I’m going to come clean and take us all to the top of Emerald City to see a man about a movie.”

RIC AND TALLGRASS, Quicksilver and I, stepped out of the shuddering elevator shaft and onto the penthouse floor to feel the tower itself shimmy and the very height make us shiver like wind chimes.

Snow was there to greet us, a commanding figure reminiscent of a CinSim ghost.

“What took you so long?” he asked our survival party. “The view here is spectacular, not to mention strategic. Let me show you.”

Tallgrass looked him up and down … and up and down again. “You are Ben’s Las Vegas bigwig.”

“It’s not a wig,” Snow said. “I wear my hair long.”

“A noble tradition, if a trifle old-fashioned,” Tallgrass said. “Ric? What do you know of this person Ben calls Christopher?”

“Christophe. It’s French. He’s a Vegas bigwig, all right, and a man of many names,” Ric replied. “I don’t know if he can be trusted for the long run, but if he has interests at stake that mirror ours, he’ll be prepared to indulge in mutual using.”

“I don’t renege on deals,” Snow said. “And nobody takes what’s mine.”

“Ah.” Tallgrass nodded. “My people have heard that first lie from the white man, but we endorse the second claim. You’ll have to prove your honorable intentions.”

Thank goodness no one had asked me to recommend Snow.

At my side, Quicksilver whined. I believe the major position he meant to convey was impatience.

Snow led our party onto the open-air balcony that surrounded the highest residence Emerald City had to offer. The evening air had that heavy, sullen stillness that promised a major storm was about to break loose. A fully three-quarter moon hung like a leaky football in an unclouded bit of night sky.

We all adopted Tallgrass’s signature squint as we stared out over green and gold rolling Kansas fields shivering in the rising wind. Everything was colored the sick chartreuse color the landscape took on before a major storm. It was like looking through a glass of absinthe.

An out-of-season blue-black front of storm clouds was rolling in from the northwest. Kansans knew that cloud cover for a raging monster spawned on the flanks of the Colorado Rockies, whose howling high winds would lash the land with icy cold and snow. They called it a “blue norther.”

Snow held out a pointing forefinger, his long white hair flowing back in the wind, making him resemble the monumental Crazy Horse statue carved from the Black Hills of South Dakota.

“There are three attack positions,” Snow said. “To the south, west, and north.”

I leaned over the balcony to watch heat lightning flirt with a familiar broadcast tower.

“WTCH is to the west,” I pointed out.

Ric held me to anchor us against the driving wind. “The drug cartel’s cattle-drive path runs south to north.”

“And that unholy traffic that destroys the earth and its beings has roused the gods of my people,” Tallgrass said. “From the north comes the Wendigo. That’s where the zombies drive the drug-laden cattle for slaughter. Wendigo is a giant evil spirit, a starving cannibal who dines on the greedy and devours them all. El Demonio’s enterprise is a desecration deserving of death, and that restitution will come, no matter if we stand in its path, no matter what we do.”

A monstrous conjunction of elements was assembling on the verdant stage of Kansas that night, no doubt. I studied the scene.

Lightning was building around three towers. Emerald City was the highest, and the most obvious target. Next highest was the broadcast tower to the west, WTCH-TV. Alma mater.

Speaking of my actual alma mater, I looked to the unmentioned east. The spire of a church was catching jagged lightning bolts. Was the lightning rod atop it cast in the figure of a gargoyle? Or a dragon?

“We have enemies converging from all four points of the compass?” Ric asked, noticing the direction of my gaze.

“Not really,” I said. “The east is an ally under fire, Our Lady of the Lake.”

“Why?” Ric asked. “What did we do?”

“Got what somebody else wants first,” Snow answered.

Ric stared at him for a long, hard moment. I feared he would take Snow’s comment personally, or Snow would mention Ric’s new silver eye.

Neither spoke.

Tallgrass broke the silence. “What more does El Demonio want? His band of bad men and their dead minions have been invading Wichita for years, like a blood tide seeping up from the Mexican border killings. Now everything evil is drawn to these fantastical towers on which we stand.”

“I’m no military historian,” Ric said, “but if you’re the center of a three-pronged attack, you need to snap one leg out from under the triad.”

“Quicksilver and I will take out the west,” I volunteered.

“No, Delilah.” Ric tightened his grip on me. “It’s insane to go out into the teeth of that oncoming physical and mystical storm. Stay.”

I looked over the lurid green-lit landscape that still resembled a Fanny Farmer deluxe box of mint and chocolate squares, with caramel drizzles on top. Wheat and corn and molasses and apple pie. Kansas farmland, as it had always been. I measured the blue-black tornado twisting Emerald City way and the lightning bolts flash-dancing around Our Lady of the Lake’s spire and the WTCH broadcast tower.

I saw the snarling face of Tallgrass’s terrifying Wendigo in the oncoming blue norther.

And I was supposed to be scared of Sheena Coleman?

Weather witches were the weakest link in the forces arrayed against us, but one of them controlled the highest tower. Besides, it’d be a pleasure to take out the witch that blew down my house.