Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

Who’s a storm chaser?

Ace reporter, that’s who.

“I have an issue with the station’s lousy weather witch, and Dolly’s horses know the way,” I told everyone and no one in particular. I didn’t want to cross any glance that could stop me. “We’ll shut down that broadcast tower and be back in no time. Quicksilver! Time to do your job.”

I slipped Ric a crooked smile and didn’t look back, although I heard him being forcibly restrained, probably by Leonard Tallgrass.

Quick and I zipped into the open elevator and hit “M” as in “Main.” We had sixty-some stories to plummet down and a bunch of flatland to cross.

You can’t take me out into this monster storm with you, Irma objected. It’s murder.

Eh. Murder-suicide, technically, I told her. I’m not being heroic and I’m not being stupid. Do the math.

I’d figured out the best use of personnel. Tallgrass had to remain at Emerald City to protect his tribe’s investment and deal with its oncoming cannibal vengeance god. The Wendigo sounded like another Lord of the Slaughter, a Shezmou with bear teeth, the power of all the earth’s winds at his back, and really bad breath. Nasty.

Snow had led the rescue party for Ric and produced a dragon to do it. I was pretty sure he’d come up with something spectacular to save the newest lynchpin of his Vegas empire, not to his mention his albino skin and the ordinary hides of everyone around him. And me, probably. Now that he knew what I could do for him, he’d want the satisfaction of forcing or tricking me into healing those whip welts I’d accidentally bequeathed to him in my uniquely soothing way.

What about our beloved Ric? Irma wailed.

Snow saved him before and he will again, I told her. Ric’s too vital to some part of this puzzle. Snow will save Ric and me … us, just for my future crawling potential.

What about El Demonio and his zombie army?

That I don’t know. Ric may have to settle that score all by himself.

Irma went silent as the elevator reached the main floor. Quicksilver and I picked our way through the fallen corpses of El Demonio’s thugs. True, I had tricked the chupacabra into becoming my hit man, but in the ghoul-eatghoul world of the Millennium Revelation, it wasn’t how you got things done, but that you did.

Outside, litter skidded across the deserted Emerald City parking lot like skeletal fingers playing the “Devil’s Waltz” on an asphalt keyboard. The temperature outside at ground level, including wind chill, had dropped to a blood-freezing forty degrees.

There was no point in putting Dolly’s top up.

The wind would just rip it off.

Quicksilver leaped in the front passenger seat with a shit-eating grin.

“You have been just waiting to ride shotgun again,” I accused.

He showed fang.

“Riding shotgun is good for you,” I told Quicksilver. “Save your footpads for later.”

Dolly’s engine choked for a moment, but revved high and hard when I peeled out of the lot into the dark and stormy night.

“You never knew these WTCH folk,” I commented.

Quicksilver remained mum and curled his claws into the front seat upholstery. I cringed, but kept silent. My mind started toting up losses to motivate my righteous anger. Achilles. My job. My house. My history.

The streets were eerily deserted, so I ran about a dozen red lights, feeling like a ghost.

“We’ve got to take whoever’s there down,” I told Quicksilver. “They would put orphans like us up for adoption in a cage,” I added, in terms he would relate to.

He growled.

“They are so wrong.” I kept up a running dialogue as I pushed Dolly up to seventy-five on the abandoned city streets. Ric would be proud. “They sold out the serious profession of The News, of informing the community, for impure greed. Sheena just wanted blackmail money for giving bad weather to good people and good weather to bad people. Undead Ted was a lame tool. Literally. El Demonio could plant his shills in management and hide the fact that Wichita was becoming a drug-smuggling hub.

“Now the broadcast capabilities of WTCH-TV can multiply the powers of all the southeast Kansas weather witches. We have to cut the power to the tower. Any ideas?”

Quicksilver lifted his furred throat and howled at the three-quarter moon peeking between the gathering storm clouds.

“I’m glad we see eye-to-eye on the storm,” I said. “It generates a lot of power that’s not answerable to anybody but Mother Nature. Let’s hope we can tap that.”

By the time I cruised Dolly through the WTCH parking lot, the cloud bank had sped to meet us so fast that I could see only darkness above the tree line, and hear only the wind hissing and the lightning spitting.

Most of the cars and vans were gone. Storm-chasing, I hoped. That’s what real news people would do. I was after unreal news people. Only Undead Ted’s Prius and Sheena’s vintage iridescent pink Geo Storm were still there.

Dolly’s headlights spotted someone hunched at the driver’s side of Sheena’s Storm, trying to break in.

“Undead Ted.” I hailed him as I pulled Dolly alongside, sandwiching his body between her hefty black side and the Storm.

“Don’t call me that,” he responded. “And your car is creasing my best suit.”

“Where’s Sheena?”

“You don’t want to go in there, Delilah. Some kind of crazy feminist rave is going down. I had no idea Sheena was so invested in ‘career at any price.’ She’s got all her gal pals doing the Macarena around a Crock-Pot in the station kitchen. When I heard their chant was calling for ‘eye of Newt Gingrich’ and a ‘samp of vamp,’ I got the hell out. I think that crazy Slo-mo Eddie is hunkered down filming it all.”

Go, Eddie, go. He’d win the YouTube viral sweepstakes of the week with that footage. That would out Sheena’s secret coven.

“Sheena alone has power to skew the weather,” I told Undead Ted, “but not to brew up a megastorm like this.”

He joined me in looking up at the roiling blue-black sky.

“I’m sorry, Delilah,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I really did have the hots for your blood type. And I was right that you’d taste like clarified blue blood. Awesomely rare.”

A gourmand vampire? Euww.

“What do you want in Sheena’s car?” I asked.

He nodded at two briefcases on the floor mat. “My share.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’m shutting Sheena down. You don’t want to ever show your sorry face in Kansas again.”

He scrambled into his Prius and lurched away at top speed.

As he left, I spotted a sudden hailstorm heading for us through the lot. Sheena was still watching the exterior. No way was that witch going to ice-blast the pristine finish on my vintage car. Taking my job and my rental house was one thing, but Dolly was family.

Also pretty much Detroit tank.

I gunned her over the curb and the lawn, cutting across to the concrete canopy sheltering the station’s main entrance. The hailstorm passed over, tinkling down a few stray ice crystals.

Now that Dolly was safely parked out of the elements, Quick and I headed into the eerily rainless storm for the broadcast tower.

I’d always taken this five-hundred-foot Eiffelesque structure at the station’s side for granted. Now, it was scary. A fan of lightning bolts as tall as the tower itself grew from its top, glowing so white-hot the tendrils looked pink against the night sky.

The tower sat on a concrete pad next to a shack unsavory enough to house an illegal still. Dozens of thin guy wires anchored the mass for hundreds of feet around. Toppling the tower would be impossible. Cutting off the dark artery of cable that ran up it would not, but this electrical storm could ground itself through me, a process called electrocution. I so wished I had paid more attention in those required science classes. Luckily, it wasn’t raining. Yet.