Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

Maybe that was why the silver familiar wasn’t morphing into something handy like a hedge trimmer or hatchet or a hacksaw; using it would kill me. Or it just didn’t do yard work.

Quick’s sharp bark drew me around the shack’s side to where the metal conduit housing the cable met ground to run into the shack. Simple. Cut the power to the tower by hacking the conduit and interior cable in half. I needed a real tool. …

The shack’s exterior toolbox was filled with goodies I pawed through by lightning flash. If I had a hammer. … I picked up one with a rubberized handle. It wasn’t suitable for cutting a coax but reminded me that tools around here would need insulated handles. I finally lifted up an awesome little Tin Man hatchet with a wooden haft.

Hoping that the nonmetal handle would interrupt a lethal electrical shock, in seconds I was hacking at the conduit like a demented ax murderer. I’d cut through the outer metal and was denting the rubber insulation when Quicksilver growled and rushed something behind me.

Sheena stood screaming beside me, her blond hair flaring in the wind to show her brunet roots. “Stop that, Street! That hacking is giving me a throbbing headache.”

I ignored her and kept slinging my hatchet, counting on Quicksilver to keep her at bay.

Suddenly a hurricane gust of wind lifted me off my feet while Sheena yanked me back by my windblown hair. The hatchet flew from my hand into the dark as Sheena and I fell struggling on the concrete. Another lightning flash showed Quicksilver nosing at the half-cut-through cable.

No! He could electrocute himself. I kneed Sheena in the stomach and swung her off me by her hair, struggling to my feet in the straight skirt and heels. I’d never wear a business suit anywhere again.

“Quicksilver,” I screamed. “Leave kitty!”

Everything happened in jerky slow motion, as if lit by a nightclub strobe light.

Quicksilver regarded me with calm, stubborn doggy inaction.

By the next flash, Quicksilver had lifted a leg.

A rear leg.

I shut my eyes.

“Quick, no!” Water would short out the cable, of course, but Quicksilver would be fried.

Sheena was clawing at my skirt to pull me back down, but I back-kicked her away and charged for Quicksilver …

Just as lightning flashed and showed his hair snapping with static into a gorgeous electric-blue halo, leaping toward me …

As the tower-top lightning streaked to ground with the sound of berserk electrical snapping. The wet cable shorted out the tower, making it a dazzling firecracker flaring, and then fading to disappear against the night sky.

Sheena was moaning behind me. “You witch! My coven’s been grounded. You’ve broken my perfect storm.”

Quicksilver, still looking twice his normal size, regarded me with calm, stubborn doggy inaction. I reached my fingers to his punk-rock coat, and got a nasty little shock.

That’s all. He’d been smart enough to piss and run before the current could connect. We turned to bustle back to Emerald City.

Halfway to the parking lot, Sheena caught up to us. She must have been planning a quick getaway too.

“Street!” she shouted. “Wait. What have you done to my car?” she screamed. “Where is my Storm?”

I looked at the parking lot. Lightning had struck the small car into a twisted mass of blackened metal with a burnt pile in the middle.

“My money!” Sheena wailed, running to the wreckage to claw at the remains.

“Will she ruin her perfect manicure clawing for those burnt bills?” I said to Quicksilver. “Money is the root of all evil.”

I ran to the station portico to jump behind Dolly’s steering wheel as Quicksilver took the passenger side, having done his business and being ready to leave. I tried to call Ric, but my cell phone had been fried. Better it than me or Quicksilver.

“And I think your whole perfect storm is going south,” I yelled to Sheena as we sped down the exit road.

I HAD TO watch for the broken glass in the station driveway, so it wasn’t until we were almost at the street that I looked up at the sky again. I glimpsed Emerald City’s towers coated in heat lightning, the highest point practically touching the threatening storm clouds.

Without the weather witches adding harassing phenomena to the storm, it had boiled down to a fixed, churning vortex spinning fog and lightning and darkness around the Emerald City towers, which were being swarmed by climbing hordes of El Demonio’s zombies, swinging like disintegrating apes up the glittering slick green sides on thin steel guy wires. Talk about flying monkeys.

When had El Demonio and his crew besieged Emerald City?

I may have disabled the broadcast tower, but Emerald City was WTCH-TV now, threatened by an evil new power, and there was no longer any coaxial cable to fall victim to Quicksilver’s bladder magic.

By going to the ground to take out the WTCH-TV tower, I’d put an unbridgeable gulf between myself and my stranded allies in the Emerald City towers.

I drove up to the deserted parking lot with despair in my soul.

The storm was so ferocious and high.

I was so isolated below.

There were so many fierce, hungry zombies in the many stories between.

I needed to rejoin Ric in Snow’s suite. I had a lobby to cross and an elevator to get into, with dog. I parked Dolly away from any trees that could fall on her, in a dark part of the Emerald City lot.

Slipping around the side of the building, I noticed that the storm-green light distorted colors, making what was dark blacker, what was sickly yellow-green paler. So I was glad for the dark navy shoes and suit I wore and only wished I had pants. Even Quicksilver’s crisp gray and cream coat looked jaundiced, like a … an absinthe-toned CinSim.

I peeked in the first lobby window. Had the chupacabra come back?

No, it was El Demonio himself lounging on a visitor’s chair, sending tremors down his thirty-foot bullwhip so it twitched like an impatient tail. The light gave his clothing and skin a greenish reptilian cast. His squinty black eyes were bloodshot enough to match the chupacabra’s. I wondered if the man who’d been surnamed Torbellino had disappeared entirely into El Demonio over the past twenty years, if the Millennium Revelation had brought out a true demon in him.

The lobby bodies had been piled in a corner, where a few limbless zombies chewed frantically on the remains. I suspected they had fallen during the assault on the towers and had broken off too much to keep going at anything but devouring, so they’d been relegated to the “clean-up” crew.

Other thugs sat around with the head man, drinking from liquor bottles. An empty one of Old Crow rolled back and forth on the floor as the storm shook the building.

Toto came skittering through the ruins, sniffing for the yellow brick road. A thug pulled out a semiautomatic, but although the bullet sprayed green splinters from the recycled glass floor, the small black flash disappeared behind another chair.

“Where is that vicious little dog?” a woman’s shrill voice demanded. “I’ll show that Dorothy.” Almira Gulch came stomping through in her old-maid dress and ridiculous crushed black straw stovepipe hat, a basket over her arm. “That dog needs to be put away.”

“You got it, lady,” drawled one of Torbellino’s men.

She turned on the boss man after stepping daintily over his bull-hide tail. “You, sir, look like a man of authority. I want you to put that dog in a cage and that stupid girl Dorothy who let it bite me in jail.”

The thug who’d shot at Toto lifted the gun, but Torbellino raised a lazy hand.

“Don’t waste your ammunition. These things aren’t real.”