Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

Heck, honey, Irma pointed out, they all can eyeball your naked back with that mirror behind the bar. She giggled. Except your skin looks almost Wicked Witch of the West green. It matches your gown, but it’s your least favorite color, and you’re even wearing her shoes. Remember, Dorothy got the ruby slippers from the WWW’s dead body through the Good Witch Glinda’s intervention. Any message for the future in those facts?

Maybe for Lilah West back in Vegas’s Sunset City, I told Irma. She’d always wanted to play Glinda. Perhaps she finally did somehow, seeing to her wicked sister’s coven of weather witches fall from grace here.

“A toast,” Ben Hassard announced to those present, which did not include Irma.

He lifted his Silver Zombie. “To Emerald City’s booming future, to the destruction of all my immortal enemies, and to the good fortune of all my unsuspected friends.”

“To unsuspected friends.”

The end of the phrase was murmured around the room as Ric moved beside me. His arm slipped around my bare waist, caressing me as he and I chimed glass rims. I felt my world had snapped back into place after a few moments of temporary insanity.

“Amor,” he murmured against the glass rims that separated us.

“Amor,” I repeated the toast, under my breath.

Meanwhile, the public self-congratulations continued.

“To unsuspected enemies and immortal friends,” Snow rephrased Ben’s toast, his sonorous voice wafting from behind my back. “May we always be able to tell them apart.”

Quicksilver added a canine arf of agreement to that, and of course we all laughed, as the cast so often did at the end of so many movies.

Maria, the universally sought CinSim robot from Metropolis, did not laugh. She just stood there in aloof metal majesty and shone like the once and future star she was and would be.

Forever and ever.

Amen.

I was betting she was a virgin, poor thing.

Invented in Silver Zombie

We have got one hot little Roomba robot vacuum cleaner on our hands. Master? I wonder if she does dudes.

—Irma, Delilah’s alter ego, in Silver Zombie

3 ounces chilled Fuse blueberry raspberry bottled water

3 ounces chilled lemon-lime sparkling bottled water or champagne

1 ounce José Cuervo Silver tequila

1½ ounces lime vodka 1 ounce Alizé Bleu with vodka, cognac, and tropical fruit

Combine all ingredients, then dribble a dash of blue curaçao down the inside of the glass to sink to the bottom. Be careful that you don’t sink to the bottom in the snare of the real Silver Zombie.

Vampire Sunrise

Invented in Vampire Sunrise

“Umm. Subtle yet spicy … for modern women like us.”

—Psychic psychologist Helena Troy Burnside in Vampire Sunrise

6 ice cubes

1½ ounces pepper vodka

½ ounce DeKuyper “Hot Damn!” hot cinnamon schnapps

4–7 ounces orange juice, well shaken

1 ounce Alizé Gold Passion orange cognac

½ to 1 ounce grenadine

Put ice cubes in 12-ounce highball glass. Pour in pepper vodka and cinnamon schnapps, add orange juice to fill to desired level. Add Alizé. Last, pour in grenadine, which will settle to the bottom. Keep adding ice to this classic brunch eye-opener and daytime drink as it melts … for a longer, more sensual experience to the very last drop.

Invented in Brimstone Kiss

“Sounds like something you’d sip on all night long and I’d knock back in a couple slugs.”

—Rick Blaine/Humphrey Bogart CinSim in Brimstone Kiss

2 jiggers Inferno Pepper Pot vodka

1 jigger DeKuyper “Hot Damn!” hot cinnamon schnapps

2 jiggers Alizé Red Passion

Jalapeño pepper slice (optional)

2 ounces champagne (for Version 2)

Version 1: Pour all ingredients into a martini shaker with ice. Shake gently. Pour into a martini glass garnished with jalapeño pepper slice. A hell of a drink!

Version 2: Pour all ingredients into a tall footed glass filled with ice. Stir well. Top off with champagne. A frothy but potent libation that might lead to pleasant damnation.

Invented in Dancing with Werewolves

“A sweet, seductive girly drink, but with unsuspected kick.

” —Werewolf mob enforcer Sansouci, in Brimstone Kiss

1 ounce white crème de cacao

1½ ounces vanilla Stolichnaya

1 ounce Lady Godiva white chocolate liqueur

½ ounce Chambord raspberry liqueur

(Other brands may be substituted)

Pour vodka and liqueurs except the raspberry in the order given and stir gently. Drizzle in the raspberry liqueur. Don’t mix or stir. The raspberry liqueur will slowly sink to the bottom, so the white cocktail has a bloodred base (for a final taste sensation with bite).

Visit with Bogie and Bacall on

Key Largo

For a click-on list of entertaining vintage film, actor, and Las Vegas sites, and film trailers, including for Night of the Living Dead, see the Delilah Street page at www.carolenelsondouglas.com.