Silver Zombie

Chapter Twenty-eight

 
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.”
“They’re real nuisances,” the guy answered, taking a bead on Miss Almira Gulch’s hat.
“I said, don’t,” Torbellino ordered through gritted teeth. “This isn’t a carnival shooting gallery. This is our Armageddon, ass. Either grow or die, and those snoops on our Kansas drug-drives are threatening my operation going international. We’d be outa here with our prize if some damned necromancer hadn’t turned all the elevator wires to silver.”
“But, boss, you want this silver thingamajiggy.”
“I want the power of the ultimate Silver Zombie. I’ve had these cheap Mexican models for the digging up, sure, for decades. But the Silver Zombie would be able to find and dig up whole armies of new undead meth-heads. I’d be King of the Zombies. I could run this continent. Hell, I could run this hemisphere with that one heavy-metal piece on the crime game board.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“You don’t need to. If the weather witches’ storm doesn’t knock those holdouts out of their pretty glass tower, our zombie cattle-drivers will finally reach the top and throw them off. It’s just bad luck some rich guy made off with the Silver Zombie before we did.”
“Won’t all this throwing off and knocking off lose you the Silver Zombie?”
“Nope. No more than your bullet can kill these kinky CinSims running around here. They’re zombies too and already dead.”
“But they … look normal and talk and wear clothes and don’t eat anybody’s brains. That one there acts just like my Aunt Clara and I’d really like to clean her clock. One shot, boss, please?”
Almira was heading through again, like the clockwork CinSim she was and would be until she became a full-fledged hotel-casino attraction and some of the actress underneath her, Margaret Hamilton, a perfectly nice lady, came out to soften the film persona.
“Shut up,” El Demonio shouted, “or you’ll end up in my local body farm and get raised to run with the cattle, like these stupid zombies. Don’t push me. I really need a better grade of zombie.”
Thanks to the broken door, I’d heard everything. I parted my Green Room–permed hair and pulled it forward into two pigtails. The silver familiar obligingly split and clipped each tail into place.
I played director and gave Quicksilver a short but key nonspeaking role.
The moment Miss Gulch vanished, I nodded at my dog.
Quick padded silently through the broken door and slunk around the furniture so he could appear right behind El Demonio’s chair.
Toto zipped out again, thanks to Miss Gulch’s absence. While the men’s eyes were automatically drawn to the streaking little dog, I eased on down the lobby’s trashed yellow brick road and into the armed thugs’ view.
Interacting with them at just the right level was the biggest difficulty.
“Where has my little dog gone?” I said sadly. “That awful witch in the even more awful hat wants to take him away to be killed.”
“Say, are you Dorothy?” one guy asked. “You came through here before. You should be in the storm shelter.”
“Oh, dear, I’ve got to find my dog first. And then I’ll go.”
By now I had edged over and past Torbellino’s whip and was even with his chair.
Quick whisked out from behind the chair and ran into the hall.
“There he is,” I cried, dashing after him.
“Hey, boss,” the dazed thug was saying. “This whole scene looks more like that Alice down the rabbit hole thing, only with dogs.”
I heard the real Toto following our trail, arfing all the way.
“Say I can shoot this one, please.”
No one or no thing guarded the elevator bank. I pressed a button and hoped.
“You, there. Dorothy. I want that dog!”
Miss Gulch didn’t seem to notice Toto had added a hundred and forty-six pounds. Or that Dorothy had added a bust and a business suit. Like feral zombies, feral CinSims seemed to degrade. I was getting a whole new insight on CinSims, but probably wouldn’t live long enough to come to any conclusions but my own.
“Shaddup in the hall,” came from the office area. This order was followed by a sharp crack of a whip.
“I’m not Dorothy,” I told Almira, “and your hat is horrible.”
“Well, of all the nerve, you young whippersnapper. You’ll be sorry.”
The elevator doors opened … on another CinSim, garbed in checked pants, brocaded vest, and black hat.
“Almira Gulch,” he said, “you’re a mean, wicked woman. I’ll see Dorothy home before the big storm turns into a tornado. You’d better find your bicycle and ride like Hell for home yourself. Come on, Dorothy, and your big dog too. There’s no time to be lost.”
Professor Marvel grabbed my arm to hustle me into the elevator car, with Quick behind me turning to snap at Almira Gulch to stay behind.
“This is very kind of you,” I told my CinSim escort, “but I hear the elevator cables don’t work.”
“Not for their kind. I’ll have you know, young lady, I have been to Kansas City in my travels, where everything is up-to-date, and have ridden in these new-fangled things called elevators for years. Oh my, I have ridden in even more exciting aerial transportation, my dear. Now. Up, up, and away.”
We did indeed whoosh upward in a working elevator.