ACOYOTE YIPPED in the desert night surrounding Las Vegas.
Its sharp introductory barks escalated into a full, soulful howl at the moon.
I straightened from my feral crouch to listen.
Then I smiled.
That lonesome coyote might be the only natural critter within hearing tonight.
Even the glowing yellow moon, half full, looked pretty unnatural. Its blade-straight inner edge reminded me of a giant casino chip split down the middle.
I wasn’t used to working under moonglow. Usually Sin City’s gigantic bouquet of neon lights backlit my night-crawling expeditions.
Tonight, though, my beat was a raw desert landscape of distant mountains that made the flat valley floor into a huge, empty, open maw surrounded by massive saw teeth. I stood at its center, the moonlight reflecting from the steel studs embedding the arms, legs, and torso of my form-adapting black catsuit.
“Bite me,” I whispered at the jaundiced half-werewolf moon, “and you’ll get a jawful of broken fangs.”
Something came barreling out of the darkness right for me, as if answering my invitation. Fast and furred, the yellow-beige flowing blur grew ears, hackles, and hulking shoulders as it neared—like a panting locomotive with a boar’s-head cowcatcher.
I turned sideways as it charged by, kicking up sand chest-high. Then it wheeled and leaped for my throat.
“Quick,” I shouted, using the word as a name, not a command. A huge pink tongue swiped my jaw and slimed my costly, FBI-approved night vision goggles. Only borrowed, alas.
I couldn’t wipe the wet lenses clean on my steel-studded outfit. Scuff City. So I swept off the goggles and shook my head at the grinning wolfish face now at standing height. My waist.
“Quicksilver, you’re supposed to find prey, not me,” I told him.
I fished in the secondhand cop utility belt swagging my hips for a microfiber cloth, then glanced around. All around. The new bone-reading night vision lenses had tinted everything a Beatles-submarine yellow. I pushed them, cleaned, atop my head like sunglasses.
It was pleasant to see the true moonshine-silvered landscape, cool and serene. Silver is my talisman, including this silver-gray dog who’s half wolfhound, half wolf, and all partner. Quicksilver is more lupine than K-9, and just what a girl needs for a bodyguard and buddy after the Millennium Revelation.
Hmm. A hummock of Joshua tree–tall cactus was edging into sharper focus. I snapped the lens strap back around my head and the lenses down over my eyes. Several hummocks of cacti were shuffling toward me. Quicksilver had accomplished his Australian sheep dog act, after all.
I drew the police baton at my hip. The idea was to serve and protect, not to hurt.
And not to be hurt.
The closer they came, the bigger they got. Human figures, three of them. These were professionally big guys, the kind who walk with beefed-up arms out from their sides at acute angles, with thigh-heavy legs pushing their feet apart so they make a waddle into a threat.
Muscle, in the classic PI term.
And you just a slip of a girl, Irma commented sardonically.
Shut up, I told my inboard invisible friend since orphanage days. I’m on the tall and solid side. Quick and I can handle these Three Stooges.
Sadly, that’s about all they were. As much as twentieth-century zombie movies celebrated a dogged will to ambulate, the New Millennium’s feral zombies share the same lack of social graces, not to mention coordination.
Quicksilver immediately trotted to circle behind them and nip at their shambling heels or backsides if necessary.
The three were still shod and wore “rent”ed suits … not the hired kind, but the tattered variety rent apart by werewolf fangs and claws. Their dim memories of being torn to death by Cesar Cicereau’s werewolf mob didn’t make them want to gnaw brains yet, but somewhere deep down they must still be plenty pissed.
Nor were they visibly rotting on the hoof. In fact, their pre-chewed condition put them in more danger from predators than the other way around. Those mortal wounds had never healed, but remained blood-crusted scars of their last stand some twenty to seventy years ago. Werewolf chieftain Cicereau had been offing competition since Vegas began in the 1940s. The Millennium Revelation had unfolded a lot of mysteries along with all the variations of supernatural underworld creatures it had coughed up.
Still, three guys heading for a lone woman was never a safe situation, even if she had a hundred-and-fifty-pound dog in attendance.
“Okay, fellas,” I told them, brandishing my club, “welcome to Rancho Second Chance-o.”
That stopped them dead in their tracks.
Or perhaps what had stopped them was sighting the low bunkhouse and corral behind me, where a horse lifted its head to nicker. Home, sweet, home on the range. Don’t ask me why, but horses have a soothing effect on feral zombies.
I stepped aside to let the trio stumble into the ranch’s safety zone surrounded by silver barbed wire fencing. That’s when a pack of shadows rushed me from the surrounding sagebrush, from every last bush.
A coyote pack!
No time to play zombie tourists.
My night stick prodded all three Zobo butts hard to keep them moving, and I raised my right arm just as the lead coyote leaped for my throat. With my leather-gloved palms at both ends, I managed to wedge the police baton between its fangs, then twist my upper body. That threw the alpha male off to the side in time for me to knee the next coyote in the leaping chest, so it fell back.
Quicksilver, snarling and snapping up a storm, was harrying ears and tails and flanks to drive back the middle of the pack of five. Coyotes don’t weigh much, maybe thirty pounds, and neither Quick nor I wanted to kill them. These were just desert dogs, doing what comes naturally. It’s actually harder to fight off opponents you only want to discourage.
From the grunting sounds behind me, the zombies had roused to kick away coyotes trying to slip through the barbed wire isolating the corral, protecting the nervous horses that had bunched and whinnied.
Quick raced over to add the discouragement of his big bad wolf teeth, while I shouted and flailed with my baton, trying not to break any animal’s delicate leg.
Between the kick-dancing zombies, Quicksilver’s slashing speed and teeth, and my shouts and hard knocks, the coyote pack was retreating, snarling, with ears down.
The oncoming dirt-bike roar of a Ranger RZR utility vehicle spitting up twin funnels of sand and snapped-off brush finished the job. The coyotes vanished into the moonlight-dappled sand as if made of it.
The ATV ground its noisy way to the enclave’s open gate. I followed, dusting off my supple yet rhino-hide-tough Inferno Hotel catsuit. The driver doffed his helmet and goggles. My Vegas-based, designer suit–wearing ex-FBI guy was looking provocatively off-Road and Track.
Oooh, chica, Irma purred in my mind. Our Ricardo is flaunting his muy macho mode. My motor is revving.
Yup, my uninvited alter ego is the Queen of Shallow.
“Coyotes?” Ric greeted me. “Are they okay?”
Quicksilver circled the Ranger to sniff its huge tire footprint, hackles raised.
“A bit bruised and cut,” I said. “We pick a time were-wolves aren’t out and then run into their innocent little brothers on a tear.”
“They must be hungry to pack in fives,” he said. “Coyotes generally stick to mated sets or run in threes.”
“Like zombies?” I asked, nodding at the stolid waiting trio.
“Just more stragglers from that lot I resurrected at Cicereau’s Starlight Lodge.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Keep them out of the zombie trade, at least. You bring something back from the dead, in whatever state, you’re kinda responsible for it.”
His words left me speechless. My tough FBI guy didn’t know it, but I may have done exactly that with him.
“I really understand,” I said in a serious tone that slipped past him. His mind was still on the wandering zombies.
“The rest have scattered pretty far,” he said, “but I won’t need you and Quicksilver for roundups after this. Didn’t know if Cayuse here”—he slapped the Ranger’s sand-blasted engine cover—“would work to round up stray Zobos. It sure does. They shy like horses at unnatural sounds.”
“Jeez, Ric. A man and his wheels. You’ve named that mobile mechanical monster of overbearing tires and sheer ruckus?”
“You’ve got Dolly.”
He nodded at the barely visible black bulk of my ’56 Caddy convertible. Her full name was Dolly Parton, and she had the awesome chrome “bumper bullets” to prove it. She was parked on the dirt road that was way too far from the highway asphalt for my taste and her black-satin finish.
“Come inside.” Ric dismounted easily in his spandex race driver jumpsuit. “I’ll show you the setup. We need to get these Zobos tucked away for the night and the next few weeks. Now that they’ve got horses to tend and guard— and are safe behind silver wire—they’re ready for rehab.”
“Rehabilitation for what? Basket weaving?”
“I don’t know yet. I just can’t leave any known dead wandering around to be meat for the Immortality Mob.”
I followed him inside the rambling barbed wire, shaking my head and muttering “Cayuse?”
Quicksilver couldn’t trot away from the parked Ranger fast enough. We were two of a kind, urban creatures, especially when that citified outpost was Las Vegas, the capital city of all things spectacular and supernatural in 2013.
Inside the fence I saw the usual barn, horse corral, and bunkhouse.
The three rag-suited Zobos were being tended by four of their ilk, this set wearing Lee jeans, work boots, and plaid cotton shirts with pearlized buttons.
Quicksilver whined behind me, whether from confusion or outraged fashion sense, I couldn’t tell.
The brown leathery look of the Zobos’ visible skin evoked human cowhands who worked outdoors in the desert. Ric could even open a dude ranch with these guys. The Lazy Z.
“This place looks like the Louisiana Hayride TV show set,” I commented. “What do feral zombies eat? I suppose these guys haven’t worked their way up to brains.”
“That’s a bad rap. They eat nothing … yet. Right now they just feed and water the horses. These are the sleepwalking dead. Since drops of my blood animated them, they have to obey me. I don’t know if the Immortality Mob exists, but I do know somebody’s learned to exploit zombies.”
“We need a word out of earshot, Montoya,” I told him. How sharp were Zobo senses, or brains, anyway?