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?”