“THERE’RE PUTTING VINTAGE movies in three-D?” I exploded. “That craze has gotten out of hand. Some of us find what Romero did in 1968 plenty scary, not to mention icky.”
“I’m no film purist like you or Hector Nightwine,” Ric agreed, “but adding three-D is odd for restored drive-in-movie fare. It’s very realistic, though.”
I noticed some smaller figures actually running between the cars parked closest to the screen. Some were scrambling over car hoods and tops and trunks, heading our way.
“Those aren’t the walking dead people,” I yelled. “They’re the fleeing audience members.”
By then I’d recognized the lone figure that had run over the car silhouettes to perch on an HHR roof and brace its feet while shouting a challenge.
Actually, it braced all four feet and howled a challenge.
Quicksilver.
By now, Ric and I had scrambled out of the Caddy as fleeing people on the ground and victims on-screen streamed toward us.
“Why are the zombies escaping the film?” Ric asked me.
“I’m not the zombie expert,” I shouted back.
Then I blinked at his face. “Your brown contact lens is missing.”
He put his fingers to his cheekbone. “I bumped into the cheesy screen door frame leaving the food stand with all the boxes in my hands. That must have jolted the contact out. I’ve got another dozen packed in Dolly’s trunk.”
“Did you—did your naked silver eye—call the zombies off the screen? Have you got a brand-new way to dowse for the dead?”
“These things aren’t real,” Ric said. “They’re figments of old film.”
“So are CinSims, and they’re solid enough to dance cheek-to-cheek with casino customers. Where’s the projection booth?”
“I’ve never raised anything without a dowsing rod,” Ric objected, still working out the phenomenon.
“Eyes have ‘rods’ in them, don’t they? Aren’t there millions that control the black and white part of vision?”
“That’s anatomy in miniature, not … not a piece of wood or metal from the real world.” Ric’s hands fisted in a balked desire to hold a physical Y-shaped implement.
“Don’t rationalize. Something’s going on here, and even if we didn’t start it, we have to stop it.”
Quicksilver’s protective instincts had realized that. He was leaping into the oncoming zombies, giving them gnaw-for-gnaw. They ignored him, shrugged him off, even though his teeth gritted to tear off what little clothes and, in some cases, flesh, were left on them.
Not my fave movie monsters, and now they were coming right for us. Luckily, they were vintage zombies, very, very slow and shambling.
Dolly’s trunk levitated behind me like a large shiny laptop screen opening. Ric must be going for his contact lenses … no, for his licensed Glock semiautomatic, our only serious weapon besides my cop duty belt.
I tossed the paper cups, closed the glove compartment, and grabbed the metal Club on the passenger side floor that locked Dolly’s steering wheel in iffy locations, like near the Vegas Sinkhole. It made a better weapon than a wooden billy club.
As Ric slammed the trunk lid shut, a woman rushed past him, screaming, “He must be one of them. That glass eye gleams like solid ice.”
By now we were playing dodgem cars with our bodies, slipping between the few high-riding elderly SUVs the Gas Wars had left on the road to hide from the suddenly animated horde of screen zombies.
I heard the scrabble of claws on metal. Quicksilver leaped to the ground beside us, a disgusting bone in his teeth. I had no idea if the bone belonged to friend or foe but ordered, “Quick! Leave kitty.”
Ric rolled his oddly colored eyes.
I think even the oncoming zombies paused to mill about in confusion at hearing that command. I’m sure they assumed a tasty tidbit to gnaw was nearby.
I saw the whites of Quick’s baby blues as he reluctantly dropped the big, juicy bone that now was in living color. Was it a prop, or part of a 3-D zombie? I knew he wouldn’t gnaw on a victim. He was K-9 to the core.
Come to think of it, some of the fleeing moviegoers had vivid red scratches on their faces and arms.
Oh, shoot, I thought, just as Ric shot his automatic into the air. I noticed that his pockets were stuffed with extra ammo, not candy bars from a food mission to the snack shack.
Speaking of snack shack, I heard bones cracking and splintering all around us.
“We’ve got to reverse this film,” I shouted at Ric. “Where’s the projection booth?”
“In front of the concessions building,” he answered. “And it’s built like a bunker. We’re going to have to mount an assault. I bet the projectionist is quaking among his reels in there.”
“That’s just what we have to get away from him. This movie must stop before the cast devours the audience.”
“Okay. You run for the building. You see it over there?”
“The zombies have almost reached it.”
“I’ll follow, shooting. Beware of spraying bone chips.”
“And Quicksilver will lead,” I muttered, as the dog loped into the open, hurling his hundred and fifty pounds on fragile zombie shoulders and bringing these skeletal remnants down, even as they clawed their way forward on their bellies.
Shack to shack and jelly to jelly, it’s a zombie jamboree.
Was that Irma jiving me, or my own mind in over-drive-in?
Since Quicksilver had committed his bone and blood to the zombie attack, I ran after him, swinging my steering wheel security device right and left. It cracked on so much moving sagging flesh and bone that I didn’t have to look very hard to see what effect I was having.
I heard Ric pounding behind me, letting off single, on-target but sadly ineffective shots.
Ric and I shouldered against the projection room’s locked wooden door, hearing the loosened film strip snapping like a playing card in the wire wheels of a fifties Schwinn. Why else did they call them “Bicycle” playing cards?
Ric kicked open the door.
Quick dodged inside the squat structure as Ric and I slammed the door shut just behind Quick’s long wolfish tail and right on a couple of clawing arm bones aimed at joining us.
“Aiiiii,” the farm boy projectionist was chattering.
I recognized those dungarees and that plaid shirt from my previous life in Wichita and wanted to sit down beside the young guy to reassure him.
Ric brandished his sinister matte-black firearm, jerked the boy away from the old-fashioned Mickey Mouse–eared projection machine, and threw him to the dirt floor. He was a lot safer there.
Outside, the clawing sound of fleeing human and hunting zombie beat a tattoo on the crude wooden door. Soon it would be toothpicks and we would be on the zombie menu. I guess they liked to serial snack on a night out too.
As Ric and I stared through the lit square that cast the film images larger than life on the massive screen, we saw writhing human and zombie silhouettes looming large on the rural landscape.
My silver familiar, meanwhile, had lost the charms and was looping itself around and around my wrist in lengths of thin but hindering chain.
Before I could draw Ric’s attention to this, the familiar leaped like an anorexic boa-constrictor-turned-bicycle-chain onto the film projector, wrapping around the shiny silver nitrate surface.