Virtual Virgin

right?”

“Right. And I promise to speak softly and carry a big nightstick.”

Ooh la la, Irma sighed before I could shut her commentary down cold just as the shower did the same thing to us.

I couldn’t help thinking Sansouci had been right. I’d let myself be lulled into sexy mock-vampire turn-ons. Who hadn’t these days?

Not me, Irma boasted, but I wanna be.

I ignored her. I’d interviewed enough psychologists, and confided enough in Ric’s foster-mother shrink, to know that love and trust were part of any erotic game. As kinky went, this interlude was minor league. As for me realizing that Ric would love and want me even when I’d pissed him off, it was major.

I DREAMED THAT night I was the Silver Zombie.

Maybe it was because I was sharing a sleeping bag with Ric, which is such close quarters. Maybe I’d been obsessing about it . . . her . . . too much.

Somehow I was inside its glamorous shell, even inside its unplumbed mind. . . .

I LIFT MY mechanical metal arm, strong and smooth. I notice my house of elaborately sculptured wood has received a brand-new coat of sterling silver, so it shines like the carapace of a bug.

I’m trapped inside, body and soul.

I’ve heard of a girl named Alice who outgrew a house once, but I have always lived inside, it seems. I’m not growing or shrinking, I’m getting no smaller, no larger, imprisoned upright in the dark like this. Buried alive like a gagged mummy in a case leaned against the wall.

I must stand and wait.

My memories are a jumble of fresh and incredibly stale.

One memory is of movement, awkward, stiff. I’m a knight in a ponderous suit of armor made of plaster and plastic wood. Another memory is of dancing, as light as air, wearing only scarves of silk chiffon. Blue chiffon. Like a Blue Angel.

I’m an idealistic girl stung by social injustice. Haunted children look to me for salvation as to a mother. Now I’m a powerful and seductive goddess or a cabaret chanteuse . . . maybe even, someday, a monstrous bride of a famous monster.

I can be anything anyone would care to make of me.

For a moment the dancing angel’s free, soaring movements make my prison a smothering coffin again. I feel the plaster, wet and heavy, wrapped around my face and body like a mummy’s bindings. No! I am not a mummy! I am young, young. I need to move, breathe.

Oh, but I am old, old too, shrinking like that girl, Alice, my body the walls that are collapsing around me.

The biblical Tower of Babel flashes through my mind, and a shining city where trains fly alongside aeroplanes, an entire towering futuristic city made from hubris and light, like Lucifer, the fallen angel. I see screaming thousands rioting and drowning. I see a woman in a green gown and a man all in white, like a ghost. I see world war and world peace.

Perhaps . . . I am eternal.

Who am I? What am I? Who will tell me? Who will shape me, free me, use me, destroy me?

I glimpse again the man with the searching eye of a camera . . . the one with a silver eye that sees past the plastic and wood of my coffin to my hidden human heart beating inside.

WHAT A NIGHTMARE! Buried alive.

I blinked awake, trying to figure out if I was dreaming or hallucinating. In the dim light, I searched for the vague bulk of Quicksilver sleeping in front of the door. No, he’d stayed with Tallgrass tonight.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the night lights of Juarez leaking around the skimpy curtains over the window, I made out Ric’s sleeping form next to me. One way or another, I had my nightly guard.

I was surprised to see a supple silver chain linking us, my familiar reaching out to Ric in the night. Was that why I’d dreamed of the mechanical woman from Metropolis? That idle thought made my dream seem more like being in a comic book rather than a movie. Maybe I’d snagged a small part in Superman’s Depression-era Art Deco “Metropolis” that was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis film.

By now Ric’s profile was as clear as if outlined by a thin wire of neon, every feature sharp. I could see his eyelids vibrating with the hyperactivity of REM sleep, the dreaming stage I’d just left. I wondered what dreams, or nightmares, he was having tonight. Me in his arms? Or has the Silver Zombie seized his subconscious, the way she’d mastered mine?

HE’S A BOY again, in his seventh year of captivity to the human and zombie trafficker named Torbellino and his gang of coyotes.

Our Lady of Guadalupe has come to his dreams for years, perhaps even to his waking moments, her face melting with compassion for his loneliness, her pressed-together palms praying for him.

Now he’s mesmerized by the woman’s tantalizing image behind the smoke of a dirty magazine’s cigar ad. Now she’s come to life, dancing for him in her sheer skirt with her bare breasts gleaming at the tips. He’s mesmerized, never having imagined anything like this.

But he likes it. He likes it even when he feels the needle fangs of a vampire bat he hesitates to tear away for fear the almost-naked woman gyrating in the cloud of smoke will vanish if he wakes from his dream trance and moves.

Pleasure seeps from him like smoke, and then he wakes up, pulling the soft bat body from his neck with a sharp spasm of pain. It flies away, but the woman has vanished, as he feared. Maybe he should feel shame. He’s seen the women dragged into the cabin of Torbellino and his men and has clenched his fists and squeezed his eyes shut, but this woman is different.

She likes him. She likes what she does for him, likes to ease his pain and fear.

He doubts the Virgin of Guadalupe will ever appear to him again.

But this vision will.

Chapter Thirty-three

A KNOCK ON the door caught me slapping on some lip gloss late the next morning just as my stomach was growling up a storm.

So was the other side of the door.

I opened it pronto to find Quicksilver on perk-eared, lifted-lip alert next to Leonard Tallgrass. He and Tallgrass managed to look both worried and sheepish.

“So . . . how are you guys?” Tallgrass asked, not examining the room behind me with his usual law- enforcement sweep.

“Starving,” I said. “Ric will be out of what passes for a shower in a minute. What brought you two here?”

“The need to kill time,” Tallgrass said. “If your stomach is growling, we know how to feed it. The sun is shining. It’ll be a fine day. We could do the town until the heat of early afternoon, then take a siesta until it’s time to go back to the desert and kick butt.”

“Sounds great,” Ric said from behind me. “I worked up quite an appetite last night.”

“Scouting on the desert,” I added quickly.

“Peace at any cost,” Tallgrass murmured. “You two ready to do the Ciudad Juarez tourist shuffle?”

BREAKFAST WAS A very late brunch in the open patio section of a giant restaurant complex off the Plaza del