Virtual Virgin

of storm lightning fanned out a hundred and fifty feet in the air from the ends of each one, surprising even me. My familiar was rising to the challenge.

“Now Ric has some flashy Vegas neon backup,” I told Tallgrass.

El Demonio seemed to welcome my showy defiant gesture. His right arm lifted far back before snapping down. The long, heavy whip arced high, poising for an instant right over Ric before snaking into its natural curve to curl down toward his back.

Ric held his ground, but lifted his right arm.

I’d expected his gesture to repel the whip. Instead it summoned a heavy gust of wind that spun the desert surface into dancing legions of swirling silver insects and reptiles. The hissing, spitting, biting toxic dust devils numbered almost as many as the massed and leashed zombies.

The last ten feet of the demon drug lord’s whip curled into a spiral, caught in the mini tornadoes’ eddies. Through the dancing dervishes of dust, I glimpsed the zombie chains falling to their feet. They were loose and rushing forward into a semicircle to hem us all in.

Tallgrass squinted through the eerie, murky yellow light the dust devils cast, then ran down the last ridge, his heavy hip-held rifle spitting rapid rounds through the dust, blasting the limbs and heads off the frontline zombies.

I snapped my arms in unison again, my silver whips lashing lightning straight at El Demonio’s car, striking a chupacabra on each side. They curled into smoking remnants the whirlwinds spun away.

My next target would be the demon himself. I shook my arms but my hands were empty. I shook my arms again in frustration.

The damn silver familiar was now a spiked left forearm guard, useful only for hand-to-hand combat. By the time it rent any Torbellino henchman at the rear, I’d be downed and gnawed to death by oncoming zombies.

I looked to see how many I might be confronting and how soon.

An agile gray form advanced and retreated from the forward zombie force, Quicksilver gnawing legs off to create a fallen wall of zombies. It was like any other war since time began: the others just marched over their fallen comrades’ disintegrating forms.

Tallgrass, still shooting zombies, backed up in the shifting sand. I called Quick to join us, but the wind whirled my voice away.

“Why aren’t you shooting?” Tallgrass yelled at Ric and the similar weapon slung over his shoulder.

Ric shook his head. “No need. The dust devils are vacuuming up the front lines. They’re thinning out the zombie noose even as El Demonio tightens it on us.”

He gazed up at the sky. The moon had broken through clouds, painting them into a silver sea above the agitated dust storm below.

A full moon had always reminded me of Bing Crosby’s face crooning ba-bub-bub- boo, like a fairy godfather about to bibbity-bobbity-boo a barrel cactus into an escape carriage and lizards into snorting steeds with a desert fox for a driver.

“Don’t shoot through the dust,” Ric ordered Tallgrass. “I think . . .”

And then the moon’s size enlarged and lengthened like the melting diamond pendant in the thorn forest.

I tried to decipher the face I saw in it now, for it was different. . . .

The moon grew so bright we lifted our arms to fend off the pain to our eyes, at least Tallgrass and I did. Quicksilver came bounding around the line of dust devils, joining us to sit and lift his throat to the sky and bay at the swelling moon.

Distant coyotes joined in as the rasp of insect legs and wings from our barrier wave surged louder. If sheer noise would repel zombies, we had it made.

Most of them didn’t have ears, though. The smaller parts are the first to rot.

Even now the gap was closing.

Meanwhile, Ric was moon-gazing into the blinding light.

I ran to shake him out of his trance, but he turned eerie eyes on me that had Quick leaping to my side. Ric lifted his fists, nails digging into the palms until I saw blood running. Then he spotted the jagged spikes of the silver familiar on my arm and wrapped his hands around it.

“No!” I screamed, looking wildly for Tallgrass, who had lowered his weapon in confusion.

Blood was pouring from Ric’s hands as he released them from the familiar. I gazed down at my forearm guard to see bright scarlet tipping every point. Then the silver melted like the moon and slithered up my arm in a network of fine chains, leaving my forearm bathed in nothing . . . except Ric’s blood.

I looked to heaven for help, for hope, and was horrified.

The swollen face of the moon was the visage of the false Maria from Metropolis. Her slanted eyebrows and pouting lips and halo of a headdress were the face of the Whore of Babylon performing for the male patrons of the elite and decadent nightclub, who’d been hypnotized by her bared breasts and undulating pelvis, frozen by lust.

I needed more than this sky-borne CinSim from Metropolis to counter real evil. El Demonio’s cartel killers and zombie forces didn’t freeze at beauty bare.

Unlike the men in the nightclub, I could tear my eyes from the sky-borne seductress. I noticed the clouds on the horizon piling into the shape of the pillars supporting her hooch-koochy dance stage. The crouching hills beneath them became . . . the film’s Seven Deadly Sins.

The Sins below her crouched on their haunches, supporting the platform the movie-screen succubus danced upon. Five robed men and two women, they were all as massive and muscular as Atlas upholding the world and now they stood and advanced as one. Their ghostly gray robes resembled a huge thunderous fog bank rolling across the land.

Behind them strode the stormy blue-black hooded figure of Death, its silver-bladed scythe sweeping left to right.

The creepy film figures—actual, not SinCims—rose to the top of the sky, and rolled over the human cartel killers at Torbellino’s back. Guttural screams choked under the heavy tread as storm troopers of Envy, Anger, Greed, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, and Pride found and crushed the human bodies that harbored them.

That shattered Torbellino’s ranks to the rear. What about the forefront of the army massed just behind El Demonio and his rolling thunder car and crackling lightning whip?

Oh, God!

Ric had turned to face the undead army, putting his arms straight out like a zombie from a corny old movie. Or like Frankenstein’s monster.

He moved toward the meeting walls of dust devils and zombies. With El Demonio watching through binoculars from atop his black Lincoln, Ric’s extended hands dripped fresh scarlet in his own tracks.

Quicksilver gave a blood-thickening howl and hurtled around the outside edge of the dust devils to lead their advance. Tallgrass had somehow come beside me, holding me prisoner in his iron-armed embrace as I lunged forward to help.

“Look!” he shouted in my ear, but I could barely hear. “Look at the ground behind Ric.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes from Ric’s vanishing figure as a curtain of dust devils and the evil yellow light obscured him. Tallgrass’s big hand grabbed my head and pointed it like a gun where he wanted me to look, in Ric’s sandy desert wake.

Bloody hands were breaking through the sand that had spun into the dust devils. Human fingers stretched out like fans of playing cards, reaching up into the dust until they became arms and then facial features broke through the shifting sands behind them . . . foreheads, noses, open mouths frozen in silent screams.

Ric was zigzagging back and forth among the wind-eddied rows, a shadow I could barely see. I was reminded of a farmer sowing seeds or a harvester of the dead or Death itself on another stately but implacable rampage.

“Tallgrass!” I screamed into the wind. “Let me go! Ric and Quicksilver, I can’t lose them.”

He pressed my head against his chest and I smelled ironed cotton. Crazy! It was blood and bone and guts all around us. I should have smelled rotting mortality. He ironed his shirts? Such a weird detail to circle in my brain, but maybe I needed to cling to any shred of normality.

“Have faith.”

I heard Tallgrass’s voice gusting away from me even as his words sifted through to my dust-bedeviled mind. I