struggled to break the ex-FBI man’s grip, but it was as implacable as Ric’s methodical progress, every stride taking him a precious two feet farther away from me.
“You look but don’t see,” Tallgrass shouted in my ear.
I looked again, through the sandstorm tears blurring reality into a fun-house mirror.
And I saw naked female forms undulating upward from the bloody sand, a bizarre bony, ragged forest raised by blood and sucked free of the earth by the dust devils. They were mere pieces of people, not visibly rotting like the zombies, but bruised, mutilated, burned, and broken. I wanted to turn my eyes away in pity and revulsion.
But I couldn’t. The silver familiar had formed a thick high collar on my neck, forcing me to watch the end of all I loved as man and dog vanished into a meeting wall of sand and cloud, earth and sky, dead and undead.
And . . . it had become impossible not to watch the resurrection before me.
The rising female bodies spun as the light enveloped them, clothed by the dust and blood into glowing orange figures as fierce as fire.
The light brightened and purified until it seemed they danced in an eddy of moondust . . . they one by one became whole as burnished silver metal replaced the ruined and missing pieces . . . a breastplate here, a jawbone or forearm or thigh-piece there, all elements of the
They’d been reborn into a patchwork robot zombie army, gathering speed, hurtling like the silver wave of desert reptile and insect life toward El Demonio’s command post.
A shrill scream shattered the desert night.
The army of femicides Ric had raised swept over the zombies that fell into blackened ashes at their passage and beyond to the murdering human men behind them.
Ric and Quicksilver were standing together behind them, dark shadows against the light that seemed a bloody silver sunrise on the western horizon. I stumbled forward.
Tallgrass was running with me, his—I finally remembered the damn name—M249 SAW assault rifle braced on his hip spitting ammo.
Torbellino’s devil whip lashed once against the advancing fire and dust.
I cracked my left arm and the familiar finally took a single whip form to meet it, shaking Ric’s blood off itself into a circle of seething acid that shriveled the Demon’s horrible weapon into a dried length of brittle leather.
This close we had to advance over zombie bones.
They were finished.
Torbellino was standing in his parade car, his eyes scarlet, his empty whip arm pointing a clawed forefinger at Ric. Demonic gunfire blasted from his being in the form of a fiery hail of bullets stitching the air as it took whip form.
I watched Ric jerk and spin in that immaterial onslaught of power, my own body shuddering with sympathetic pain.
But as he turned in that circle of torment and death, his head swung left and then right and left again. A luminous silver-blue lash like a laser cut through El Demonio’s neck, severing his head from his body, and then back again, cutting his torso in two.
Like the whip and the chupacabras, Torbellino shriveled and blew away into fading smoke. In the desert behind him his followers went down, their forlorn cries of
Ric had sunk onto his knees in the sand, Quicksilver’s sturdy shoulder beside him the only force holding him up.
I ran to him, sliding onto my knees beside him, grabbing his hands and once again surveying the price of his dead-dowsing powers. His own blood. I madly patted the bloody camouflage jacket to find the deadly on-target wounds from El Demonio’s very being. He’d been strafed before my eyes by weapons both physical and supernatural.
Ric swayed, most of his weight on my shoulders. And then the burden lifted.
“Delilah,” he whispered.
The demon’s last attack had failed to bring down his prey.
I looked up to see the moonlight clear and pure, liquid silver on the desert.
The hellish wind had been snuffed out like a candle flame.
The metallic insect hallelujah chorus was silent and I could hear my own breath panting, and Ric’s, and Quicksilver’s. Only Tallgrass stood tall and stoic.
“Justice,” he said, “is a mighty power to invoke.” He bent to pick up a palmful of desert sand. “May they rest in peace.” The grains fell to the ground, captured before rejoining the desert waste by small upsurge of wind.
I looked at the desert floor behind us. Spotlights of red shimmered in the silver moonlight and faded, softly. A chorus of sighs rode on the night’s back.
“Those are their graves.” Ric’s voice was hoarse from not having spoken for so long, and from his exhausting role in the mass rising of the dead. “Tallgrass, you report that when we get out of here. Tell the mission forces where to come to find and honor the Juarez dead. They’ll believe you’re an expert tracker. Torbellino?” he asked last.
Tallgrass shook his head. “Gone with the wind.
“I don’t want armies.” Ric struggled to his feet with my aid. My pat-down of his torso found no obvious wounds. A miracle. “I want one evil demon eradicated from the earth.”
“Perhaps he is. If not, next time,
Quicksilver was lapping at Ric’s slack hands, looking more doglike than he usually deigned to appear. His healing tongue would erase Ric’s physical wounds from raising the murdered women.
What would heal Ric from drawing on such unhuman power, I didn’t know.
Chapter Thirty-four
THE JEEP BOUNCED our weary bones back to Juarez and the Flamingo motel for what was left of one more night.
I drove while Tallgrass updated me on what would happen next. Ric lay more drained than sleeping in the back with Quicksilver.
The government commanders and their troops would be fully occupied for a couple days, rounding up the quick and the dead from the cartel war they’d engineered and won, for the time being.
Fringe support people like Ric and Tallgrass were free to leave, the earth-shaking stand they’d taken against an underestimated drug lord named Torbellino merely freakish weather effects to the official armed forces from both sides of the border.
Quicksilver and I had never been spotted.
Apparently the military mind was the least vulnerable to—or most prejudiced against—Millennium Revelation influences, just like Ric’s foster father, the retired military man.
“Good thing,” Tallgrass said when I mentioned that. “Official forces have to obey orders at once, without hesitation. The brass doesn’t want unhuman hocus-pocus distracting them from their mission.”
“So the destroyed zombies they find are—?”
“Opposing cartel fighters their flamethrowers and handheld missiles
At the motel, he hauled Ric into our room and installed him in the single sleeping bag on the floor without comment. When Tallgrass bid me good night, Quicksilver followed him to the door and then sat on the floor and moved no farther.
Someone had lost a roommate.
