Virtual Virgin

“Lock up good, Miss Delilah,” Tallgrass told me, giving me a forefinger salute before shutting the door behind him.

IN THE MORNING I drove the Jeep across the international bridge.

Tallgrass insisted Ric and I cover our clothes with camos. That and some official military personnel papers Tallgrass produced got our party through the border stations with only a cursory inspection of the vehicle.

Quicksilver following every move of the border officers with eyes and slightly open jaws speeded up the routine considerably. As for the duffel bags harboring any suspect items, I assumed the guys’ weapons were buried deep in the desert with the femicides.

Me, I was just glad that I didn’t have to produce a passport. Even if I’d taken Ashley Martinez’s passport, its theft had surely been reported by now.

When we got to the El Paso garage where I’d parked Dolly, Ric and I stripped off the camos to our street clothes. Quicksilver jumped out to inspect Dolly’s chassis from chrome bumper bullets to rear Cadillac insignia on the trunk.

“This where I say adios,” Tallgrass told me and Ric. “I got a short walk to a shortish flight to Wichita. You good for the long drive, amigo?”

“I did it solo and can again,” I was quick to point out.

“I know, Del,” Ric said with a flash of returning humor. “Make a guy feel redundant, why don’t you?”

I stepped close to rub my thumb under his lower lip and feel the rasp of that sexy three-day smudge of beard growth. “No worries. I just like to feel this guy.”

Tallgrass cleared his throat.

“Ric, there may still be some . . . lingering presence of El Demonio out there and after you,” he warned us. “Losing any confrontation just makes his type of supernatural more vicious if he shifted into another form, so be careful.”

Ric nodded, clasping forearms with his one-time mentor.

Tallgrass tipped his straw Western hat to me. “You let that dog take care of you, Miss Delilah, and you’ll never go wrong.”

“I take care of him.”

“You think.”

He turned and left us beside Dolly. We listened until the echo of his cowboy-booted amble faded entirely. Quicksilver whimpered.

“I drive first,” I said, not looking at Ric.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered in mock military tones. “Just as long as I drive last.”

FUNNY, IT DIDN’T work out that way. I guess raising a killing field of zombies can wear a guy out. Not to mention what I put him through before and after in that sleeping bag.

I never thought seeing the neon fireworks of the Vegas Strip quivering like the aurora borealis on the night horizon would make me feel the relief of coming home.

From a distance, the place didn’t look infested by werewolves, vampires, and even completely human corporate-greed moguls.

“Okay if I drop you off at home?” I asked Ric, who was stretched out in the roomy Caddy passenger seat, dozing. Quicksilver did likewise on the rear seat.

I felt good about handling the last leg of the trip while my guys slept. The bad taste in my memory of being left behind like a girl had evaporated.

“Makes sense,” Ric murmured. “Then we both have wheels in the morning.”

Another bad taste in my memory had not faded. I knew I’d have to do something about it. That would be my showdown in the Valley of the Virgin, but it could wait.

Meanwhile, Ric was reviving nicely. He pushed himself upright.

“You feeling okay?” I asked. “No remaining pain from your hands, the impact of Torbellino’s magic bullets?”

“I’m coming back fast, chica. It was a good sign that the showdown with El Demonio took place in the Valley of Guadalupe. We had the blessing of the Virgin, who visited and comforted me during my childhood enslavement.”

“But . . . but that’s not what unreeled in the cloud cover over Juarez.”

“Sure it was, Del. You saw it too. Haven’t you ever seen a holy card of the Virgin of Guadalupe?”

That comment stunned me. “Remind me again how the Virgin manifests herself. She was the first and last Latina manifestation of the Virgin Mary, I know.”

I also knew that, while driven by El Demonio’s whip to raise zombies in the Mojave Desert, the child Ric was sure the Virgin of Guadalupe had visited him in the goat pens at night. So he ought to recognize her when he saw her.

Hmm, Irma mused. You do also recall that his last vision of the Virgin coincided with a vampire bat bite and the photo of a female hottie from one of the zombie-runners’ dirty magazines? Hello, first wet dream. Bye, bye Our Lady of Guadalupe. Until now?

I glanced at the passenger seat. Ric’s narrowed eyes were fixed on the gleaming towers of Vegas growing closer. His face broadcast pleasure as he consulted his memory.

“I saw this beseeching . . . compassionate female face of transforming beauty. Our Lady of Guadalupe folds her hands before her. Her form in its heavenly blue cloak of sky is hallowed with golden rays. She comes with the scent of roses in the desert, which she let tumble from her cloak for the peasant Juan Diego.”

“The guy who was secretly Zorro?”

“That was Don Diego.” Ric looked over and saw I’d been teasing. “Okay, chica, maybe only my subconscious conjured her when I was a prisoner of Torbellino and his gang, but it helped keep me sane. She’d told Juan Diego she was ‘Entirely and Ever Virgin and your compassionate Mother,’ so Mexicans have prayed to her for protection from all evil for more than five hundred years.”

“And they need it now more than ever,” I warned. “Your psychologist foster mother would tell you that if ever there was a kid’s wish fulfillment fantasy, an exploited child’s patron saint, it would be that paradox of endless virginal purity and boundless maternal love.”

“Yet fate sent me an aging virgin,” he said with a wink.

“Not that old, Montoya!”

“Modern rationalizations like yours don’t work nowadays. I was a child when I first saw the Virgin of Guadalupe. What I saw in that cursed place in Juarez tonight, above those hundreds of unmarked graves of violated girls, was like the Virgin, but pale-skinned, Anglo not Mexican, more a peasant Joan of Arc, who was also a warrior woman and a saint. This figure of the clouds and the moon didn’t look modern, with her simple gown and hair. She seemed an ordinary young woman, yet her encompassing arms sheltered a horde of cowering children.”

I recognized the Good Maria from Metropolis, of course, but I kept my mouth shut. Like a virgin.

“That vision,” Ric said, “gave me the strength to drive my nails into my palms until the blood flowed and the dead returned, like roses springing up in the desert, alive again and lethal to evil.”

I’d seen a lot of bizarre and terrifying and impossible things since the Millennium Revelation had sprung a whole new supernatural dimension of life on earth on us all. Just before he’d raised the femicides, I’d thought Ric had gone mad.

Afterward, Quicksilver’s healing tongue had erased the stigmata on Ric’s palms. Most people would say he’d been hallucinating, except I’d shared his sky-borne vision.

Only I hadn’t seen Metropolis’s saintly working-class girl, Maria, obviously a Virgin Mary stand-in, begging the heedless rich to pity and help the poor children.

Silent now, I let my brain attempt to superimpose the Virgin Mary over the drive-in movie screen-in-the-sky image I’d seen . . . the virtually nude, jewel-draped, pastie-wearing pagan goddess-cum- Folies-Bergère chorus girl, the Whore of Babylon from Revelations in the bible, another face of the same actress from the same film. Brigitte Helm.