him where pixel or plasma met flesh and blood. Ric reached out a hand and a robotic arm lifted to touch a silver gauntlet to his fingers.
The theme of the film was what Lilah West had said about work and art and passion: "The heart lies between the hand and the head."
Ric's hand guided the silver robot as if leading her in a gavotte as she stepped out of the film and into the room, jerkily glancing around like Frankenstein's suddenly alive bride. Life-size, like a real girl.
We all watched, stricken to stone by Silver Screen lightning.
I knew Ric had found and raised zombies since he was a toddler.
Now he'd raised the first CinSim never touched by the Immortality Mob, or bonded to any imported human corpse. One only and wholly itself. Herself. The Eve of zombies. The Silver Zombie supreme. The supernaturally scientific creature El Demonio must have wanted to conjure himself, that he could somehow use to raise and control and master a worldwide zombie empire.
"Master?" she said in a flat, dead tone viewers of the silent film had never heard.
To Ric.
Oooh, Irma bemoaned in my ear. We have got one hot little Roomba robot vacuum cleaner on our hands. Master? I wonder if she does dudes. Kiss your romantic aspirations good-bye.
Chapter Thirty
"NOW," SAID SNOW, "that we know what Torbellino wants, we have the key to a battle plan. Mr. Tallgrass."
We had adjourned to the living room.
"Yes?" Tallgrass advanced, Quicksilver by his side.
Snow said, "I can project the image of the Silver Zombie face ten stories high on the black storm clouds."
"That'll be just a shadow of the real thing," I objected. "Will it project any silver power on its own?"
"Some," Ric thought.
"It doesn't matter," Snow decreed. "It'll have the power to amaze and distract the drug lord's forces. If I banish the weather witches' circling tornado," Snow asked Tallgrass, "can you turn back the Wendigo?"
"Possibly. With Quicksilver's help."
"Montoya?" Snow asked.
Ric shook himself back into sober reality and stepped forward, shadowed by his glitzy robot handmaiden.
Snow posed a second question. "You called the Silver Zombie to life. Do you have the power to banish El Demonio from the lobby and his Alpine zombies from the Emerald City walls?"
"My pleasure to try," Ric said.
"What about me?" I asked, feeling a very selfish Dorothy confronting a contrary wizard.
"Your choice," Snow said. "You can soar in the storm clouds with me or fight in the basement barricades with Montoya and friend."
"Delilah's coming with me," Ric said.
I couldn't argue. We had the silver mojo, no matter how iffy it was at the moment. And I still had to figure out exactly what the robot Ric had seduced off the screen was.
Quicksilver had padded over to lick my wrist. I hadn't noticed until then that I'd scraped the skin raw in the battle to cut the WTCH coax cable. It healed as I watched.
"Good dog. I hope our efforts to get Kansas skies back to the clear blue color of your eyes work," I told him. "Is Tallgrass shaman enough to keep you safe?"
Quicksilver shifted from foot to foot like the Cowardly Lion being bashful. I realized he wanted to convey, modestly, that he was accompanying Tallgrass to protect him, as I intended to protect Ric.
Who, I wondered, would ever dare to protect Snow?
THERE WAS NO question that Ric's silver elevator cables worked for our party, if not zombies. Escorting the robot was like moving an automated department store mannequin to another floor.
When we didn't move, she didn't move. When we did, she marched in our wake.
What I found Mister-Spock "fascinating" was that I could see the climbing zombies loosen their grips on the guy wires and plummet to the ground as our see-through glass elevator car on the inside came even with them on the outside.
Maybe that's why Marriott Hotels favored glass lobby elevators and open atria. To keep the zombies down.
By the time we reached the lobby, the attacking zombies, or what was left of them, were converging with us on Torbellino and his occupying minions.
Maria might be a zombie lord's magnet, but now she was a zombie repellent.
They circled the lower floor and the yellow brick road still speckled with blood. Their skeletal jaws shivered and chattered with anticipation, but either Ric or Maria broadcast a vibe that kept them outside an invisible circle of sorts.
Unfortunately, El Demonio was inside it. He wore the same black leather hat that had shaded his sinister features in the WTCH parking lot sunshine.