zombies have almost reached it."
"I'll follow, shooting. Beware of spraying bone chips."
"And Quicksilver will lead," I muttered, as the dog loped into the open, hurling his hundred and fifty pounds on fragile zombie shoulders and bringing these skeletal remnants down, even as they clawed their way forward on their bellies.
Shack to shack and jelly to jelly, it's a zombie jamboree.
Was that Irma jiving me, or my own mind in over-drive-in?
Since Quicksilver had committed his bone and blood to the zombie attack, I ran after him, swinging my steering wheel security device right and left. It cracked on so much moving sagging flesh and bone that I didn't have to look very hard to see what effect I was having.
I heard Ric pounding behind me, letting off single, on-target but sadly ineffective shots.
Ric and I shouldered against the projection room's locked wooden door, hearing the loosened film strip snapping like a playing card in the wire wheels of a fifties Schwinn. Why else did they call them "Bicycle" playing cards?
Ric kicked open the door.
Quick dodged inside the squat structure as Ric and I slammed the door shut just behind Quick's long wolfish tail and right on a couple of clawing arm bones aimed at joining us.
"Aiiiii," the farm boy projectionist was chattering.
I recognized those dungarees and that plaid shirt from my previous life in Wichita and wanted to sit down beside the young guy to reassure him.
Ric brandished his sinister matte-black firearm, jerked the boy away from the old-fashioned Mickey Mouse - eared projection machine, and threw him to the dirt floor. He was a lot safer there.
Outside, the clawing sound of fleeing human and hunting zombie beat a tattoo on the crude wooden door. Soon it would be toothpicks and we would be on the zombie menu. I guess they liked to serial snack on a night out too.
As Ric and I stared through the lit square that cast the film images larger than life on the massive screen, we saw writhing human and zombie silhouettes looming large on the rural landscape.
My silver familiar, meanwhile, had lost the charms and was looping itself around and around my wrist in lengths of thin but hindering chain.
Before I could draw Ric's attention to this, the familiar leaped like an anorexic boa-constrictor-turned-bicycle-chain onto the film projector, wrapping around the shiny silver nitrate surface.
The reaction resembled a diamond saw blade mating with an oil slick.
The turning reels ground and squealed, and then the film strip came splintering off its track, glittering with a silver aura that reached the screen and set white lightning dancing across the moving black-and-white images of predator and prey.
In the projection booth, the splintered film, bleached to white, coiled around and around on the floor, an endless maggot, while the boyish projectionist sobbed with horror.
"Stop it," he gasped out. "Please stop it. I'm killing them. I'm killing the customers."
"Not you," I said, squeezing a hand on his shoulder. "They'll be all right. Every one of them. This is all just a real scary feature at the drive-in."
Ric disabled the projector with the butt of his gun, watching the young guy to make sure he'd know the demonic machine was dead and gone. Ric rolled the unreeled film into a fire-hose thickness around his forearm.
I winced at one more vintage film destroyed, even if it was from the sunset of black-and-white.
Only zombies were left ranging around the deserted cars, including Dolly.
"This bunch have escaped the film forever," I said. "We've got to ... destroy them."
We ventured outside for a wide-screen view of the situation.
Ric set his teeth in the moonlight. "I haven't got enough ammunition, or time, to shoot all of them to writhing bits. They'll be on us in a couple minutes."
Quicksilver was still barking himself hoarse trying to round up these monsters as if they were merely feral Zobos.
"Ric." I put my hand on his arm. "I can't call him back. 'Leave kitty' won't cut it. He knows better. I won't leave Quicksilver."
"Where's your familiar?" he asked suddenly.
I lifted my arms. "I don't know. I could use a pair of silver whips right now."
Ric grabbed my left wrist. A lightning-bolt-shaped cuff bracelet twined my forearm.
"Huh? Pretty ... but pretty useless," I complained. "'Into the valley of darkness,'" I began, pushing forward.
"No." Ric was eyeing the scene, calculating the fan of zombies ranging farther and farther from the screen. "We need to go back to the projection hut."
"The projector's broken," I protested, but he grabbed and dragged me along.
I spotted