the unreeled old-fashioned film flapping on his arm. In front of the hut's pathetic little darkened window, he stopped.
"All right. We're at the last row of sound poles. Grab an end of the film and move to the nearest pole on your right. I'll take the left."
"This is not square dancing," I shouted.
The damned zombies growled, drowning out normal speech. I saw cadaverous, nauseating faces and bodies, all rotting, coming into far too sharp a focus. At least Quick was backing up toward us now, belly down and barking.
"Grab the pole, Delilah," Ric yelled.
Somewhere, very far behind me, Irma giggled insanely.
I grabbed, he grabbed, and the film between us suddenly snapped and went luminous. A coat of speeding mercury covered the aluminum-painted poles and raced among them left and right and forward and back, creating a buzzing, snapping grid of some sort of electric power the zombies walked, relentlessly and slowly, right into. They winked out like cinders at a barbecue.
By then, Quicksilver had retreated almost back to us. He took a fast look-see to make sure we were still standing, then had to dart forward to sniff each former-zombie hot spot.
"They did something like this to stop The Thing," I told Ric. "Now that was classic horror movie. No mindless sleepwalking and gnawing. I think it was scientific stuff, not paranormal."
"I don't know what this was," he said.
"Do you suppose some silver nitrate remained on that unreeled film?"
"Maybe. Or maybe some of your silver familiar. I just know you're not going to believe where I got this silver network idea."
"Yeah?"
He glanced at the jagged lightning bolt form of my forearm band.
"The familiar was trying to tell us something. Use conductivity - whether electric, metallic, or magic, I don't know - but it worked."
A few fading zombie ghost-images were still circling the drive-in fringes when Ric burned the film in the deserted snack shack's hot-dog turning machine and - zombie by zombie by bone by bone by blood by blood - they each went up in flames in turn.
Vehicle engines were coughing into life all over the parking lot, choking, and then turning and grinding through the maze of aisles leading from the drive-in lot. Folks had crept back to claim their cars. I saw the half-moon, its hard center line softened to a blur, reflecting off Dolly's generous dollops of chrome. She looked fine.
"Let's get out of here," Ric said.
"First, I need to wash my hands."
"You want to visit that no-woman's-land again?"
"I can't touch Dolly with these hands, much less Quicksilver."
"Delilah. Your dog is a carnivore too. He was good to go."
"I'll never understand males. I'm going to freshen my face, all right? And then we get out of this hell-forsaken retro-ghouls-gone-wild scene. Got it?"
Ric shrugged. I think Quicksilver, standing beside him with legs braced and hackles still up, shrugged too.
I just wanted to wash my hands and face and apply some fresh Lip Venom gloss to my desert-dry lips. The familiar had morphed into a Swatch telling me it was half past the witching hour. Everything looked okay inside the women's restroom. The concrete-floored sink area was deserted; the black-spotted mirrors above the dripping sinks were blurry and misted. Nothing to fear in them.
I pulled out my Lip Venom tube, shaped like a high-octane bullet, and slicked it over my lips. Ric and I still had to get to a motel room for the night.
That's when I heard the whimpering from the stalls around the cinder-block corner.
Yes, it smelled like a urinal in here. Where a lot of the guys had also been suffering from periods, or just bleeding out. No, I was not going to leave the Cold Creek Drive-in without a civilized touch on my lips and libido and self-respect.
I turned when the whimpering and lap-dog noises got overpowering.
Quicksilver would never go into a girl's bathroom.
Oh.
Crawling out on the unspeakably wet concrete floor came terrified humans of both sexes. They'd found safety huddling in the women's bathroom.
Not even the zombies would go here.
I was so going to personally "liberate" the next male john I came across.
Or the next male, who was the usual suspect and who wasn't twenty feet away.
"Come on, Lassie," I told the familiar, "we have fifteen more miles to a motel room tonight. I hope there's only cable."
Chapter Nine
THAT NIGHT AT Cold Creek Motel did us all a lot of good.
The water was hot, the sheets were flannel, and Ric slept like a baby while Quicksilver roamed the night and I