cop utility belt swagging my hips for a microfiber cloth, then glanced around. All around. The new bone-reading night vision lenses had tinted everything a Beatles-submarine yellow. I pushed them, cleaned, atop my head like sunglasses.
It was pleasant to see the true moonshine-silvered landscape, cool and serene. Silver is my talisman, including this silver-gray dog who's half wolfhound, half wolf, and all partner. Quicksilver is more lupine than K-9, and just what a girl needs for a bodyguard and buddy after the Millennium Revelation.
Hmm. A hummock of Joshua tree - tall cactus was edging into sharper focus. I snapped the lens strap back around my head and the lenses down over my eyes. Several hummocks of cacti were shuffling toward me. Quicksilver had accomplished his Australian sheep dog act, after all.
I drew the police baton at my hip. The idea was to serve and protect, not to hurt.
And not to be hurt.
The closer they came, the bigger they got. Human figures, three of them. These were professionally big guys, the kind who walk with beefed-up arms out from their sides at acute angles, with thigh-heavy legs pushing their feet apart so they make a waddle into a threat.
Muscle, in the classic PI term.
And you just a slip of a girl, Irma commented sardonically.
Shut up, I told my inboard invisible friend since orphanage days. I'm on the tall and solid side. Quick and I can handle these Three Stooges.
Sadly, that's about all they were. As much as twentieth-century zombie movies celebrated a dogged will to ambulate, the New Millennium's feral zombies share the same lack of social graces, not to mention coordination.
Quicksilver immediately trotted to circle behind them and nip at their shambling heels or backsides if necessary.
The three were still shod and wore "rent"ed suits ... not the hired kind, but the tattered variety rent apart by werewolf fangs and claws. Their dim memories of being torn to death by Cesar Cicereau's werewolf mob didn't make them want to gnaw brains yet, but somewhere deep down they must still be plenty pissed.
Nor were they visibly rotting on the hoof. In fact, their pre-chewed condition put them in more danger from predators than the other way around. Those mortal wounds had never healed, but remained blood-crusted scars of their last stand some twenty to seventy years ago. Werewolf chieftain Cicereau had been offing competition since Vegas began in the 1940s. The Millennium Revelation had unfolded a lot of mysteries along with all the variations of supernatural underworld creatures it had coughed up.
Still, three guys heading for a lone woman was never a safe situation, even if she had a hundred-and-fifty-pound dog in attendance.
"Okay, fellas," I told them, brandishing my club, "welcome to Rancho Second Chance-o."
That stopped them dead in their tracks.
Or perhaps what had stopped them was sighting the low bunkhouse and corral behind me, where a horse lifted its head to nicker. Home, sweet, home on the range. Don't ask me why, but horses have a soothing effect on feral zombies.
I stepped aside to let the trio stumble into the ranch's safety zone surrounded by silver barbed wire fencing. That's when a pack of shadows rushed me from the surrounding sagebrush, from every last bush.
A coyote pack!
No time to play zombie tourists.
My night stick prodded all three Zobo butts hard to keep them moving, and I raised my right arm just as the lead coyote leaped for my throat. With my leather-gloved palms at both ends, I managed to wedge the police baton between its fangs, then twist my upper body. That threw the alpha male off to the side in time for me to knee the next coyote in the leaping chest, so it fell back.
Quicksilver, snarling and snapping up a storm, was harrying ears and tails and flanks to drive back the middle of the pack of five. Coyotes don't weigh much, maybe thirty pounds, and neither Quick nor I wanted to kill them. These were just desert dogs, doing what comes naturally. It's actually harder to fight off opponents you only want to discourage.
From the grunting sounds behind me, the zombies had roused to kick away coyotes trying to slip through the barbed wire isolating the corral, protecting the nervous horses that had bunched and whinnied.
Quick raced over to add the discouragement of his big bad wolf teeth, while I shouted and flailed with my baton, trying not to break any animal's delicate leg.
Between the kick-dancing zombies, Quicksilver's slashing speed and teeth, and my shouts and hard