Virtual Virgin

Chapter Thirty-three

A KNOCK ON the door caught me slapping on some lip gloss late the next morning just as my stomach was growling up a storm.

So was the other side of the door.

I opened it pronto to find Quicksilver on perk-eared, lifted-lip alert next to Leonard Tallgrass. He and Tallgrass managed to look both worried and sheepish.

“So . . . how are you guys?” Tallgrass asked, not examining the room behind me with his usual law-enforcement sweep.

“Starving,” I said. “Ric will be out of what passes for a shower in a minute. What brought you two here?”

“The need to kill time,” Tallgrass said. “If your stomach is growling, we know how to feed it. The sun is shining. It’ll be a fine day. We could do the town until the heat of early afternoon, then take a siesta until it’s time to go back to the desert and kick butt.”

“Sounds great,” Ric said from behind me. “I worked up quite an appetite last night.”

“Scouting on the desert,” I added quickly.

“Peace at any cost,” Tallgrass murmured. “You two ready to do the Ciudad Juarez tourist shuffle?”

BREAKFAST WAS A very late brunch in the open patio section of a giant restaurant complex off the Plaza del Sol called Mariachiville.

More English than Spanish echoed off the colorfully tiled fountains, while parrots chattered in the surrounding jacaranda trees. Those gorgeous lilac-blur trumpet flowers were blowing in the wind with mariachi band fervor. Scents of hot peppers and cilantro mingled with the perfume of tropical blooms. The waitstaff was young, vibrant, and bilingual. I was ready to book a return trip to Juarez for a romantic getaway with Ric at a five-star hotel.

Dream on, Irma advised.

Over glasses of Negra Modelo beer Ric and Tallgrass were muttering about “rendezvousing” with military “big shots” and “borrowing” some firepower bearing numbers and alphabet letters instead of names.

“Quick and I go along tonight, no matter what?” I inserted into their intense, whispering dialogue.

Tallgrass looked at Ric, who nodded impatiently. “Of course. You and the dog have your built-in defense systems. You’ve proven that time and again. I get to solo head-to-head with El Demonio, though.” His expression relaxed into a grin. “Unless my ass is being whupped. Then, I expect all of you to play some really killer backup.”

The technical talk ended when the waiter wafted platter-size dishes of heavy pottery holding the kind of ammunition I dig—nachos, fresh guacamole, fiery salsa, tomatillos and chipotle sauce, enchiladas, tacos, jalapeño and habanero peppers.

This menu could melt down zombies, not to mention start a hot border war with the digestive system. We finished with smooth, sweetly bland crème caramel all around.

“I can see why tourists won’t give up on this border city.” Ric’s smile lit up the entire area and even the big blue sky above it. “I won’t give it over to the gangs and cartels either,” he added, his glance darkening.

“Softly,” Tallgrass cautioned him. “Enjoy the day, amigo, with great simple cuisine, an old friend, a beautiful woman, and a loyal dog. What more could a man ask? The night will bring the closure you seek.”

“You? Talking about closure?” Ric teased Tallgrass. “Sounds like you’ve been powwowing with my foster mother.”

“Wouldn’t mind if I did.” Tallgrass winked at me as I lifted my bubble of a margarita glass in a toast to Ric. “Is her husband involved in the US side of tonight’s action?”

Ric shook his head. “Burnside is really and truly retired. It’s better that way. He never knew why I was enslaved by Torbellino. Discovering my dead-dowsing abilities—or even my civilian efforts to bring down the Torbellino cartel—would bring out the army mule in him.”

“Do you regret he never really knew you?” I asked Ric.

Now that I was starting to wonder who had sired me, I was realizing I needed to find that out as badly as Ric needed to stop his lifelong lethal enemy. My father might be someone I knew and would never suspect, or ever respect. He might already know me and not be willing to admit it.

Ric shook his head. “Why regret it? My foster dad’s a suck-it-up kind of guy. He wouldn’t have wanted any whining.”

I exchanged a glance with Tallgrass. This man was Ric’s soul-father. I could only hope to find one as wise and supportive as he was. I again recalled my brushes with the Perry Mason CinSim, and smiled. Couldn’t ever be for real, but I could always rely on Perry as paternal backup if my freewheeling investigation work got me into any tangles with the law.

I realized that Ric’s resting hand was warm over mine, the hot dappled sunshine sealing our mutual thoughts with the kiss of contact.

“I’ve had way more in the way of parents than you have, Del.” His smile was as healing as my lips and Quicksilver’s tongue could be at times. “Sometimes great, sometimes not so. Remember that.”

What struck me then, with surprise, was that Quick and I shared that oral healing thing. I’d never quite focused on that before. Poison dog lips? And mine? I stared into my dog’s blue eyes, blander and paler than my own.

He laid his snout on my knee and gave me his clearest mountain-lake gaze.

This tableside love fest was getting sweeter than tooth decay. I shook off my mood with Quick’s snout and Ric’s hand.

“What do we do next?” I asked.

“Shopping,” Ric said.

I didn’t think he and Tallgrass had silver and sombreros in mind. Besides drugs heading north and dead bodies, Juarez was most noted for being the busiest illegal weapons purveyor on the south banks of the Rio Grande.

“THIS PLACE IS called the Valle de Guadalupe?” I repeated to Tallgrass, stunned.

Night had returned to Juarez, eclipsing its sunny side.

I was back in Tallgrass’s loaned camos and we were back on the ridge where Quicksilver and I had intercepted him and Ric the previous night, smelling creosote bushes and tented by small cold stars and a moon so big it seemed blurry.

“You asked me where our party was gonna make our stand,” Tallgrass said. “All the military intelligence targeted this place southeast of Juarez as the most violent drug-war zone. You have something against the name Guadalupe?”

“No. I just hope that means we have the Virgin of Guadalupe on our side.”

“We all met up last night a bit farther north, but this is that same long ridge where Ric is sure Torbellino’s soldiers will hunker down, ready to mow down escapees from the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels clash up there.”

“And the Mexican-US forces will stay north to capture whoever survives the cartel war too, entirely unaware of this side of the contest farther south?” I wanted to get the combatants and the geography straight.

“Yup. Torbellino will form an unsuspected trap south of the action, offing any rival cartel men who escape the government trap. That’ll make him chief dog in the border smuggling trade.”

“So two guys, a gal, and a dog are going to take out Torbellino’s army?” I asked.

“It was supposed to have been just two guys,” Tallgrass reminded me sternly. “And Ric only wanted me along as backup.”

“Talk about a Lone Ranger. Maybe he has some secret weapon.”

“Maybe you.” Tallgrass chuckled.” I suppose you were too busy using your feminine wiles last night to get all the logistical details out of him.”

“Wiles take time. I prefer truth. I never thought Ric could or would keep something this big secret from me.”

Tallgrass shook his head at Ric’s solo act. “The gal and dog weren’t in our original plans, but we four did pretty well against Torbellino’s Wichita posse. All I know is Ric wanted to wait and take El Demonio down on their common ground where he’d once been a helpless child.”

“Ric’s personal crusade is the source of his greatest personal danger,” I told Tallgrass. “He’ll never allow anyone else to be enslaved as he was, and he’s absolutely fierce and fearless in going after the exploiters. That’s why I had to follow him here. By the way, I love the new accessory you guys got me during your spending spree in town. It really looks cool with my camouflage jammies.”

I saluted the night vision goggles casually stationed atop my head where California women wore sunglasses 24/7.

Then I lowered the goggles to focus first on the heat lightning doing a war dance on the night horizon, then far closer and below, on Ric and Quicksilver. Funny, Ric hadn’t been upset about the dog’s presence here, in the heart of battle, I couldn’t help grumbling mentally.

Together the hunting pair had reassembled the panicking desert reptile and insect life of last night into a thin silver line down in the sand canyon’s crease. Together, they were belly-crawling up the next ridge, which was the only cover between here and the Valley of Guadalupe.

There the sagebrush stations of hidden weaponry were now shaking with the emergence of a low-profile army of drug-and-zombie smuggling gangs and hitmen.

The silent night was abruptly interrupted by distant automatic gunfire chattering amid the spectacular fireworks of exploding grenades and shoulder-launched missiles. Out of sight to the north the warring cartels were fully engaged and clashing like an electric storm, harried into mowing each other down to escape a pincer operation of combined government forces.

The rumbling north of this valley obscured the vibrating chirrs and humming and scale-scrapings of the agitated and silver-armed insect and reptile foot soldiers Ric and Quick had gathered until they were poised like the top curl of a gigantic surfing wave about to wash over El Demonio’s forces.

“Let’s bring up the rear here and put Torbellino’s ass in a silver sling,” Tallgrass hissed in my ear.

A rear in a silver sling. Nicely put.

Tallgrass grinned up at the fading northern fireworks in the sky above one last time.

Then we turned sideways to crest the ridge behind the one Ric held now and maneuver down the steep sides of the earthen gash, our booted feet moving fast to catch up to the advance party of two. We knew that Ric’s showdown with his childhood enslaver had to put him first and foremost in the confrontation and that Quicksilver was the best scout in the party.

Soon we were approaching the quivering and broadening silver band making a do-or-die border like the Rio Grande. The maraca racket of all those metal scales and wings, feelers and legs, quieted and stopped. Like an ice-frozen river, the living shimmer of creatures stopped.

Tallgrass and I hastened to reach Ric’s back, Quicksilver sitting beside him.

The lightning on the horizon ahead of us grew bigger and snapped like a chupacabra twitching its tail. Yet we faced a vastly different scene from last night.

Across the wide valley massed the forces of hell.

Talk about a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. Row upon row of feral zombies, a standing army, twitched and writhed like giant maggots, all white bone and bared red muscle in the moonlight. Only then did I see the black iron shackles that made them into chain gangs.

Any remaining flesh gleamed in the moonlight, reflecting the actual maggots burrowing through what was left, ready to drop off on living prey.

“They’re . . . dancing?” I wondered aloud. Then I got it.

We were confronting an entire army of the new-generation zombies El Demonio Torbellino had created, hop-heads jived on crystal meth, a perfect meshing of the drug and the zombie trades.

“I’m going down,” Ric announced, turning so I could see the lightning flashes reflected in his exposed silver iris. “You two hold the high ground here until I get something going down there. Proceed at your own discretion. Be advised I don’t intend to be heavily into discretion tonight.”

He started down the incline to the Valley of Guadalupe, his every step pushing the silver wave of desert vermin at his feet ahead of him.

I lowered the high-tech binos that read bones, not heat, to my eyes for an ugly, close-up view.

“That’s it?” I asked Tallgrass. “Those are our only marching orders?”

“It’s mano-a-mano now. Our boys are both in the ring.”

Now I could see El Demonio had arrived at the jitterbugging zombies’ forefront. He sat on his traveling throne, the trunk of a black sixties Lincoln Continental convertible, his feet planted on the backseat. He was riding the stalled car like the grand marshal in a grisly parade of death, greed, and utter evil. He also was committing vintage car abuse.

I’d never forget his face as I first saw it in Wichita. At this safe distance I could study it longer. The brim of his flat-crowned black leather hat cut across the satanically arched eyebrows overhanging his hooded gaze. Thin high-flared nostrils made his nose as flat as a snake’s, his lipless mouth a raw slash like deli-sliced rare beef.

Why hadn’t I recognized who Torbellino looked like before? He was the spitting image of the sinister corporate muscleman in Metropolis who was only known as The Thin Man. That reminded me of the film title that had introduced my CinSim friends, Nick and Nora Charles, to an adoring public. Weird that something so innocent and light echoed something so evil.

Two chupacabras flanked the car, their eyes gleaming red with smoke steaming from their scaly hides like a visible stink. This multibreed creature resembled a small dinosaur with leathery gray-green skin and sharp quills down its spine and tail.

Despite the lizardlike quality, its fanged face, smoldering red eyes, and black forked tongue gave it demonic cast. To underline that, I can speak from experience that a chupacabra’s every exhalation broadcast the hellish and overcoming reek of sulfur.

I had reason to know chupacabras weren’t the biggest and brightest monster at the matinee, but they sure were among the ugliest.

Tallgrass was shaking his head at the opposition. “I didn’t believe in chupacabras until I saw that one in Wichita. Just how dangerous are those mythical beasts? It’s not a native Midwest monster.”

“A monster it is,” I agreed, “and mythical for too long. The real ones had a great cover all these years. Cheesy tabloids kept producing what people found and called chupacabras, dead coyotes ravaged by mange. You’d think they’d realize that creatures reputed to suck the blood out of goats and other stock had to weigh more than thirty pathetic pounds.”

“People want to believe folktales that look safe and are in somebody else’s backyard,” Tallgrass said. “The more lethal and unkillable the monster, the less we want to believe it’s really out there.”

“Some of the worst monsters aren’t supernatural.”

“That’s for sure. Look at these cartel mobsters.”

“And we call unhumans inhuman.” I surveyed our immortal enemy on his throne.

El Demonio’s thick bull whip draped the car’s front seat, windshield, and long, shiny hood before it coiled down to the desert floor. The last three feet of thirty—which Ric had often felt the slash of—swayed upright, an animated leather cobra ready to strike. Torbellino was a demon with an exterior tail.

And with every sway of the hypnotically moving whip end, lightning sizzled and danced in the sky, obscuring the stars and stabbing at the moon.

Ric marched closer to the drug lord’s battle line, Quicksilver nipping at the sides of the silver wave to shape it into an advancing U-shape.

“Great strategy,” Tallgrass observed. “We need to move to the ridge Ric left, pronto.”

He slung his bulky new rifle over one shoulder and sent sand chunks tumbling as he hurtled down with a sideways gait.

I followed his example, stumbling and having to abrade my fingertips on the sand a time or two. Getting up the last ridge was easier, and we lay just under the crest, breathing hard.

Apparently it was going to be a battle of words before action.

“How do you like my wheels?” El Demonio’s basso voice jibed across the barrier of stalled silver desert life.

I followed Tallgrass in sticking my head above the ridge to hear the cartel boss’s rant.

“JFK bought it in this car. Jackie crawled where I’m sitting. The conspiracy nuts thought it was the mob, but they had the wrong mob in mind.”

“Wrong,” Ric shouted back. “That car’s a museum piece far away and you soon will be too.”

“Hola, mi niño pequeño,” he taunted in tones of false fondness. “How you have grown. Every inch of height you gained must have stretched the welts from my whip on your back.”

The crude Kennedy car reference had made my blood boil and now it boiled over. I scrambled to my feet and used my strongest voice from when I was at the back of a noisy press conference.

“Those evil marks are gone, you monster,” I shouted. “What monsters make can be unmade.”

“Ah. The Wichita bruja. Maybe the marks on the flesh can fade, but never those on the soul.”

I knew that bruja meant “witch”—and didn’t I wish I had those powers!—but I could use the ones I did own.

I shook out my spread arms. I felt the familiar stretch across my shoulders under my two layers of clothing as it streaked down both arms to escape the big, ugly camo shirtsleeves. Butts of solid silver filled my leather-clad palms with sleek and icy metal power.

Tallgrass muttered in his native tongue to see me holding twin braided silver whips, twelve feet long.

I raised my arms high and gestured sharply down, like a conductor. Narrow whip ends touched earth and snaked up again toward the sky, conjuring an arch of snapping, sizzling blue lightning above us. An electric branch of storm lightning fanned out a hundred and fifty feet in the air from the ends of each one, surprising even me. My familiar was rising to the challenge.

“Now Ric has some flashy Vegas neon backup,” I told Tallgrass.

El Demonio seemed to welcome my showy defiant gesture. His right arm lifted far back before snapping down. The long, heavy whip arced high, poising for an instant right over Ric before snaking into its natural curve to curl down toward his back.

Ric held his ground, but lifted his right arm.

I’d expected his gesture to repel the whip. Instead it summoned a heavy gust of wind that spun the desert surface into dancing legions of swirling silver insects and reptiles. The hissing, spitting, biting toxic dust devils numbered almost as many as the massed and leashed zombies.

The last ten feet of the demon drug lord’s whip curled into a spiral, caught in the mini tornadoes’ eddies. Through the dancing dervishes of dust, I glimpsed the zombie chains falling to their feet. They were loose and rushing forward into a semicircle to hem us all in.

Tallgrass squinted through the eerie, murky yellow light the dust devils cast, then ran down the last ridge, his heavy hip-held rifle spitting rapid rounds through the dust, blasting the limbs and heads off the frontline zombies.

I snapped my arms in unison again, my silver whips lashing lightning straight at El Demonio’s car, striking a chupacabra on each side. They curled into smoking remnants the whirlwinds spun away.

My next target would be the demon himself. I shook my arms but my hands were empty. I shook my arms again in frustration.

The damn silver familiar was now a spiked left forearm guard, useful only for hand-to-hand combat. By the time it rent any Torbellino henchman at the rear, I’d be downed and gnawed to death by oncoming zombies.

I looked to see how many I might be confronting and how soon.

An agile gray form advanced and retreated from the forward zombie force, Quicksilver gnawing legs off to create a fallen wall of zombies. It was like any other war since time began: the others just marched over their fallen comrades’ disintegrating forms.

Tallgrass, still shooting zombies, backed up in the shifting sand. I called Quick to join us, but the wind whirled my voice away.

“Why aren’t you shooting?” Tallgrass yelled at Ric and the similar weapon slung over his shoulder.

Ric shook his head. “No need. The dust devils are vacuuming up the front lines. They’re thinning out the zombie noose even as El Demonio tightens it on us.”

He gazed up at the sky. The moon had broken through clouds, painting them into a silver sea above the agitated dust storm below.

A full moon had always reminded me of Bing Crosby’s face crooning ba-bub-bub-boo, like a fairy godfather about to bibbity-bobbity-boo a barrel cactus into an escape carriage and lizards into snorting steeds with a desert fox for a driver.

“Don’t shoot through the dust,” Ric ordered Tallgrass. “I think . . .”

And then the moon’s size enlarged and lengthened like the melting diamond pendant in the thorn forest.

I tried to decipher the face I saw in it now, for it was different. . . .

The moon grew so bright we lifted our arms to fend off the pain to our eyes, at least Tallgrass and I did. Quicksilver came bounding around the line of dust devils, joining us to sit and lift his throat to the sky and bay at the swelling moon.

Distant coyotes joined in as the rasp of insect legs and wings from our barrier wave surged louder. If sheer noise would repel zombies, we had it made.

Most of them didn’t have ears, though. The smaller parts are the first to rot.

Even now the gap was closing.

Meanwhile, Ric was moon-gazing into the blinding light.

I ran to shake him out of his trance, but he turned eerie eyes on me that had Quick leaping to my side. Ric lifted his fists, nails digging into the palms until I saw blood running. Then he spotted the jagged spikes of the silver familiar on my arm and wrapped his hands around it.

“No!” I screamed, looking wildly for Tallgrass, who had lowered his weapon in confusion.

Blood was pouring from Ric’s hands as he released them from the familiar. I gazed down at my forearm guard to see bright scarlet tipping every point. Then the silver melted like the moon and slithered up my arm in a network of fine chains, leaving my forearm bathed in nothing . . . except Ric’s blood.

I looked to heaven for help, for hope, and was horrified.

The swollen face of the moon was the visage of the false Maria from Metropolis. Her slanted eyebrows and pouting lips and halo of a headdress were the face of the Whore of Babylon performing for the male patrons of the elite and decadent nightclub, who’d been hypnotized by her bared breasts and undulating pelvis, frozen by lust.

I needed more than this sky-borne CinSim from Metropolis to counter real evil. El Demonio’s cartel killers and zombie forces didn’t freeze at beauty bare.

Unlike the men in the nightclub, I could tear my eyes from the sky-borne seductress. I noticed the clouds on the horizon piling into the shape of the pillars supporting her hooch-koochy dance stage. The crouching hills beneath them became . . . the film’s Seven Deadly Sins.

The Sins below her crouched on their haunches, supporting the platform the movie-screen succubus danced upon. Five robed men and two women, they were all as massive and muscular as Atlas upholding the world and now they stood and advanced as one. Their ghostly gray robes resembled a huge thunderous fog bank rolling across the land.

Behind them strode the stormy blue-black hooded figure of Death, its silver-bladed scythe sweeping left to right.

The creepy film figures—actual, not SinCims—rose to the top of the sky, and rolled over the human cartel killers at Torbellino’s back. Guttural screams choked under the heavy tread as storm troopers of Envy, Anger, Greed, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, and Pride found and crushed the human bodies that harbored them.

That shattered Torbellino’s ranks to the rear. What about the forefront of the army massed just behind El Demonio and his rolling thunder car and crackling lightning whip?

Oh, God!

Ric had turned to face the undead army, putting his arms straight out like a zombie from a corny old movie. Or like Frankenstein’s monster.

He moved toward the meeting walls of dust devils and zombies. With El Demonio watching through binoculars from atop his black Lincoln, Ric’s extended hands dripped fresh scarlet in his own tracks.

Quicksilver gave a blood-thickening howl and hurtled around the outside edge of the dust devils to lead their advance. Tallgrass had somehow come beside me, holding me prisoner in his iron-armed embrace as I lunged forward to help.

“Look!” he shouted in my ear, but I could barely hear. “Look at the ground behind Ric.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes from Ric’s vanishing figure as a curtain of dust devils and the evil yellow light obscured him. Tallgrass’s big hand grabbed my head and pointed it like a gun where he wanted me to look, in Ric’s sandy desert wake.

Bloody hands were breaking through the sand that had spun into the dust devils. Human fingers stretched out like fans of playing cards, reaching up into the dust until they became arms and then facial features broke through the shifting sands behind them . . . foreheads, noses, open mouths frozen in silent screams.

Ric was zigzagging back and forth among the wind-eddied rows, a shadow I could barely see. I was reminded of a farmer sowing seeds or a harvester of the dead or Death itself on another stately but implacable rampage.

“Tallgrass!” I screamed into the wind. “Let me go! Ric and Quicksilver, I can’t lose them.”

He pressed my head against his chest and I smelled ironed cotton. Crazy! It was blood and bone and guts all around us. I should have smelled rotting mortality. He ironed his shirts? Such a weird detail to circle in my brain, but maybe I needed to cling to any shred of normality.

“Have faith.”

I heard Tallgrass’s voice gusting away from me even as his words sifted through to my dust-bedeviled mind. I struggled to break the ex-FBI man’s grip, but it was as implacable as Ric’s methodical progress, every stride taking him a precious two feet farther away from me.

“You look but don’t see,” Tallgrass shouted in my ear.

I looked again, through the sandstorm tears blurring reality into a fun-house mirror.

And I saw naked female forms undulating upward from the bloody sand, a bizarre bony, ragged forest raised by blood and sucked free of the earth by the dust devils. They were mere pieces of people, not visibly rotting like the zombies, but bruised, mutilated, burned, and broken. I wanted to turn my eyes away in pity and revulsion.

But I couldn’t. The silver familiar had formed a thick high collar on my neck, forcing me to watch the end of all I loved as man and dog vanished into a meeting wall of sand and cloud, earth and sky, dead and undead.

And . . . it had become impossible not to watch the resurrection before me.

The rising female bodies spun as the light enveloped them, clothed by the dust and blood into glowing orange figures as fierce as fire.

The light brightened and purified until it seemed they danced in an eddy of moondust . . . they one by one became whole as burnished silver metal replaced the ruined and missing pieces . . . a breastplate here, a jawbone or forearm or thigh-piece there, all elements of the Metropolis robot.

They’d been reborn into a patchwork robot zombie army, gathering speed, hurtling like the silver wave of desert reptile and insect life toward El Demonio’s command post.

A shrill scream shattered the desert night.

The army of femicides Ric had raised swept over the zombies that fell into blackened ashes at their passage and beyond to the murdering human men behind them.

Ric and Quicksilver were standing together behind them, dark shadows against the light that seemed a bloody silver sunrise on the western horizon. I stumbled forward.

Tallgrass was running with me, his—I finally remembered the damn name—M249 SAW assault rifle braced on his hip spitting ammo.

Torbellino’s devil whip lashed once against the advancing fire and dust.

I cracked my left arm and the familiar finally took a single whip form to meet it, shaking Ric’s blood off itself into a circle of seething acid that shriveled the Demon’s horrible weapon into a dried length of brittle leather.

This close we had to advance over zombie bones.

“El Finado, El Finado,” I heard the cartel men cry as they turned to run but fled into the ensilvered embrace and grinning skulls of the risen corpses. These slavers and rapists and murderers were hailing their own deaths.

They were finished. Finado.

Torbellino was standing in his parade car, his eyes scarlet, his empty whip arm pointing a clawed forefinger at Ric. Demonic gunfire blasted from his being in the form of a fiery hail of bullets stitching the air as it took whip form.

I watched Ric jerk and spin in that immaterial onslaught of power, my own body shuddering with sympathetic pain.

But as he turned in that circle of torment and death, his head swung left and then right and left again. A luminous silver-blue lash like a laser cut through El Demonio’s neck, severing his head from his body, and then back again, cutting his torso in two.

Like the whip and the chupacabras, Torbellino shriveled and blew away into fading smoke. In the desert behind him his followers went down, their forlorn cries of “El Finado” dying with them.

Ric had sunk onto his knees in the sand, Quicksilver’s sturdy shoulder beside him the only force holding him up.

I ran to him, sliding onto my knees beside him, grabbing his hands and once again surveying the price of his dead-dowsing powers. His own blood. I madly patted the bloody camouflage jacket to find the deadly on-target wounds from El Demonio’s very being. He’d been strafed before my eyes by weapons both physical and supernatural.

Ric swayed, most of his weight on my shoulders. And then the burden lifted.

“Delilah,” he whispered.

The demon’s last attack had failed to bring down his prey.

I looked up to see the moonlight clear and pure, liquid silver on the desert.

The hellish wind had been snuffed out like a candle flame.

The metallic insect hallelujah chorus was silent and I could hear my own breath panting, and Ric’s, and Quicksilver’s. Only Tallgrass stood tall and stoic.

“Justice,” he said, “is a mighty power to invoke.” He bent to pick up a palmful of desert sand. “May they rest in peace.” The grains fell to the ground, captured before rejoining the desert waste by small upsurge of wind.

I looked at the desert floor behind us. Spotlights of red shimmered in the silver moonlight and faded, softly. A chorus of sighs rode on the night’s back.

“Those are their graves.” Ric’s voice was hoarse from not having spoken for so long, and from his exhausting role in the mass rising of the dead. “Tallgrass, you report that when we get out of here. Tell the mission forces where to come to find and honor the Juarez dead. They’ll believe you’re an expert tracker. Torbellino?” he asked last.

Tallgrass shook his head. “Gone with the wind. El Finado. Still, a demon knows how to vanish when it’s outspelled. But he’ll have a far harder time than you raising another army.”

“I don’t want armies.” Ric struggled to his feet with my aid. My pat-down of his torso found no obvious wounds. A miracle. “I want one evil demon eradicated from the earth.”

“Perhaps he is. If not, next time, amigo,” Tallgrass said, touching his shoulder.

Quicksilver was lapping at Ric’s slack hands, looking more doglike than he usually deigned to appear. His healing tongue would erase Ric’s physical wounds from raising the murdered women.

What would heal Ric from drawing on such unhuman power, I didn’t know.