BEFORE I COULD corral my scattered thoughts or solve the whole mess or say a word, another crisis invaded the blood-and-body-strewn office.
“Chickens?” Ric demanded as a black-and-white flock flooded the floor with panicked clucking and fluttering wings. “This is insane.”
By then the Wizard of Oz CinSims were all homing on Ben Hassard’s office like pigeons caught flying in the midst of a Manhattan ticker-tape parade.
“We’ve got to get to a storm cellar,” Hunk, the future Straw Man, said, appearing at my side to grab my arm. “Come along, Dorothy. Forget the dog.”
What I’d forgotten was that my hair, after the Emerald City makeover treatment, flowed in black waves to my shoulders, as Dorothy Gale’s had after the film’s EC make-over scene. I’d also forgotten that my hair was so dark and my skin so white I looked like a ready-made CinSim with colorized blue eyes.
The CinSim Toto skittered past my ankles and I chased him, wishing for a basket.
“Storm cellar?” Tallgrass speculated to Ric. “The hotel must have lower levels.”
“I spotted a service door on the way in from the parking lot,” Ric answered. “Just outside this office wing.”
“There must be one inside as well,” Tallgrass said. “Tyohni,” he ordered. “Hunt.”
“Wait!” I cried, appalled to see Quicksilver bound away into the earth-shaking chaos outside the office area on another person’s orders. “Leave kitty!” I screamed.
“Leave the dog, Dorothy!”
Strong, callused hands held my forearms prisoner. The hands of … farmworkers. The other two Gale farm workmen were not about to let “Dorothy” run out into the storm. Hickory, the Tin Man, and Zeke, the Cowardly Lion, had already shooed Uncle Henry and Auntie Em toward Ric and Tallgrass.
“Come on,” Ric said, pulling Hickory and Zeke off me. “I’ll take care of Dorothy. You boys get the old folks.”
When Quicksilver barked from just down the hall, we herded the party to the door marked mechanics he’d found.
Those Wizard of Oz CinSims were a loyal and determined bunch, but after a small taste of running around at large in Emerald City they weren’t too pleased to be jammed back in the basement.
Hickory tried to grab me again and take me with the CinSims, but I slipped from his custody as Tallgrass pushed him into the stairwell and slammed the metal security door with its exterior lock shut.
I breathed a sigh the strength of a snow-globe tornado. The Wizard of Oz was as much about hands, head, and heart as Metropolis. My hands, head, and heart were happy to have all the Kansas farmyard folk and critter CinSims tucked away in the Emerald City’s high-tech sub-basements. They’d have lots of room to roam, although the chickens and pigs and horses could be seen ranging through the outer offices in confusion.
Then my panicked Scarecrow brain got ticking again.
Where was Dorothy? And Toto? And Professor Marvel?
And, most of all, where the hell was Almira Gulch?
“Is everybody unreal we can get our hands on stowed safely below?” Tallgrass asked.
“Some major players are still out and about,” I admitted, “but the same thing happened to them in the opening scenes of the movie, so we can’t expect to totally override their conditioning.”
Tallgrass frowned at me. “You Vegas people live in a fantasy world, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“So do we Plains people,” his confidential rasp whispered. “Millennium Revelation,” he pronounced with a Quicksilver-worthy snort. “Not new to us. My people and your people may yet save Wichita, and all our asses.
“All right, ‘Dorothy.’ You’re the white man’s lucky charm, but clearly also the key to the entire puzzle we’re all facing now, filmed and real, past and present.
“You take us on that corny yellow brick road to the heart of Wichita, Emerald City edition. Got it? How are you going to do that?”
How could I ever explain Snow to Leonard Tallgrass? Maybe as a … wizard. Or a shaman. How would I ever explain to Snow why everyone in our ragtag party and everything evil in Wichita seemed to have a serious stake in his prize vintage movie? I sure didn’t know.
“Well?” Tallgrass prodded me.
“I’m going to come clean and take us all to the top of Emerald City to see a man about a movie.”
RIC AND TALLGRASS, Quicksilver and I, stepped out of the shuddering elevator shaft and onto the penthouse floor to feel the tower itself shimmy and the very height make us shiver like wind chimes.
Snow was there to greet us, a commanding figure reminiscent of a CinSim ghost.
“What took you so long?” he asked our survival party. “The view here is spectacular, not to mention strategic. Let me show you.”
Tallgrass looked him up and down … and up and down again. “You are Ben’s Las Vegas bigwig.”
“It’s not a wig,” Snow said. “I wear my hair long.”
“A noble tradition, if a trifle old-fashioned,” Tallgrass said. “Ric? What do you know of this person Ben calls Christopher?”
“Christophe. It’s French. He’s a Vegas bigwig, all right, and a man of many names,” Ric replied. “I don’t know if he can be trusted for the long run, but if he has interests at stake that mirror ours, he’ll be prepared to indulge in mutual using.”
“I don’t renege on deals,” Snow said. “And nobody takes what’s mine.”
“Ah.” Tallgrass nodded. “My people have heard that first lie from the white man, but we endorse the second claim. You’ll have to prove your honorable intentions.”
Thank goodness no one had asked me to recommend Snow.
At my side, Quicksilver whined. I believe the major position he meant to convey was impatience.
Snow led our party onto the open-air balcony that surrounded the highest residence Emerald City had to offer. The evening air had that heavy, sullen stillness that promised a major storm was about to break loose. A fully three-quarter moon hung like a leaky football in an unclouded bit of night sky.
We all adopted Tallgrass’s signature squint as we stared out over green and gold rolling Kansas fields shivering in the rising wind. Everything was colored the sick chartreuse color the landscape took on before a major storm. It was like looking through a glass of absinthe.
An out-of-season blue-black front of storm clouds was rolling in from the northwest. Kansans knew that cloud cover for a raging monster spawned on the flanks of the Colorado Rockies, whose howling high winds would lash the land with icy cold and snow. They called it a “blue norther.”
Snow held out a pointing forefinger, his long white hair flowing back in the wind, making him resemble the monumental Crazy Horse statue carved from the Black Hills of South Dakota.
“There are three attack positions,” Snow said. “To the south, west, and north.”
I leaned over the balcony to watch heat lightning flirt with a familiar broadcast tower.
“WTCH is to the west,” I pointed out.
Ric held me to anchor us against the driving wind. “The drug cartel’s cattle-drive path runs south to north.”
“And that unholy traffic that destroys the earth and its beings has roused the gods of my people,” Tallgrass said. “From the north comes the Wendigo. That’s where the zombies drive the drug-laden cattle for slaughter. Wendigo is a giant evil spirit, a starving cannibal who dines on the greedy and devours them all. El Demonio’s enterprise is a desecration deserving of death, and that restitution will come, no matter if we stand in its path, no matter what we do.”
A monstrous conjunction of elements was assembling on the verdant stage of Kansas that night, no doubt. I studied the scene.
Lightning was building around three towers. Emerald City was the highest, and the most obvious target. Next highest was the broadcast tower to the west, WTCH-TV. Alma mater.
Speaking of my actual alma mater, I looked to the unmentioned east. The spire of a church was catching jagged lightning bolts. Was the lightning rod atop it cast in the figure of a gargoyle? Or a dragon?
“We have enemies converging from all four points of the compass?” Ric asked, noticing the direction of my gaze.
“Not really,” I said. “The east is an ally under fire, Our Lady of the Lake.”
“Why?” Ric asked. “What did we do?”
“Got what somebody else wants first,” Snow answered.
Ric stared at him for a long, hard moment. I feared he would take Snow’s comment personally, or Snow would mention Ric’s new silver eye.
Neither spoke.
Tallgrass broke the silence. “What more does El Demonio want? His band of bad men and their dead minions have been invading Wichita for years, like a blood tide seeping up from the Mexican border killings. Now everything evil is drawn to these fantastical towers on which we stand.”
“I’m no military historian,” Ric said, “but if you’re the center of a three-pronged attack, you need to snap one leg out from under the triad.”
“Quicksilver and I will take out the west,” I volunteered.
“No, Delilah.” Ric tightened his grip on me. “It’s insane to go out into the teeth of that oncoming physical and mystical storm. Stay.”
I looked over the lurid green-lit landscape that still resembled a Fanny Farmer deluxe box of mint and chocolate squares, with caramel drizzles on top. Wheat and corn and molasses and apple pie. Kansas farmland, as it had always been. I measured the blue-black tornado twisting Emerald City way and the lightning bolts flash-dancing around Our Lady of the Lake’s spire and the WTCH broadcast tower.
I saw the snarling face of Tallgrass’s terrifying Wendigo in the oncoming blue norther.
And I was supposed to be scared of Sheena Coleman?
Weather witches were the weakest link in the forces arrayed against us, but one of them controlled the highest tower. Besides, it’d be a pleasure to take out the witch that blew down my house.
Who’s a storm chaser?
Ace reporter, that’s who.
“I have an issue with the station’s lousy weather witch, and Dolly’s horses know the way,” I told everyone and no one in particular. I didn’t want to cross any glance that could stop me. “We’ll shut down that broadcast tower and be back in no time. Quicksilver! Time to do your job.”
I slipped Ric a crooked smile and didn’t look back, although I heard him being forcibly restrained, probably by Leonard Tallgrass.
Quick and I zipped into the open elevator and hit “M” as in “Main.” We had sixty-some stories to plummet down and a bunch of flatland to cross.
You can’t take me out into this monster storm with you, Irma objected. It’s murder.
Eh. Murder-suicide, technically, I told her. I’m not being heroic and I’m not being stupid. Do the math.
I’d figured out the best use of personnel. Tallgrass had to remain at Emerald City to protect his tribe’s investment and deal with its oncoming cannibal vengeance god. The Wendigo sounded like another Lord of the Slaughter, a Shezmou with bear teeth, the power of all the earth’s winds at his back, and really bad breath. Nasty.
Snow had led the rescue party for Ric and produced a dragon to do it. I was pretty sure he’d come up with something spectacular to save the newest lynchpin of his Vegas empire, not to his mention his albino skin and the ordinary hides of everyone around him. And me, probably. Now that he knew what I could do for him, he’d want the satisfaction of forcing or tricking me into healing those whip welts I’d accidentally bequeathed to him in my uniquely soothing way.
What about our beloved Ric? Irma wailed.
Snow saved him before and he will again, I told her. Ric’s too vital to some part of this puzzle. Snow will save Ric and me … us, just for my future crawling potential.
What about El Demonio and his zombie army?
That I don’t know. Ric may have to settle that score all by himself.
Irma went silent as the elevator reached the main floor. Quicksilver and I picked our way through the fallen corpses of El Demonio’s thugs. True, I had tricked the chupacabra into becoming my hit man, but in the ghoul-eatghoul world of the Millennium Revelation, it wasn’t how you got things done, but that you did.
Outside, litter skidded across the deserted Emerald City parking lot like skeletal fingers playing the “Devil’s Waltz” on an asphalt keyboard. The temperature outside at ground level, including wind chill, had dropped to a blood-freezing forty degrees.
There was no point in putting Dolly’s top up.
The wind would just rip it off.
Quicksilver leaped in the front passenger seat with a shit-eating grin.
“You have been just waiting to ride shotgun again,” I accused.
He showed fang.
“Riding shotgun is good for you,” I told Quicksilver. “Save your footpads for later.”
Dolly’s engine choked for a moment, but revved high and hard when I peeled out of the lot into the dark and stormy night.
“You never knew these WTCH folk,” I commented.
Quicksilver remained mum and curled his claws into the front seat upholstery. I cringed, but kept silent. My mind started toting up losses to motivate my righteous anger. Achilles. My job. My house. My history.
The streets were eerily deserted, so I ran about a dozen red lights, feeling like a ghost.
“We’ve got to take whoever’s there down,” I told Quicksilver. “They would put orphans like us up for adoption in a cage,” I added, in terms he would relate to.
He growled.
“They are so wrong.” I kept up a running dialogue as I pushed Dolly up to seventy-five on the abandoned city streets. Ric would be proud. “They sold out the serious profession of The News, of informing the community, for impure greed. Sheena just wanted blackmail money for giving bad weather to good people and good weather to bad people. Undead Ted was a lame tool. Literally. El Demonio could plant his shills in management and hide the fact that Wichita was becoming a drug-smuggling hub.
“Now the broadcast capabilities of WTCH-TV can multiply the powers of all the southeast Kansas weather witches. We have to cut the power to the tower. Any ideas?”
Quicksilver lifted his furred throat and howled at the three-quarter moon peeking between the gathering storm clouds.
“I’m glad we see eye-to-eye on the storm,” I said. “It generates a lot of power that’s not answerable to anybody but Mother Nature. Let’s hope we can tap that.”
By the time I cruised Dolly through the WTCH parking lot, the cloud bank had sped to meet us so fast that I could see only darkness above the tree line, and hear only the wind hissing and the lightning spitting.
Most of the cars and vans were gone. Storm-chasing, I hoped. That’s what real news people would do. I was after unreal news people. Only Undead Ted’s Prius and Sheena’s vintage iridescent pink Geo Storm were still there.
Dolly’s headlights spotted someone hunched at the driver’s side of Sheena’s Storm, trying to break in.
“Undead Ted.” I hailed him as I pulled Dolly alongside, sandwiching his body between her hefty black side and the Storm.
“Don’t call me that,” he responded. “And your car is creasing my best suit.”
“Where’s Sheena?”
“You don’t want to go in there, Delilah. Some kind of crazy feminist rave is going down. I had no idea Sheena was so invested in ‘career at any price.’ She’s got all her gal pals doing the Macarena around a Crock-Pot in the station kitchen. When I heard their chant was calling for ‘eye of Newt Gingrich’ and a ‘samp of vamp,’ I got the hell out. I think that crazy Slo-mo Eddie is hunkered down filming it all.”
Go, Eddie, go. He’d win the YouTube viral sweepstakes of the week with that footage. That would out Sheena’s secret coven.
“Sheena alone has power to skew the weather,” I told Undead Ted, “but not to brew up a megastorm like this.”
He joined me in looking up at the roiling blue-black sky.
“I’m sorry, Delilah,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I really did have the hots for your blood type. And I was right that you’d taste like clarified blue blood. Awesomely rare.”
A gourmand vampire? Euww.
“What do you want in Sheena’s car?” I asked.
He nodded at two briefcases on the floor mat. “My share.”
“Forget it,” I said. “I’m shutting Sheena down. You don’t want to ever show your sorry face in Kansas again.”
He scrambled into his Prius and lurched away at top speed.
As he left, I spotted a sudden hailstorm heading for us through the lot. Sheena was still watching the exterior. No way was that witch going to ice-blast the pristine finish on my vintage car. Taking my job and my rental house was one thing, but Dolly was family.
Also pretty much Detroit tank.
I gunned her over the curb and the lawn, cutting across to the concrete canopy sheltering the station’s main entrance. The hailstorm passed over, tinkling down a few stray ice crystals.
Now that Dolly was safely parked out of the elements, Quick and I headed into the eerily rainless storm for the broadcast tower.
I’d always taken this five-hundred-foot Eiffelesque structure at the station’s side for granted. Now, it was scary. A fan of lightning bolts as tall as the tower itself grew from its top, glowing so white-hot the tendrils looked pink against the night sky.
The tower sat on a concrete pad next to a shack unsavory enough to house an illegal still. Dozens of thin guy wires anchored the mass for hundreds of feet around. Toppling the tower would be impossible. Cutting off the dark artery of cable that ran up it would not, but this electrical storm could ground itself through me, a process called electrocution. I so wished I had paid more attention in those required science classes. Luckily, it wasn’t raining. Yet.
Maybe that was why the silver familiar wasn’t morphing into something handy like a hedge trimmer or hatchet or a hacksaw; using it would kill me. Or it just didn’t do yard work.
Quick’s sharp bark drew me around the shack’s side to where the metal conduit housing the cable met ground to run into the shack. Simple. Cut the power to the tower by hacking the conduit and interior cable in half. I needed a real tool. …
The shack’s exterior toolbox was filled with goodies I pawed through by lightning flash. If I had a hammer. … I picked up one with a rubberized handle. It wasn’t suitable for cutting a coax but reminded me that tools around here would need insulated handles. I finally lifted up an awesome little Tin Man hatchet with a wooden haft.
Hoping that the nonmetal handle would interrupt a lethal electrical shock, in seconds I was hacking at the conduit like a demented ax murderer. I’d cut through the outer metal and was denting the rubber insulation when Quicksilver growled and rushed something behind me.
Sheena stood screaming beside me, her blond hair flaring in the wind to show her brunet roots. “Stop that, Street! That hacking is giving me a throbbing headache.”
I ignored her and kept slinging my hatchet, counting on Quicksilver to keep her at bay.
Suddenly a hurricane gust of wind lifted me off my feet while Sheena yanked me back by my windblown hair. The hatchet flew from my hand into the dark as Sheena and I fell struggling on the concrete. Another lightning flash showed Quicksilver nosing at the half-cut-through cable.
No! He could electrocute himself. I kneed Sheena in the stomach and swung her off me by her hair, struggling to my feet in the straight skirt and heels. I’d never wear a business suit anywhere again.
“Quicksilver,” I screamed. “Leave kitty!”
Everything happened in jerky slow motion, as if lit by a nightclub strobe light.
Quicksilver regarded me with calm, stubborn doggy inaction.
By the next flash, Quicksilver had lifted a leg.
A rear leg.
I shut my eyes.
“Quick, no!” Water would short out the cable, of course, but Quicksilver would be fried.
Sheena was clawing at my skirt to pull me back down, but I back-kicked her away and charged for Quicksilver …
Just as lightning flashed and showed his hair snapping with static into a gorgeous electric-blue halo, leaping toward me …
As the tower-top lightning streaked to ground with the sound of berserk electrical snapping. The wet cable shorted out the tower, making it a dazzling firecracker flaring, and then fading to disappear against the night sky.
Sheena was moaning behind me. “You witch! My coven’s been grounded. You’ve broken my perfect storm.”
Quicksilver, still looking twice his normal size, regarded me with calm, stubborn doggy inaction. I reached my fingers to his punk-rock coat, and got a nasty little shock.
That’s all. He’d been smart enough to piss and run before the current could connect. We turned to bustle back to Emerald City.
Halfway to the parking lot, Sheena caught up to us. She must have been planning a quick getaway too.
“Street!” she shouted. “Wait. What have you done to my car?” she screamed. “Where is my Storm?”
I looked at the parking lot. Lightning had struck the small car into a twisted mass of blackened metal with a burnt pile in the middle.
“My money!” Sheena wailed, running to the wreckage to claw at the remains.
“Will she ruin her perfect manicure clawing for those burnt bills?” I said to Quicksilver. “Money is the root of all evil.”
I ran to the station portico to jump behind Dolly’s steering wheel as Quicksilver took the passenger side, having done his business and being ready to leave. I tried to call Ric, but my cell phone had been fried. Better it than me or Quicksilver.
“And I think your whole perfect storm is going south,” I yelled to Sheena as we sped down the exit road.