Virtual Virgin

Chapter Thirty-two




THE MOON HAD visibly moved across the sky before Quicksilver came bounding through the sagebush to greet me and Tallgrass with triumphant pants and wags. That big tail could really whip your legs with “happy.” Ric joined us soon after.

“Let’s roll,” he said, leaving all the enthusiastic reunion greetings after their trek back from danger to Quicksilver.

Subsequently, Ric kept silent as he and Tallgrass stowed their gear in the army Jeep.

I was happy to have even this rough ride after hoofing it through Juarez to the desert killing ground both old and new, and for a rest for Quicksilver’s pads.

My dog leaped into the backseat with me, wanting to sniff noses to gauge my state of “okay.” Smart guy. He knew Ric and I were not speaking. He’d acted fast to join forces with me and delay any messy public scenes, such as harsh words spoken in front of Ric’s mentor.

If Tallgrass sensed any forthcoming fireworks, he was too savvy to show it.

The jolting journey back to Juarez postponed chitchat anyway, except for my shouting out the motel address to the GPS on the cell phone Rick wordlessly held up over his shoulder.

“Gadgets,” Tallgrass shouted back to me from the shotgun seat, shaking his head. “Another invention that just ain’t natural.”

But the GPS worked like a magical charm. Within half an hour the Jeep was growling in idle outside the gaudily painted adobe-and-neon facade of the Motel of the Pink Flamingos.

“Get yourself and the dog a room,” Ric told Tallgrass. “I’ll escort Delilah to hers.”

Escort, Irma huffed. What are we, theQueen Mary?

Quick flicked me an inquiring doggie look that meant “should I take this ingrate off at the knees, or let you handle it?”

Ric turned to shoo Quicksilver out. He got a fang brush and throaty growl for his trouble. Quick jumped over the Jeep’s side, high-flagging his tail, the perfect raised third-finger salute, canine-style.

Tallgrass smothered a smile but lifted shaggy eyebrows at me in silent question too. I had to admit I wasn’t looking forward to this solo reunion with Ric after kissing him sweetly good-bye and then heading right down to Juarez anyway.

I shrugged at Tallgrass, so he left the Jeep to do what Ric had said. Ric and I’d never had a serious argument, but I wasn’t about to apologize. I gestured to the right motel door, and, when he parked in front of it, hopped out with my backpack hitched over my shoulder and the room key in hand.

Not looking behind me, I unlocked the painted metal door and went inside first. Whew. It smelled both moldy and dry after the clean desert air we’d been breathing. The air conditioner rattled and dripped. I couldn’t wait to whip off the borrowed camos but needed to avoid any appearance of something as provocative as stripping.

Once inside the room, Ric locked the three possibilities: chain lock, bolt lock, and bottom chain lock. You’d think this was a major metropolitan tenement instead of a border motel.

I waited in the center of the small room. Ric turned to me, his face a stone mask of anger carved into Aztec warrior ferocity.

“You! Out of those filthy borrowed camos.”

My heart hiccupped and my own adrenaline surged in a nasty confusion of defiance, anxiety, and excitement tinged with an undeniable sexual edge.

“So,” I answered in a voice as guttural, “you’re pissed at me because I tagged along without official permission, or more important, your permission, Señor Montoya, sir! I thought you didn’t go into the military like your foster dad wanted, but now you’ve turned into an ungrateful, backassward martinet as far as I’m concerned.”

I snapped off a mock salute as a muscle in Ric’s cheek pulsed, Clint Eastwood-style.

“Isn’t that a tad hypocritical?” I demanded further. “After all, you and Tallgrass did the same thing to the whole undercover raid unit, and followed your own private mission. To say nothing about the dog, what my dog thinks about that too.”

He stood there, wide stance braced, glowering.

“So,” I said. “You first! Out of those filthy camos.”

“With pleasure!”

His hands lifted to undo the top closure, then ripped right through the fastenings to bare his body from throat to hips in one tearing gesture. Speaking of ripped . . . A veil of sweat still glistened on firm pecs nicely accessorized with rock-hard nipples over subtly six-packed abs. The effect was so romance-cover drop-dead, I gulped.

His hands reached for the pants drawstring below his navel, but if I saw one more hard thing I was likely to lose my self-respect and throw myself at his naked, um, feet.

“Stop,” I ordered. “I could say ‘God, you’re beautiful when you’re angry’ but I won’t do fight club sex. It’s an unhealthy distortion of the power exchange between a couple.”

Ric approached me, laughing. “You never miss the nuances.” His fingers toyed with my camo top opening. “Take off these filthy clothes, por favor, paloma. You need to get naked, and clean.”

“So saying please is going to make me cooperate?”

He took my balled right fist and stroked it down from his collarbone to hip bone. My fingers uncurled at first touch to give my palm a languorous, warm, skin-tingling, undulating ride. “Slowing down will make you see reason.”

“Fine. But I get the shower first.”

I stomped away, bulling through the first shut door I saw. I hoped to God it wasn’t a closet because I dearly needed a dignified exit.

The shower stall was tiny, but tiled, at least. After losing the clothes, I teased a feeble cold stream out of the corroded head. With pipes clanking, it finally worked up a warming gush. And this was a three-star motel in Rough Guides! I shut my eyes to let the dust and ugly gruesome sights of the day and night wash away.

Something big and bare and dry pushed me face against the shower wall. I wasn’t exactly surprised. I’d already turned my cheek to one side, welcoming the expected full body press. Ric’s thumb streaked the available cheek, his voice even more caressing than his gesture.

“With that tan spray on you remind me of the old Hollywood pinup I encountered on the Inferno’s Lust level, Maria Montez. New look. Almost a new woman, chica. I hate that you came down to this hellhole, but I love having you here. We’re going to need a discussion, after I get off my standard three. You set the bar high the night before I left for Mexico. No wonder Samson couldn’t resist Delilah.”

“Kinda tight in here,” I pointed out.

“Why do you think I came?” His voice went even lower, intimate. “You still made an unauthorized trip across the border. I’m going to have to do a serious body search on you.”

He turned me into his arms. “The mouth is often used to conceal forbidden objects.” His search was thorough and probing. His hands paused on my breasts. “Definitely contraband, requiring careful inspection and attention.”

A pulse between my legs was pounding in rhythm with my heart. We were safe, we were alive, and we were in total sexual sync.

He drew away, resuming his role. “I’m afraid I’ll have to finish up with the standard procedure. Assume the position, face the wall.” He spun me into place.

He pulled my hips far from the wall and pushed the half-damp hair off my neck. In a few seconds I was coming myself, loving his lips, tongue, and teeth doing shivery things to my nape, his pelvis locked and rocking with mine.

“New place, new position,” I agreed, breathing hard.

“Besides, we won’t want to sleep on the bed. There are sanitized sleeping bags in the Jeep. I’ll bring one in. No reason we can’t share.”

“Information too,” I said pointedly, but he was turning me around, pulling me into his arms and the skimpy shower stream. I had to close my eyes again as warm water rinsed my tan-in-a-bottle away and his kisses washed over them.

“Mi virgen, mi amor, mi mujer, mi vida,” he murmured. “I missed you already. I didn’t want to leave you behind. It’s just that I’d go crazy if anything happened to you.”

I think he tasted my tears of joy in the cascading water.

“You like our little game, yes? Why not reverse roles next time. We’re an equal opportunity couple, right?”

“Right. And I promise to speak softly and carry a big nightstick.”

Ooh la la, Irma sighed before I could shut her commentary down cold just as the shower did the same thing to us.

I couldn’t help thinking Sansouci had been right. I’d let myself be lulled into sexy mock-vampire turn-ons. Who hadn’t these days?

Not me, Irma boasted, but I wanna be.

I ignored her. I’d interviewed enough psychologists, and confided enough in Ric’s foster-mother shrink, to know that love and trust were part of any erotic game. As kinky went, this interlude was minor league. As for me realizing that Ric would love and want me even when I’d pissed him off, it was major.


I DREAMED THAT night I was the Silver Zombie.

Maybe it was because I was sharing a sleeping bag with Ric, which is such close quarters. Maybe I’d been obsessing about it . . . her . . . too much.

Somehow I was inside its glamorous shell, even inside its unplumbed mind. . . .


I LIFT MY mechanical metal arm, strong and smooth. I notice my house of elaborately sculptured wood has received a brand-new coat of sterling silver, so it shines like the carapace of a bug.

I’m trapped inside, body and soul.

I’ve heard of a girl named Alice who outgrew a house once, but I have always lived inside, it seems. I’m not growing or shrinking, I’m getting no smaller, no larger, imprisoned upright in the dark like this. Buried alive like a gagged mummy in a case leaned against the wall.

I must stand and wait.

My memories are a jumble of fresh and incredibly stale.

One memory is of movement, awkward, stiff. I’m a knight in a ponderous suit of armor made of plaster and plastic wood. Another memory is of dancing, as light as air, wearing only scarves of silk chiffon. Blue chiffon. Like a Blue Angel.

I’m an idealistic girl stung by social injustice. Haunted children look to me for salvation as to a mother. Now I’m a powerful and seductive goddess or a cabaret chanteuse . . . maybe even, someday, a monstrous bride of a famous monster.

I can be anything anyone would care to make of me.

For a moment the dancing angel’s free, soaring movements make my prison a smothering coffin again. I feel the plaster, wet and heavy, wrapped around my face and body like a mummy’s bindings. No! I am not a mummy! I am young, young. I need to move, breathe.

Oh, but I am old, old too, shrinking like that girl, Alice, my body the walls that are collapsing around me.

The biblical Tower of Babel flashes through my mind, and a shining city where trains fly alongside aeroplanes, an entire towering futuristic city made from hubris and light, like Lucifer, the fallen angel. I see screaming thousands rioting and drowning. I see a woman in a green gown and a man all in white, like a ghost. I see world war and world peace.

Perhaps . . . I am eternal.

Who am I? What am I? Who will tell me? Who will shape me, free me, use me, destroy me?

I glimpse again the man with the searching eye of a camera . . . the one with a silver eye that sees past the plastic and wood of my coffin to my hidden human heart beating inside.


WHAT A NIGHTMARE! Buried alive.

I blinked awake, trying to figure out if I was dreaming or hallucinating. In the dim light, I searched for the vague bulk of Quicksilver sleeping in front of the door. No, he’d stayed with Tallgrass tonight.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the night lights of Juarez leaking around the skimpy curtains over the window, I made out Ric’s sleeping form next to me. One way or another, I had my nightly guard.

I was surprised to see a supple silver chain linking us, my familiar reaching out to Ric in the night. Was that why I’d dreamed of the mechanical woman from Metropolis? That idle thought made my dream seem more like being in a comic book rather than a movie. Maybe I’d snagged a small part in Superman’s Depression-era Art Deco “Metropolis” that was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis film.

By now Ric’s profile was as clear as if outlined by a thin wire of neon, every feature sharp. I could see his eyelids vibrating with the hyperactivity of REM sleep, the dreaming stage I’d just left. I wondered what dreams, or nightmares, he was having tonight. Me in his arms? Or has the Silver Zombie seized his subconscious, the way she’d mastered mine?


HE’S A BOY again, in his seventh year of captivity to the human and zombie trafficker named Torbellino and his gang of coyotes.

Our Lady of Guadalupe has come to his dreams for years, perhaps even to his waking moments, her face melting with compassion for his loneliness, her pressed-together palms praying for him.

Now he’s mesmerized by the woman’s tantalizing image behind the smoke of a dirty magazine’s cigar ad. Now she’s come to life, dancing for him in her sheer skirt with her bare breasts gleaming at the tips. He’s mesmerized, never having imagined anything like this.

But he likes it. He likes it even when he feels the needle fangs of a vampire bat he hesitates to tear away for fear the almost-naked woman gyrating in the cloud of smoke will vanish if he wakes from his dream trance and moves.

Pleasure seeps from him like smoke, and then he wakes up, pulling the soft bat body from his neck with a sharp spasm of pain. It flies away, but the woman has vanished, as he feared. Maybe he should feel shame. He’s seen the women dragged into the cabin of Torbellino and his men and has clenched his fists and squeezed his eyes shut, but this woman is different.

She likes him. She likes what she does for him, likes to ease his pain and fear.

He doubts the Virgin of Guadalupe will ever appear to him again.

But this vision will.