CHAPTER TEN
They drove back to Las Vegas in silence. Agent Chin sat in the back seat, her hands shaking. In what West figured was an attempt to calm her nerves, she smoked one cigarette after another.
At the Fremont Street headquarters, the agents unloaded their weapons cache from the Jeep. When they were done, the trio sat down and tried to make sense of what had just occurred.
"I still can't believe it." A breathless Chin slowly shook her head. "I stabbed that guy between the eyes, and it didn't even faze him! He just kept coming at me."
"Bullets didn't affect them either," Artie added. "And they weren't wearing bulletproof vests. I would have noticed that."
West suggested, "Perhaps Loveless developed a drug that made them impervious them to pain."
Artie said, "We do know one thing: they weren't impervious to fire."
"That could be helpful," Chin said through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
"But," West said, "we're still no closer to finding Loveless than we were this morning."
Chin's mouth dropped open and she slapped herself on the forehead. "Of course! Why didn't I think of it before?"
"Think of what?" Artie inquired.
"A plane! We can hire one. We'll cover a lot more ground, and Loveless' goons—or whatever they were—can't get us."
West had to snicker. "I keep forgetting it's the 20th century."
"A plane ride?" said an excited Artie. "Count me in!"
xxx
Per the aerial map Artie obtained, a mesa lay about twenty-five miles northeast of where the onslaught had occurred. It seemed plausible that Loveless had built a lair inside the land mass. As the map revealed nothing else potentially helpful, the agents had their pilot circle the mesa at as low an altitude as he could maintain. They each scanned the area with binoculars.
"Jim! Amanda!" Artie exclaimed. "Look down there."
They aimed their spyglasses where Artie pointed. A long, and relatively narrow, strip of land cleaved the cacti, sagebrush, and other desert growth.
"That looks man-made," West noted.
"Could be a landing strip," Chin suggested.
"For visiting Nazi dignitaries?" Artie suggested.
"Let's find out." West ordered the pilot to land.
It was only on the ground that the sheer size of the mesa dawned on them.
Artie asked, "How tall do you think it is?"
"Hundreds of feet," West replied, "and it's miles wide."
"How do we cover it on foot?" Chin wanted to know.
"We don't," Artie assured her. "We drive back here in the Jeep."
"With plenty of weapons," West added.
"That's your department, Jim."
xxx
"Well, well! They've found us." Loveless sat in front of a control console with a futuristic viewscreen above it. "Baby, now that I've found you, I can't let you go. I'll build my world around you."
A lackey said, "Of course they found us, doc. They had help."
"Indeed, they did. Help me get my feet back on the ground. Won't you please, please help me?"
"Should I send the menials out to get 'em?"
"No."
"You sure, doc? I'd love to pay West back for that kick in the chest!"
"Not to worry, cherie. They'll return, and we'll be ready for them."
"We sure will, doc."
Loveless giggled. "Are you ready? Yes, I'm ready! Are you ready? Yes, I'm ready!"
The lackey did not ask why Loveless had answered his own question, much less twice. His job included not asking questions.
"And now, my gorgeous man, let us retire to the boudoir."
His job included that, too.
xxx
West and Artie returned to the Golden Nugget to find a message from the Clark County Coroner's office. They made the call from their room.
The coroner spoke hesitantly. "Through some miracle, I performed autopsies on the men you burned."
"We're listening," said Artie.
Silence.
West asked, "Are you there?"
"Yes, I'm here, but I don't quite know how to say this."
"To say what?" Artie wanted to know.
"I double and triple-checked my work, and had my assistants do the same. We all reached the same conclusion."
"What conclusion?" asked an anxious West.
The coroner took a deep breath. "You didn't kill those men."
"What are you talking about?" Artie demanded. "Of course we killed them! They're dead, aren't they?"
"They're dead all right, but that was the case before they attacked you."
Now West and Artie went silent.
The coroner went on, "The remains we examined were men who've been dead for several days, if not longer."
"I see," said West.
"You see? Do you really? Because I sure as hell don't! I assumed you'd think I was crazy."
"Not at all, doctor," Artie assured him. "We encountered something similar once before."
"You did? When?"
"If I answered that truthfully, you'd say I was crazy."
After they hung up, West and Artie considered their situation. The former spoke first.
"How did we defeat Dr. Faustina?"
"By destroying her laboratory," Artie remembered. "And we never did catch her."
"No. We were too busychasing that human bomb of hers—the one that looked like you."
"Ugh! Don't remind me." Pausing Artie said, "So, how do you kill something that's already dead?"
"Besides burning it?"
"First thing in the morning, I'll go to the library and see what I can learn about walking dead men."
"I think the proper term is 'zombie.'"
"All right—zombies. We'll need to tell Amanda what what we're dealing with, too."
"Think she'll believe us?"
"I don't see why not, Jim. After all, we came back from the dead."
"But not in our old bodies."
Artie grinned. "Minor detail."
xxx
The next morning, Amanda Chin—still processing what West and Artie had told her on the phone—picked the agents up. She dropped Artie off at the library, while she and Jim headed to Fremont Street to stock up for their return to the mesa. When they picked Artie back up, he related what he had learned.
"It's commonly believed that the best way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain."
"But I tried that yesterday," Chin pointed out, "when I stabbed that guy in the skull."
"Your knife didn't penetrate deeply enough. The skull, you see, is one of the thickest bones in the body. And its shape allows it to absorb tremendous amounts of force to protect the brain."
West interjected, "So that's why we never got brain damage from all the times our enemies hit us on the head!"
"That would be my guess." To Chin, "For your knife to have gotten the job done, you'd have had to stab that man in the skull numerous times."
"So, what do we use instead?" she asked from the driver's seat. "Guns?"
"Exactly! A bullet to the frontal lobe or the brain stem should fell a zombie."
"That would fell anybody," West noted with a chuckle.
"Mind you, I read all this in books of folklore. I can't vouch for its real-world application."
West added, "We also don't know how many of those creatures Loveless has at his disposal. I only hope we brought enough ammo."
Chin lit a fresh cigarette from the one she was finishing. "It's going to be one hell of a day."
"The operative word being 'hell,'" said Artie.