WE HAD OUR first “discussion” while the giant screen showed inane cartoon characters and animated boxes of candy and popcorn. If I never saw another Dancing Milk Dud, it would be too soon. And the music was the sappiest I’d ever heard in my life.

“Ric, I’m not sure this whole trip is a good idea. Happiness was Wichita, Kansas, in Dolly’s wide-screen rearview mirror. And this side trip is creepy. I know I wasn’t really abducted by aliens as a kid, but that scenario is way too close for comfort to what might have actually happened. The closer we get to Wichita, the jumpier I get.”

“Hey, Delilah.” He pulled me across the bench seat to lay my head on his shoulder. “Not many restored drive-in movie screens survive in the country. I thought you were a vintage film buff. Anyway, the girl is supposed to get a little scared and snuggle up, right?”

“Drive-ins were dead before I was alive. Why are we here?”

“You love vintage, right? I just thought we could do something fun for a while, be together like a normal couple at a movie instead of chasing down IDs on buried bones and digging up ancient vampires along with lots of early Vegas history and getting exotic supernatural killers on our tails.”

“Speaking of tails …” I glanced around for Quicksilver.

“He hopped out as soon as we were hooked up to the speaker to find a better viewing spot.”

“Now Quick’s gone and we’re sitting in this parking lot of strangers in the wilderness.”

“Cold Creek,” Ric said.

“What?” I thought the phrase meant something like “tough shit,” at first.

“Cold Creek, Colorado,” he repeated. “That’s the town just fifteen miles away. We’re not in the wilderness, and Quicksilver is just off doing doggy guard duty, I bet.”

“There’s a hot shower and fast food just fifteen minutes away?”

“Yeah, and we’ll go there after the show. Meanwhile we can do what Dolly was meant to do, take a couple of hot kids to the drive-in with her top down and the guy hoping to get the girl’s top down. We can neck through a few reels, and I do mean reels, because they show old black-and-white movies here. Just neck like the normal teenagers we never were. Smear your lips with that hot new color lip gloss you’re using and I’ll get to work wearing it off.”

I did adore the kissing part. I dug in my hobo bag on the floorboard. “You like this stuff, huh? It is flavored.” I screwed up a bullet-shaped tube of deep raspberry color with flecks of silver glitter.

His “yeah” was one of those gruff, turned-on under-statements he made during sex.

“Let me put it on you,” he said, suddenly. “What’s it called?”

“Midnight Cherry Shimmer,” I said before he tilted up my chin and ran the smooth oily stick over my bottom lip so slowly it was like he used his tongue.

“‘Cherry,’” Ric repeated. “Perfect for the tender teen mood I want you in tonight.”

He slicked the gloss over my top lip as I felt a deep quiver inside.

“We’re way past that stage, Ric,” I said anyway.

“What’s the harm in going back?”

“Going back? You never were at a drive-in movie. You’re way too young too. Didn’t you get enough thrills sneaking around dating those rich and spoiled baby socialites in Washington, D.C.? You were the exotic wild child turned bureaucrat’s foster kid and high school heartthrob. Don’t kid me.”

“I meant going back to a more innocent time. The minute I laid eyes on Dolly I was wishing I could take you and her out on a date.”

“We kinda got to the endgame of a date right there in Sunset Park over an overexcited dowsing rod before you ever laid eyes on Dolly at the curb.”

“I wouldn’t regret that moment for the world, Del. Look, that teenage tear of mine wasn’t real, any more than those Barbie girls were. Sure, I made it with them … in the beach house, in the boat house, in the upstairs maid’s quarters, in the gazebo in the garden, in their graduation Beamers and Porsches with bucket seats and central consoles, and upright shifts making it an instant three-way. I never made love with them.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“Del, you must know that I know all the things you’ve been doing to spare me any aftershocks from being eaten by vampires.”

I could only mutter the next sentence. “I’m supposed to laugh at that phrase, but they tortured and almost killed you.”

“I know. I’ve got most of those memories back. I know how you bent your whole heart and soul to making sure when I came out of my coma it wasn’t like waking up fresh from a nightmare, like you do so often. And it wasn’t, was it?”

Now he was nibbling on my earlobe, my neck.

Necking. Just the word made me nervous now that vampires were surfing U.S.A. across the whole world. Back in Dolly’s day, the term had meant lots of smooching and maybe even tongue if the guy was a J.D., a juvenile-delinquent-in-training, and lots of above-the-waist groping. I’d seen American Graffiti too. It was a forty-year-old antique, even though it was in color.

“I love being behind this steering wheel,” Ric said.

“Ric, we’re not even moving now. We’re parked.”

“Right. And I’m in the driver’s seat and you’ve got both hands free. And girls just want to suck face forever.”

He pulled me against him. I looked around nervously, but the tall gateway and road lights were shining in the now totally dark distance. Our car was open, but we were pretty hidden.

Ric’s face bent to find mine for a passionate kiss that took my breath away, breaking it only to murmur sexy Spanish words against my lips, moving from short, soft nibbles to soul kisses that were so much searching tongue I was thinking who needed anything more and how could we keep finding new angles and different rhythms that would keep us on the brink of this insane delirium?

We never stopped lip-syncing. The vast night air and our hot-breathed body moves in a confined space and confined clothes were beyond erotic. It was sexting in the dark. Ric’s mouth was everywhere, burning up my skin and moving on so fast I seemed bathed in pre-orgasmic sensation. Despite my lips’ many near-collisions with his neck, I managed to avoid his bite scar, remembering that in the first heat of our relationship I’d accidentally bitten him a little and scared myself silly. I’d kill myself if I found out I had any vamp tendencies, although that would be tough. Suicidal vampires don’t exist.

Ric finally broke off to let me breathe, leaving me dizzy, my fingers curled into his thigh to keep myself upright. My head lolled onto the seat back while I stared up at bright swaths of stars sowed like seeds on the wind in the black sky. Ric lowered his head to my heaving chest as if dowsing for my heartbeat, his mouth kissing a line up to my collarbone and chin.

I certainly was getting why drive-ins had been called “passion pits.” Warm, wet lips suckled my earlobe; teeth pinched it. A hot, probing tongue plunged into my ear. The sudden nip and plunge sensation pushed a sexual rush from my brain down to my toes and back up again.

On that wave, sucking me beneath the waterline of sensation into utter surrender, Ric’s face nuzzled behind my ear, pushing under my hair. A fiery burning sensation on my neck paralyzed me. Then I realized … I started to mouth the word, “No,” but his fingers fanned against my lips as if to sign shhhhh. I reined in my galloping breath.

The sudden ceasing of our motion except for Ric’s mouth burning, burning, burning the skin on my neck made time freeze. I heard crickets screaming all around us for the first time, but mostly I felt a hot, surging pulse coursing through my body, sensed its echo in his. I didn’t want to stop him. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to let him take me, take me, take me until he could take no more.

My lips parted to draw his caressing fingers inside, but otherwise nothing in me could move but the pounding, pounding of blood and desire, until his face drew back and his fingertips caressed the stinging sweet-spot on my neck.

“Te amo,” he whispered. “I won’t use that word you hate, but every teenager in the world has done this in a place like this. You see now? How the kiss that seeks the hot blood that drives our love excites? Let me give this as well as take it from you. All right?”

“Will I … bruise?”

He stroked me there again. “That’s the point, amor. It’s the badge of our passion. That’s why I put it far back on your neck, under your hair. Only you and I will know it’s there. Only I can see it.”

“That seems … possessive.”

“Passion is possession. I love that you thought about stopping me. It’s so hot that you didn’t. I know,” he said, stroking me again, bolts of desire surging through me now on every caress, “you always feared an attack here from vampires. That you overcame that to let me make my love visible; there’s nothing better.”

Our mutual fever still raged, so I understood what he meant, I guess, but icy tendrils of doubt still stirred my soul.

“Chica,” Ric whispered, “don’t you want to explore the deepest levels of our love? Don’t you want sex that shakes your soul? Don’t you feel safe with me no matter what?” he asked, coaxed.

Now he had me. The last thing I wanted to mess with right now was his machismo.

Only one answer, Irma butted in. Don’t blow it.

“Yes. I trust you. Of course, I do. Sí. Te amo, hombre.”

I guess I’d just have to look up “suck me” in my Dirty Spanish dictionary for future use. I didn’t have the nerve for the even dirtier version. Yet.

BUT I SURE didn’t feel safe in the drive-in’s great outdoors.

It’s not like Ric did a suck and run. He held me close, kept kissing my mouth, my face, the small damp spot near my carotid artery that throbbed and pulsed with the still-ragged beating of my heart. My head on his chest felt the echo of his own slowing rhythms. We pulled apart to let the urge to merge subside until later.

I heard a thump from the backseat and knew Quicksilver had returned as soon as the mushy stuff was safely over. Having Quick in the backseat meant we could prepare for the actual supposed point of the outing, the movie. Ric, of course, had wanted to initiate me in the proper setting all along.

Reality took over. The liquid heat at the crux of my body was major. I pulled myself together and made my first trip to the cinder-block women’s “restroom.” Hip boots and tongs required.

While Ric went to relieve (men have it easy) and retrieve (the menu gave fast food a bad name), I established myself back in Dolly’s passenger seat. Just letting Ric drive my baby had been a good move. The whole point of this trip, I realized, was to let Ric take charge on the professional investigative turf that was his, and take care of me for a change. And did he ever.

Deep sigh. I’d grown up wary, edgy, ready to be pounced on by some vamp boy or mean girl every moment. This trip “home” was going to be a hard assignment, except for the extracurricular activities. Maybe I was being a worrywart about Ric’s minor physical … alterations and his randy schoolboy fixation on “branding” his girl. “Won’t you wear my ring around your neck?” I saw that iconic fifties’ song could refer to a more intimate claim. Same symbolic point. I doubted a class ring on a chain could have me nearly stroking out the way Ric’s fifteen minutes of semipublic necking had.

Looking at the charm bracelet on my wrist, I realized the silver familiar hadn’t given even one defensive twitch during the entire episode. It certainly was getting with the nineteen-fifties program.

I could only hope the familiar wasn’t also a one-way spy-line for Snow. Now that I was getting a lot more clued into sexual subtexts, I remembered Snow’s remark when we first met near his Inferno Hotel bar that our conjoined black and white long hair would look sexy in the mirror above his bed.

I’d taken it for a not-too-subtle message that he wasn’t a mirror-phobic vampire—since he was phobic about being taken for an albino vampire—but I hadn’t discovered my own mirror-based freaky powers then and had only just met Ric and my own libido.

Maybe the remark had been a pure come-on I was still too naïve to recognize.

Maybe I can sub for you under that mirror, Irma suggested.

Maybe Lilith already had.

Good. I wanted to leave Snow as far behind as I’d recently wanted to lose Wichita. Forever.

WHILE WE WAITED for Ric’s return, I shared my smaller misgivings with Quicksilver in the backseat. His ears perked and fanned forward while his eyes, glued on my every word, expressed bottomless sympathy.

“Romantic, isn’t it?” I began. “I’m gonna get a cricked neck from watching a horrible, scratched film way above us. I won’t hear the rotten sound over Ric’s munching, and he’ll probably throw you more popcorn than is good for you. We’ll hear a chorus of growling tummies from ersatz snack food. And endure cramped legs from awkward petting positions. I mean ours, not yours. Oh, well. Ric’s been a sick man. We have to humor him.”

Quicksilver growled, leaped out of the car, and lifted a leg against the metal sound unit pillar before he vanished again for his usual nightly run.

“Right on, brother,” I called after him. “I’d do that, and then make my escape if I could. You should see the women’s restroom here.”

Shhh, Irma warned. Ric’s coming back.

Ric had returned bearing a tray holding four red-and-white-striped boxes of popcorn, enough to make up a dapper barbershop quartet, and huge paper cups of soda pop. I scooted far across the bench seat and leaned even farther over to open the heavy door for him.

“Not a lot of cup holders here,” he muttered when we were back in our respective seats. “We’ll have to drink fast.”

Me, I was doing nothing that would require a second visit to what passed for a women’s restroom here. “Stall” was indeed the correct expression.

Dolly was pre–center console, pre–cup holders. I opened the huge glove compartment and lined up the drink cups on the horizontal lid.

The sound unit spouted alive, producing chuckling music and a laugh track as film trailers and commercials for long-gone car models and local businesses unreeled on the screen. I could hear rustlings and heavy breathing from the cars all around. One great heaving beast of lust had materialized in the parking lot.

Meanwhile, giant numbers were counting back from ten on the screen. From the surrounding parked cars— some convertibles, all with rolled-down windows—came an echoing shout. “Four—three—two—one!”

Meanwhile, the film started flickering on the giant graph-paper-lined screen.

Meanwhile, the sound system surged into Phantom of the Opera shrieking organ mode. Heavy block letters as distorted as the sound covered the screen.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

“It’s a contemporary newsreel,” I said.

“It’s a classic,” Ric said. “You must have seen this on the TV in your group home.”

“I turned off anything made after the nineteen-forties, pretty much.”

“Delilah, this was released years before we were born.”

“So were the film zombies! I turned off the gory stuff. Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price were scary, but elegant. And a bit too hokey to believe.”

“Come here, baby,” Ric coaxed. “You can do this. You’ve offed vampire mummies.”

“But they were real. This is just freaky-scary.”

Ric stroked my hair as I peeked through its strands to the screen. His arm was around my waist. My hand on his chest could feel the calm, steady thrum of his heart.

“I’m here for you,” he whispered into my forehead.

Yes, he was. Guess I could sit through one gory guy movie after having risked my soul to bring him back from the dead.

And the chance to see a black-and-white film blown up to Times Square billboard size was awesome.

TOO BAD THE black-and-white people on-screen weren’t my favorite CinSims, but no-name actors from the sixties. I amused myself for a while by eyeing the heroine’s ultra-short skirt and long blond hair in a shoulder-brushing flip.

Ric picked up the popcorn and pop and munched and sipped, even when lumbering, glassy-eyed zombies crammed a liver into their mouths or gnawed on an obviously human bone.

Yawn. The humans took refuge in a deserted farmhouse. They broke furniture to nail breakaway boards over the doors and windows, to no avail. They cowered and screamed, the zombies walked. Very, very slowly. And walked. Relentless.

Around us the audience gasped and shrieked a little.

Me, I fell asleep, waiting for a witty line of dialogue, on Dolly’s body-warmed red leather, in the embrace of my zombie movie-loving significant other. My silver familiar had become a calming, actually ticking, old-fashioned locket-watch on a neck chain, resting right where my heart slowed and disappeared into a dream.

THE SHRIEK THAT awoke me echoed on and on, nothing new in this movie.

Another voice had joined the panicked chorus and I knew it.

I sat upright.

“Some date, sleepyhead,” Ric said. “Where’s the fire?”

“Quicksilver’s howling at the half-moon.”

“How could you hear him with all this zombie growling and gnarfing and victim shrieking? This is classic. Nightwine should lease some of these zombie CinSims to guard his grounds and yours.”

“Something’s wrong, Ric.”

“That’s a line from the movie, Del. Aren’t you glad I’m into classic films, like you are?”

Grrr. Arghh! The dialogue leaves a lot to be desired, I thought.

“Quicksilver?” I got on my knees in the front seat to look into the back one.

My dog lofted over the car’s side, his hackles fluffed enough to masquerade as a bad dame’s good fur coat in a thirties movie. Real classics.

“Ric!” I screamed.

He had set the nostalgia food and drink on the open glove compartment lid and was staring at the pandemonium on the giant screen.

“These zombies are marvelous,” he said. “Romero, the director, got away with murder. Nude rear shots, cannibalism close up and personal, helpless humans, the living dead on a rampage. This is the forerunner of spatterpunk.”

Oh, joy.

Quicksilver was panting and salivating as he stared at the screen. I followed his intent canine gaze.

Oh.

Oh.

The zombies were walking, all right.

Right off the screen.

And they all looked eight feet tall.