She was right, of course. But, then again, so was I. Even a queen deserves a break every once in a while, every century or three. “Look, Dara, VaVa promised we’ll be back, and we will be back. But for some odd reason, these queens came looking for me and also seem to need me; might as well find out why. And maybe get some fabulous new clothes in the bargain. Not like they have any back in Salt Lake City, right?” Trust me on this one: the answer is a resounding no.
In any case, I knew that last bit would be the nail in the coffin, so to speak. “Fine. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen?” She laughed. “We die?”
Not likely.
At least not again.
But close. Oh so very, very close.
***
After we filled the plane with a few sacks of salt and a couple of funnels, we took our seats: me on one side, Dara on the other, Ginger and Kit in front of us, VaVa, gulp, in the cockpit.
“Um, excuse me,” I shouted toward the front of the plane. “But how, exactly, could you possibly know how to fly a plane? Do they have lots of planes on this Liberty Island of yours? Some sort of flight school for wayward drag queens?”
She revved the engine and then turned back our way. “This is our only plane. And, as a result, the only one I’ve been trained to fly. Just like my mother before me was trained to fly it and hers before her, going all the way back.”
“Back to what?” asked Dara.
“To the beginning,” replied Flo from catty-corner to me, a candy bar suddenly in her hand, ruby red lips now dabbed with chocolate brown. I was surprised to see the bar there. It had to be as ancient as, well, me. As to its origins, I’d learn of that soon enough.
“The beginning of what?” asked Dara as the plane began its way across the parking lot, picking up speed as it did so, VaVa’s head again facing forward.
“The beginning of the House of St. James,” replied Ginger.
I nodded, ruefully. “The beginning of the apocalypse, you mean.”
“We do not speak of that,” all three of them replied, the plane suddenly lurching—it and my stomach both.
I stared out the window and down, my minions staring up, my fellow zombies doing their best to do the same. The factory looked impossibly small from up there, the undead horde impossibly large. So I gazed into the approaching cloud bank instead. “You don’t speak of it? You’re joking, right? It’s all around you.”
Flo was now on candy bar number two—or two thousand, it seemed. “We never joke, sugar. At least not without the promise of tips.”
Dara rested her head back into the seat. “But why do you need tips if you don’t need money?”
“It’s the thought that counts,” replied VaVa, the plane banking to the east as it slowly gained altitude. “Besides, we look at it as a tithing.”
I scratched beneath my wig. Not because it itched so much as I was confused. Yet again. “A tithing? But isn’t that a religious term? Like paying taxes to a church or something?”
“Exactly,” said Ginger, as if it was obvious. Though, it seemed, with these three nothing was in fact obvious.
“Okay,” I said, moving on to a different topic, seeing as I was clearly missing something here. Or they were. And I was betting it was them. “Just out of curiosity, how did you find us?”
Ginger turned around, confusion blanketing her face. And with so much makeup on, it was more like a tarp than a blanket. “What do you mean how did we find you?”
“Well,” I replied. “Not like you could Google us, right?”
“Goo . . . what?” said Flo.
“Never mind,” I replied. “Just tell me. How exactly did you locate us, all the way from Liberty Island to Utah? In fact, how did you even know about me in the first place, about us?”
Ginger was still facing my way. “You’re joking, right?”
“Not without tips,” deadpanned Dara. Emphasis on the dead.
“Um, just humor me, please,” I said to the lot of them.
It was again VaVa’s turn to answer, her face now forward as she flew us ever higher. “The factory is the only place we could go. It is where we knew you would be. Must be.”
“You lost me,” I freely admitted.
“No,” said Flo. “We found you. Sort of.”
“Sort of?” said Dara.
“Well, one cannot find something that is not missing,” she replied. “We knew where you were. The plane knew where you were. This is the only place the plane can go. Are you now, as you said, humored?”
Not even close. Not even fucking close. Still, a lightbulb did pulse above my head all of a sudden, dim though it was. And so I unbuckled my buckle, asked Flo to help me from my seat, and then trudged the few feet to the front of the plane. “Show me,” I said to VaVa. “Show me why the factory is the only place the plane could go.”
She pointed to the screen that was embedded in the dashboard. Instantly, I knew what they were all getting at. “Destiny and Kit and Blondella,” I said. “They flew from Utah to New York.”