Suddenly, upon hearing their names, Miss Voom’s hands again went up in prayer.
Dara yelled from behind me, “They’re doing that back here, too, Creature.”
I nodded. “Those are coordinates there,” I said, pointing to the screen. “The very last ones.”
“The first ones,” she corrected me. “From the beginning.”
I didn’t argue. By then, it seemed pointless. “So if this plane can only go from Utah to New York and back again, and you’ve never been to Utah before . . .”
“No fucking way!” hollered Dara.
“Way,” I uttered, if just barely. Then I tapped VaVa on the shoulder. “So, just to clarify, this is the first time you’ve ever flown this plane?”
She looked up and smiled. “Any plane. Seeing as this is the only one.”
Hard as it was, I managed to take a seat next to her, then once again buckled myself in. Tight. “So you’ve been trained to fly, but never flown.”
She nodded. “As was my mother before me and hers before her—”
“Back to the beginning,” I interrupted.
She touched fingertip to nose. “Exactly. See, not so difficult.”
“Says the drag queen flying us cross-country for the first time.”
“And hopefully not last,” said Dara, now chiming in.
“But I’m not flying,” VaVa replied. “The plane is.”
“Huh?” huhed Dara.
My face craned right. “Auto-pilot, hon.” Which explained a lot. Or just enough. For now. Because suddenly I’d had my fill. And so I simply stared out at the passing clouds, glad, at least, that there were no groaning zombies within thousands of feet of us.
For the time being, that is.
Lady Liberty
It was a long flight, several hours, and when you can’t sleep or eat or drink and the nearest Kindle fizzled out hundreds of years earlier, several hours ticks by like molasses off a turtle’s back. Still, the girls had plenty of makeup on them, so while we didn’t get any answers to our innumerable questions, at least the confusion on our faces was dressed to impress.
And then, all of a sudden, we saw it. Or her, that is to say. And, no, she didn’t look at all like she used to. Not unless I was remembering her all wrong, which seemed highly unlikely. I mean, not like Lady Liberty had been a drag queen several hundred years ago, right? Butch, okay, but a drag queen? No way.
“Liberty Island,” said Dara, her newly made-up face pressed firmly to the glass. “I forgot that’s what it was called.”
VaVa banked the plane and made a wide arc around the emerald-colored statue, her face now adorned much like our own, her toga painted a shimmering gold. And that, in and of itself, was reason to give me pause, had the rest of it not been equally as surprising to see. Because where once there had been churning water between her and Ellis Island, there was now a makeshift city, all built, it appeared, on pontoons, hundreds and hundreds of them that connected the two islands, thereby creating one giant one.
“Look at all the people,” I managed, my eyes wide, mouth agape as, necks craning skyward, they waved up at us.
“Libetians,” said Flo.
“We don’t drink,” commented Dara.
Flo shook her head. “Not libations—and too bad for you, because we make some fierce cocktails, girl—Libetians, the people down there, huddling and amassing below Libby.”
I chuckled. Seems Lady Liberty got a new name and a makeover. Goody for her. No one should have to wear the same dress for five hundred years. Trust me, I know.
As to the runway, there was a now-ancient bridge that connected Ellis Island to the mainland. It had, thank goodness, been widened for takeoff and landing. Beyond that, a narrow band of fields and crops hugged the coastline, all of them clearly converted from parks and parking lots, and all of it ringed with a dense copse of trees, obviously hundreds of years old. New York City lay in the not too distant distance, still as magnificent as she once had been, if not a tad bit more ivy-covered, slightly cracked, off-kilter. Then again, I’d always so loved all things cracked and off-kilter. In fact, I was just as cracked and off-kilter myself these days.
But what of the zombies? With this many humans so nearby, there had to have been millions of undead clamoring to get to them, even if the watery barricade would forever keep the two races separate.
“Where are they?” asked Dara, now turned my way as the plane began its descent.
“Who?” asked Ginger.
“The zombies,” came her reply. “People like me and Creature.”
Behind the fa? ade of makeup, of rouge and lipstick and eyeliner, I could still detect the cringe, faint as it was. “We . . . we do not speak of them.”
“Of us,” I reminded her.
Flo turned our way as the plane at last skidded on the pavement, the engine quickly revving down. “You are not like . . . not like them.”
“Semantics, sweetie.”
The plane stopped. There was now silence in the cabin. Almost. “They’re out there,” I whispered, squinting as my eyes scanned the horizon. “Not nearly as close as ours are in Utah, but they’re there all right.”
“I don’t hear anything,” said VaVa as she reemerged from the cockpit, hands primping her towering blonde wig, her tight silvery dress readjusted.
“But we can,” said Dara. “After all, it’s all we’ve heard for hundreds of years now. Like a buzzing mosquito, unseen but there just the same, ready to sting, to suck.”