He reached across the gap that divided us, grabbed my arm and gave it a squeeze. “We can’t turn my wife without you. Besides, that’s not why I’m coming back for you.”
“You don’t even know me, Ricky.”
He smiled. “And, yet, you’re all I have.”
I smiled. “Poor you.”
He shrugged as Blondella’s guards at last made it our way. They were no mere zombies. They were like us: thinking, feeling. After all, Blondella knew about the salt, so it wasn’t too difficult to turn one of them. “Yeah, poor me. But it could be worse.” Barely, but true.
“Just be careful then. And don’t trust anyone but Dara.”
He nodded as the guards kicked the fallen zombies out of their way before reaching us. Though stiff, like us, they could think and reason and plan. Meaning, eventually they managed to right us, holding us in place until Blondella had time to make her way down to the dance floor.
The minutes ticked by ever so slowly, the waiting interminable. Still, she was standing in front of me a while later. My friend. Undead. And wickedly grinning my way, all cat finding the canary like.
“Long time no see,” she said, bloodshot eye to bloodshot eye.
“I could’ve waited a bit longer,” I quipped, then added, “I thought you were dead.”
“The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated, Creature.”
“They worship you, you know. The humans. What few remain.” Flattery, I hoped, would get me somewhere.
Her grin went maniacal. Not pretty. No sir, no how. “Smart humans. Too bad they have so little time left.” She poked me in the chest. “Too bad you have even less.”
I shot her a grimace. “But we’ve only just found each other. Don’t you want to celebrate the grand reunion?”
She twirled her bony finger in the air and whooped. “There. Celebration over. Now you die, officially, and I’m left to rule the planet, to rule all of zombiekind, forever!” She chuckled, the sound evil, twisted, mad. Though, to be fair, she sort of sounded that way a few hundred years earlier, if memory served. Which it did, of course.
“Why bother?” I asked. “It’s like ruling bowling pins, Twinkies, trees.”
“None of those things heed me, though. And with you gone, with the humans gone, with those few who obeyed you soon to follow, the world will be eternally mine.”
I nodded. There was no point in arguing with her. Then again, there never was. Poor thing. Her wig had always been one notch too tight. “But why now? What have you been doing all this time? You knew where I was, where the humans were. It’s been over three hundred years since your, uh, death.”
Her frown sagged further on her overly-made up face, her fake hair askew, dress dusty and tattered. This was both Blondella and not Blondella, a funhouse mirror image of the drag queen I’d known so long ago. “This thing we have, that we are, it’s an infection, a virus, spreading through us, changing us.”
I shook my head. “It’s the radiation that does that.”
Again she poked me, hard. Thankfully, I had little to no feeling left in me. “No,” she hissed. “The radiation maintains what we are, keeps us in stasis, but ultimately death is the infection, snuffing all else out.”
It hit me what she was saying. “It infected you, you mean.”
She nodded, the scorn spreading like wildfire across her ghastly face. “Between the time we found you, me and the other girls, and the time we parted ways, we encountered so many of these retched beasts, fought so many of them, rekilled so many. At some point, an errant scratch must’ve occurred, a tiny prick . . .”
And, yes, my lips cracked open of their own accord, ready to make a joke at her expense. Old habits, like I’d said, had indeed died hard. Ironically, dying hard seemed to be in my near future as well.
In any case, she knew me all too well, the final poke of her bony finger nearly tearing through leathery flesh. “Don’t even think about it.” Too late. I nearly smiled, but caught myself. After all, she really was the queen bee, and tiny prick or not, she could still sting with a hell of a lot of force. “In any case, the infection spread by the time we made it to Liberty Island, and with the radiation levels still high enough in the atmosphere, in the ground, in the very water that surrounded us, the virus was able to survive, to slowly replicate.”
“Slowly,” Ricky repeated. That, after all, was the key word here.
I frowned. I knew the sad implication. “You’ve been dying this whole time, cell by cell, year by year by year. That’s why you had to wait to attack; you weren’t strong enough.”
Her grin was terrifying. “Until now.”
I felt for her, I really did, despite what she was planning. After all, it must’ve been like Chinese water torture, the drips replaced by decades, turning her into the maniac standing before me. And then a new question popped into my head. “The zombie attack centuries ago, your graves, your clothes, did any of that really happen?” And then I remembered what I’d discovered back on the island. “But that wasn’t your grave I saw, of course, which is why the combined plot was so narrow. And those weren’t your clothes in the case, just like I thought.”