Just for the briefest of moments, her face softened. “Don’t,” she whispered.
“You loved him. Like she loves me and I love her, like my friend here loves his wife, the women who I’m going to help him find.”
The scowl returned almost as quickly as it had disappeared. If my one-time friend really was both human and undead, as she’d said, it was clear which part was stronger. “Johnny is dead. They’re all dead, Creature. It just takes some people longer to realize that.”
I gave up. There was no point in arguing with her anymore. She wasn’t the queen I’d known, just a close facsimile. In any case, seconds later, she was gone, the door locked behind her, the grains of sand in my hourglass quickly running out.
“Well,” said Dara, “she’s even lovelier in person.”
I moved to the chair and tried to untie her, but my hands being what they are, or, that is, what they weren’t, it was pointless. I looked around for scissors, but the room was devoid of anything but furniture and a few yellowed sheets of paper and some odds and ends in the drawers, nothing sharp, nothing that could free her or us from our prison.
Or so it seemed.
“Look,” said Ricky, his skeletal index finger aimed at the open drawer. Inside his hand went, outside it emerged, a book of matches revealed, the logo of the club on the cover. “Sanctuary,” he read. “An apt name.”
“You’re going to burn the bindings?” I asked.
He nodded. “To start with.” He righted himself and opened the book of matches. There were but two. “First, and just checking, but are we zombies, um, water-proofed? Or, like the Wicked Witch of the West, do we simply melt when wet?” He pointed to the ceiling, to the smoke detector.
“You think that thing still works?” I asked.
He scrunched his face. “Not a clue. But there is power in this place, so perhaps. Now what about that melting thing? I mean, there’s something sizzling inside me. I hear it, feel it.”
And then I nodded. “That’s the radiation. But our skin, our flesh, it’s too leathery now, no longer water-permeable. To a point, I mean.”
“But the sprinkler would still be a good diversion, even if it didn’t melt them all,” said Dara. “Worth a shot anyway.”
“Except we’ll still be locked in here,” I countered with. “Trapped and wet.” Then I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. Because, finally, centuries after working in a club, my experience would at last prove useful. “Wait,” I said. “Wet, yes, trapped, maybe not.” I pointed to the door. “It locked behind her, automatically. But should the alarm go off, if this club met its fire safety codes, then every automatic lock will unlock. That way, anyone trapped will be untrapped and the firemen don’t have to break in anywhere.”
Dara grinned. “Oh goody, big, brawny firemen.”
“Wrong century,” said Ricky.
“Way to rain on my parade,” she retorted, pouting all the while.
Ricky gripped the matches and pointed to the ceiling. “If all goes as planned, yes.” He smiled. “The rain part, anyway.”
I grabbed a sheet of paper and held it near the matchbook. Wasn’t easy, but Ricky managed to light a match, the paper going up a second later. I then leaned over and set the rope between Dara’s hands on fire. “Yank,” I told her. The age-old rope burned quickly, so that when Dara pulled her hands apart, her bindings quickly split in two, the fire then squelched between my clapping hands. “Yippy for deadened nerves,” I said, staring down at my sooty digits.
“My hero,” Dara cooed, slowly rising from the chair.
“Plural,” said I, tilting my head Ricky’s way. “Now all we have to do is set the alarm off, start a rain shower, escape, and hope they’re too disoriented to notice our escape or the fact that we’re suddenly missing.” Dara frowned. Ricky frowned. “Um, yeah. I realize how unlikely that all sounds, but you gotta have faith, right?” I pointed to the ceiling. “In an ancient sprinkler system.” Then I grinned. “On a bright note, at least I got to dance to Donna Summer again.”
Dara’s frown deepened. “While I was being held prisoner?”
I shrugged. “To be fair, I was worried the entire time I was dancing.”
“Uh huh,” she grunted. “To be fair.”
I quickly changed the subject. “Light the match, Ricky. And then let’s get the hell out of here.”
He nodded, gripped the book, yanked the last match out, and struck it against the strip. Sadly, he struck too hard, the red tip grating against the back of the book before breaking apart and crumbling to the floor. “Uh, oh fuck,” he cursed, locking eyes with me.
“Times a hundred,” said I, looking inside the drawer again, then the one beneath it, but the book of matches we had was the only one. “Oh fuck.”
Dara sighed. “Yeah, been there, done that, now what?”
Ricky rubbed his temples and squinted his eyes shut. “Now what? Now what? Now what?” he repeated, clearly trying to come up with yet another plan. He then opened up his eyes and again looked my way. “How exactly does the radiation inside of us work, Creature?”
An odd question, but I played along. “It powers us somehow, bridges the gap between our brains and our bodies, allows what should by all accounts not work to work.”
“So we control it in a way?” he then asked.