“I think I have a plan to kill two birds with one stone,” I offered.
Dara frowned. “No birds. And good luck tossing a stone these days.”
“Figure of speech,” said I. “In any case, it involves dressing up.”
Dara clapped—well, as best she could. “Goody!”
And now Ricky frowned. “Dressing up? In dresses? All of us?”
Poor guy. It was like Sleeping Beauty being kissed awake by RuPaul. “No, Ricky. Just me.” Again Dara frowned. “Sorry, you can dress up, too. But only I have to actually be seen.”
“You lost me,” said Dara.
Ricky raised his hand. “I’ve been lost this entire time.”
I grinned. “Then it’s time to be found, sweeties. Time to be found.”
***
We had hours to make it back to the pier where we’d originally been dropped off, according to the watch still strapped to my arm. It would be cutting it close, but we had time, pardon the expression, to kill. The marina was a nice one, so there were ample shops to visit, shops that, we hoped and prayed, would contain what we needed in order to pull off the start of yet another plan.
“Does it get any easier?” asked Ricky, about halfway there, the sun a bit higher in the sky now, the silence no less annoying.
“Walking?” I replied.
He shook his head. “All of it. The unendingness of it. The tedium, years and years of it, with no sleep to break it up with.”
I turned and looked at him. “You picked up on all that in less than a day?”
He looked my way and patted his chest. “I feel it.”
“The radiation?”
His head kept shaking. “Eternity, like this, the way we are. Unchanging.”
That was a hard one to answer. In fact, they were all hard to answer. And so instead I looked to Dara, who simply smiled in return. She knew the answer as well as I did. “We’ll find your wife, Ricky,” I told him. “That will help.”
He looked back to the street again and kept trudging forward. “And if we don’t?”
Dara sidled in closer to him. “Then you have us. And if anyone can break up tedium, it’s Creature and me.”
He chuckled. It was a nice sound to hear. Not Donna Summer, no, but nice just the same. “Trust me, I’ve seen you two break up tedium. In a word: scary.”
He meant it well, and that’s how I took it. Still, I let it drop. Because even with Dara by my side, the tedium, the unendingness, as he put it, always threatened to smother you, to trample you until you begged for the end. This was the way of the world now, the way of our kind. Like a Yoko Ono album, it wasn’t pretty, but, like I said before, it sure as hell beat the alternative.
In any case, a couple of hours later, we saw the bay and the empty pier. Soon enough, the queens would arrive. What would happen next was anyone’s guess, but at least we were now hedging our bets.
A high-end women’s clothing shop was first on our list. The shop was unlocked, the zombie sales woman finally smelling fresh air for the first time in centuries. We let her out, if only to make ourselves feel better. Besides, not like she was going to be recommending styles and colors or the latest trend, seeing as the latest trend was sun-drenched and dusty duds.
Once inside, Dara and I had ourselves a look around, while Ricky stood outside and stared at the lifeless bay.
“Is he alright?” whispered Dara.
I shrugged. “Haven’t a clue, but at least he’s still up and running, so to speak.”
Eventually, we found the perfect dress, silver, sequined and so tight that if I still had a pulse it would’ve been strangled to death. The store also had shoes. If I could’ve drooled, I would have. I mean, the closest I ever got to a pair of Jimmy Choos were the knock-offs you bought from a guy on the street, the kind where the glue holding on the heel melted away if the temperature shot above ninety. Good that I lived, past tense, in San Francisco, where ninety was the cost for lunch and not something the thermometer ever reached.
“Can you manage in them?” asked Dara. “I mean, the heels are kind of high.”
“Can I manage in them? Can I manage in them?” I looked at her with ridicule.
“Well, can you?”
I froze. “Not a clue, but I’ll give it the old college try.”
“You didn’t go to college, dearest.”
“School of hard-knocks doesn’t count?”
She helped me lift up my feet before sliding the shoes on. “Well?” she asked, staring up at me.
“Like butta.”
“Yeah, but you can’t walk in butta eitha.”
Still, like the song went, I put one foot in front of the other and soon I was hobbling out the door. Because, yes, drag queens wobble, but they don’t fall down. Or so it’s been said. And probably by a drag queen.
Next shop was two doors over. This one was a hair salon. We couldn’t free the seated patrons, but we managed to scoot out the workers. More karma points for us. Though, to be fair, they and the store both needed some heavy airing out.
This time we required Ricky’s help, though. Because getting in a dress and shoes were one thing, and difficult things at that, but putting on makeup was a job for three. Heck, if we had six zombies it still wouldn’t have been enough, but three was all we had and so three would have to do.