And then Ricky walked in, plaid from head to toe, from his pom-pom-topped tam right on down to his golf shoes. “Well?” he asked.
“Hole in one,” I commented.
“What’s that smell, though?” Dara asked, nose scrunched up.
Ricky held up a bottle of Windex and then sprayed himself with it before tucking it into the back of his pants. “Nice vintage.”
I nodded. “And it makes your elbows shine.”
“Yep, win/win,” he quipped. “Now let’s get a move-on. No telling when the call will come in. Because, if they’re in some sort of partnership, like we’re pretty certain they are, then they certainly need to somehow communicate.”
I nodded my agreement. “Think we can make it back to the disco before the queens make it off the ferry?”
Ricky was smiling. I think. Hard to tell with a zombie. He then pointed outside. “Your carriage awaits, Madame.”
I followed his point with my eyes. They landed on a golf cart. “Marina Security,” I read aloud. “No way can that thing still work after all this time.”
“You still work after all this time,” he pointed out.
“Barely,” whispered Dara out of the corner of her mouth.
“Hey!” shouted I.
“In any case,” interjected Ricky, “I already checked. Sucker is solar powered. Yippy for the green movement.”
I couldn’t help but smirk. “Ironic, huh? They thought that the sun would save them and, in the end, it was the sun that did them in.” I looked his way. “But will it still run?”
He shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
Again I stared at the ancient, rust-covered cart. “What if it simply explodes instead?”
He winked and walked outside. “We’ll go with ironic again, seeing as the one thing that can save us will, in the end, do us in.”
“Funny,” I groaned.
“I wasn’t trying to be,” he replied.
“And she was being sarcastic,” Dara informed, the three of us doing our best to board the cart. “It’s what we drag queens do. It’s like breathing for us.”
Ricky was now sitting, sort of, in the front seat. The key was still in the ignition. “But you don’t, in fact, still breathe.”
He turned the key. Nothing happened. I tapped his shoulder from the passenger seat. “Lucky for you, though, I can still remember how to drive.” I pointed to the pedals. “Your foot is on the gas, Doc. Try the brake.”
He blushed, if only in my head. “My bad.” He tried again. The cart wheezed and buckled and chugged and died—it and me both, I realized. He tried again. At last, the motor revved, the sound glorious to my ears. Plus, it semi drowned out the constant zombie groaning.
Out of the marina we then drove, golf-cart slow, but certainly faster than had we been on foot. “Miracle,” I reverently whispered.
“That this thing is moving?” Ricky asked, turning my way, bloodshot eyes twinkling just the same.
I shook my head. “That I flew in a plane, drove in a golf cart and danced to Donna Summer, all in the same week. In Utah, we have fun by tipping zombies.”
“The cows are all dead,” informed Dara, just in case he’d missed that part.
Anyway, seeing as, like I’d said before, our brain cells stay locked and loaded at all times, we knew exactly which way to travel. And, since we were now motorized, it didn’t take us all that long to make it back to the disco and park nearby.
“Guards,” noted Dara from the back seat, pointing, gulp, dead ahead.
I looked over at Ricky. “By chance did you bring the Windex?”
He nodded. “Yeah, why?”
I pushed and pushed and soon toppled out of the cart. “Bring it and follow me.”
The following me was easier said that done and, considering there were a half-dozen glassy-eyed zombies locking in on us all of sudden, it wasn’t even all that easily said. Still, the guards weren’t approaching us, so at least, I figured, they also didn’t recognize our little group, seeing as Blondella’s orders, as I remembered it, were to kill us. Or, that is to say, re-kill us. Unkill us? I don’t know, with zombies the verbiage is never all that simple.
Dara soon appeared by my right side, Ricky by my left, the three of us ambling their way. The six of them then left their posts and lumbered our way. Suddenly, it looked like the showdown at the Not-So-Okay Corral.
“I hope you have a plan,” whispered Dara out of the side of her mouth.
I nodded. “Hell to the yeah,” I whispered in reply. Then I gazed upon the guards. “Suck it, bitches!” As Ricky sprayed them with Windex, my gaze, suffice it to say, promptly turned lethal. Zap popped my radiation beams, slaaash went their desiccated belly flesh and, lastly, ugh they all grunted, the Windex sizzling through as it mixed with their internal radiation. It was like Chernobyl on a smaller, stinkier scale: nuclear zombie meltdown.
“Good aim,” I said to Ricky as we walked around the pile of fetid, steaming corpses.
“Aw shucks,” he twanged. “T’weren’t nothin’, ma’am.”
Dara leaned in and said in my ear, “Is it weird that that turned me on?”
I chuckled. “It would be weird if it didn’t, dearest. After all, it’s been several hundred years since I’ve been that butch.”
And then she chuckled. “Says the man in the size two dress.”