“Bitch.”
“Which is why you love me.”
Ricky, who could obviously hear us the entire time, merely shook his head. And then, two minutes later, we were walking up the stairs to the club. “Go in, split up and look for some sort of communication device,” he said. “And act nonchalantly.”
My chuckle returned. “Zombies do blasé quite well, sweetie, so no worries there.”
He opened the door for us, um, ladies, and we were in like Flynn. Though Flynn, I’m guessing, had never tried to infiltrate a disco filled with mindless zombies before. Lucky Flynn. The jury was still out if we would be so fortunate.
In any case, Ricky went left, Dara went right and I went straight—um, directionally forward, that is to say, seeing as the only thing straight about me was the jacket (of the straight variety) I now so richly deserved for putting us smack-dab into the belly of the beast once again.
The floor was still wet and a great deal of the zombies were still writhing about, so it wasn’t necessarily easy going, but going, nevertheless, is what I did. And then I recalled our first encounter with Blondella, when she’d screamed for her minions to kill us. The sound, I remembered, had come from above. I craned my neck up, my eyes landing on the catwalk. It was dark up there. Still, I assumed there must be rooms nearby, a reason for Blondella to hang there instead of nearer to the dance floor.
I turned. Ricky and Dara had already disappeared from my line of sight. I looked back up, then turned my head from side to side, searching for a stairwell, anything that would get me from here to there. I moved away from the dance floor, my feet sloshing through the puddles that remained, sidestepping the downed zombies as I went.
Eventually, I found a kitchen, a small number, meant, I was certain, to be used for catered events. And there, thank goodness, is where I found the elevator. I say thank goodness because the idea of finding a stairwell and then walking up it was fairly terrifying, especially so soon after our recent stairway debacle. I mean, you could fall down a flight of stairs easily enough, but gravity had a lot to say about doing such a thing in reverse.
And so into the elevator I stepped. It was small and silver and claustrophobic, not to mention horribly lit by fluorescent lights that made my skin look gray—well, okay, grayer—but it did work well enough, slowly taking me to the upper floor.
Had my heart still worked, I’m sure it would’ve been beating furiously from within my padded chest. Instead, I felt the phantom pounding, like when your hand is lopped off and you can still feel your fingers as they clutch the silk of your dress. I stared down. My fingers were clutching the silk of my dress. Go figure. And then the elevator went ding and out I stepped.
There were few zombies up there, which wasn’t at all surprising. Zombies, after all, are ground dwellers. Which is also not surprising, considering that’s where we’re meant to be: in the ground. Me, I preferred being six feet above it rather than six feet below, in heels whenever possible. Anyway, these zombies were cognizant, minions, just like the ones I had back home. Thankfully, they also didn’t seem to recognize me. Proof of this was the fact that they were neither chasing me nor tossing my nearly lifeless body over the side of the catwalk. Phew. In fact, they were doing nothing but milling about, probably waiting for Blondella’s evil commands.
“Where are they?!” I heard, seconds later, her voice bellowing behind a door.
The they in question was obviously us, and the where part was also obvious, at least to me. The only thing not obvious was where the device was that allowed Blondella to communicate with the treacherous island drag queens. “There has to be one,” I whispered to myself. “It’s the only way they can safely communicate without being found out by the others.”
I kept walking. There were two more rooms up there. One, I quickly found, was a long-unused storage closet. The other . . . “Bing-fucking-o.”
The bitch was using some sort of CB radio device. It was one of those big, bulky numbers with a hand-held transmitter. I picked it up and whispered, “Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine.” Which was about all I learned from watching numerous trucker movies on Lifetime. In any case, all I got in return was a bunch of static, meaning the ferry and the queens aboard hadn’t made it back home yet or at least weren’t on their end of the line. In other words, the two camps hadn’t communicated yet. “Thank goodness.”
Except, of course, seeing as our luck as of late was on the rather shoddy side, my ‘thank goodness’ was a bit premature.
“Drop it,” I suddenly heard, my hand frozen (more so than usual) to the transmitter.
Slowly (again, more so than usual), I turned. Blondella was standing in the doorway. And that, of course, would’ve been bad enough except that on either side of her were her goons, which also would’ve been bad enough except that they were holding my struggling compatriots in their death grips. Which meant that in order to shoot my radiation beams at them, I had to go through Ricky and Dara. Plus, there was no water around now, so even if I tore through the bad guys, it would do little good except to make them even nastier-looking than they already were.
“Checkmate,” said Blondella, with a self-satisfied smile (sort of) on her rather twisted-looking face.