“If memory serves, dear one, you don’t know how to play chess.” I sneered her way. “Or balance your checkbook, or correctly work a cell phone, or set the clock on your TV, or—”
“Enough!” she interrupted—which was something, at the very least, that she still did quite well. Bitch never did like sharing the stage, after all.
“Let them go,” I said, trying, and failing, to keep my voice even, especially as my eyes locked with Dara’s.
“Sure,” she replied.
“Sure?”
She nodded, repeating as she had the first time we were in this damned-similar predicament, “After you’re dead and after their salt runs out, then sure, no problem.” The bitch sure as hell had a one-track mind.
“I’m already dead,” I retorted, anger now rising, boiling up.
She shrugged. “Semantics.”
Things weren’t going well, I knew. But I also knew that I had to do something. And, since I obviously couldn’t rescue my friends, at least not at that very moment, I still had one chance to throw a monkey-wrench into her sinister plans. And so I charged up my batteries and widened my eyes. “You asked for it,” I spat.
“You can’t,” she barked. “You’ll slice your friends open.”
I released my beams. “Not what I was going for.” And out they shot, slamming into the CB radio instead, which instantly began to sizzle and spark and belch black smoke. “Whoopsie,” I then added, once I was sure that the two enemy groups were now permanently incommunicado.
“You bitch!” she hollered.
And now it was my turn to shrug. “Takes one to know—”
“Silence!”
“You know,” I said, ignoring the command, “you’ve become quite the drama queen in your old, old, seriously old age.” I again focused my beams. “And if you don’t let my friends go, that pretty, ugh, face of yours is going to have more holes in it than your head. Which I believe is really saying something.”
Immediately, she lunged behind the guards. “You’ll never escape,” she said. “I turned the water off to the building. That trick of yours won’t work again.”
“Apart from wrecking your, ugh, beauty.”
“Guards!” she then hollered. “Seize her!”
Now then, the guards, not caring about their, ugh, beauty as much as Blondella did, started moving toward me. Though with their captives, who were still struggling, held tight, their moving, which was sluggish at best, was no walk in the park. In other words, I had a moment to think. And to act.
Again I turned, again charging my beams, only this time I fired at the window behind me. It shattered and split a moment later, glass raining down two stories below. I moved a few feet over and stared down. We were in the rear of the building so rather than staring into the street, I was staring into a dumpster, ages old garbage still piled high within.
“Ta ta,” I then said, leaning in and over before I too rained down two stories below. Because those who fight and run away live—oh the irony—to fight another day. And fight was what I had to do, to rescue them, to rescue my Dara.
I landed on my back, staring up at the blue sky above. And then I was staring at Blondella, whose head was now poking out the window. I slashed her face with a concentrated beam even before she knew what hit her.
“BITCH!” she bellowed.
I grinned, despite the awful circumstances I was in, and despite the garbage I was in, and despite the fact that I was flat on my back with a dumpster beneath me and not a minion in sight. “Yeah, I think we covered that already,” I replied. “Next time it’s your heart. Oh, wait, you seemed to have lost that a few hundred years ago.”
Her face was no longer poking out, but I still heard her loud and clear. “Just like you lost your friends here, forever, and, soon enough, all the remaining humans as well. And then I’ll be sending an army for you, to tear you limb from fucking limb.”
And with that she was gone.
Though certainly not forgotten.
Try as I might.
I forced a sigh. “Creature Comfort, table for one,” I lamented.
I then recapped my predicament to myself: I was in a dumpster; Dara, my life, my love, had been drag-napped (again!); my lone minion had been taken prisoner and would soon revert back to zombiehood; and the one group of possible help was full of traitors who would rather see me dead(er) than victorious over a stark-raving-mad drag queen from hell.
“Yep, that about covers it,” I said as I teetered back and forth and back and forth until, miracle of miracles, I was able to roll over onto my face and into a bag of garbage that had been sitting out in the sun and rain for centuries. “Gross,” I coughed, then pushed myself up and managed to grab on to the edge of the dumpster. A moment later, after again falling, albeit from a much lesser height this time, I found myself face down on the ground. “Not a good day,” I groaned, but at least I was safe and, uh, sound. Though my new dress had certainly seen better days.
Still, I had little time to revel, because, knowing Blondella, I was sure she and her henchmen were on their way down to capture me at that very moment. I turned my head to the side and spotted the rear door to the building, the one I was certain they’d be pouring out of at any moment. If that happened, all hope, which I now had very little to spare, would be gone. Again I groaned and then mustered all the energy to shout, “Any zombie within the sound of my voice, run this way!”