My grin widened as I took the transmitter into my hand and pressed the button on the side. “Um, any requests?” I asked. “Some Barbra might be nice, yes?” Now, wouldn’t you know it, but my voice boomed out in all directions and every last zombie in the reach of it promptly froze, still and lifeless as mannequins. It was the effect I’d always had on them, ever since the beginning of all this, except magnified now by the speaker and magnified even further than that by the steel and concrete buildings that bounced my voice hither and yon. “Move off the sidewalk!” I bellowed. “Now, bitches!” I gazed down at the metal in my hand. There was a repeat switch near the top. I hit it. Move off the sidewalk! Now, bitches! It played and replayed, over and over again.
In other words, I now had free reign on the sidewalk, me and my lowly, weather-beaten, marina security golf cart chugging along, nothing in our path now, the undead lifelessly staring my way from the sidelines as I rode by. I gave them all a queenly wave as I made my way toward my destination, hand held up high, flicking right and left.
In a few minutes, I was on 42nd Street, zooming (ish, as usual) past Grand Central Station, the building just as it had been several hundred years earlier, still central, though far less grand, seeing as the trains and buses were way (seriously way) late. Next on my city tour was the New York Public Library. I frowned as I stared up at the great expanse of it, all wasted now, seeing as reading was no longer fundamental. In fact, the only thing fundamental was finding a woman I’d never met before for a man I’d only met just recently to save a drag queen who was my whole reason for being.
Bryant Park came and went, the grass and the trees severely overgrown, wild, jungle-like. And then, soon enough, there I was: Times Square. I pictured Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat up into the air. Would I make it after all? In any case, everywhere I looked, the lights were off, the usual sound of cars and horns and people, save for my speaker on repeat, long vanished, the joy, the spectacle of it all, gone as well. It was a ghost town, except that the dead people all around me, everywhere, had failed to give up said ghosts.
I didn’t hang around there except to take one final, long look at it, trying to remember what it had felt like so many years earlier to stand there in that spot. I smiled because, of course, like everything else in my head, the memory was easily accessible. The last time I’d been there was with the girls, just before a show, Blondella included. And then my smile promptly vanished. “Stupid bitch,” I muttered, revving the golf cart yet again.
I turned up 7th Avenue, the zombies parting in my wake, then over to 44th Street, the Shubert Theater just ahead now. It had taken many hours to drive barely fifteen miles, but at last I was there.
“Please, Lola,” I said, just beneath my breath. “Please be here.” I managed to make the sign of the cross over my chest, then a Jewish star as well, barely missing a couple of the end points. I wasn’t sure what the signs for Buddha and Allah were, so I merely ended my praying with hands clasped and held heavenward.
I then pulled the cart in front of the building. Apart from the dusty, cracked sidewalk, it looked as it had the last time I’d been there, aged but no worse the wear. The cities had fared well over the centuries, the buildings meant to last. In the towns outside of my salt factory, the wooden homes hadn’t weathered as well, most of them rotted out, gaping with holes or crashed-in altogether, taken over by the grasses and trees that returned around the same time that the rains had. But here, here in the city, especially if you were looking up, it seemed that no time had gone by.
I stood in front of the theater, the posters out front so sun-bleached that it was impossible to make out what they had once said. Even the sign on the marquee was gone, beaten into submission by time. I squinted up. “I know just how you feel,” I said to the nonexistent sign, because I too had very nearly been beaten into submission.
I paused as my hand reached for the front door. This was it. All or nothing. If she wasn’t there, if she couldn’t help me, then Dara and Ricky would more than likely turn back to their zombie forms and be released from their discotheque prison into yet another prison, with no chance of a parole.
I pushed the door open, then breathed a forced sigh of relief as it gave. I stepped inside the lobby. The only light was that which filtered through the filthy windows, plus a few cracked ones. I hadn’t counted on the darkness. My salt factory, the disco, they had power. I’d rarely stepped into any place else since the sun went all solar-screwy on us. The darkness, the stillness, was creepy, eerie, bleak.
Squinting into the dim light, I spotted a mere few milling zombies. Still, there was noise, and lots of it, coming from behind the doors to the inner-theater. I knew what that meant. There must’ve been a matinee going on when everyone was turned. Which meant that hundreds and hundreds of undead lay beyond, all trapped in their seats or shuffling around in the pitch-blackness.
Just then, a zombie walked by. Like many of the midday theater goers, this one was old when he undied, a man with a walking stick still gripped in his hand.