In any case, eventually, there she stood. “Lola,” I whispered, the fire dancing across her face. Miraculously, she looked amazing. That is to say, without decades upon decades of wilting sunshine and other various elements forever beating down upon her, she looked much like she had, I assumed, at the time that death took a front row seat. Oh, sure, she was a bit gray and certainly dusty, but, even given all that, she was, to be quite honest, rather lovely. For a long-dead zombie, I mean. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Madame.” I bowed, or at least tried my best to.
For her part, and par for the fucking course, she stared into the nothingness and groaned. And so I took her hand in mine and led her from the theater and into the lobby, returning forthwith to the bar. Luckily, there was a full canister of iodized salt still sitting there, unopened, pure as the day it’d been packaged.
I snuffed the fire out in the sink, grabbed the salt and led us outside onto the sidewalk. The sun was fading by that point, her face lit up in the pink and red of a promising sunset. In three hundred years, I hadn’t seen a zombie such as her, preserved as she was by utter darkness, very nearly human in appearance, or at least as close as any of us was ever going to get. Had my breath not be taken from me so long ago, it would’ve been knocked out as I stood there gazing upon her.
“Ricky is a very lucky man,” I said, hoping beyond hope that I could still use the word is and not have to change it to was in the very near future.
After that, I led her back to the golf cart and tried my darndest to get us both seated, or at least inside enough without the risk of being flung to the pavement. I then looked for a spot that was relatively zombie-free. I found it in a small nearby park, behind a fence. Like everywhere else where the grass and the trees managed to come back to life, after the drought that occurred post-solar-flare, this place was overgrown, a forest nestled in front of a bleak steel and concrete backdrop.
I walked us to a slight clearing in between two ancient oaks. The zombies in the distance could still be heard, but at least muffled now, like the hum of a great machine buried deep within a factory. Again I looked at her, her face cast in shadow, the sky turning a brilliant purple and pink. “Tilt your head back, Lola,” I commanded. “Mouth open as wide as you can get it.”
She was shorter than me by far, so I wouldn’t have needed the funnel my minions usually used on us. She simply tilted and I simply poured, the salt cascading down her gullet until I was certain she had the proper dosage. I then did my best to dump a good bit down my own throat, just to be on the safe side.
“Mouth closed, Lola,” I told her. “Head facing me.” Again she did as I asked. And then I waited, eyes wide, watching intently, waiting for the inevitable. “Lola, can you hear me? Lola?” My body was abuzz as I stood there. Even though I hated doing this, hated bringing someone back, with her it somehow felt different, promising in fact. “Lola?” I said, yet again, softer this time.
At last she blinked, coughed, blinked again. A cloud of salt particles puffed through the air, glittering in the soft light of dusk like tiny floating diamonds. “What . . . what happened?” she croaked out.
I nodded and smiled, even if it was only for her sake. “You’re okay, Lola. Everything is okay.” Which was about as far from the truth as you could get. Like quoting the National Enquirer. Or Fox News.
Again she blinked. She clearly knew that everything was not okay. She had a memory, that much I knew from experience, even if it came to her in fits and starts, more like a dream than anything else. “Who . . . who are you?”
“Creature,” I replied.
“Who,” she repeated. “Not what.”
Ouch. “No, that’s my name. Creature Comfort. I’m friends with your husband, Ricky . . . er, um, Lester, I mean.”
Again she blinked. “Lester.” She suddenly looked panicked, as if she was remembering what had happened to her. Though, really, what could she know, trapped for centuries in the dark of a theater? “Is he . . .”
Dead? Alive? Was there really a difference for us? She couldn’t put a word to what we were. After all, it was a hard concept to digest. And so I chose for her. “Cognizant? Yes. But still dead, like us.” I nodded, ruefully. “I’m sorry, Lola. The whole world, or just about the whole world, is dead(ish). Except, you and me, Lester even, for now, we’re, like I said, cognizant.” I lifted the salt canister up for her to see. “Thanks to this.”
She ignored the cure I was holding. “For now?”
Figures she would latch on to that. “Well, um, yeah, you see, there’s an evil zombie bitch holding him captive in a disco in Queens,” I replied so sheepishly that I almost said baa at that end of it all.
Again she blinked. “That’s . . . a lot . . . to take in.” The blink repeated again as she stared around at the jungle that surrounded us. “All of it.” She then looked back my way. “And you’re here to—”
I interrupted her. “To find you.”
“Took you long enough.”