Superqueen
“Welcome,” said Blondella as she opened the door to the club, a ferocious beat instantly greeting our ears.
Up the steps we hobbled and inside we went, the water from my previous visit cleaned up, the overhead lights back on, swirling and gyrating as before. As for the music, it was very nearly intoxicating, especially considering the fact that what lay beneath was a constant groaning drone. Even Lola seemed impressed, but, then again, she’d already witnessed the alternatives.
Further inside we were led, pushing our way between the barely-animated bodies, not one of them appreciating the fine music that washed over them. Me, I ached to dance again or, better still, knock the head bitch down and go searching for my comrades. Neither, however, was an option at that very moment, at least not yet. And so I merely went with the flow. And the flow was quickly heading toward the kitchen, which meant to the elevator, which meant that we were now royally screwed.
“Darn,” said Blondella, turning back our way with mock pity on her mock face. “There’s only room for a couple of us in here. Your friends will have to stay down here and wait for you.”
Lola, it seemed, forced her smile to stay put. “What’s up there anyway?” she asked.
The elevator door opened. “My private quarters,” she replied. “Only fully-aware zombies are allowed up there. Makes it, shall we say, homier.”
Lola glanced my way, if only for the briefest of moments. I nodded at her, hoping that our hostess with the leastess hadn’t noticed. Besides, as long as Lola kept her Fountain of Youth secret just that, a secret, I knew she was safe from harm. After all, the whole point of us being there was to lull the bitch into a false sense of security, the secret being what we were using to do the lulling. If that meant that the two of them needed to be alone together, so be it. Plus, with Blondella occupied, I could snoop, could potentially divide and conquer.
So, yeah, I nodded and, yeah, inside the elevator they went and, yeah, once again I was alone with a bunch of stinking—and I mean that quite literally—zombies. And, no, I was none too happy about it, despite all the plus-column items previously mentioned. Because two seconds alone with Blondella was two seconds too long, secret or no secret.
“But what choice do I have?” I said, aloud, nothing but groans reaching my ears in reply. “By any chance do you guys have a flip side to this album?” I waited for a reply that I knew would never come. “No? Okay then, guess I’ll go check out the place instead, see if I missed something the previous times I was here.” No surprises, they groaned in response. “Uh huh, same to you.”
Outside the kitchen I went, emerging into the disco once again. Lady Gaga’s voice filled the space, bouncing off the walls and inside my head. Surrounded by the beating pulse of it, I almost felt alive again, like my old self.
Fine, I knew I wasn’t there to enjoy myself. I was there to find my husband and Lola’s husband. And so I searched, but all I found beyond the enormous dance floor was the DJ booth, a couple of bars, a storage room that was filled with booze I could not drink and snacks I could not eat, the office Dara had been locked up in before, now empty, plus one locked room, the sign above telling me it was the coat check. Clearly, it seemed to me, Ricky and Dara were upstairs, which was the one place I couldn’t go, not safely, not anymore.
Or so I thought.
As I leaned against a wall, staring out at the zombies that crisscrossed the floor, I spotted one I’d slashed during my earlier trip. Even I found it funny that hundreds of years had passed and, up until just recently, I hadn’t a clue that I had Superqueen powers. Then again, I really hadn’t a need for them before. I could, after all, control the zombies with the merest direct order; slashing and burning them seemed excessive, even to me—until the current circumstances deemed it necessary, that is.
And that put a new thought inside my addled brain: what else could I do with my radiation apart from cutting through leathery flesh?
“Can I fly?” Even if I could, right about then all I’d manage to do was slam my head into a ceiling, or worse, a spinning light array. I scratched my head, missing my wig all that much more all of a sudden. I turned. There was a huge speaker by my side. “Can I . . . hmm . . . can I lift heavy objects?” I placed my hands on either side of the speaker, made them rigid, vise-tight, then crouched, as much as physically possible, which wasn’t much at all, then uncrouched. The speaker was right where it had been before, but I was certain that I’d done some serious damage to a few of my vertebrae. “Thank goodness for those dead nerve endings.” Still, I was not to be deterred. “What else could Superman do?”
I flipped through the pages of the childhood comic books that resided inside my head, but, drag queen in training that I was back then, all I saw was Betty and Veronica up to no good. And the only super powers they had were to make Archie and Jughead pop boners—and then probably jack each other off, which was hot, but not getting me anywhere now.
That is until the comic books reached their last page or two, where the ads were placed that appealed to the nerdy kids who read them, like those Charles Atlas placements where the scrawny guy gets sand kicked in his face. And that’s when it hit me, a super power I could in fact possibly, maybe, hopefully possess. Because those ads also promoted X-ray vision glasses, and what geeky kid wouldn’t want those? Or what queen wouldn’t? Or, better yet, what Superqueen? And what, exactly, where the X-rays made up of? Drum roll please . . . “Radiation.” And radiation was something I had plenty of.
Again I turned to the speaker, the atoms somewhere deep inside of me bubbling up, that all too familiar snapping and crackling and popping rising, building, before . . . POW! ZAP! ZAM!