I turned off my internal, infernal beam and stared across the floor. Lola was gazing down at the motionless corpse on the ground, Blondella’s wig and fingertips all that remained outside the crash site. The guards, in the meanwhile, stared at one another in confusion. This, after all, was their meal ticket, even if said meal consisted of nothing but salt. They then turned to Lola for an explanation, something, anything. After all, they hadn’t thought for themselves in ages and ages.
“Oh no,” she sobbed, ever the glorious actress, falling to her knees to see if there was anything to be done. “She’s dead,” came the eventual conclusion.
“Um . . .” said one of the guards, clearly thinking the obvious.
Lola glanced up. “And gone. Forever.” To which she added, “Now you’ll have no one left to command you. What will you do?”
The realization hit the guard like a, well, ton of disco ball. “I hate this fucking music,” he replied. “Hated it for years and years and years. Always on fucking repeat. Day in and day out.”
“Amen,” said another of the guards.
“Ditto,” piped up another.
“I’m outta here,” said the first. “Grab the salt.”
“Ding dong the witch is dead,” added the second.
Ten minutes later, the guards had departed, each with a box of salt over their heads, the disco again silent save for my footsteps as they approached the crime scene. I stared down at her. Though of course I was glad she was gone, a small part of me was sad to see her go. She was, after all, one of the last vestiges of my former world, of my former self, and at one time my friend.
“Are you okay?” asked Lola, staring at me as I in turn stared at the flattened body and the now motionless giant ball, a thousand lights shooting off of it, a fabulous send-off for a fabulous, if not entirely bitchy, queen.
“I wish you’d met her in her better days,” I grieved.
“Would I have liked her?” she asked.
I chuckled. “Probably not. She wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea.”
“I hate tea,” she informed. “Hated, that is.”
“See.”
I helped her up off her knees. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go get our husband’s, Creature. Three hundred years is a long time to be apart.”
I nodded. “Three days has been too long.” I stared at her, at her face now bathed in swirling color. “I’m glad I finally got a chance to see you act, though.”
“And?” She was smiling.
“If I had a third Tony, I’d give it to you. Gladly.”
She patted my shoulder and pointed to the disco ball. “That’s all the award I need, Creature,” she said, slightly nodding her head. “Now let’s go.”
I followed her across the floor, never looking back. The past, after all, was just that. And, with Dara, I had the future to look forward to.
So to the kitchen we went, into the elevator and then up. The catwalk was now deserted, one door up there open, the other still closed. I looked to Lola as she looked at me. “Ready?”
Her smile was brighter than the beams shooting all around us. “Uh huh!”
I reached for the knob, my still nonexistent heart beating a still nonexistent rhythm in my very real, strangely unpadded chest. I smiled, trying to recall the last time Dara had seen me completely out of drag. I then turned the knob and flung the door open.
“Surprise!” I shouted, my grin quivering, quaking and promptly fading altogether.
“What the . . .” said Lola.
“Fuck,” said I, finishing her sentence.
“Where are they?” she asked, panic now blanketing the joy that had just recently been there.
I willed the radiation up again, then turned the dials and released my X-ray beam, moving it left and right, sweeping it this way and that, covering the length and breadth and width of the entire disco, but all I saw were empty spaces and milling zombies. “They’re gone,” I barely managed to squeak out.
“Gone?” she fairly sobbed. “Reverted back to zombies and released?” Her eyes went wide, manic. “We have to go find them before it’s too late.”
I grabbed her wrist. “Wait!” I then bent down, which was easier said than done, and, with my free hand, retrieved a strange object off the dust-covered floor.
Lola stared at it as it sat nestled in my upturned gray palm. “A miniature Statue of Liberty? How did that get here?”
I looked from it to her. “Dara had it. She picked it up at the graves back on the island.”
“And she dropped it before she . . .”
“No,” I said, squeezing her wrist tighter in my hand. “It was in her clutch. She still had it on her, attached to her belt. So if this is here . . .” I gripped it between my fingers. “Then she put it here.” I looked at Lola again. “She put it here for us to find. They must have taken them back to the island. This is simply her way of telling us that.”
She groaned. “But how? When?”
I shrugged. “Maybe Blondella told her guards that if anything should happen to her that they take our husbands back to the island. Maybe the traitors need them as bargaining chips. Who knows? All we know is that they’re missing and headed back there.”
“Presumably,” she made note.