I let go of her wrist. “We’ll go outside and do a quick sweep.” I forced a comforting smile. “Three hundred years of being with someone, Lola, day in and day out, with no sleep, no breaks, let me tell you, I know Dara, know her almost as well as I know myself. And, trust me, this little souvenir was left here on purpose.” Heck, I’d almost convinced myself. As if I had a choice, right?
“Fine, Creature,” she said, her face resigned, defeated looking. “You’ve got me this far. I trust you.”
In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure where I’d gotten her, or any of us for that matter, but I was glad she still had faith. As Huey Lewis used to sing, that’s the power of love. Then again, Huey was dead now, so what did he know?
We exited the way we came in, avoiding the smooshed queen as we did so. Thankfully, if I could still use the word and not get struck by lightning, our chariot awaited us. That is to say, the guards either didn’t notice our golf cart or were to busy escaping to do it any harm. We then drove around and around, the cart’s speaker on, my voice projected outward, searching for our husbands.
An hour or so into our mission, Lola put her hand over mine. “Stop,” she said. I stopped and turned her way. “If they had turned zombie and were released, they couldn’t have gotten far, correct?”
“Correct.”
“So they were taken to the island then.”
I nodded my head ever so slightly. “It seems so, Lola. The only other scenario I can think of is that they took them from the disco and released them farther away from here, but, apart from being sinister, which, don’t get me wrong, Blondella was, I don’t see the point in that. She had allies, maybe just a couple or more, but, for whatever reason, she had them. And they’re clearly back on Liberty Island.”
She sighed. “I hate the thought of leaving here in case they’re just around a corner somewhere.”
“But, if they’re headed back to the island, we’re giving them too great of a head start. As it is, they’re probably already there, the salt running dangerously low or completely out already.”
“Rock and a hard place?” she groaned.
And though I usually quite enjoyed hard places, not this time. “We have to go, Lola. Now. Back to the island and, fingers crossed, find them there.”
It was now her turn to nod. “Go,” she said, now staring straight ahead, her hand again in her lap, a warm breeze blowing the hair behind her.
So go I did, heading back to the marina once again.
“Um, in case you didn’t already realize it, I don’t know how to drive a boat, Creature.”
“Neither do I,” I admitted. “But how hard can it be?” A nervous chuckle worked its way free from between my cracked lips. “Look how well I can drive a golf cart, though.”
“I hazard to guess that the two are quite different.”
Not surprisingly, she wasn’t far off the mark on that one. In fact, she was, pardon the expression, dead on.
***
We made it back to the marina a short while later. It was then we encountered a problem far greater than the fact that we didn’t know how to drive a boat, namely that it had been more than three hundred years since any of them had even been started and, unlike the golf cart, there were no solar-powered vessels to be found, if they even existed in the first place. In other words, we were screwed, and not the good kind of screwed either.
“The ferry that the Libetians use,” I told her, “has been in continual usage all this time. Such in not the case for any other vessel around here.” I looked and looked and then added, “And whatever Blondella used during her attack isn’t around here either.”
Lola nodded her head and walked to the end of the pier, staring out at the rather tranquil bay in front of us, the sun glimmering off the water. I shuddered, despite the beauty of it. Water, after all, was the enemy of the undead, or, more to the point, to the radiation that kept us up and running. On the ferry, we were high above it, safe, but standing so close to it now, a mere couple of feet above, well, it gave me the creeps, truth be told. Because once you see a zombie go up and/or down in a puff of smoke, melting like so much rotted flesh, you tend to stay clear of water, let alone a whole body of it, whenever possible.
I say all this now, admitting my well-based aquaphobia, because Lola wasn’t suddenly pointing out so much as down.
My eyes landed on her arm, then hand, then to the water below. “No to the fucking way, Lola.”
She turned and looked at me. “It’s the only fucking way, Creature.”
I cringed as I gazed upon the tarped kayak down below. It was one of those long and narrow numbers, the kind used in competitive rowing or perhaps to travel down the Nile with, transporting Cleopatra. And, queen though I may be, I was a land-locked one and smartly so.
“Not to rain on your little floating parade, Lola, but there are only two of us, and . . .” I began to count. “Ten oars.”
She was still turned my way, but pointing beyond where I was standing. “Take your pick.”
I also turned, hundreds of zombies milling around behind me, all of them clueless as to what she had in mind—lucky them, not so lucky me. “Please tell me you’re joking.”