“Liar!” shouted the first Blondella.
“Bitch!” shouted the second, the faces in the crowd moving from one to the other and back again, like a good—or perhaps bad, as in very bad—tennis volley.
The first Blondella, the unfortunately real one, paused, grinned and then responded by lifting her hand up into the air. In it she held a pistol, the same pearl-inlayed one she held in the mural, the one every islander recognized all too well. She fired it, the sound exploding all around us. “Yeah, I am a bitch. Too bad for you.”
And amen to that.
***
Surprisingly, considering that just moments before we were welcomed as heroes, we suddenly found ourselves locked inside a room in a house just below the statue, guarded by a team of well-armed humans. Seems the pistol was the clincher when it came to deciding who the real Blondella was, especially once Lola’s wig got ripped away and the makeup smudged off to reveal the zombie beneath, the imposter easily identified. Plus, it’d been several hundred years, so of course Blondella looked like she did. Stood to reason, right? Well, that’s what we figured they figured, once she was free and were summarily imprisoned.
“I’m so not enjoying my afterlife, Creature,” bemoaned Lola as the door slammed in our faces. “Where are all the angels and the pearly gates, not to mention the unlimited chocolate?”
I shrugged. I think she had our story confused with Willy Wonka’s. Still, I replied, “The way things are looking, we might find out soon enough.”
“And then the husbands will be left here all alone,” she added, despondently, face half hers, half our enemy’s. “We can’t let that happen.”
“We need help then.”
She looked up. “Gee, ya think?”
I shook my head. “I mean, Topaz and VaVa, they said they weren’t the traitors, they implied that they knew who was. They seemed just as shocked and disturbed at Blondella’s reappearance as we did. Given that, can’t we assume that they’re still on our side?”
She didn’t look convinced. “Even after we sent the entire island after them, turned their friends against them, accused them of what we accused them of?”
I turned away from her and faced the door. “Doesn’t matter. If they recognized Blondella at the marina, if they know what she is and what she means to do to them, to all of them, then they’re still on our side, even after what we did, because we’re their only hope.”
She chuckled. “Says the man—”
“Drag queen.”
Again she chuckled. “Says the drag queen imprisoned inside a guarded room.”
I focused my X-ray vision outward, scanning it this way and that. The crowd was still outside, Blondella speaking to them, promising Lord only knew what. Though a false sense of security was what it must’ve been. Topaz was now standing by her side, the priestess by her goddess.
I switched the waves around, X-ray turning to radio. I focused the beam, aiming it straight for Topaz, hoping, praying that only she could hear what I had to say. “We need you,” I said inside my head, inside hers.
“Creature?” she replied.
“Who else?”
“But how, where—”
“Never mind that,” said I, cutting her off. “You’re not the traitor?”
She had little to lose now, no reason to lie. “I am the priestess,” she replied. “My people are who I serve.”
“Not the goddess?”
She laughed. “Hard to worship that.”
“But someone still does.”
She sighed, if only in her head. “Three hundred years have come and gone since your time became ours. One priestess rises when another falls, the teachings passed down.”
In an instant, I knew what she was getting at. “You’ve always known about Blondella then?”
Her sigh repeated. “Yes, even while I’ve venerated her and taught others to do the same. It’s my way, the way of the priestess. To say otherwise would be to contradict all that we’ve stood for, all that we’ve built.”
“And VaVa?”
“VaVa runs the ferries. She’d seen Blondella. She came to me for guidance,” Topaz explained, her voice echoing in my head. “She’s on our side.”
“But there is a traitor, at least one,” I replied. “There is someone or ones communicating with Blondella from the island.”
The final sigh was the loudest, the longest. “When the zombies last attacked, just before we came for your assistance, I assumed that Blondella had help to pull off the raid. It stood to reason. She would need to know where to attack, when, would even need help landing her vessel and debarking, even as she needed help today.”
“And do you know who helped her both then and now?”
She paused, silence filling my head. “I . . . I think so. I had my suspicions before, and when I saw said help approaching the statue just before Blondella, they were confirmed.”
“But how was she able to help?” I asked. “We destroyed their communication device. This traitor had no way of knowing that we were headed here, that Blondella was also headed here?”
“No?” she replied. “And yet you and I are indeed communicating. Besides, who’s to say that what you destroyed was their sole means. The city is full of discarded equipment, as was the island.”
I turned and looked at Lola. “Fuck.”
She grimaced. “What now?”
“Blondella,” I told her. “She must have had other ways of reaching the traitor.”
She nodded her head. “Makes sense. Bitch, it appears, is nothing if not resourceful.”