Queens of the Apocalypse

Chapter 4

CHAPTER ONE

THE LEAST OF OUR PROBLEMS

“That b***h!” shouted Blondella as a silver can whizzed by me.

“Which b***h?” I asked with a heavy sigh, Lee Press-ons held up for close inspection as the can rolled around the floor before coming to a rest against my fabulous Jimmy Choos. Knock-offs, yes, but the guy on the corner promised me that no one would know the difference. Or at least no one past the first few rows—when the lights were dimmed, of course. And who could possibly spot the glue that held the heels on anyway? From past the fourth row, I mean.

“Which b***h?” came her world-weary reply. “Kit. b***h used up all my hairspray yet again.”

I turned and glanced her way. Blondella Bombshell had her hair jacked up so high it was a wonder she didn’t topple over. Then again, drag queens frequently wobble, but they never fall down. When they’re sober, at any rate. Which, thankfully, we rarely were. “One errant match,” I made note in reply, pointing at her platinum hive, “and KAPOW!” Then I turned back to the mirror and began my daily moisturizing routine.

She chuckled as she rummaged around for a second can. “Be that as it may, Destiny, it was mine, not hers, and she is, as I said, a bitch.” The second can was promptly found, another coat applied to the towering, temporarily inferno-less mess that sprouted dangerously above her head like a garden desperately in need of a good pruning.

I nodded. “She’s only a b***h when she’s low on sugar.”

The chuckle repeated as the heady aroma of jasmine-infused aerosol wafted my way, an ozone hole seemingly widening above our heads. “And exactly what year was Miss Kit Kat low on sugar? She practically owns half the M and most of the & with a lease on the second M as it is.”

Blondella had a point. Still, who was I, Destiny St. James, to cast the first stone? Or in Kit’s case, boulder, because one measly stone would barely leave a dent in all that girdle-encased rotundity. Yes, though far be it from me to say it—to her face, as opposed to behind her wide expanse of back—Kit looked like a cross between Aretha Franklin and Jennifer Hudson, pre-Weight Watchers. And by “cross” I mean take Aretha and take Jennifer and mash ’em together, and voila, you get Kit in size, color, and diva-demeanor. Seriously, she should’ve been counting her blessings that the music at the club was so blaringly loud, because otherwise, she’d be lip-synching to nothing but the squeaking floorboards beneath her size twelve feet all night long.

In any case, in she walked, or at least waddled, a few moments later, the steel door shutting behind her. And yes, I said steel. See, the dressing room had once been a meat locker back in the day, the club itself a converted restaurant located just outside The Castro. Pretty to look at, but, like my shoes, only in dim lighting and from a distance. Or if you weren’t sober. Then again, like us, our patrons rarely were. Thankfully. Because tip ratio equates to drink ratio. In other words, the drunker they were, the better we looked and the more do re mi dough (hairspray, moisturizer, candy bars) for all of us.

“Bitches!” Kit shouted in cheery greeting, a Snickers bar waved like a wand above her head.

“Yes,” said Blondella icily. “We already covered that.” She gave Kit the onceover—twice. “Girl, you look like ten pounds of potato in a five-pound sack.”

“Says the queen in her fifties wearing the fifteen-year-old’s dress,” came the snarky reply as Kit took her squeaking seat in front of her makeup mirror. “Was there a rummage sale down at the high school, hon?”

“Thirties,” came the teeth-gritted reply. “Not fifties.”

Kit turned and squinted at the ever-shellacked Blondella. “If you say so.” Then she giggled and turned back to the mirror, lipstick tube momentarily replacing the Snickers bar.

In truth, none of us knew exactly how old Blondella was. None of us, after all, had ever seen her out of drag, out of makeup, or out of her monstrous expanse of wig. If she had a driver’s license, it was about as well-hidden as the pores on her face. Best guess, though, I’d say forties. High-end. Low in the dim light. And yes, there wasn’t anything above fifty watts within the club’s walls. Mandatory. Drag queens’ law. Enacted and brutally enforced by all ten of us girls. Well, boy-girls. Um, men-bitches, really.

In any case, terms of endearment at an end, we went back to work on our faces. With the club opening in a few hours, we barely had enough time to prepare. Especially once the other performers arrived and war promptly ensued. Because ten of us and six makeup mirrors made Vietnam look like a night at Disney.

So before all hell broke loose, we eagerly primped and preened and glossed and coated and sprayed and glued and—groan—tucked merrily away.

Though, of course, all hell did in fact break loose soon enough.

Seriously.

SERIOUSLY!

All hell and a good part of Oakland, for that matter. BOOOOM! we heard first, with a couple of extra vowels thrown in the middle for effect. Then the floors shook, the steel screeched within its brick encasing, and Kit’s belly Jelloooed, again with a couple of extra vowels in the middle. And then the three of us shrieked, very unlady and certainly unmanly like.

“Earthquake!” shouted Blondella. “Duck and cover.” She quickly ducked under Kit’s broad cover.

Me, I dove under the table my mirror sat upon. “That didn’t feel like any earthquake I’ve ever felt before,” I managed, body trembling, manicured hands grasping the table legs, mouth in a pant. “That felt like an explosion. Like a friggin’ bomb went off.”

“Or a case of Blondella’s hairspray,” offered Kit, kicking the drag queen at her feet.

Blondella grunted. “Hammer-toed b***h. Stop it,” she whined. “That was an earthquake, and you’re the thing in here least likely to crumble under your own weight.” She paused and reconsidered her remark. “Probably.”

Then we all sat there and waited for the aftershocks. Because any earthquake that large had to have mighty-ass aftershocks. Loads of ’em. Only, all we heard was our collective breathing. The earth, it seemed, had raised a ruckus and then promptly piped down, which, all in all, was very unlike itself.

“Huh,” huhed Blondella ten minutes later. “Guess that was it. Let’s go survey the damage.”

“Gin bottles better be in one piece,” groused Kit.

“Amen,” I agreed, hand resting over fake chest at the mere thought.

And so out we went, my heart racing as the steel door swung open and the three of us peeked outside. A trio of relieved sighs followed as we emerged, the club just as we’d left it. Then we rushed up to the bar, only to find that all was a-okay as well. Deathly silent, yes, but in one glorious piece, gin bottles included. Phew.

“Guess we eluded catastrophe this time,” said Kit, kissing the side of a clear bottle of booze, lipstick smudge left in her hefty wake.

Still, something didn’t seem right, didn’t feel right. “Sure is quiet, though,” I made note. “No one milling about, no cars driving by, no sirens or honks or shouts. Nothing.”

The other two craned their necks up, ears pointed to the front door. “She’s right,” said Blondella. “Nada.”

“Weird,” agreed Kit, a lemon-sized lump gliding down her less-than-slender throat.

We each moved forward, side by side by side as we headed for the door, my heart beating in my chest, the padding doing little to hide the obvious lub-dub pounding in double time. Slowly, I opened the door, the sun so bright that we were instantly blinded, hands quickly raised to block the rays as a tear streaked down my face, my mouth going all Saharan on me.

Sunlight: the bane of a drag queen’s existence.

Too bad that turned out to be so literally true, though.

“Look,” croaked out Blondella, finger pointing left, right, left again, up and down the block, her mouth gaping open, eyes wide, sweat smearing through all that caked-on makeup.

“What the…” I barely managed.

“f**k?” Kit finished my train of thought.

“They’re not moving,” whispered Blondella, finger still outstretched as we took in one lifeless body after the next, all of them flat on the sidewalks, in the street, hunched over steering wheels, crumpled against buildings, the absolute silence of the grisly scene completely unnerving. “Are they…”

“Dead?” It was Kit again.

I moved away from the door, tentatively stepping a few feet up the sidewalk to the nearest body, a woman on her back, eyes staring up into nothingness, chest still. Dry heaving, I bent down, two fingers held out just above her jugular. I pressed down only to retract them a fraction of a second later.

“What’s wrong?” shouted Blondella, gripping the club’s door.

I jumped up and turned. “She’s searing hot,” I yelled back. “Burned my fingers.” Blondella scratched at her wide expanse of wig, while Kit just scratched at her wide expanse. I, in turn, hurried back their way, terrified that whatever happened to these people was soon to happen to us as well. “She certainly looked…”

“Dead?”

I punched Kit in her arm. “Stop doing that,” I told her. “And yes, dead. Hot and dead. Baked where she stood, by the looks of her, and of… of them.” And now it was my turn to point.

“But how?” croaked out Blondella. “Some sort of weapon? Kills everyone but leaves the buildings intact?”

“Everyone but us,” amended Kit as she wiped the sweat off her furrowed brow.

“We were in the meat locker,” I reminded them. “That must’ve protected us; the steel, I mean. Blocked whatever it was that baked them.” And still my finger kept pointing. “But how many of them are there exactly?”

Blondella reached into her front pocket and removed her cell phone. She looked something up and then dialed. “Police,” she mouthed as we waited. And waited. And waited some more. “f**k,” she soon cursed, then dialed 911, only to repeat the curse a minute later. “No one’s answering. What if they’re all…”

I turned to Kit. “Don’t say it.”

“But what if they are?” she replied, tears welling up in her chocolate-brown eyes. “What if everyone is… is…”

“Impossible,” I said. “It has to be localized. If it’s a weapon of some sort, it can’t go beyond a few miles, right?”

We all took our cell phones out, all of us dialing. And dialing. And dialing, until my fingers began to cramp and sheer panic ran up and down my back like a runaway freight car.

“No one is answering,” said Kit, voice cracking. “No one anywhere. And I called friends in Europe, too. All I got were messages, answering machines.”

“Same here,” coughed Blondella.

“Same here,” said I, head low as I imagined all my friends and family, all of them looking like the bodies scattered around us. “But it just can’t be. What if the phones aren’t working properly? What if the satellites are down?”

Kit shook her head, jowls jiggling. “Then we wouldn’t have gotten rings on their ends and bars on ours.”

And then, when all seemed lost, Blondella nearly dropped her phone. “I have a message,” she informed, almost breathless now. “From Johnny. And it came not five minutes ago.”

Johnny was Blondella’s supposed boyfriend. Supposed because, like her age and boy-face and body, he was a mystery, never seen or heard of except in passing by Blondella herself. “What’s it say?” I asked, panting again, a sea of sweat pouring down my face, my makeup thankfully waterproof and surprisingly holding up much better than I was.

She pressed a button and held the phone to her bejeweled ear. It didn’t stay there long, but a smile quivered on her face just the same. “Are you okay?” she said.

Kit chuckled. “Girl, I’ve been a hell of a lot better.”

“No,” said Blondella. “That’s what the message said: are you okay?” Again she stared down at the phone screen. “It came just after the blast. My phone was on vibrate. I probably didn’t feel it since the room itself was already vibrating. But it definitely came after the blast; I’m sure of it.”

I grabbed the phone and also stared down. It was impossible to tell when the blast hit, but it was certainly around the time of the call. Plus, there was the message itself: are you okay? Meaning, was she okay after what had happened. “Johnny’s in New York, isn’t he?”

She nodded, gulped, clearly understanding the question’s implication. “His business is there.”

Kit was also now looking at the phone. “What kind of business is he in?”

She looked at each of us in turn. “Shipwrecks.”

“What, is he some sort of pirate?” asked Kit, always eager to make a dig, even at the worst times. And, clearly, this was the worst of times. Ever. Wait, let’s go bigger with that. EVER!

Blondella shook her head. “Salvages them. Up and down the Eastern coast.”

And then my own smile quivered, as did Blondella’s. Kit, suffice it to say, remained lost. Perhaps her sugar had indeed run low; that always seemed to do the trick. “I don’t get it,” she freely admitted, reaching into her other pocket for a Milky Way bar. Eagerly, she bit down on it, her eyelids fluttering upon contact. When they opened up again, she too was finally smiling. “Wait, don’t those salvage boats have mini-subs?”

Blondella’s smile returned as well, brighter this time. “Now she’s getting it.”

“So he could’ve survived whatever it was that blast was,” I said. “If he was in a metal boat beneath the water’s surface, I mean. Right?”

She didn’t answer. In fact, she was already turning and heading back inside the club, the two of us running after her. Or at least, me running. Kit, well, she was just barely managing a rapid waddle, the remnants of her Milky Way getting sucked off her fingers.

Still, we followed Blondella back inside the dressing room. Seconds later, she was flinging gowns and makeup into every bag she could find, just like a whirling drag Dervish.

Kit grunted as she sat down and watched. “’Bout time you got rid of that crap.”

Blondella turned and glared. “I’m not getting rid of it, you fat f**k. I’m packing it up.”

“Um, and why is that?” I hazarded to ask.

She paused momentarily and wiped the sweat from her forehead before she pushed her t**s back in place. “I’m going to New York. Johnny is alive. I know it. And I have to get to him. Fast.”

“Call him then,” said Kit, saying it more out of a dare than anything else, knowing full well that Johnny was likely more dead than alive, that there might’ve been a delay before the message went to voicemail. I knew it too, but didn’t especially feel good about rubbing salt in the gaping wound.

Blondella stood there, staring at us. “I… I already did. He was the first person I dialed.”

“And?”

Her lips went reedy thin. “He didn’t answer.”

“And?” Kit crossed her thick arms over her ample bosom—no padding needed, just some cinching to create the effect of real girly boobs. It was oddly effective if not a tad bit disconcerting.

Blondella closed the gap between them. “And I’m going to New York. And I know he might be dead, but I don’t care, because he could just as easily be alive, like we’re somehow still alive. And for all we know, maybe lots more of us are alive and it’ll just take us leaving San Francisco to find out. And if you want to come, then come, but, for the love of God, please shut the f**k up already and start packing.”

I nodded and walked toward her, my hand on her shoulder, a comforting squeeze administered. “Blondella, you saw the bodies out there, the cars. The roads will be blocked, even if the devastation is simply localized. There’s no way we can drive out of here.”

It was then that Kit snapped her fingers. Or at least tried to. Because that was like snapping two sausages together and hoping for a popping sound. “The TV up at the bar,” she said. “Let’s see about that localization.”

“Good idea,” I said, already heading out of the dressing room, the others behind me. The TV flicked on a moment later as Kit poured us all a round of tequila shots. “Or, um, maybe not such a good idea,” I added as I pressed the channel button on the remote, each station with their emergency messages flashing and not one with a live person staring back our way.

“Doesn’t prove anything,” said Kit, downing her glass in one fell swoop, eyes squinting as the alcohol burned down her throat. “The blast. It might’ve just knocked everything out, everything, it seems, but the electricity.”

“She has a point,” I allowed.

Blondella grimaced. “No points,” she said, finger aimed Kit’s way. “All rounded edges. In any case, yes, the blast might’ve knocked out the TV.” She turned on the nearby stereo, static crackling through the speakers, the grimace widening. “And the radio.” Then she held up her phone, only to find that there was nothing new on Yahoo News past the blast time. “And the Internet.” She sighed and slammed her shot glass on the bar. “But I’m still going to New York. Sitting here and waiting is not an option. Johnny needs me. I can feel it.”

“Girl,” said Kit. “What you’re feeling is that too-tight wig of yours cutting off the oxygen to your pea-sized brain.” Then she held up her hand before the verbal sparring could pick up again. “But I agree with you on one thing: waiting here doesn’t seem like such a hot idea, despite the ample quantities of booze at our general disposal.”

I groaned and downed my shot. “But that doesn’t solve our problem,” I told them. “How do we get out of here?”

It was then that the door burst open, a thick shaft of light pouring in as we three, um, girls screeched like a record album with about fifty scratches running across it. “Least of your problems,” he said, standing there in jeans and boots and a tight denim jacket and not the least bit dead and scorching like all the others. Though he was awfully hot just the same.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “And why aren’t you dead?”

He chuckled, the sound riding shotgun down my spine before swirling around my midsection, prick pulsing upon impact. Then he raced to the bar and also poured himself a shot from our tequila bottle, a double, gulping it down in a heartbeat. And speaking of which, mine went into overdrive when he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun before setting it down on the bar. “Funny thing that,” he replied, with a satisfied belch.

“Funny ha-ha?” asked Kit. “Because that gun of yours looks anything but.”

He shrugged. “Okay, nix funny and go with lucky.” He grinned and downed a second shot, also a double. “Lucky for me, anyway.” Then he jumped up and locked the door behind him. With us inside. And suddenly that midsection of mine was knotted up so tight that it could just about dock the Queen Mary. The boat that is. Not the performer who went on just after my act. If I even still had one, that is. If any of us did.

“Um, not exactly good timing to rob the place,” I told him, voice trembling just about as much as my legs were by that point. “The register is empty, and the world seems to have gone to pot.”

“Speaking of which,” he said, reaching into his other pocket, a joint held up like a beacon in the night. It was promptly lit, promptly toked, and then, thank goodness, promptly passed around. “Now, as to the lucky thing,” he continued, inhaling all the while before letting out an acrid blast of smoke that wafted in swirls as the light from the darkened window hit it. “I was down the street in my bank when that weird sonic boom s**t happened.”

“But, again, how come you’re still alive?” asked Kit, a second blast of smoke blown up, the joint held out to me next.

He nodded. “That lucky thing.” He took another shot, another toke. “I was inside the safe deposit vault when…”

“BOOM!” blasted Kit.

We all jumped, the stranger included. “Sorry,” I said. “She does that a lot. Too much sugar.”

He nodded as he stared her way. “I can see that. In any case, I went outside to see what was up, and everyone was dead. Everyone in the bank, everyone in the street, everyone in their cars. All dead. Which meant that I needed a drink more than a fistful of cash all of a sudden. Hence my entry into your fine establishment. And the gun I grabbed off the guard, just in case.”

I too nodded, eyes still fixed to said gun. “You were, it appears, safe in the vault. Same for us in our dressing room. Must be all the metal, blocks whatever it was that happened. But, uh, if you don’t mind me asking, uh…”

“Max,” he informed, hand held out, contact made, heart lub-dubbing all over again.

“Yes, Max, a pleasure,” I said. “And I’m Destiny, and this is Blondella, and this is Kit.” I pointed to each of us in turn. “But if you don’t mind me asking, what did you mean when you came in here and said least of our problems?”

He snapped his fingers and hopped off the stool, motioning with his upheld digit that we should follow him, which we did, to the window to the right of the now-locked door. “Ah, right. Nearly forgot. Geez, that’s some strong weed.”

“Got that right,” agreed Kit, teetering at his side.

“Anyway,” he continued, with a stoned grin. “See, the dead were scattered everywhere, just like I said.” He paused. “At first, that is to say.”

And no, I didn’t like the sound of that. Especially when he stared out the window and pointed outside. And then I knew what he meant by at first and the least of our problems. The dead, you see, were even more of a problem for us now that they were no longer quite dead. Or at least not the prone or crumpled or leaning-against-buildings kind of dead.

“Holy crap,” I managed, a lump the size of Cleveland lodged in my throat.

“Ain’t nothing holy about that,” said Kit, pointing at the throng that had amassed outside, all of them very much erect. And not the good kind of erect either. No sir, no how. Not by a long shot.

“But how?” squeaked out Blondella.

Max shrugged and again turned our way. “Beats the hell out of me,” he said, turning to go sit on his stool again. “One minute they were dead, the next, well, undead. Sort of. Like, uh, mostly dead but with privileges. And by the looks of things, they know we’re in here, and they look kinda hungry, if you ask me.”

Blondella pointed at Kit. “Buffet.”

“Funny, tired queen,” she said, slapping Blondella’s hand away. “And f**k you very much.”

Max suddenly squinted at each of us in turn. “Wait a minute. Tired queen?” Then he looked around. “What kind of bar is this?”

I grinned. “Drag bar. Couldn’t you tell?”

He shook his head. “Place is f*****g dark as night in here.”

The three of us smiled knowingly and nodded in sync. “We know, sugar,” said Blondella. “We know.”