1 Chapter 1

Feel the Burn

I can feel it, you know—the radiation, I mean—feel it snap, crackle and pop inside of me. All these years later, decades now, centuries even, it’s like a constant hum, as if I’m a forever percolating pot of coffee.

As to real coffee, sad to say but nuh-uh—water and zombies, you see, simply do not mix. Sizzle City, girlfriend. Ouch. Not that I feel pain, mind you, but I’d imagine it wouldn’t be all that delightful to suddenly go out all Wicked Witch of the West like. Nope, all I ingested back when this whole sordid tale began, once every week or so, like clockwork, was a heaping helping of iodized salt, poured down my gullet by one of my various human minions.

Sorry, not bragging here, not that being the Queen of All Humanity isn’t brag-worthy, I know, it’s just that that’s what they were and still are: my minions. Besides, humanity, really, was nothing more than a couple of hundred surviving men and women and children, as far as I was aware.

And the other zombies? Fine, there were a few billion of them, and though they did indeed heed my every command, I tended not to interact with them all that much. Kind of like talking to a toaster, if you know what I mean. And without electricity, beyond the solar power we utilized, a toaster isn’t all that much fun to chat with. Plus, it always ended up being a rather one-sided conversation: I talked, they groaned. Suffice it to say, it wore kind of thin on an undead person, like real fast.

As for that salt I regularly swallowed and continue to swallow to this very day, the one of the iodized variety, it’s the next best thing when you don’t have potassium iodide radiation pills. See, it’s the salt that keeps the radiation in check and allows for my humanity, what’s left of it, to rise to the grayish-purple surface. Which is why, for the past few centuries plus some change, I ruled the roost from a salt factory in Utah. Funny how in life I wouldn’t have been caught dead in Utah, and then I found myself trapped there, both alive and dead. Still, without my regular iodized intake, I too would’ve been just like one of those groaning toaster-like zombies, aimlessly milling about for all eternity—or at least until those infernal internal nuclear power plants of ours goes poop instead of pop. And Lord only knows how long that will take.

So that, in a rather stiff nutshell, is me, Creature Comfort, undead zombie queen.

Wait, wait, undead zombie drag queen. Mhm, such a nicer ring to it that way, don’t you think? The silver lining to my rather tarnished existence. Or maybe let’s make that lining lamé. Goes nicely with my brown hair (sans blonde wig) and brown eyes (sans the ever-present bloodshot) and cheekbones for days (too many to count), all topping my average height and fabulously slender body. Though of course nothing else is even remotely average about me. Nothing. It bears repeating.

Yep, ages-old Creature Comfort, fabulous to the bitter end. Emphasis on the bitter. As to the end, well, I think we’ve already covered that. And based on my exceedingly limited knowledge of radiation, which is slim to say the least, plus that snapping and crackling and forever popping going on, the end ain’t coming any time soon.

As to the beginning, what made me me, well here goes: one massive solar flare equaled one dead planet, minus anyone that was lucky enough (if you saw your glass as half full) to be walled up inside anything thickly metal at the time of the blast. Me, I wasn’t so lucky (glass empty, as it were), but a few of my drag sisters were. They figured out the iodized salt routine, which in and of itself was a miracle, considering that they could barely make it through a Madonna number without miserably tripping over themselves. In any case, “Creature Comfort: Drag Queen” promptly became “Creature Comfort: Zombie Drag Queen.” From life to death to undeath to, well, this, what you see standing—well, somewhat teetering—before you today.

As for my dragged-up friends, they headed for New York, while I opted for the confines of that aforementioned salt factory in Utah. Sure, I could’ve gone with them, taken a chomp out of that Big Apple core, but even then, neophyte zombie though I was, I knew that I would outlive them (to use the term loosely) by eons. And being a zombie was bad enough without being a zombie who also had to watch her friends die, one by one by one. As in really die. As opposed to what the rest of the world did. As opposed to what I did, me and those zombies I took with me back when all this began, back when one world ended and another began, all of us sustained by the salt, plus the dozen or so salt-administering humans that were with us at the time, now totaling, many generations later, that also aforementioned couple of hundred.

But what of my friends’ fates? Honestly, I hadn’t a clue what happened to them once we parted ways. After all, my ragtag little group was out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains, and if there were cell phones still working at that time, they certainly weren’t doing so in the confines of Utah. Also, Yahoo froze the minute the blast blasted, and that was my only email account. Ditto for Facebook, forever on the fritz, just like me. In any case, within fifty years, give or take, the electricity completely stopped and by then I assume so had they. Sad but true.

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