Eve Morton

From urban legend to legends on stage, the tone shift from Magda Mayfly to We Will Survive is–to me–a wonderful form of whiplash.

And the premise for We Will Survive was even better. It was also one of those few instances when I write a story specifically for an anthology, and it gets in!! First try!!

“We Will Survive” was written for the Vinyl Cuts Anthology by Scary Dairy Press. Make a scary story but also have a tie in to some form of class rock music in some way. Oh, but don’t reproduce lyrics!

Challenge accepted.

Throw in some drag queens lip syncing their way to Gloria Gaynor and rescuing kids from a gay conversation camp and you pretty much have the whole story. It was a BLAST to write while my first kiddo was napping and I was experiencing a reprieve from the morning sickness of my second.

I truly hope you enjoy it (and survive) too!

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We Will Survive

By Eve Morton

“How long has it been?” said Jan.

I glanced at my watch, then at the clock on the idling car’s dashboard. I wanted the times to be different, but they weren’t. “At least a half hour.”

“Shit. We’re screwed. We’re—” 

I put a hand on Jan’s shoulder, but Jan brushed me away, so I turned down the radio instead. As much as I wanted to keep listening to the sultry stylings of Gloria Gaynor, the song only reminded me of what Jan already knew and what I had refused to acknowledge for the past thirty-five minutes. We really were fucked. 

Only three days before, we’d all been getting ready to perform our latest number in the Haven Bar, a place for queers, freaks, and all those in between. Jan was in the Miss Terri get-up, transforming Jan’s current buzz cut into something more dazzling with a blond wig and a dress that cascaded down slim and ever so delicate shoulders. Markus, or Miss Mary Quite Contrary, had been in her fur number, the one with the thick collar and long sleeves to disguise the big footballer’s shoulders. Though Markus had not played the game in years, he often acted as the bouncer for Haven, so he had to cover up the muscles when he played his alter ego of Miss Mary. She was a stunning woman whenever she took the stage; a strong soprano with a show person’s charm. Last year, when she’d sung “Happy Birthday” to Haven’s owner, she’d done the Marilyn Monroe version. Just stunning, just wonderful. 

I felt a tear slide down my cheek now, just thinking about it. Markus had left to get us gas when we’d run out on the side of the road in Arkansas, and it was now clear he was not coming back.

“Why are we doing this?” Jan asked me, running a delicate hand through his short hair. “I mean, we hardly know this kid. We could just turn around right now. Go back.”

“And do what?” I asked. “File a missing person’s report for Markus, which will just be ignored because he’s a big guy, or a faggy queen, and no one cares about us? Not to mention the other kid.”

Jan looked down at his lap in shame. He’d looked the same when he’d called his father last Easter to wish him a happy holiday and a happy birthday, and his father pretended to not know who he was. I have no son, the stereotypical answer from all homophobic dads. Jan had been upset, but put on a stunning, cathartic performance of Miss Terri that night, as if to channel his father’s pronouncement. He was not his son anymore. Damn right, Miss Terri was a vixen queen who helped the less fortunate.

I reminded Jan of that day now. “Your dad left you. My family left me. And we know Markus never really had a family to begin with. This kid—”

“Barry,” he corrected me, and I knew he hadn’t forgotten his heart.

“Right. Barry. He’s just like us. He’s come to watch us every single Saturday night for the past six months. Then he up and disappears. We know what’s happened to him. It’s what almost happened to all of us, what would have happened to us had there been such a thing as conversion therapy when we were his age.”

“But there wasn’t. We just ended up homeless.”

“And fabulous.” I tried to grin, but it was hard. The Arkansas woods around us, and the fact that Markus was still missing, got under my skin. The feeling seemed to have a life of its own. The moment we truly crossed into the Deep South, passed the freshness of Georgia’s peach stands and into the swamps of Louisiana, I felt as if we were surrounded by ghosts. Civil War soldiers; slaves; and of course the missing men and women who lay stranded like us, trying to channel Blanche Dubois and depend on the kindness of strangers, only to be taken off the earth.

I shook my head and tried to focus. Panicking was going to get us nowhere fast. “We have to keep going.” 

“But how?” Jan’s eyes were deep blue and utterly desperate. “Markus was bigger than both of us. And if he’s gone—”

“Then we need to rely on what we’ve always been good at.” I looked into the backseat, where our bags had been tossed. Once we realized Barry was gone, and that his parents had sent him to one of those horrible rehabilitation camps that ran ads in the back of religious magazines, we had set off on our mission. There had been almost no discussion, just utter understanding between the three of us that we had to do this for the inner, abandoned child inside all of us. So we threw all of our clothing in a bag, plus some cash we had lying around and a map of the South that we found in the Haven’s lost and found. 

It’ll be a fun road trip, Markus had said. If nothing else.

Oh, we’d been so naive. Three days ago, all that worried us was whether we’d be able to break a kid who was not related to us out of a camp his parents had probably paid good money for. We had some half-baked notion of walking in, claiming to be his cousins and that there was a family emergency he needed to attend to. Since Barry often worshipped us from afar at the bar and asked us for advice between sets—advice that mostly amounted to finding the right shoes in a man’s size ten, not how to escape zealot family members—we were hoping that he’d recognize us out of makeup. If he didn’t, we were planning on humming a few songs to prime his memory pump. And then he’d go with us, and we’d introduce him to being a newly independent queer kid, and everything would be hunky-dory.

Everything was not going hunky-dory. And without our strongest member, I had no idea what to do next. 

Except to get dressed.

“I think we need a disguise,” I said, and then shook my head. “No, no. I think we need to become who we really are. That’s the only way we can fight this place. That’s why Markus is missing—this would have never happened to Miss Mary. The land swallows you whole. You may as well be in a good skirt while it happens.”

Jan looked at me as if I was crazy. Then as if I was a genius. He opened the passenger side door and, after a careful look around the woods where we were stuck, began looking through our travelling wardrobe in the backseat. “What are you waiting for, Miss Robin?”

Power pulsed through me at my stage name. Oh, I missed her. The badass girl who could leap over tall buildings, a better Dick Grayson than the real Robin. And now we’re crime fighters, too. We looked through our clothing at the back, found the best outfits, and began to get dressed. 

The entire time, I swore the woods were watching us. Be it ghosts or hicks or even Markus, lingering on the sidelines and waiting for us to emerge as our true selves, I could feel eyes on me. 

And I thought, we may as well give them a final show.

*

Once we were dressed up, it was easier to find gas. We still had to walk from our broken-down car back towards the gas station we’d spotted off the interstate but when we did it together it was less scary. We were also dressed in a toned-down version of our typical garb. We weren’t performers right now; we were just women out for a walk because our car had broken down. 

No one at the gas station looked too closely at either one of us. We were lucky, in a way. Jan’s hands were small and delicate, and though his voice was deeper, I’d sung for years in a choir and had better control over my cadence in the everyday waking world; we could mix between the genders, an array of masculine and feminine, and no one would look too closely. I asked softly for gas, holding a scarf over my Adam’s apple, and then asked the kid behind the counter if he remembered a big burly man coming through here and asking for gas an hour earlier.

“That queer?” he said. He twisted his pockmarked face in disgust. “Yeah, I sold him gas.”

“He’s a little funny, but that’s just because he’s from New York,” I said, and hoped that the explanation made sense. The kid just shrugged, reiterated that he’d sold him gas, but nothing else. 

“So, he left here?” I asked.

“Yes’m.”

The rest of the conversation was like talking to a brick wall, and I felt as if we were already risking so much. We walked back to the car, arm in arm, as the sun was setting. 

“It’s supposed to be summer,” Miss Terri, Jan’s alter ego, complained. “What happened to the sun staying out all night and beach parties and fun things?”

“We’ll get them, my love,” I told her, gripping her arm hard. “We just have to survive.”

When Miss Terri began to hum the beginning bars of Miss Gloria Gaynor’s hit, I thought it was the best idea we’d had so far. We hummed together, repeating the chorus like a call that would get us through this night. Because once there was gas in the car, and no other sign of Markus, we had to keep going forward. 

Our plan pretending to be Barry’s cousins had now also changed. Our clothing made us feel powerful, and since we’d managed to get out of the Arkansas woods with them once, we didn’t want to take any further chances. 

“We have to go in as women,” I said, once we were only a few miles from the camp. We’d been passing billboards as we turned deeper in Arkansas, each one proclaiming a line from the Bible about damnation and salvation or broadcasting an alert about another missing kid with a black and white photo. None of them were Barry, but so many looked the same: wispy hair, a genuine smile, and a fae presence that left me with a faint stirring of recognition. Oh, these boys. These were my boys and they were in trouble. 

Miss Terri had been quiet, but when I met her gaze, she nodded. She reached down into her purse and grabbed more makeup and started to put it on using the car’s mirrors for guidance.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“We’re going in as ladies of the night,” she said as if it was obvious. “We’re someone’s dates now. Someone in the camp, or someone working at the camp. Doesn’t matter. But they’ve called for us, so we gotta get in somehow.”

I debated the merits of this. Either they’d see through the thin disguises we had on now, call us the faggots and queers and sinners we were to them, or they’d see us tarted up like Jezebels and try to get us. Or maybe we’d dazzle them. Maybe there would be just enough ambiguity that we could slip in while the confusion was still fresh, and pluck Barry to go home with us.

Along with any other boy who wanted to come along. 

“You think there are lesbians there, too?” I asked.

“Of course. These people make no distinction. Probably make ’em play house together, too. Like some sick Norman Bates nonsense.”

We both shuddered. I hated Psycho. Just gave dressing up a bad rap. As Jan continued to put on more makeup, fully becoming the elegant Miss Terri in the flesh, I continued to drive. The road changed from paved to dirt. She was done with her eyes by then, so the shaking didn’t rattle her around too much. But the lights that I had once relied on for the road, and the lingering sun, were now almost completely blotted out. The trees surrounding the dirt road became thicker and thicker. I slowed down on impulse, feeling as if I was going into a jungle.

And that feeling of being watched came back. Ghosts or goblins or hicks, but definitely not the eager eyes of the audience I was used to. “Miss Terri,” I whispered. “I need to put on makeup.”

She handed me her purse, her makeup, without caring. She could feel the eyes, the strange gazes from the woods, too. 

“Maybe we should—”

“We’re not turning back,” I said.

“No. But I think that’s the camp. And we can’t drive up like this. We need to keep our car as a getaway vehicle.” She gestured into the distance. I was convinced she was crazy, that her vision was going, but the orb that I thought had been the moon rising on the horizon wasn’t that at all. There was no moon in the sky that night, I would later look up. Just blackness, just stars—and this single lamp outside the camp. 

We pulled the car into thick brush between two trees. I finished a quick slather of my makeup, hands shaking as I did, and then we walked towards the light. We held hands, arms and elbows interlocking with each step forward. Each crunch of the dirt and rocks under our feet made us jump. Each snap of the trees in the woods filled my stomach with dread. I wanted to go back. Desperately so. But each time I remembered that look on Barry’s young face when we performed, longing and despair mixed into one, and I crept forward. I wished someone had done this for me. I wished someone had done this for all the missing boys I’d seen on those billboards as we came in.

“Hello?” called a man’s voice from our left.

We turned to see a shadowy figure wearing thick army coveralls and a camouflage jacket. He was clean-cut, and something gold glimmered around his neck. A cross, maybe. He was part of the camp.

“Can I help you ladies?” he asked. 

“Yes. We’re a present for one of your guests.” Miss Terri smiled and leaned close to him. She was acting brilliantly; only I saw that her hands shook as she made up our cover story. “Is Bobby inside?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The man seemed baffled by our presence, but he was also polite. And when asked a direct question by a lady, or someone who seemed like a lady, you answered. “I didn’t know it was his birthday.”

“It’s a bit early, yes. But we’ve been called in as special entertainment.”

The man looked from Miss Terri to me, and then back again. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“No?” 

“No.” He reached for something in the side of his pants, and in that split second, Miss Terri jumped on him. She wrestled his hand away from whatever was in his holster, and then used her much more massive body weight to pin him to the ground. When he struggled, she reached behind herself, grabbed a high heel, and gouged it deep into his stomach. He cried out in pain and released his hand from his pocket. 

“It’s a fucking walkie-talkie!” Miss Terri threw the device away with her free hand and huffed. He struggled underneath her as she tried to feel him up and down for weapons. There were none. “What do I do now?”

I grabbed the walkie-talkie instead of answering. I pressed the button to listen and heard murmurs of conversations, then I let it go and addressed the man we had pinned. “How many of you are touring the base?”

“What?”

“How many of you?” I got close to his face. “You have this walkie-talkie to talk to someone. So, how many someones?”

He struggled under Terri. He spat at us. Miss Terri held his head against a rock, threatening him in muffled gasped, until he finally mumbled, “Three.”

“Three?” Miss Terri repeated, but he was silent. She threatened him with the rock again, but he said nothing else. 

So she knocked him out. 

“Okay,” she said, looking to me. “Don’t worry, he’s not dead. But let’s take care of these brutes before we go inside.”

We did the smart thing and stuck together, walking clockwise around the perimeter until we stumbled on two more men just like the one we’d found earlier. Miss Terri distracted the closest man, while I approached the other one from behind. On a silent count of three, we knocked them out, but didn’t kill either one, because we did not want to be murderers. It was tough work, though, and both of our knees were bloody and parts of our dresses were torn by the end of it. 

“We have three now.” Miss Terri gestured with her head, her hair only slightly out of place, towards the front gate of the camp. We could see three main cabins now, and the one with the light on was the largest. “Let’s subdue whoever’s there, then move on to free all the troops. I sort of like the idea of the woods being filled with free gays and lesbians.”

I chuckled, feeling the adrenaline pumping through me. But I also looked over my shoulder. I still felt like we were being watched. The men we’d knocked out, we’d also tied up with zip ties  we’d found on their persons, but there was something else. Something more.

“Hey, wait,” I said to Miss Terri, hurrying to catch up as she took the lead. “Did that guy mean three including him, or three—”

I didn’t get a chance to finish my question. Only paces in front of me, Miss Terri stepped into the light of the main cabin, and a different shadowy figure ran out of the dark and tackled her from the waist and into a thatch of trees. I froze and saw nothing, only heard grunts and screams of a struggle. My bladder seized with fear as I heard the piteous cries of someone losing a fight.

I backed away from the cabin’s light and ran towards the woods. I was all fear, all animal instincts. I ran and ran, twigs and branches scraping against my dress and my face. My heels broke off, nearly tripping me, so I was running in flats and then in bare feet. I was almost shirtless, shoeless, and bleeding from both knees and one cheek by the time I reached our car. I got behind the wheel, only to realize that Miss Terri had the keys. Her dress was the only one with pockets. And it had seemed like a good idea at the time for her to carry them, like this whole thing seemed like a good idea only three days ago.

“Oh no, no, no.” I sobbed onto the wheel, shuddering and shaking with fear. I kicked the floor, the dashboard, and then the radio. Something blinked in the car’s engine, and for a brief second, the car came to life. A snippet of the Gloria Gaynor song came on the air. It left just as quickly, and no matter how many times I kicked the car again, it did not return. Only her voice in my head lingered, the memories I had of performing it with my two other darling ladies.

Markus was gone. Jan was gone. 

It was only me now.

And I was determined to survive. 

*

I dressed all in black, the outfit I usually wore to weddings and funerals. And baptisms, had I ever been invited. I thought of it as my “birth and death” dress, the little black number that all girls needed whether they were bio-girls or something else. I’d packed it on a whim, as if this new adventure would have ended in Barry’s eventual christening into a new life. I shimmied my way into it under the starlight of the Arkansas woods. I trembled as I slipped on new shoes, sneakers that did not go with the dress, but would help me as I went back into the woods and took back the only thing I could: Barry. 

And hopefully some dignity, too.

When I returned to the camp, I made sure to take a different pathway. I walked through the woods with careful footfalls and over fallen logs; I waited and listened and hunted like my father tried to teach me when I was younger. I was almost grateful for my violent, alcoholic father in that moment, though hunting anything still left me feeling weak. But the one thing he had given me before he kicked me out was the patience to wait for whatever you wanted, be it doe or buck or to save the queer kid from a life of horrible repression.

I soon saw the men with walkie-talkies. Four of them. Damn. Each one we’d tied was now untied. I verified their numbers at least six times before I followed them with the grace that I still had from years of performing.

“What should we do with the prisoners?” one of them said. 

“Didn’t one get away?” another spoke up.

“Damn. We’ll need to canvass the woods.”

“With who? We need to watch the freak we still have. How are we supposed to find the other?”

“That girly man is gone. Scared.”

“Right. But the other one, the big one that got away. How do we get that back?”

“Hmm. Maybe if we use the campers?”

The four of them looked at one another and let out a laugh. “Of course,” one of them said. “Make them do the dirty work. I’ll wake them.”

I waited on the edge of the forest, not moving from my position, as the four guards scattered into the base camp again. Lights flicked on in each one of the cabins that had once been shrouded in darkness. A whistle sounded, followed by a bell. And then masses and masses of boys and girls, none no more than seventeen years old and some seeming as young as twelve or thirteen, spilled out of the cabins. They all gathered in pajamas—drab and grey—in front of the base camp. The four men—boys, really, they had been so young–in army jackets with walkie-talkies took a secondary position while a man, tall and bone-thin, stepped out of the main cabin to address all of them. He wore a preacher’s outfit, sleek and dark and accented with a golden crucifix. When he spoke, he swayed from side to side as if this was a congregation.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have intruders on the base,” he proclaimed with high theatrics and in a Southern drawl. “We have caught some of the miscreants, but I am afraid their power of sin is no match for us. We need your help to scatter the evil that has laid waste to this camp and tried to turn it into a den of iniquity. You know your missions here.”

The crowd tittered. Everyone seemed too tired and yet utterly afraid to move. The preacher man leaned towards the crowd, cupping a hand by his ear. “What do you say?”

“We are here to live clear and righteous,” the crowd said in a dull, flat voice. “We will fight for the light of the Lord.”

“Very good. Now go!”

The four boys walked through the crowd and gave them large sticks to use as weapons. At first I thought they were merely walking sticks, or the type of poles you’d give teams in Capture the Flag, but one teenager slammed it into the ground. It stuck up out of the dirt like a bitter knife. 

“I’m not using this,” the boy said. “I won’t kill anyone.”

Barry. I knew that voice. That was Barry. I wanted to run to him, put my arms around him, but my joy was cut from me by a powerful slap. One of the guards had hit him, and then lectured him on the use of force. “You will protect the camp. You will protect your right to live a just life. Say it now.”

“I will protect the right to live a just life,” Barry said, though the words were clouded by tears. 

I wanted to vomit and cry along with him. But I forced myself to slink closer to the tree I was watching from, trying to blend into the night. The rest of the cabin’s inhabitants scattered into the woods. The movement sounded like a harsh echo, a wave of violence and sighs from the mouths of babes who did not want to do this, but only wanted, like we all wanted, to survive. 

Barry moved slowly with his weapon. He was half-hearted in all his actions until the guard disappeared into the base camp with the preacher. They truly were letting the young ones do their dirty work. Maybe they were calling in reinforcements or doing something sinister behind closed doors—but it was here, as the main antagonist ostensibly went to bed, that I thought I had a chance.

I tiptoed to Barry. He was skimming close to the edge of the forest, looking more at the flora and fauna around him than truly in search of intruders. I had to be careful to not scare him, so instead of calling his name, I hummed. 

He froze, holding his back rigid, utterly afraid. When he recognized the song with a shoulder sway, I braved to say his name. “Barry.”

He turned towards the sound but made no other movement. I emerged from the forest and hoped I didn’t look too beat up. He needed to recognize me for this to work. He needed—

Barry ran into my arms, tossing his stick on the ground as he did. I embraced him easily, and when I thought of all I had lost to get here, I held him even tighter. “Come on,” I said, though my voice trembled. “We do not have a lot of time to waste.”

Before we ran deeper and deeper into the woods, he grabbed his stick. Good boy, I thought. Thank you for that. I had no idea how we were going to escape beyond the woods. All I knew was that we had to run. Whenever we couldn’t run anymore, we were going to have to fight. As I repeated the words to “I Will Survive” in my head, I used it like a chant to spur myself forward. Like these small soldiers and the young men who trained them probably used Bible verses to convince themselves that what they were doing was right and just and true.

Only, I was right. I may not survive this, I thought as we reached the edge of the woods and the world became darker all around me, but I know we are right. I regretted nothing of this strange errand. Except maybe that I definitely tore my dress.

“What do we do?” said Barry as we burst out of the woods. He was out of breath, like me, and I had stopped us where the car was parked. 

But the car wasn’t there. 

“No, no, no,” I moaned. Damn. We were so close. We were … I got on my knees, my wounds stinging as I did, because there were tire tracks. The car had been here. I wasn’t lost. 

“I don’t understand.” Barry stabbed his stick in the dirt, frustrated. “What do we do?”

I wanted to scream at him that I was out of fucking ideas. This was it. I had nothing else, other than to embrace our death with dignity. And as I saw bright headlights come towards us, I knew that was the next step. 

I was ready, world, to be taken into the arms of whoever was on the other side. Maybe I’d see Marilyn and Judy and the other queens I’d loved. I remained on the dirt road, my arms open in supplication.

“Oh Mary,” I cried. “I’m ready to come home.”

The car stopped in front of me. And Markus stuck his head out of the driver’s side window. “I’m not Mary right now, but it would definitely please me if you got in this car right fucking now.”

I gasped, touching the headlights in front of me as if they truly were a heavenly vision. The car was back. The car was running. Miss Terri was in the passenger seat—looking a little worse for wear, as did Markus—but they were there. My Miss Mary and my Miss Terri, back in my life. Alive!

A door slammed. Barry had already gotten in the backseat while I was still on my knees. Oh, that was ironic. I rose quickly and got into the other side. We’d left the stick behind, an abandoned flag for an unconquered land, but it didn’t matter. Not even as swarms and swarms of other kids came out of the woods with their sticks, along with the preacher and his minions, and surrounded the car with a violent aggressive swarm. We had gas. We had a vehicle.

And we had Miss Gloria Gaynor on the stereo. 

“You ready?” Markus asked, though he was already driving. “Better put on your seatbelts. We’re gonna need to go fast and rough.”

“My middle name. All of them,” I said just as Markus floored it. I hit my head on the back window, seeing stars, but I didn’t care. Hours later, with the camp behind us, we would figure out what to do next, where to go next, and who to perform as next since our drag names were now discoverable. We’d bandage ourselves and sleep the restful sleep of the free. 

Until then, though, I was going to enjoy the music.

END