Killer Queens
A Drag comedy show gets attacked by cryptids – a short horror story.
“So, I didn’t expect him to show hog five minutes later, but here we are… And that’s when the bad tacos kicked in…”
Rita Aorta turned in her chair, rolling her eyes beneath a marquee of false eyelashes. She could see an adorable little ass wiggling in front of the backdoor of the dressing room, blocking the entrance to the silhouette of a 1960s brunette Barbie. There was nothing she hated more than endless cackling. She pinched her cheeks and made the mirrors ring with her snark.
“Alright, Miss Farrah Noid, we get it, your life is so eventful! Now can we get your attention for our boring little show?”
Farrah pivoted nonchalantly on her thigh-high latex boots, and planted herself in the doorway, sizing up her elder. “That’s what happens when you see more bad tacos than hogs,” she whispered to the one giggling in the hallway.
“Did you mistake me for Maddy Morphosis!? Put your contact lenses in, Mocosa, I eat Chorizo Cubano all the time.”
A lavender velvet-gloved arm playfully pushed Farrah away, and a Victorian vampire stepped forward with a regal gait, tossing a faux-fur boa onto the chair next to Rita. “Great form, Milady, I see.”
“Druselle, will you last until the encore in that corset, or should I warn the bouncers to prepare the AED?”
Druselle leaned towards her friend, a tender pout on her pin-up lips, and the neon lights sublimely illuminated her perfectly smoothed raven-wing wig. “Save some for our audience.” Two dimples creased Rita’s cheeks as she concealed a smile. “Estrogen suits you, you look amazing, darling.” The whisper slipped unnoticed in the noise Farrah made as she pulled a suitcase into the room, panting.
“Speaking of bouncers, weren’t they supposed to help me carry my sewing machine?”
“Why do you need...?” Rita snapped. “The show starts in ten, are you going to sew yourself a thong??” Her neighbor’s hand slapped her tattooed shoulder. “You know Farrah never goes anywhere without it. It’s haunted by her grandmother’s ghost.”
“The Thai or the Filipina? It’s hard to keep up.”
“Rita, shut up.”
Druselle kept her voice calm, knowing the pre-show nerves of her partners and friends. However, she could not shake the feeling of an ice-cold fingernail slowly creeping down her bare back. She had not seen any sign of the bouncers backstage. If the audience got out of hand, some liked to look the other way; they reviled drag queens. Reapplying glitter highlighter to her high cheekbones, she scolded herself. The audience seemed quiet tonight; you could barely hear them in the comedy club. Real quiet. She glanced at the poster on an easel. “Ur-ban She-Screams!” it proclaimed in red rhinestone and blood letters, just above a photo of the three of them, pretending to shriek at the top of their lungs. Her vision frosted over, a cold gust whistling in her loins, while the girls were still bickering behind her.
“I really don’t see why Abba is on the playlist of a horror special, that’s all.” Farrah muttered, readjusting her sexy alien bodysuit.
“I lip-synced to Abba for ten years, my fans request it, I’m not suddenly going to start doing acrobatics to Reysha Rami. See, it’s my good heart, I wouldn’t want to steal your act!” Rita stood up, ready to make the audience burst out laughing with an assault of salty comebacks about classic horror monsters.
“Your arthritis rather than your kind heart,” sneered the young performer, going back to get her case of juggling knives in the hallway.
In the flashing penumbra of a dying lightbulb, Farrah contemplated the open, and empty case. She also heard long, dirty toenails, rasping on the floor, while a figure floated toward her. She cleared her throat, throwing the long braid of her wig behind her back.
“Hmm, girls? Call the Boulet brothers, they’re missing a contestant. Either that or we have an infestation issue.”
Druselle got first on her side, while Rita pivoted and ran on her stilettos to join them. The silhouette they all faced could have come straight from a horror pageant. Serpentine and emaciated, it flaunted a headdress emulating a frilled-neck lizard, made from the same papyrus-colored skin as the rest of its body. An ominous flicker lighted up behind the skull’s empty orbits, and claws that could put to shame the longest acrylic nails glowed in the darkness, framing rotating rows of fangs bursting from the irritated gum of a chest cavity. Last but not least, elongated organs gushed nimbly from its back, toward the queens.
“Keep your fucking tentacles away from us, you’re not on Grindr, levitating freak.” Rita hissed.
Farrah grabbed her arm, and pointed towards a remote, dark corner of the corridor. More movement. She used the flashlight app of her phone, and its beam swept gibbous eyes in place of nipples, thorns on bark skin, pallid, long limbs and faces, as well as furry, arched legs. With her acute eye, Rita discounted the presence of Chupacabras, but she tallied three cryptids in addition to the lich. The girls were outnumbered. Druselle bent to recover a business card, lying on the floor. Robert Merriweather, Exterminator. A mean-spirited hand had scribbled, “Let’s see how you do this time...” over an embossed axe symbol.
“Wait, it’s that vaguely homophobic guy who said we were his most ludicrous competition!” Farrah looked again at her empty case. “He trapped us, none of us came with our weapons.”
Druselle crushed the card in her fist. “I wanted to perform my burlesque act to ‘I Hate People’ by Willow Pill tonight, I wonder why…”
“Well, if you ask me, misanthropy has its perks!” Rita pulled them inside the changing room, and barricaded the door as best she could with the chairs. “That won’t last long, and those guys clearly didn’t come to kiki, so we need to improvise our defense.”
Just to be sure, she checked the door leading to the comedy club; locked, of course. A deathly silence reigned in the building. No way out, no help. She grabbed a can of hairspray and her lighter. Druselle plugged in her curling iron and hot glue pistol. “I’m too cinched, you need to take my corset off!” Farrah opened her suitcase, revealing a vintage sewing machine, and rummaged around to find a small pair of scissors. Her friend’s waspie fell on the floor in no time, and the youngest tucked the sewing accessory between her silicone breast forms. She also grabbed a pair of clear stripper heels, and gripped them like Sai.
Scraping sounds could be heard against the door, taunting them; the creatures were savoring their given superiority. After a minute, the chairs began to jerk like fishes out of water. With tense muscles, the queens took their positions in the room.
When the barricade gave way, what looked like a pair of legs covered in viscid fur leaped out first. Rita projected a powerful jet of hairspray at it, which she ignited, and the crawler received a fiery uppercut. A pungent smell of burning slapped the girls in the face, and the flaming creature crashed into a dressing table, shattering the mirror and lightbulbs. Rita switched to a fire extinguisher, and the artificial snow promptly covered the monster. She then used it as a buffer, and heard a creaking sound beneath the charred fur. As she smashed through what remained of the solid parts of the burned body, a lanky humanoid jumped on her back, and the contact with its bleached and slimy skin made her feel nauseous. Worse than an old man’s dong. A wide black slit cut the creature’s head in two, revealing needle-like teeth: this thing had the nerve to smile at her. Despite her scrawny limbs, it now gripped her body with the power of an anaconda, and Rita, struggling, retrieved pieces of broken mirrors to plant them randomly in its exposed ribs. A syrupy liquid gushed out from ashen flesh wounds, squirting on her face, and making the floor slippery. The two combatants collapsed to the ground, and with a snap of its jaws, the cryptid ripped off the queen’s wig, revealing her buzz cut. In retaliation, she elbowed the creature across the face, and it went limp. She thought she only had stunned it, however, when the creature fell face down, Rita saw a lucite heel had shattered the back of its skull, lodging in a blackish marmalade. Farrah reached out to help her up, the other heel poised to strike. “Here, take your wig.”
“Don’t even try to smile. Where’s Druselle?”
Some ruckus drew them into the corridor, where Druselle was struggling on the floor, her hair iron deepthroating the third crawler. Acrid smoke billowed from its mouth, but the thorns covering it clawed and dug into the queen’s bare abs and thighs, covering her in ruby blood. Grasping the electrical cord of her tool, she wrapped it around the cryptid’s neck, and tightened until the bark-like skin burst open, shearing at its head, which splattered against the wall in a shower of greenish lumps. Its torso lurched backward, blinking its eye-nipples; two perfect targets for Farrah’s sharp heel, which struck with ninja-like dexterity. Rita, her wig askew, hurried to help her friend to her feet. The latter was shivering. “I have a better question, where’s the lich?”
Retrieving the scissors from her cleavage, Farrah rushed towards the exit. Locked from the outside as well. She let out a string of curses, and whirled around. Her two friends scanned the space around them, ears pricked. “Where is that sound of moving spaghetti coming from?” Rita bent towards the dressing room. The pair of bashed legs wriggled like thousands of strands of vermicelli, crawling on the floor like bastards of charred caterpillars and sentient mac and cheese. They joined the pale crawler’s black brain matter, and copulated spasmodically with it before barfing in the direction of the queens’ stilettos. The queens jumped aside, but they were not the target; the reproductive goo went to retrieve the glaucous globules from the third cryptid, and resumed its coitus, swelling like a sickening leavening dough, from which soon emerged eight arachnoid legs, as well as a head, entirely occupied by an orifice, from which came a blood-curdling howl.
“Damn it,” whined Druselle, “that lich bitch has the power to raise the dead. If we don’t find that fucking twat, we’re doomed to fight resurrected Gollums until we die of exhaustion!”
Rita did not have time for a witty reply, the newborn crawler charged at them like a train, each leg raining down a hail of blows on them. With crushed heels and a taste of iron between their teeth, the two creature hunters were thrown into the next room, stunned. Only Farrah remained in the corridor. She spotted two discarded stanchions in a corner and grabbed them. She mainly used her Arnis practice to embrace her Filipino heritage, but this time, it would serve to dismantle the ugly mug of this poorly baked tarantula. The two adversaries lunged at each other, screaming, and Farrah used the metal bars to deflect the blows of the legs. Soon, loud crack-crack echoed the piercing ding-ding, and the martial arts expert managed to land powerful blows on the pulsating anal face. Redoubling her efforts, the young queen concentrated her attacks on the shrieking hole, despite the projections of putrid fumes, and soon the undead was nothing but a puree of critter spread over the entire length of the corridor.
Breathless, she used the stanchions to raise her VIP body, and noticed Druselle, who was struggling to get back on her feet too. Rita’s wig stood on end as if she had touched a Van de Graaf generator. Her body convulsed, and blood flowed from her nostrils. “The lich,” Farrah yelled, “we have to locate her invisible ass!” Druselle managed to shake off the icy grip that had enveloped her at the sight of her friend in distress, and a rush of adrenaline lit up her eyes. Grabbing a compact of loose setting powder from a vanity, she flung its contents all over the room. The particles triggered eye irritation and coughing, including to the fourth figure that appeared in the room. Revealed, the furious lich abandoned its attack on Rita to grab Druselle by the neck. She soon saw stars, and felt fangs sink into her lower abdomen. Not the gender-affirming surgery she had dreamt of. Fortunately, the pressure eased, and the lich’s sink garbage disposal moved away: Farrah was using the hot glue gun like a nunchaku.
Druselle slid against the wall. Rita smiled weakly at her, prostrate on the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Farrah enduring the lich’s electrical energy blasts, crying with rage. A strange noise, however, caught her attention to her right. In the open suitcase, the sewing machine had started up. The object jumped from its container, and slid across the ground toward the lich, hammering its needle with vigor. Reaching the creature, the machine leaped on it, plunging its sewing head into the lower back of the attacker of her granddaughter. The lich cried out in pain, and tried to dislodge it with its tentacles and arms, but the machine had already sunk deep into its spine, stitching frantically through bones, dead nerves, and supernatural fluid. The machine disappeared inside the corpse, which twitched as if electrocuted. It fell heavily to the ground, taking on the appearance of a flabby, empty intestine, except for the sewing machine, which clicked with a small laugh like an old Thai woman’s.
“Thank you, yai!” Farrah was crying and laughing at the same time. “Yeah, thanks granny!” Rita, putting herself on her elbows, cautiously tapped the top of the machine, now still in the cooled bowels. The three queens looked at each other: their wigs battered, their bodies and faces covered in blood, wounds, bruises, and strange secretions; their makeup smeared; their costumes and shoes in a sorry state. They burst into hysterical laughter.
After a while, silence fell. “Alright, that’s it for tonight, ladies. Let’s get ourselves together, and then we’re going to give that asshole who sent us this shitty audience a piece of our mind.” Druselle and Farrah grinned at Rita. You bet they were up for it.
You did not ruin a drag queen show without consequences.
I’m in a personal challenge phase, and considering my usual MCs are all in isolation, it doesn’t exactly leave room for dialogue. So I wanted to work on that, with a good dose of sass, and a truckload of gore. Somehow, this idea came to me during a conference on video games I attended (none of the games discussed sounded fun to me, so I came up with a fun idea for myself). If you enjoyed the show, you know the drill: bring this post to life by liking, commenting, and sharing! And of course, you can reward me for my hard work with a Ko-Fi donation or by upgrading to a paid subscription!
Oh, and in case you missed it, I’m quarterfinalist in the 2026 Killer Shorts Competition, in the category Short Fiction (Prose)!
What a time! I loved the dialogue and getting a glimpse of camaraderie between the queens 💜 the crytid descriptions were insane and when they reassembled it reminded me of The Thing!!!
Glitter and gore....this really hit the spot today! Thank you 💜