ZA Chapter 10: Lady M and the Resurrection

Lady M stood in the vast wasteland. The scorching sand, still aflame in some places, seared up through the soles of her flat-heeled black leather boots. She scanned the desert. Hot wind whipped her long blood-red hair tipped with yellow into her pale eyes. Lady M didn’t blink. A scowl creased her freckled forehead. Bodies lay as far as the eye could see, scattered and burning across the desert. Not human bodies, as far as she could tell, although the stench of rotting human was not much different from the decay stink of annihilated zombie.

No. These were the remnants of the already undead.

M scowled again. This was not the work of Cam and the Cleaning Lady. The haphazard manner in which these minions of Selig had been dispatched did not resemble Cam’s slaughter-style in the least. As impulsive and obsessed as Cam could be (that’s all he talked about—zombie heads and the myriad ways they could explode, the directional trajectory of the gore, the satisfied smile a good noggin-pop brought to his lips), he always hit his mark—the head. He was a professional, one of the best Quellers in the sector. And as annoyingly passionate as he was about his job, M appreciated his commando diligence in this war. She trusted him above all other Quellers, whose statistical burn-out rate had increased exponentially since the return of Retsuc and his followers. Yes. Cam was crucial in this fight. And Virgil, with his quiet ways and deep thoughts, was vital. If anything happened to him….

Yet Virgil was the reason she was out here in this goddess-forsaken wasteland in the first place.

Damn you, Virg-- M shook the thought from her head. No use wasting energy.

“Well, Cam’s obviously not the only one out here with a mission,” Lady M breathed, peering out across the zombie littered desert. The thought of having to deal with a rogue zombie killer made her sigh in exhaustion. She had statistics to get to, after all, and hunting down a sloppy Queller wannabe was not on her list of things to do today. Especially one who didn’t have the decency to clean up after himself.

M rolled an organic cigarette, extra fat to help her concentrate, and crouched down to light it off a twitching zombie’s flaming ass. Definitely not the work of Cam and the Cleaning Lady. Cam may occasionally and out of sheer rebellion go for the genitals (what’s left of them) before blasting the head, but he would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, never ever leave behind a wriggling zombie. Or a hundred. All the deciduous fuckers needed was a few minutes to regenerate to the point of function and they’d be back at it. And M had statistics to get to, goddamn it.

She unsheathed a long, heavy skinning blade, put the heel of her dusty black leather boot between the twitching zombie’s bugged eyes and added a little weight. A stream of green-black goo arced into the air out of the top of its head, sending the most god-awful stench into the dry wind. M didn’t flinch. She often found the reek of burning zombies intoxicating, a turn-on even. She'd learned much from her zombie dissections and autopsies of late, information she hoped would better arm them in this much-too-long war with the undead.

M extracted her heel and put the blade under the thing’s charred chin. The razor edge cut easily through its necrotized flesh. The zombie stopped twitching. M backed up, took a few long strides, and kicked the head as far away as possible. She preferred using her hands in most cases, snapping spines and ripping heads from necks bare-fisted, but she had a nicely rolled cigarette to finish and some healing to attend to and didn’t want to get her fingers all slimed up with zombie goo. Not yet anyway.

Straightening, M took a deep drag and let the wind pull the smoke from her lungs. She whistled and Cyrus and Billy Ray came loping from the stinking morass, leaping to her shoulders and chattering away.

“Where is she, my darlings?”

Cyrus smiled a mischievous capuchin smile and pointed a long finger into the distance. M noticed the tiny bauble ring on her scout’s slender wrist and grabbed the monkey’s hand.

“And where did you get that, young lady?”

Cyrus nodded her head up and down, a deferential smile on her deceptively sweet face.

“Okay, you little thief,” Lady M said in capuchin clicks and growls. “You can keep it. But if the zombie you took it off of comes looking for it, don’t come crying to me.”

Billy Ray screamed with delight, pulling Cyrus’s ear. Cyrus smacked her brother and leapt from Lady M’s shoulder, pausing to make sure she would follow.

M took a final drag from the world’s most perfect cigarette, checked her piglet-skin satchel one last time, sheathed her knife, and followed her trusty scouts out across the desert. It wasn’t long before they found the girl lying in the dusty dryness, nearly burned beyond recognition.

Lady M crouched down and brushed the girl’s blackened hair off her charred face.

“Hello, little one. It’s me, M. I’ve come to bring you back.”

M got to work just as the sun dipped below the horizon, casting shadows across the writhing zombie bodies strewn across the vastness. She would have to hurry. As much as she liked kicking stringy zombie ass, there was more important business at hand. Namely, saving the only person who knew every detail of Selig Retsuc’s diabolical plan for the Zombie Revolution. The girl had done well, using her seemingly innocent and brainless wiles to extract Selig’s secrets during that long, loving embrace. Damn Virgil for making unfounded assumptions about the girl, sacrificing her in favor of that slut Meg! Virgil was due for a serious ass-kicking, and M had special boots just for that purpose. Chains, too. And whips.

M straddled the girl's limp body, rubbing oil of peppermint into her wounds and speaking the ancient incantations she had studied with shamans from all over the world since she was very young.

“Great powers of dark and night, let there be a spark of life light!”

The girl coughed, her body convulsing with the streamers of light that suddenly sailed from the dark skies above. In the glow of it, M saw a crooked, twisted, one-armed body rise from a stinking pile of corpses.

Billy Ray covered his head as Cyrus wrapped her tiny monkey arms around her brother.

Lady M retrieved the tapping stick and ink from her satchel, set the blue-black pigment into the sharp point, and began the inscription on the girl’s left shoulder, much as she had done for Virgil as he teetered between this world and the next years ago. That had been a particularly brutal zombie battle, and M wasn’t sure the inscriptions carved into his embattled body would even take. But they did and Virgil had come back stronger, more capable than ever, though a little more nasal when he spoke now. The same would be true for the girl lying limp in the hot sand (the stronger and more capable part, not the nasally voice part) … if the zombies awakening all around them could be kept at bay long enough.

Damn you, Virgil. Damn you!

Lady M tapped, penetrating the girl's flesh all the way to the bone, the blue-black ink like lifeblood gifted from the gods and goddesses themselves. The girl groaned in pain. Summoning life back into a body was not an easy task, nor was it without consequence. The girl would bear the scars of this process for the rest of her life, scars that marked her as Other and a woman to be feared, for Lady M planned to instill in the girl the insights of the ancients… her legacy.

“Great powers of light and day, let this woman have her say!”

Another stream of bright white light and the young woman convulsed once more, flailing her fists at Lady M’s face.

“Get off me, you stinking rotten zombie bitch!”

Lady M smiled, holding the girl's wrists. “Hello, Lucy. Welcome back.”