Mademoiselle Consuela and Her Army of One

by Amber Benson

  Zombies vs. Robots: Mademoiselle Conseula and Her Army of One

  DIGITAL EDITION January 2012 | ISBN: 978-1-61377-186-0

  Edited by Jeff Conner | Digital Design by Gilberto Lazcano | Assistant Design by Ben Brown | Production Assistance by Rebekah Cahalin

  Zombies vs. Robots created by Chris Ryall and Ashley Wood

  Ted Adams, CEO & Publisher | Greg Goldstein, Chief Operations Officer | Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist | Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief | Matthew Ruzicka CPA, Chief Financial Officer | Alan Payne, VP of Sales | Lorelei Bunjes, Dir. Digital Services | Jeff Webber, Dir. ePublishing

  Zombies vs. Robots © 2011 Idea and Design Works, LLC. IDW Publishing, a division of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Editorial offices: 5080 Santa Fe St., San Diego, CA 92109. All Rights Reserved. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none of the contents of this publication may be reprinted without the permission of Idea and Design Works, LLC.

  IDW Publishing does not read or accept unsolicited submissions of ideas, stories, or artwork.

  www.idwpublishing.com

  INTRODUCTION

  The World of Zombies vs. Robots

  ZVR was cooked up back in 2006 by writer/editor Chris Ryall and artist Ashley Wood when they were both working in the IDW offices. Ash Wood (who is now based in Australia), has a unique visual take on robots, and with zombies shambling into popular culture, they decided to pit the two genres against each other and embrace the lunacy of the concept of braineaters vs rust-buckets, with a dwindling mankind caught in the middle.

  Wood and Ryall’s dark and engaging depiction of the coming zombie apocalypse first appeared as a two-issue comic mini-series from IDW in 2006, written and drawn by the Ryall/Wood team. Critical and fan reaction was positive, spawning another mini-series from Ryall & Wood, the compelling and sexy Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons.

  After Ash’s move back to Australia necessitated having other talents took over the artist chair, while Ryall continued to pen his gleefully gruesome sagas of ZVR mayhem.

  Two more comic mini-series have appeared so far, Zombies vs. Robots Aventure, and ZvR: UnderCity, the most recent one, in which the character of Pammi Shaw was introduced, thus setting up the launch of IDW’s wicked awesome ZVR prose program. Enjoy, pilgrims.

  —Jeff Conner, contributing editor

  MADEMOISELLE CONSUELA

  AND HER ARMY OF ONE

  Amber Benson

  When Consuela was a tiny girl she could not pronounce the word “Warbot.” Her small mouth, with its two missing front teeth and darting pink tongue, mangled it so badly that, like an unwitting medieval alchemist, the little girl with the pitch-black hair and wide-set brown eyes innocently transmuted something violent into its converse. “Rabbit,” she misspoke, pointing to the frontispiece of the book she held in her hand—The Velveteen Rabbit, its long-eared, stuffed rabbit protagonist sitting up meticulously on its hind end, paws at the ready, waiting to begins its journey from imagination to reality—then she slowly let her finger drift away, back over to him, the large mechanical creature conscripted to protect her.

  The book had been one among a handful her father had managed to save from the town’s small library before it’d been destroyed; the curling orange flames consuming every piece of knowledge the provincial outpost had retained after the end had come and gone. Consuela had been too young then to read any of the literature her father had rescued—Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Aristotle’s Poetics—but The Velveteen Rabbit had been just the right fit for her grasping little hands.

  Immediately upon the Warbot’s arrival she’d shown him this book—his namesake—a tattered thing missing three pages and covered in crayon scribblings, her small finger pointing to each word as the syllables formed between tongue and teeth, her reedy voice possessing a preternatural grace.

  Her father had left them not long after this first, auspicious meeting, promises to return like benevolent whispers as they fell from his lips. Consuela had cried as the tall man with the long, brown hair and sun-kissed skin disappeared beyond the horizon, the sails of his small boat flapping like wings superimposed against the glaring brightness of the sun.

  His promises would prove to be lies because he never came back.

  As the first of the zombie hordes began to crisscross the North American continent, devouring everyone in their way, Consuela’s father, Carlos, a noted nanotechnologist, had spirited his young wife and daughter away to the small village in Baja California where he’d grown up. He had no family left there, but he’d spent his childhood camping out on an uninhabited island off of its coast and he thought that, with the island’s craggy, isolated beaches and abandoned lighthouse, it might be a safe haven for his family while he continued his work for the government.

  Though the truth hadn’t been a pretty poison to swallow, it didn’t take the world long to realize the zombie infestation wasn’t going to go away...that the living dead might very well be the next evolution in humanity; perfect killing machines whose jaws did nothing else but eat away the last vestiges of life on Earth.

  Humanity had tried to combat the zombies with robots—limited AI machines that could physically battle the encroaching scourge—but the writing was on the wall: human beings were an endangered species.

  “Borrowing” a decommissioned Warbot from the lab where he worked, Carlos made the dangerous trip from New Mexico to Baja California, his plan to leave the stolen Warbot behind as protection for his wife and child, but when he arrived at the sheltered island lighthouse, he found five-year-old Consuela alone; her mother had disappeared.

  “Where’re Mommy and Daddy?”

  This was a question Consuela asked Rabbit repeatedly during the first few months of their enforced cohabitation.

  He had no answer for the little girl. He assumed her parents were dead like all the other human beings—unbeknownst to Carlos, all the lab’s Warbots (including Rabbit) had had their mobile upload circuitry disabled, so that Rabbit was unable to connect to the world at large to glean any kind of pertinent information. But after doing his time in the trenches, battling the first wave of the undead, it had seemed to him that humanity was almost certainly doomed. Zombies and robots, two opposing forces from the opposite ends of nature, were locked in eternal battle—and humanity was the ultimate collateral damage.

  For the most part, Consuela was an easy child. She entertained herself by reading her books and playing with the collection of Barbie Dolls her parents had brought with them to the island. She was content to subsist mostly on the canned food squirreled away inside the lighthouse proper, to sleep in the lantern room tucked up underneath the burnt-out lamp, and to only go outside in the brightness of day, when Rabbit could protect her best. Otherwise, she spent her time locked away inside the cold, metal sarcophagus of the defunct lighthouse like a prisoner to a reborn, but blinded, Polyphemus.

  Rabbit had been a Warbot. He knew how to fight, how to protect, but he had no idea how to raise a child. And it was not something that came naturally to him. He let Consuela be his guide. She taught him to do the things she liked best: reading to her, playing dolls with her (dollies at war quickly become a favorite), officiating at pretend tea parties where Consuela’s imaginary friends were the only other guests. He also allowed her the freedom to correct him when he was wrong—trying to feed her the uncooked fish they caught as they stood on the sandbar just beyond the island or not treading carefully enough over her toys so that two of her precious dolls lost their heads to his unga
inly gait—and over the course of many years, he learned exactly what he needed to do in order to keep his human charge alive and in good health.

  Only once did Consuela almost die under his care—and it hadn’t been his fault.

  Out tending the garden they’d cultivated from the seeds her father had left them—tomatoes the size of melons, radishes as big as a fist, kale as hearty as a weed—Consuela had sliced her hand open on the edge of a trowel and within twelve hours a rampant infection had set in, her tiny fingers swelling like balloons about to pop. Rabbit had scoured his circuitry, looking for a remedy, but he was a Warbot and only the most basic of first aid information had been programmed into him. So he did what he could without antibiotics and a first aid kit, keeping a cool compress to her head as he sat vigil beside his feverous charge as she tossed and turned, waiting for death to come and fly her far, far away.

  The fever had broken the next night and Consuela had lived, but Rabbit had never forgotten his failure. From then on he watched the child like a hawk. His mission now included the directive to protect Consuela even from herself.

  The years went by and Consuela began to grow, blossoming into a long-limbed pre-teen with a wild mane of black hair and devious eyes. As a child, she’d been more docile, but now she was curious as a cat. Roaming the tiny island, with Rabbit at her side, her longing to leave the lighthouse’s safety for the siren song of boundless land was palpable. Though he sensed her need, Rabbit worked vigilantly to keep her stranded and safe per her father’s programming. As far as he knew, the island was the last bastion of safety left in the whole of the world.

  Long before Carlos brought his family to the island, someone had carried an old wood-and-brass telescope up to the top of the lighthouse and left it there. This telescope became Consuela’s lifeline. She would sit in front of it for hours, her eye pressed to the brass eyepiece, searching for signs of human life—and always without anything to show for her hours of patience.

  Once she’d seen three Warbots attack a horde of zombies on the beachhead across from them. It had been a vicious battle, one that lasted for ten minutes—ten minutes that Consuela sat, transfixed, eye pressed hotly to the eyepiece, watching and waiting for the final outcome. Rabbit had a heightened visual array and could see the battle without aide, his sensors scanning for possible serial numbers embedded into the Warbots’ metal skins, numbers that might act as a robot’s individual identifier. Rabbit had hoped he might know one of these glistening machines, but he’d discovered no numbers; these Warbots obviously belonged to a different generation.

  In the end, Consuela had not been given satisfaction. The Warbots had destroyed all but two of their zombie nemeses—and those two had stumbled off, the Warbots instantly following them inland, well away from the girl’s prying eyes. And though there’d been numerous zombie casualties, not one of the Warbots had been damaged.

  “Why’re they fighting?” Consuela had asked Rabbit.

  She was thirteen, and up until that moment they had never once discussed why they’d been sequestered together on the island. Rabbit had given Consuela—she did not like being called Connie anymore—a factual rendering of the events leading up to the end of times for humanity. It was a cold, desiccated version of the story, told without emotion because Rabbit did not possess any. He only possessed his mission, his directive “to protect,” as pertinent now as the day Carlos had programmed it into him.

  “But why?” Consuela had whined in a nascent, adolescent twang.

  This deepening of the question stymied Rabbit, and he was unable to impart to Consuela the answer she was looking for.

  She’d given him the silent treatment after that, sulking in the corner as the night encapsulated them, the telescope sitting untouched for the first time in days. It’d taken a long time for her to warm to him again, but she’d eventually come around and their relationship had returned to a semblance of normalcy.

  Later, as she’d sat cross-legged in front of the telescope—forever searching, searching, searching—her long tan fingers encircling the eyepiece, she’d made a concerted effort to block him out, ignoring him as if she, alone, occupied the crow’s nest of the lighthouse. Rabbit had been fine with that, interested only in keeping Consuela safe...and nowhere was she safer than locked away inside her Rapunzel’s tower, pinned beneath his ever-watchful gaze.

  Consuela’s teenage years were contemptuous. She tried to slip his watch, once even managing to make it outside the lighthouse before he’d cottoned to her trick. She begged and pleaded with him to let her be alone, even for an hour, but this request did not compute with his mission and had been discarded.

  No matter how she cried, he had his orders and would remain vigilant even under her duress.

  Like a wilting flower, depression began to suck the beauty from Consuela’s features; her shining hair became lackluster straw, her luminous eyes grew hollow and shadowed. Rabbit noticed her lethargy and tried to engage her in a game of Barbies, but this only made her yell at him, kicking at his metal legs as if her tiny feet could do him damage.

  She took to huddling in the corner, rereading the books her father had secured for her all those years before: Dostoevsky and Aristotle, Nietzsche and Hawking, Marquez and Shakespeare. She inhaled the words, soaking up the philosophical treatises and the scientific discourses, losing herself completely inside the worlds crafted within their pages.

  Then one day everything changed...and Rabbit’s world was upended.

  “No,” Consuela breathed and Rabbit doubted if she even realized she was speaking out loud. “Can’t be.”

  She pulled away from the eyepiece, her brown eyes wide with wonder. She crawled over to the window, wiping the dust from the glass so she could press her face against the pane.

  “No way.”

  She sat back on her haunches, revealing a sliver of nut-brown flesh where the thin, white t-shirt she wore met the waistband of her cut off shorts—both leftovers from her missing mother’s wardrobe.

  Rabbit didn’t need the telescope. He could see the boat as it inched across the azure line of the sea, the thick white sail catching the wind like a kite. It wasn’t a large boat, but it was far bigger than the tiny sailboat Consuela’s father had departed on all those years ago.

  “There are men on board,” Consuela said suddenly.

  It was the first thing she’d said directly to Rabbit in over a week. There’d been another aborted escape attempt and afterward—when he’d secured the heavy lighthouse door, locking her inside—she’d spit at his feet and vowed never to speak again.

  He didn’t care if she spoke or not, so long as she was safe. Besides, he knew it was an idle threat. Consuela could only go so long before she would be compelled to talk again. It was human nature, this need to express oneself, to be understood by another sentient being, and what she considered to be his punishment would eventually become her own.

  Robots, thankfully, did not possess this human trait. They didn’t need to be understood by anyone.

  “They’re humans,” Consuela continued. “My own kind. Please, let me talk to them.”

  Normally Rabbit would’ve said “no,” but if the war was over, if the zombie uprising had been quelled and human beings were once more repopulating the world, then Rabbit’s mission would be at an end and Consuela would be free to go out into the world without him. And the only way to discover if this was the case would be to make contact with the humans on the sailboat.

  In the intervening years, there had been two other possible moments for human interaction. Once, when Consuela was nine, a small prop plane had passed over the island, but it’d been flying at such a high altitude and moving so quickly it never had a chance to spot them.

  The second human interaction had been much stranger.

  It consisted of a bearded man in a neon-pink hot air balloon. Upon crossing the island in his nylon beauty, the odd man had dropped a tract of religious pamphlets onto the beach, each mimeographed copy decrying the end
of the world. Rabbit had disposed of as many as he could, but he knew Consuela had squirreled away at least two copies somewhere inside the lighthouse.

  In the end, he supposed it was better to make contact with this sailboat than with a religious fanatic like the man in the hot air balloon.

  “Please...” Consuela begged—and when the unexpected answer came it was all she could do not to run and hug him, the tears coursing like winter-ravaged rivers down her cheeks.

  The lighthouse had been abandoned even in Carlos’s time, so fixing the lamp in the lantern room was nearly a Herculean task. To begin with, the giant Fresnel lens had been removed and stored inside a cubbyhole—something Consuela had discovered during one of her many exploratory expeditions of the lighthouse—and when they lifted away the aged oilcloth it was wrapped in, they discovered long, spidery cracks on one side of the curved glass.

  The cracks were troubling. Though just finding the lens guaranteed them a shot at lighting the lamp and catching the sailboat’s attention, the cracks increased the probability that the Fresnel lens might shatter at any moment from the intense heat.

  Finding a kerosene substitute to fill the lamp was also a daunting task. Both Consuela and Rabbit could start a cooking fire, but that skill would not apply here, as a wood fire would be uncontrollable, quickly overheating the Fresnel lens. No, they needed something thin and viscous to power the lamp: oil, a substance they didn’t have readily available on the island.

  “What about you?” Consuela had said, finally, looking at him sideways, her brown eyes half-lidded like a mischievous cat. “You’ve got oil inside of you, don’t you?”

  This idea had never occurred to Rabbit, that the thick oil inside of him, keeping his joints lubricated and functional, might be an ideal accelerant. The only problem with this solution was they would have to pry a section of his metal plating away in order to get to it.