Mademoiselle Consuela and Her Army of One

by Amber Benson

  Rabbit chose a section of his upper leg for the endeavor. It was strategically the best part of his body to be incapacitated because it had no other use except as a conveyance device. Once the metal plating was removed, only gears and metal ligature would be exposed; his integral circuitry would remain invulnerable.

  Consuela offered to help him, but he chose to do the work alone. It would go faster and less damage would be done to his metal-plated exoskeleton. Using a piece of sharpened wood to poke into the metal joint above his knee, he applied pressure until the casing snapped, the metal plating lifting up enough for him to grasp it with his fingers and pull it away.

  A spray of oxblood brown arced across the room and Rabbit saw he’d severed a piece of rubber tubing inside his metallic thigh. He picked up the lamp’s reservoir and placed it underneath the leaking tube, filling it with the oil. When that was accomplished, he grasped the tubing in his hands, knotting off each end like an unruly artery.

  He didn’t know how this would affect his body, if the disconnected tubing would eventually cause problems inside his leg, but the severing had been an accident that’s outcome would remain to be seen.

  With his task accomplished, Rabbit set the lamp’s reservoir back in its holder, the Fresnel lens waiting nearby for the climactic moment when, after so many years of disuse, it would be returned to its rightful place. There was still too much daylight left to contact the sailboat, so, together, they waited, Consuela’s whole body vibrating with anticipation.

  But as the night appeared on silent paws, sneaking up faster than either had anticipated, her anticipation gave way to fear.

  “They’re too far away,” she said. “They won’t see us.”

  The lighthouse had been a beacon to storm-tossed ships for decades, Rabbit assured her. The distance wouldn’t be an obstacle, especially in these becalmed seas—but still Consuela fretted, biting her thumb nail until it bled, her gaze riveted to the telescope as the sailboat disappeared in the folds of twilight.

  As night finally blanketed the room, Rabbit lit the wick, illuminating the hollows beneath Consuela’s cheeks and eyes with the flickering flame until she resembled a ravaged ghost of herself. Her dark eyes flicked to the lamp, fear and longing faceted inside of them, as Rabbit set the Fresnel lens onto its base, the light contracting then expanding outward to fill the night.

  There was no way to know if the boat had seen them, if there was anyone or anything on the boat to see them, as they sat inside their metallic crow’s nest, waiting and watching, but Consuela could not be persuaded to sleep. She sat through the night as stiffly as a plastic doll, her neck and jaw rigid, so het up that she couldn’t even pretend to read one of her books.

  Rabbit was not gifted with anticipation. Nor did he need to sleep. Instead, he watched the Fresnel lens with a quiet intensity, computing how quickly he could put out the flames were the lens to explode into a million pieces—but this proved to be a fruitless worry. The lens remained intact through the night, the spidery cracks doing little to affect the light.

  As if it had already been agreed upon, the sun ascended into the sky just as the lamp sputtered out, the last of the oil gone from its reserve. Consuela had fallen asleep, her chin resting against her chest as it rose and fell in time with her breathing. Rabbit could see the boat, a large sailing vessel with shimmering white sails and a burnt sienna hull, slowly making its way toward the island.

  For better or for worse, they had seen the beacon.

  The ship anchored off the coast of the southwest end of the island at eight in the morning. Rabbit only knew this because he’d been commissioned with an internal solar clock, something that had no real place in a post-zombie world, but was necessary for his programming to function correctly.

  Human society needed the regimentation of a twenty-four-hour day; zombies and robots did not. Time had ceased to have any importance once the zombies and robots had begun their battle, especially when their sole focus was destroying each other in hand-to-hand combat.

  Rabbit did not wake Consuela when he saw the dinghy cross the water and put in at the beachhead below them. He wanted the time alone so he could observe the three human men. He knew the moment Consuela saw them she would throw herself at their mercy.

  Three men.

  One was obviously the leader. He was taller than the other two and trimmer, wearing his long, white blond hair straight and untangled to his shoulders, his pale yellow-green eyes the color of bleached seaweed, continuously scanning the beach for signs of life, a semi-automatic rifle on his back. As for the other two men, both of whom were busy dragging the dinghy out of the water’s lapping reach, Rabbit decided they were of no consequence. It was the leader he would have to watch out for. The leader would make all the decisions and be the cause of any problems, should problems arise.

  Consuela sat up with a start, her thin, brown body shaking itself awake as her brain latched back on to the thought she’d fallen asleep obsessing over.

  “Did they see it?” she croaked, her throat raw from sleep as she crawled over to the telescope and swung it around to face the window. “Did they see the light?”

  Consuela’s cry of joy at finding the boat anchored within swimming distance from the beach let him know an answer was unnecessary. She dropped the telescope and pressed her forehead to the glass, her brown eyes wide as she stared at the three men on the beach below them. Before her brain even had time to process this new development, she was up and running for the door, her dark hair a cape flying out behind her. Rabbit had foreseen this possibility and locked the door to the lantern room as a precaution.

  Consuela was like a wild child, yanking on the handle with every ounce of strength she possessed, using her feet as leverage to get the door open, but it was no use. Only Rabbit had the key, which he wore on a chain looped around his cylindrical neck. Carlos had placed the key/necklace around Rabbit’s square head before he’d climbed into his own sailboat and disappeared, bestowing the power of seclusion onto the robot as a parting gift.

  “Let me out!” she screamed, the cords of her neck standing out white and ropey against the darkness of her tan skin.

  She banged on the door with both fists, slamming their meaty sides into the metal door—and when that didn’t work, she added her bare feet to the assault, each kick louder and more aggressive than the last.

  Suddenly, she stopped attacking the door as the sound of a semi-assault rifle firing screamed up from the bottom of the lighthouse stairs. Consuela had never heard gunfire before, but she instinctively knew it was not something she wanted to encounter unprepared. After a few moments, the echo of human feet pounding on metal carried up to them from the stairwell and Consuela moved away from the door, scurrying backward until she was safely behind her Warbot.

  Rabbit knew his charge wasn’t prepared for the entelechy of actually meeting another human being. Consuela had been alone for almost twelve years—and reading about humans, fantasizing about humans, dreaming about them, well, it was not a substitute for the real thing.

  There was a bang as metal struck metal, making the already skittish Consuela jump. Rabbit’s sensors picked up the sweaty scent of fear issuing from her pores and from the pores of the three men now standing on the other side of the locked metal door.

  “We know you’re in there, Robot!”

  The voice was harsh and guttural, a low purr of menace idling underneath it.

  “Open the door or we’ll blow it open!”

  Rabbit took the key from around his neck, sliding its teeth into the lock. There was a soft click and the door lurched forward, one of the lackeys easing it open with his foot so the leader could thrust his body—and gun—inside. Once they realized there would be no threat from their prey, the leader kicked the heavy door wide open, setting it swinging on its hinges, the scratch of metal on metal ominous even in the daylight.

  The two lackeys, both of whom babbled together in the same foreign language, could not take their bright, blue
eyes off of Consuela, their gazes riveted to the smooth, brown flesh of her décolletage, hunger emanating from their slack faces. The leader ignored their chattering, his muted irises fathomless as he stared at Rabbit, his aggressive stance giving the Warbot pause. Though he had been programmed to kill only zombies, leaving sentient humans beings to their own devices, Rabbit’s sensors began to scan the man, trying to ascertain his threat level, the directive to protect Consuela overriding his original programming.

  Rabbit hadn’t been built to understand the subtlety of the human animal, but even he could see that the two lackeys were already concocting nefarious plans between them, Consuela being the object of their attention. When one of the men made a move toward the cowering girl, Rabbit took the initiative, slamming his heavy metal fist into the man’s throat, a spray of scarlet arterial blood Rorschaching against the wall. The man’s eyes widened in death, exposing bloodshot, yellowed sclera. The wound in his neck gurgled as a bright spray of red blossomed around his throat like a bloodied clerical collar.

  Shock. Horror. Fear.

  Rabbit saw the physical manifestation of each emotion play across Consuela’s face as she watched the man die, her pink lips slowly wrapping themselves into a taut oval. Rabbit expected her to scream, but she didn’t. Instead, she stood there, eyes soft and doe-like as she waited to see what the leader would do in retaliation for his minion’s murder.

  Unaware of the tension thrumming like a livewire around him, the dying man slid down the length of the wall, the last of his life-blood spilling out onto the floor in a sluggish, red tide.

  The leader’s face was impassive. Seemingly unfazed by the dead man at his feet, he stepped over the body, moving with calm assurance and not an ounce of fear. He stopped within a foot of Rabbit, staring at the monstrous robot. Licking his lips, he threw a wink in Consuela’s direction then, like a streak of lightening, he pulled a brown cube from his pocket and shoved the device into the panel of blinking lights built into Rabbit’s chest.

  Blackness.

  He was on the sandbar, tipped onto his side, the crash of waves like a midnight symphony above him. Though the pull of gravity was not as apparent here in this new environment, he still felt like a lead weight rooted to the bottom of the sea and he found it hard to right himself. He struggled for a few minutes before finally managing to get to his feet, but the pitch-black night and the fact that his internal compass wasn’t working—the salt water was probably the culprit—made it hard for him to discover which way led back to shore.

  Though he felt slightly lighter than usual, he was still far too heavy to float, even in the buoyant salt water. Taking short, tentative steps, he began to follow the arc of the sandbar until his westerly trajectory almost walked him off into the deeper recesses of the ocean. After that, he knew which way would return him to the beach and which way would destroy him forever.

  He emerged from the salt water to find himself on the wrong side of the island. Not that this mattered to Rabbit, whose programming, even as he walked the sandbar, had already begun to run scenarios on how best to save Consuela—and letting the enemy know he was still viable would’ve run counterintuitive to what any possible plan might’ve dictated.

  He didn’t know what the leader had used to disarm him—logic predicated an E1 pulse generator—but whatever it was, the humans had believed it would disable the Warbot permanently. Otherwise, they would’ve used their boat to ferry him out into the deeper waters, throwing him overboard where he couldn’t escape the salt water that would eventually corrode his remains into rusted ocean detritus. Instead, they’d dispatched him right from the beach, never imagining a sandbar existed just beyond the wave line, protecting and keeping him from being pulled further out to sea.

  One Warbot’s luck had quickly become humanity’s misfortune.

  Do zombies think? Are they cognizant of what’s going on around them, able to make informed decisions about their movements? Or are their minds a squabbling mush of hunger and rage, their days spent mindlessly chasing flesh and fighting robots because robots stand between them and dinner?

  No one had ever given a zombie a psych test, had ever checked a zombie’s hand-eye coordination or IQ level. Zombies were the final frontier—in a way that space and the sea had ceased to be long ago—a completely unknowable entity subsisting on living muscle and brain matter, impossible to understand.

  These questions did not occur to Rabbit as he crossed the wave-strewn water. He didn’t know why zombies did what they did, but he knew that what they did would be integral to saving Consuela. There was no need to rationalize the disservice he was about to inflict upon humanity because robots didn’t rationalize—they just followed their directives as best they could.

  The rowboat barely held Rabbit’s weight, its thin, wooden-boarded bottom taking in seawater as it thundered across the watery divide between island and contiguous land. When he reached the opposite shore, he beached the rowboat high above the tide line, tethering it to a fallen log that reeked of salt and rot.

  He didn’t have to look far or wide for what he sought. The pack of zombies—four of them: two men and a woman and child—were feasting on a bloodied, dismembered corpse, splashes of red spattered all along the sloping dune that led inland and away from the beach. When they saw Rabbit, the remains were immediately forgotten in favor of larger prey. Not that they could eat the robot, but zombies seemed to intuit that where robots tread, humans might not be far behind.

  It didn’t take long to subdue the woman and child, but the two men proved testier. They didn’t want to be caught, their snapping jaws hammering at Rabbit’s metallic body in a frenzied syncopation. One even managed to pry its clawed fingers into the broken bit of Rabbit’s thigh, pulling the knotted ends of the severed tube out so oil leaked all over its fingers and chest, making it even harder to catch.

  While Rabbit relied primarily on his larger frame and heavier bulk, the zombies were far more aggressive and quicker than he remembered—and even though he hadn’t intended to destroy any of the four, he found himself accidentally stepping on the head of one of the male zombies, crushing its skull into a goopy, pulpy mess. It was a quick death for a merciless, undead creature—but one Rabbit would’ve avoided if he’d had the choice.

  As much as capturing, and not just killing, these zombies went against every electrical impulse inside of him, every directive that had ever been programmed into his mainframe, the need to protect Consuela overrode them all.

  Using a long piece of rope he’d brought with him from the island, Rabbit tied the three remaining zombies together, looping the fibrous rope around their torsos, arms, and necks until they resembled a zombified chain gang. Yanking his jury-rigged harness, he was able to get the zombies to shamble forward, their arching bodies shuddering against the confines of the cord.

  They were foul creatures, their rotten skin hanging in flaps from their desiccated frames, revealing beef jerky skeins of muscle interwoven with tartar-yellow bone. Strips of ragged clothing hung from their limbs like cobwebs, gore and bile stains on the decaying fabric. It would’ve been hard for anyone looking at the pathetic, underfed creatures to believe that they’d ever been human, that their eyes had once held joy and fear and anguish, that they’d lived in society: driving cars, holding jobs, birthing families.

  When he was done, he found the beach deserted, the rowboat exactly where he’d left it. He tied the end of the rope to the aft, ignoring the zombie’s gnashing teeth, then pushed the small boat out into the water, the rope uncoiling quickly behind it. The zombies shot forward, barely able to keep their feet as they were forcefully dragged into the water, the cold rush of sea beginning to engulf them.

  Rabbit heaved the oars into the water, unconcerned about the zombies’ progression into the sea. The undead creatures howled as they were compelled forward by the pull of the rowboat, the waves pounding against their torsos. The ocean consumed the child, who was smaller, first, its tiny head bobbing like a cork before it
disappeared beneath the waves. The other two kept their heads aloft for a moment longer, then they, too, were swallowed up by the tumultuous crashing of the sea.

  The rowboat listed backward, the pull of the three undead creatures not quite counterbalancing Rabbit’s own weight, but the Warbot pressed onward, using his considerable mechanical strength to move the boat through the cresting waves.

  Before setting off for the mainland, he’d done some reconnaissance, spying on the humans as they’d loaded Consuela into their small dinghy and pushed off into the water, heading for the larger sailboat anchored just offshore. He’d watched his former charge for signs that she’d been mistreated and noticed that her lithe form hunched a little at the shoulders, her long dark hair swinging like a curtain around her face. He’d waited until their dinghy was a small speck on the horizon, then he’d melted back into the shadows, ready to set his plan into motion.

  Now he stood at the apex of that plan’s fruition.

  Under cover of darkness, Rabbit made his way through the water until he was even with the hull of the sailboat, his precise strokes hardly making a ripple in the surface tension of the water as he silently eased his rowboat up to the side of the much larger ship. Looping a piece of braided rope between them, he easily tethered the two boats together. With this task accomplished, he pulled the oars from their locks and set them inside the rowboat’s bottom, where they would remain for the duration.

  The waterlogged zombies were heavier than Rabbit had anticipated. Hand over hand, he pulled their rope leash from the depths until he saw the head of the first zombie appear below him. Weapon at the ready, he knotted the rope to one of the oarlocks so the zombie’s face did not break the surface of the water, its rolling eyes goggling up at him through two inches of translucent liquid.