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.

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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 ungainly 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.

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.

Now, it was time to wait.

Rabbit sat in the gently rocking rowboat as the last of the candles in the sailboat were extinguished. He knew there would be at least one man on night watch, but that didn’t matter. He had the element of surprise and it would carry him far.

Untying the rope from the oarlock, he stood up, giving the line a little slack so that the zombies would remain underwater as he shimmied his way over the side of the sailboat. When he was safely onboard, he began to pull the rope up behind him. One by one, the zombies flopped onto the deck like air-deprived fish, hungry mouths flapping. It only took a moment to loose them from their binds, but in that moment the lone man in the crow’s nest caught sight of the odd hunting party from his stately perch.

Instantly, he sounded the alarm, taking aim at Rabbit with his shotgun and firing, though his bullets missed the hulking, silver Warbot by a mile. The zombies ignored the cacophony of warning bell and gunfire, their eyes rolling absently in their heads as the scent of fresh meat reached their otherwise deadened nostrils, instantly enflaming their hunger. Rabbit was forgotten in the wake of the zombies’ realization that living human beings were nearby.

He was free to make his next move.

Rabbit hid himself behind the open cabin door as the men below deck rushed up to meet the incoming zombies. Unprepared for the threat—some of them still in their skivvies, eyes caked with sleep—they were quickly enmeshed in battle with the starving undead.

The man in the crow’s nest stayed put, self-preservation his first instinct, but he did what he could for his comrades, taking aim at the zombies below him, though with little effect. Uncertainty, and the fact that he was too far away for his shotgun to do much damage, made the man hesitant with his shots. Rabbit could see that the man was afraid he might accidentally hit one of his shipmates with a stray bullet, and, of course, the man did just that, one of his poorly aimed shots causing a shipmate’s head to explode like a rotten gourd only a few feet from Rabbit’s hiding spot.

Leaving the pirates to deal with his zombie distraction, Rabbit quietly proceeded below deck. His mission: to find Consuela and take her home.

It was dark inside the heart of the ship, the stench of dirty, shiftless men ripe in the air. The ceiling was set so low to the ground that Rabbit had to dip his head forward, moving slowly through the tiny rooms, his eyes searching for Consuela. Each room he entered was in disarray; bunk beds unmade, dirty clothes everywhere, the paraphernalia of canned food—cutlery, dishes, can-openers—littering the floor. Rabbit recognized the cans from their own lighthouse supply, and he wondered what else the men had stolen from the island.

At the far end of the hall, Rabbit came to the only locked door on the whole of the ship.

And he knew what this meant.

He had not seen the leader, the man with the pale hair and yellow-green eyes, since he’d climbed aboard. It only stood to reason that the man would be locked inside this cabin with his ill-gotten prize, letting his men take care of whatever emergency had been declared above deck. Here they were, out on the open ocean where no zombies dared to tread. The leader wouldn’t know—until far too late—that he’d sent his men into a zombie feeding-frenzy, that before he’d roused himself from his cabin, his whole crew would be dead.

Rabbit grabbed a hold of the knobbed door handle, jerking it twice before ripping the metal slab out of its frame. A feminine scream issued from within, one Rabbit recognized immediately—and he knew he’d come in the nick of time.

Consuela was still alive.

He dropped the heavy door where he stood and stepped through the empty doorframe into a dimly lit room. But the vision that greeted his eyes was not the one he’d expected.

“Shoot his leg!” Consuela screamed as she pulled the ragged blanket up around her naked torso.

She was lying on a tiny, twin bunk bed, her dark hair spread across the pillow like the fan of a peacock’s tail.

“The leg!” she shrieked again, pointing at Rabbit’s busted thigh, where oil still leaked in viscous waves.

Rabbit turned his head to find the leader, naked and pale as an albino alligator, standing in the corner of the room, a shotgun in his right hand. His penis was long and hard and Rabbit could see he’d interrupted them mid-coitus.

Without hesitation, the naked man lifted the shotgun and slid his finger inside the loop of the trigger. Eyes locked on Rabbit, he blasted the robot in the thigh, the bullet tearing through metallic exoskeleton, sparks from ruined circuitry shooting into the air and igniting. Rabbit was thrown backward by the impact of the shot, landing hard on his back, his sensors going mad at the magnitude of the damage the man had inflicted upon him and the realization that his leg was ablaze.

Luckily, his body was fire retardant, and the inferno at his thigh was quickly extinguished.

But the boat was another story. The fire leapt across the boards of the sailboat’s wooden hull, the roiling smoke overwhelming the air in a matter of seconds. Rabbit tried to lift his head, to ascertain Consuela’s exact position, but when he raised his eyes to the bed, she had disappeared.

“Now for the head,” the man said to himself, striding over to the Warbot and lifting the butt of the shotgun into the air.

The fire didn’t seem to faze the man as he stood above Rabbit, appraising the Warbot with a cold, calculating stare. Rabbit had no time to do anything but lie there as the man with the deep, yellow-green eyes pulled the trigger; the shot catching the robot square in the face.

His vision flickered and sputtered, but his cognizance did not slip away. He may have been blinded, but his other senses were on high alert. Not waiting for the man to fire another shot into his middle—something that might surely end him—he rolled onto his front, slowly dragging himself away from the fire.

As he lurched forward, his hands gripping at the slick floor, he could hear the man belatedly slapping at the fire with the blanket—though even Rabbit knew the boat was a goner.

Leaving the man to his own fate, Rabbit pulled himself toward the stairs. Above him, he could hear the pirates as they continued to lay waste to the zombies, the smoke below not having reached their senses—and he wondered when exactly they would notice.

“Rabbit...?”

The voice was small and hesitant, coming from the stairs. It stopped him in his tracks.

“Rabbit, can we go home now?”

He knew that voice like he knew the ticking of his own internal components.

“Rabbit?”

That she’d tried to destroy him was superfluous.

“Rabbit, please?”

He would get Consuela home.

No matter what the cost.

This was his final directive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amber Benson is an actor, filmmaker, novelist and amateur occultist who sings in the shower. Best known for her work as Tara Maclay on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, she is also the author of the Calliope Reaper-Jones series for Ace/Roc and the co-director (with Adam Busch) of the feature film, Drones. She can be stalked on her blog (amberbensonwrotethis.blogspot.com) and on twitter (@amber_benson) and facebook (facebook.com/amberbensonwrotethis).

“I just wanted to write a simple story about a girl, her robot...and some zombies. There might be a little full frontal male nudity in there, too, but you gotta read the story to find out if it’s human, robot or zombie!”

— Amber Benson

THE IDW ZOMBIES VS. ROBOTS “8X8 PLAN”

All New ZVR Mayhem – In Words!
An Original Prose Story Every Week for Eight Weeks
Only 99 ¢ each. “COLLECT THEM ALL!”

ZVR “8x8” Checklist

Brea Grant — “Pammi Shaw: Creator of Gods and Also Blogger”
UnderCity’s lone survivor continues her blog and meets a digital deity with its own ideas about the zombie apocalypse.

Steve Rasnic Tem — “To Denver (With Hiram Battling Zombies)”
What happens when high-grade chronic is tainted by zombie blood—find out here.

Nancy A. Collins — “Angus: Zombie-Versus-Robot Fighter”
A young man is trained by his scientist father to fight zombies, robot-style. What could go wrong?

Nick Mamatas — “Throckmorton’s Bad Day”
Well before the arrival of the zombie apocalypse, young Herbert (seen later as Dr. Throckmorton in the ZVR comics) tries out his special drug concoctions on the local population of addicts. The results will have unforeseen consequences for his future self.

Amber Benson — “Mademoiselle Consuela and Her Army of One”
Like a princess in a tower, young Consuela lives alone on a secluded island with only her loyal Warbot for company. And then the pirates come.

Don Webb — “The Wizards Versus The Bots”
Can black magic control zombies? What about Warbot?

Kaaron Warren — “The River of Memory”
An Amazon goddess thinks she can restore zombies back into humans. A warbot has its doubts.

Lincoln Crisler — “Kettletop’s Revisionary Plot”
A desperate scientist goes back in time in order to prevent the original release of the Z Virus and save his wife. (This is sure to work.)

COMING IN MARCH, 2012

THE FIRST ZOMBIES VS. ROBOTS PROSE COLLECTION

Featuring “New” Technology: “The Words Create Pictures In Your Mind!”

11 Tales of ZVR Mayhem From (in Alphabetical Order):

Jesse Bullington (British Fantasy Award nominee)

Nancy A. Collins (Bram Stoker Award recipient, Eisner award nominee)

Lincoln Crisler (prolific award-eligible writer and critic)

Brea Grant (writer, actress; co-creator of We Will Bury You)

Nicholas Kaufmann (Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and ITW Thriller Award nominee)

Joe McKinney (Bram Stoker Award nominee)

James A. Moore (Bram Stoker Award nominee)

Norman Prentiss (Bram Stoker Award recipient)

Rachel Swirsky (Nebula Award recipient; Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominee)

Sean Taylor (writes the Gene Simmons comics, magazine industry award winner)

Steve Rasnic Tem (World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Award recipient)

Collection Edited by Jeff Conner (World Fantasy Award recipient)

Learn more at idwpublishng.com/zvr

Table of Contents

Cover

Introduction

Mademoiselle Consuela and Her Army of One

About the Author

ZVR 8x8 Checklist

ZVR: This Means War