Ezili Coeur Noir smiled at the noise, enjoying the terrible, familiar song of death reversed. All of the corpses had done this when she had revived them; each had sung a beautiful note of pain. It was so pure, so absolute, she wished to one day make an orchestra of these corpses, killing and reviving them to create the music she heard echoing in her black heart.
Already she was walking down the road, instinctively searching for another dead body, feeling herself drawn to it as she repopulated the Earth with her army of the undead. But soon she would not need to search. Once the Red Weed batch was completed by her lackeys, Ezili Coeur Noir would have an endless supply of the dead to reanimate, a perfect orchestra to scream her beautiful songs of death. And prized among those singers would be the three humans she had found in the underground bunker of the redoubt, the three who had challenged her with the brightness of their living souls.
The Road to Outlandsâ From Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermathâforever known as skydarkâreshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlandsâpoisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.
What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.
Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.
In the villes, rigid laws were enforcedâto atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the baronsâ public credo and their right-to-rule.
Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technologyâ¦a question to a keeper of the archivesâ¦a vague clue about alien mastersâand their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.
But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?
Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigidâs only link with her family was her motherâs red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grantâs clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.
Parents, friends, communityâthe very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the cruxâwhen Kane began to wonder if there was a future.
For Kane, it wouldnât do. So the only way was outâway, way out.
After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltvilleâs head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
She had surrounded herself with dead things, for she found their company more agreeable now than that of the living.
Her name was Ezili Coeur Noir and she was the queen of all things dead, the flower of carnage. She stood over six feet tall and her limbs were bird-thin sticks, like the tools of some perverse surgeon. Her skin clung so tightly to those limbs that it seemed as if it would crush the stick-thin bones that were visible beneath. That skin was the rippled leather of a lizard, discolored and rotten with oozing wounds, as if in sympathy with the dead things she had elected to surround herself by. She stood upon two spindly, emaciated legs at an odd angle, as if no longer able to hold herself straight, which left her looking like some hideous mannequin discarded by its satanic puppeteer.