B

I let the adult Holy Moly shower me, saying nothing as I’m gently rinsed down, all the gunk washed away.

“Your ears have rusted,” Holy Moly tuts. “They’ll need to be replaced. It will be a simple task, but you’ll have to put up with these for the time being. I don’t think the rust will affect your hearing.

“We’ll fix your stomach too,” Holy Moly says as it hoses out my hollow insides. “Not in the ugly way that Daddy stitched bits of flesh together. We’ll clone your flesh and create a covering that looks almost the way it did before it was sliced open.”

Turning off the shower, Holy Moly pats me dry and wraps me in a purple robe. In a daze I sit, and the one-time eerie baby hums as it focuses on the bones sticking out of my fingers and toes. It sheared off the remainder of them before putting me in the shower, but now it vigorously files down the stumps, reducing them and smoothing them out.

“How?” I finally wheeze as Holy Moly is working on my left hand, having finished with both feet and the fingers of my right hand.

“You’ll have to be more precise than that, Mummy,” Holy Moly says without pausing.

“How are you here?” I ask. “How am I here? Why aren’t we dead like all the others?”

Holy Moly nods happily, as if that was the question it had anticipated. “All of the babies survived. We were resistant to the viruses.”

“Mr. Dowling found a way to counteract the viruses?” I croak.

“Only in our case,” Holy Moly says. “Since we were laboratory-grown clones, he was able to tinker with our DNA. He couldn’t be certain that we’d survive, but he was quietly optimistic.”

“He never said,” I mumble.

“He never told anyone.” Holy Moly giggles. “At the time we couldn’t understand why we were the only ones who didn’t drop dead. It was decades before we figured it out.”

“Decades?” I say weakly.

“As for Mummy,” Holy Moly beams, “you were saved by the Groove Tube. You were dying when you entered, but the liquid nourished you and slowed down the rate of decay. If the virus had been active for longer, you would have eventually perished, but it only had a lifespan of several years. Once it passed from your system, the liquid began to restore all of the cells that had been destroyed, and you have been kept in a nice, neutral state throughout the centuries since.”

“Centuries?” I cry.

“Dr. Oystein didn’t know that a zombie could ride out the effects of the viruses inside a Groove Tube,” Holy Moly goes on. “If he had, he would have made more and retreated to them with his Angels. They all could have been saved.”

“Are you saying that I’m the only one who survived?” I ask shakily.

Holy Moly purses its lips. “Actually there were several others, scattered across the world. They had either been recovering in Groove Tubes when the virus was unleashed, or sought the refuge of them like you, so as not to have to face the end of civilization.

“Unfortunately we didn’t discover them until after we’d begun to travel. We didn’t leave this country for two hundred and sixteen years. By the time we found others like you, the Tubes maintaining them had malfunctioned. They died like fetuses in their wombs. We buried them. We thought you would like that.”

I’m still wearing the glasses. I lift them now, even though it pains me, to stare at Holy Moly directly as I ask, “How long was I in there?”

Holy Moly answers casually. “Nine hundred and ninety-nine years, three hundred and fifty-seven days exactly.”

There’s a long, stunned silence. Then I slowly replace my glasses.

“Almost a thousand years,” I say hoarsely.

“Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of when you released the viruses,” Holy Moly confirms. “That’s why I fished you out today. We wanted you to be with us to celebrate the millennium.”

“A thousand years,” I whisper. “I must be dreaming.”

“Silly Mummy,” Holy Moly laughs. “You know zombies can live for thousands of years. In fact, we think you might live even longer than Dr. Oystein anticipated, having spent so long in a Groove Tube. We can’t be certain, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed.”

I start to tremble. Holy Moly shoots me a sympathetic look, then hugs me.

“it’s ok mummy,” it whispers, sounding like it used to when it was a baby, a thousand years ago. “we’ll take care of you. we love our mummy.”

“What’s it like out there?” I moan. “Did you create the paradise that Dr. Oystein hoped you would? Did you find the embryos and bring back the human race? Is war a thing of the past or are things worse than ever?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Holy Moly smiles, offering me its hand.

I stare at the hand, then up into Holy Moly’s face. “Why wait so long?” I ask. “Why not fish me out before this?”

“We had to grow first,” Holy Moly says. “We didn’t want to remove you until we were sure we knew what we were doing. Then we decided to establish ourselves, explore the world and lay the foundations of our new society, so that you’d have something nice to emerge to. By the time we were ready, it was so close to the thousand-year anniversary that we figured we might as well wait, to make it more special.

“The others will be so excited to see you,” it continues. “I’ve been your attendant for most of your time here. A few more helped, and we’ve allowed a trickle of others to visit, but most of our kind have never seen you, apart from those who were alive when the viruses were released.”

“You mean you’ve cloned more of yourselves since then?”

“Oh yes,” Holy Moly says. “There are a lot more of us now.”

“How many?” I ask.

Holy Moly smiles and twitches its fingers. “Come and find out.”

I gaze through the door of the laboratory into the old courtyard at County Hall, reluctant to leave my cocoon, wanting to learn more about this strange new world before I take my place in it.

“Not the courtyard, Mummy,” Holy Moly says, having read my mind the way it could when it was an infant. “We’re not in County Hall. The Thames flooded a long time ago. Most of London is under water now. We moved you to a safe location before that happened.”

“Where?” I ask.

Holy Moly smiles and twitches its fingers again.

“Okay,” I snap, getting to my feet. “You don’t need to force me. I never backed away from a challenge in the past, and I’m not about to start now.”

“Now there is the Mummy that I know and love,” Holy Moly chuckles. “The bitch is back.”

I cock my head at Holy Moly, wondering if that was meant as an insult or a compliment. When I see that it’s the latter, I nod with satisfaction. “Damn right,” I mutter. “And she’s ready to roll.”

Then, not giving myself any time to feel butterflies in my stomach–not that I even have a stomach at the moment–I ignore Holy Moly’s hand, shoot the naked neuter a tight smile, then march to the door, kick it open and step out into the future, to see what it has in store for me.

the beginning