52

Mercy

I have always known that I was destined for greatness. As the time draws near when the whole world will know my name, it is important for everyone to understand how all of this came to be and how I saved all of humanity.

I am the product of two of the greatest lineages in all of Canada that existed at the turn of the millennia.

My mother was born Elmyra Zazel Wearghams, and she was of the Wonderous Wearghams. On her father's side, going back generations, they were famed entertainers. Her ancestor Wilhelm Silvanus Wearghams founded W. S. Wearghams Hippodrome in 1873, and that eventually grew into the legendary Wonderous Wearghams Travelling Circus.

At the height of their popularity during the Golden Age of the Circus, they rivaled any other show on earth. My great grandparents performed to audiences of ten thousand, and they made millions of dollars a year.

Like all good things, the halcyon days eventually led to a decline as moving pictures dominated the public's interest with cinemas and television. After a long and illustrious run, the Wonderous Wearghams closed their last tent in 1968. My mother was only a teenager at the time, and she went looking for a place that would appreciate her strength, tenacity, wisdom, and unwavering loyalty .

My father was born Ezekial Kaleb Loth at the tail end of the Silent Generation. He was the eldest son of the eldest son of the great Loth family of the prominent Loth Family Ranch and Cattle Company. His ancestor Lazarus Bly Loth founded the ranch in 1886 when he bought 300 acres to raise cattle and horses.

By the time my father was born, the ranch had grown to over 100,000 acres, and by the time that I was born, it was all the way up to 500,000 acres. Millions of cattle had grazed on the land, supplying the booming population in Vancouver with their demand for fresh meat.

Despite the name of "family ranch," it was a huge operation, one that earned acclaim and respect all throughout the provinces. Not only did it provide high quality and essential services, but the ranch also employed over a hundred local men.

Even with all the wealth and prestige that the family and the business already had, it only grew when my mother joined the Loths.

In 1970, Elmyra finally found someone worthy of what she had to offer. Not only a good, strong, wise man, but one that had a powerful legacy to build on. Elmyra and Zeke (as she lovingly called Ezekial) married, and under their guidance, the ranch soon became the largest and the greatest in all of the Western Hemisphere.

But for my parents, it had become more than a ranch. It was a Kingdom. They were the King and Queen, and my older brothers were the Princes, while I was the lone Princess.

Long before the virus came and the world collapsed, Elmyra knew to prepare for the End of Days. She had felt it coming, an intuition that shook her to the core. With her prescient knowledge, she prepared her children for what was to come. While other world leaders had pampered, spoiled offspring, Elmyra ensured that we were all out working the land and learning to survive without government interference.

My brothers Waylon, Kaleb, Wyatt, and Bly were all so much older than me. Elmyra had assumed that her days of bearing children were behind her when I arrived as a sickly baby girl. First, she questioned whether or not I would even survive, but when I did, she realized that I might be the one to take our family's legacy beyond our wildest dreams. Our father prepared the boys to run the ranch, our mother prepared me to run the world.

I was born Mercy Zazel Loth, and I was eighteen when the virus hit. Our ranch was built to withstand the test of anything, but our employees were not. They were infected quickly, and with great foresight, Elmyra herded them into one of the buildings on the ranch, believing they would be useful later.

My brother Wyatt had always had a strong interest in science and anatomy, and he began experiments on the zombies to gain understanding. So desperate was he for more information, he deliberately infected Tabitha, his young wife and the mother of his toddler son. He had hoped that since they had a prior relationship, he would be able to reach her in her altered state.

Tabitha was the first member of our extended family that succumbed to the virus, but she was not the only one. Soon after, an accident led to Zeke's infection, and Wyatt put him in the same empty horse stall where he stored Tabitha.

Over the course of the first year after the outbreak, both my brother Kaleb and my young nephew Colt were bitten by rogue zombies. They too were kept with all of the infected family members out in the barn .

Wyatt believed that the zombies could be tamed, and he enlisted Waylon and Bly to help him. Because of how Elmyra raised them on the ranch, they all had ample experiences with beekeeping and horse breaking, and zombie taming combined aspects of both.

Waylon and Bly considered the work to be too dangerous for me, as their younger sister, so I was not allowed out with them in the barns and fields when they were breaking the zombies. Wyatt wasn't quite as protective of me, and he would talk about it with me sometimes, when the others weren't around. That was how I learned that zombies were nothing more than a hive that could be controlled with pheromones and a strong hand.

Over time, my brothers did manage to turn some zombies into domestic guards. They were still bitey and obviously infectious, but they were not that much different than owning wolves or any other feral animal.

With the newfound livestock in tamed zombies, the ranch returned to a prosperous glory. Not as shiny or bright as it had once been, but the whole world had a tarnish to it now.

The barter culture that society had switched to after the virus made it more difficult to amass wealth in a traditional sense, but we had ammo long after everyone else ran out. We never went without a meal, and my brothers drank bourbon every night. Servants took care of our home and cooked our meals in exchange for food and board. With our zombies surrounding us, no one could harm us.

Our Kingdom was stronger than ever before.

My brother Wyatt spent the most time with the zombies, training and experimenting on them. As such, he had perfected safe ways to interact with them and make them easier to handle. A trick he found most helpful was to sew a person's mouth shut before they turned into a zombie.

It happened on accident at first. One of the servants had been bitten while feeding the zombies. Ordinarily, Wyatt or Bly would toss that servant in with our more particular zombies, the ones that required live prey to feed. But this time, Wyatt chained up the servant and sewed his mouth shut. He ripped out all his fingers and toenails, the same way he had done with his wife Tabitha after she had turned.

That servant ended up being the tamest of all the zombies. When my niece and nephews helped Elmyra pick produce in the garden, he would be there, carrying loads like a pack mule.

In the evenings, my brothers would retire to the den to drink bourbon and unwind. They never asked me to join, because Elmyra insisted that alcohol would diminish a lady's greatness. Sometimes, though, I would eavesdrop from the next room, while they drank and laughed and discussed their work.

That was how I discovered that Wyatt's wife Tabitha had become docile enough to continue her wifely duties. Waylon was repulsed, and Bly laughed uproariously. But I was entranced, hanging on Wyatt's every word as he explained how he safely copulated with a zombie.

It all sounded relatively simple actually. He bound her hands and secured them to the wall in the barn where she lived, and he bent her over so she couldn't bite or scratch him. Then he proceeded to have sex with Tabitha, the same way he had before. Although, he did joke that she was a more lively and enthusiastic partner now that she was undead.

Waylon, appalled and concerned, had asked the salient question. "Aren't you worried about getting the virus? Or knocking her up with some freak zombie child? "

Wyatt, unbothered and proud of himself, replied, "I've been doing it for weeks without getting sick, and she can't get pregnant."

Waylon pressed, "How can you be so sure about the second point?"

Wyatt considered it a moment, and then decided, "I will rip out her uterus before I am with her next time, just to be safe."

It was at that moment that my true destiny became completely clear, and I immediately set about making it happen.

In the mornings, I sometimes worked in the general store, selling goods to the neighbors and travelers who stopped by. There weren't that many, but as the reputation of our Kingdom grew, so did the amount of our customers.

Unfortunately, most of them were unacceptable. Old men with missing teeth, grubby young men covered in scars and smelling of sweat and urine. None of them would work for what I needed, and I could not compromise on something as important as this.

Finally, after weeks and weeks of pining, he arrived in the early morning sunlight, walking up as I opened the store.

He was the most handsome man that I had ever seen, a truly remarkable human. He had hair of gold and eyes of emerald green and a smile that made the earth stand still. He smelled of cedar and fresh cut grass, and he told me that his name was Christopher in a melodic voice.

When I asked him to help haul in heavy milk cannisters from the barn, Christopher didn't even hesitate before saying yes. He had a good heart, and I knew I had found the One.

In the dairy barn, Christopher put his back to me, and I hit him over the head. He collapsed in a heap, alive but unconscious, and I ran to find Wyatt.

Before meeting Christopher, I had confided in Wyatt of my plans, because I would not be able to proceed without help. Wyatt had been surprised, but he eventually agreed. He was curious about the whole prospect, but he also wanted to ensure that I was safe, because our mother would never forgive him if something went wrong.

Wyatt and I carried Christopher to the shed where he did his experiments. Normally, he would send me away, but since this was for me, he let me watch him work. To make it as safe as possible, he cut Christopher's hands below the elbow and his legs below the knee, cauterizing and sewing up the wounds after each amputation. Once he was done, he sewed up Christopher's mouth, and all that was left was turning him.

A limb from a different infected zombie, fresh and dripping blood, would be the source. Wyatt handed it to me. Christopher was awake, thrashing as much as his stubby limbs would allow, but he couldn't escape. I held the zombie arm over his face, letting the infected blood drip into his mouth and into the open wounds from sewing his full lips shut.

It took just over three days for the transformation to be complete. I didn't see Christopher at all during the change. Wyatt had told me that it was a disgusting process, and he even had to hose Christopher off before he finally brought me in.

His stumps were festering, even with Wyatt's stitches and cauterizations. He was pale and sickly, and his lips were swollen and infected. But I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw his eyes were the same. I was afraid that since becoming a zombie he would lose that brilliant emerald color, but they were still so enchanting.

A collar around Christopher's neck was secured to the wall behind him, because my brother was being so cautious. Deep down in my heart, I knew Christopher would not harm me, zombie or not. He had a pure soul, and he had been chosen for this the same way that I had been. It was our destiny, and we could not fight it.

Once Wyatt left me alone with Christopher, I approached him. He was lying on his back, writhing and wriggling, but he did not move away. He lifted his head, his lips straining against the thick black nylon that sewed them shut, and when his eyes met mine, I knew that he would say my name if he could. He wanted this as much as I did.

Wyatt had left Christopher naked to make it easier for me, and a zombie's body would still react to sensations, especially since he was fresh. He breathed, though he needed no oxygen, and he strained toward me, like a plant toward sunlight.

When I touched him, his body responded, and when he was ready, I climbed on top of him. I tried to control it, but his body knew what to do. He thrashed and finished inside me in a matter of minutes the very first time we were together.

For seven days, I visited Christopher at least once per day, spending ten minutes together trying to create our destiny. On the eighth day, he was no longer able to perform, let alone finish. Wyatt had said that he must've dried up. Since there was no more use for him, I kissed him goodnight, and Wyatt took an axe to Christopher. So he wouldn't go to waste, the servants ground him up to feed to the zombie horde.

It took weeks for me to confirm it, but deep down, I had known it had worked the very first time we were together. Christopher and I had created a new life together, and I was pregnant.

Elmyra was confused and upset when she learned I was with child. All I would tell her was this was what was always destined to happen, because I didn't want her to get angry with Wyatt. Our relationship suffered, but it was what was necessary.

The life of the chosen ones is never easy. Elmyra locked me in my room, and she brought in new servants. They were jealous of all that we had, and in a rage, they burned down the ranch. They murdered my brother Wyatt, slaughtered our zombies, and tried to kill my mother.

I was seven months pregnant when it happened, and the stress of it caused me to give birth two days later.

I hate to say that I cannot remember the night I gave birth to my first child. It was a blur of stress and loss and agony and joy. The fires were still burning in the fields, and the house smelled like smoke and ash as Elmyra held my hand and told me to push.

But I do remember the moment my son was placed in my arms, so tiny and wriggling, reminding me of his father. He looked like a newborn piglet, all covered in blood, but when I wiped it away, I could see his skin had the same ashy green color of a zombie.

He opened his eyes, and they were Christpher's eyes, that same brilliant green. But I knew that he was something else. Something the world had never seen before. A hybrid savior for all mankind.

He was my son, the Wonderous Chosen One.