Raging Old Lady

The world ended, but nobody told Madam Higgins. At eighty, in a spotless dress, she still deadheads her roses and takes her Earl Grey at four while the survivors camped beyond her fence sneer at the delusional old woman in the walled garden. Then Hammer's raiders come for her stores. She asks them, politely, to mind the lawn. Then she dissolves the first man through the gate where he stands. Across thirty episodes the raiders throw everything they have at one garden gate — numbers, armour-piercing rounds, C4, and finally a mutant thing that eats bullets — and one by one the garden takes them. Outside the wire an old veteran recognises a killing stroke he last saw at the Berlin Wall and puts a name to her: Poison Ivy, the Cold War's deadliest shadow, retired but never disarmed. In her cellar sits the last dose of the cure, and she has no intention of yielding an inch of it to men who broke down her gate. When it is over she leaves the serum on the steps, tells the survivors not to dirty them, and goes back to her soil.