Previously in SHANNA THE SHE-DEVIL…

One year ago, Kevin Plunder – otherwise known as Ka-Zar – falls victim to the dark sorcery of Ezlenza, The Red Priestess. Believing her husband dead, Shanna The She-Devil casts his body from the steppes of Mount Kluj in the Savage Land and retires to grieve. However, Ka-Zar has actually been transformed into a strange state of magical undeath and survives, albeit in a degenerative state that is inexorably eroding his mind as much as his body.

Deranged and decomposing, the zombie-like Ka-Zar witnesses men from the outside world stealing velociraptor eggs from the Savage Land and stows away aboard their airplane. Eventually traveling to Europe, Ka-Zar learns that a man named Philippe Bruneau is hatching the eggs and breeding raptors to fight in an arena known as The Pit, located beneath Prague’s venerated St. Vitus Cathedral, for the bloodthirsty amusement of a secret, aristocratic society.

Ka-Zar becomes obsessed with stopping Bruneau; however, crippled by his failing brain and victim to a delusional, paranoid state, he doesn’t seek help from old allies such as Reed Richards or T’Challa of Wakanda but instead seeks to deliver a warning to Shanna through other means. In London, Ka-Zar chances upon a familiar face from his past – a doctor named Madeleine Presley – and compels her to travel to the Savage Land. This proves to be a disastrous action, as Madeleine is actually Ka-Zar’s first wife from a time prior to meeting Shanna, a not-so-inconsequential fact he’s never divulged to his second spouse.

Initially oblivious to Madeleine’s relationship with Kevin, Shanna accompanies the doctor to Prague along with two other allies: a zebra-man named Marty and a sabertooth cub, the offspring of Ka-Zar’s longtime comrade Zabu, now christened Scooby. Upon learning that Madeleine is Ka-Zar’s wife – and that there’s never been a legal divorce to boot – Shanna hurls the other woman over the side of the St. Charles Bridge in a fit of rage. Madeleine is saved from the freezing waters of the Vltava river by Marty and Scooby, but before Shanna can regret her rash actions she is confronted by the bewildered, zombified Ka-Zar himself…

…and also by a pack of savage velociraptors, escaped from The Pit and now loose upon the snow-covered streets of Prague.

Meanwhile, back in the Savage Land, a similarly undead Ezlenza has returned and is planning a bloody revenge upon Shanna. Using a dimensional warp known as the Mandragorgona Helix, the Red Priestess and her band of ne’er-do-wells now seek to follow Shanna to Prague, unaware of the chaos that is already taking place…

And now… the adventure continues!

SHANNA AND THE MALEVOLENCE OF THE ULTIMATE FOE

By Meriades Rai

The velociraptor stood proudly at the far end of the St. Charles Bridge, framed by the inky darkness of the evening skies and by the lights of the old city beyond. It was a magnificent specimen, by far the largest Shanna had ever seen, especially considering its young age. She suspected that the men who’d stolen the raptor eggs from the Savage Land had somehow manipulated those eggs during the incubation period, genetically augmenting the reptile fetuses inside. Such treatment likely accounted for the raptor’s coloring also: a bluish-green hide so lurid in places it was the turquoise of peacock feathers, and with a livid scarlet crest that erupted from the beast’s skull and trailed down its powerful neck and back like a ceremonial headdress.

Shanna scowled. The Savage Land itself had been a product of extraterrestrial experimentation. Now mankind was following suit, meddling with matters it didn’t understand or fear anywhere near as readily as it should… and that meddling might prove to be the death of them all.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Ka-Zar declared, clapping his hands. “And, just to think, this is the first time she’ll have seen snow!”

Shanna glanced across at her husband, her expression one of sorrowful disbelief. This wasn’t the man she’d once loved, the man whose memory she still loved. There were fragments of Kevin Plunder to be sure, but these were just momentary glimpses beneath the dementia. It wasn’t the mottled gray skin that distressed her, not the withered muscles or the dead eyes; she could look past that cosmetic deterioration, as awful as it was. It was the corrosion of his mind that she couldn’t bear.

Better you’d remained dead, she thought disconsolately. Better that had been the end of it, when I’d cast your body from the Kluj, than to be confronted with this mockery of life. And the worst thing was, Kevin would have agreed with her. The real Kevin.

“If I ask you to stay here, will you listen?” Shanna murmured. She looked into the man’s hollow eyes and saw no comprehension there. She sighed and shook her head.

This wasn’t going to end well.

Shanna shrugged out of the voluminous black coat she’d been wearing since arriving in Prague, revealing her more customary attire of figure-hugging leopard skin and fox fur. Where her flesh was now exposed it prickled in the sudden cold, but she didn’t flinch. She merely retrieved a pair of weapons from a belt slung at her slender waist: a traditional hunting knife of sharpened bone for her left hand and a more alarming piece for her right, a knife with two greenish-black blades, carved from the armor-plated crest of an avaceratops, extending in opposite directions from a central knuckle-clasp. In recent days Shanna had slain Mandragorgona snake-women and drachlu’pa – dire wolves – with that customized dagger. Now it was the raptor’s turn… and, with everything that had happened since she’d met Madeleine Presley, it was safe to say she had a measure of pent-up aggression to work through.

“Come on then, girl,” Shanna muttered, eyeing the velociraptor as it began to approach. “Let’s see if you’re as colorful on the inside as you are on the outside…”

There were three other raptors in addition to the one on the St. Charles Bridge. Hunched down in the gutter with a bottle of cheap vodka, a vagrant named Jan Krasic had witnessed the beasts emerge from the darkened interior of St. Vitus Cathedral and then proceed to unleash bloody carnage upon the hordes of innocent victims that thronged the surrounding streets. It was a sobering affair. Almost.

A drunk and a drifter with barely a coin to his name, Krasic wasn’t a member of the aristocracy and therefore had never attended The Pit. He’d been aware of its covert existence beneath the cathedral of course, as most street-dwellers were – a man had to be careful, you see, that he wasn’t ‘disappeared’ one night, thereafter ending up as fresh meat for The Pit itself – but he’d never believed the wilder tales about dinosaurs. Now the evidence before his own eyes was clear.

Prague with a Pit had been dangerous enough. Prague with dinosaurs was just too much. Swallowing down the last of his vodka, Krasic determined that it was time to move on.

For that, however, he’d need money.

There was a woman’s body at the end of the alley where Krasic was hiding – or, to be more exact, two-thirds of a woman’s body, considering she was missing most of her left leg and a portion of her hip and waist, severed with a crude but unmistakable semi-circular bite radius. Choking back bile, Krasic stepped gingerly through the blood and reached for the item that had convinced him to approach the partially eaten corpse where it lay: the woman’s handbag. Her expensive dress suggested that she’d been a member of the pozorovatele, The Pit’s exclusive audience, and that before ending up as a dinosaur’s hors d’oeuvre she’d been alluringly wealthy. When Krasic rifled through the bag and found the woman’s purse to be stuffed with bills he was momentarily delighted to be proved correct.

Then he heard a noise behind him, and he turned to see three figures materializing out of thin air.

There was a wolf-beast, eight feet tall on its hind legs and all sinewy limbs and slabs of powerful muscle thatched with gray-black fur, with massive claws and teeth and glowing red eyes. There was a dead man, a man who couldn’t have been anything other than dead considering the pallor of his decaying flesh and the emptiness in his black, soulless eyes, but a man who remained upright regardless, an animated cadaver. And then there was the woman in red, even more corpse-like than her companion in her blood-hued robes and ruined coronet, and with her shriveled skin crawling with what appeared to be ants but which were, Krasic instinctively realized, something far, far worse.

In her outstretched, skeletal hand the woman was holding a severed head that was crowned with snakes instead of hair. As Krasic looked on, his fragile mind splintering at the horror of it all, the woman gazed about at her surroundings and smiled an ant-filled smile.

“Ah,” breathed Ezlenza, the Red Priestess. “The power of the Helix… truly, it’s everything I dreamed of. To tread the invisible corridor between one aspect of the mortal world and another in the space of a heartbeat… to escape the confines of that Neanderthal realm and to seek out a new land to conquer… oh, the magnificence! But there’s something more. Traveling in such a way I find myself psychically aware of the Nuwali essence that lingers in every aspect of what they created, their manipulations of space and time to generate-”

Krasic made a sound. Ezlenza glanced towards him, noticing him for the first time. Her sepulchral smile widened, the insects swarming beneath her papery skin as much as on top of it now alive in frenzy.

“Hello, my darling,” the Red Priestess purred. “In all my dalliances with visiting outsiders, when marooned back in the Savage Land, I was always curious about the notion of convenience food. Now, finally, I begin to understand the concept…”

Ezlenza hitched the skirt of her robe up past her fleshless knees and a tumble of pir’achai – piranha ants – spilled out like the folds of a black petticoat, skittering and squirming as they surged towards poor Jan Krasic, who barely had time to scream before he was consumed.

“Feed, little ones, feed,” Ezlenza crooned. “And then, when we’re sated, we’ll hunt down the one we’ve come for and strip the flesh from her bones in the softest, saltiest red ribbons you can imagine. But hurry! The Helix calls to me in ways I never anticipated, and only now do I begin to understand the opportunity that presents itself.

“I don’t need to conquer this world. I need to remake it…”

Philippe Bruneau wasn’t dead, and he didn’t know why.

The loathing in the velociraptor’s eyes had been plain enough when it had pinned him down some minutes earlier and then taken him bodily in its oversized jaw, and such hatred was understandable; it was Bruneau, after all, who’d overseen the systematic program of beatings and starvation the dinosaur had endured since hatching, abuse calculated to render it all the more savage for its time in The Pit. Bruneau was a bastard, and sage enough to accept that the raptor was due as bloody a vengeance as it could deliver.

However, the raptor had demonstrated a strange resolve in conveying its prize from the catacombs beneath the cathedral out into the city at large, ignoring his struggles and the flailing of his hooked hand as it carried him out onto the St. Charles Bridge for all to see. Was this some deliberate gesture of triumphalism, an indication for all to see that reptiles were superior to man, or something more? Could it be that the beast was experiencing a manner of kinship with its tormentor, the one true authority figure it had known in its brief life?

Bruneau didn’t care. He only knew that he was still breathing when the raptor finally loosened its jaw and deposited its prey on the snow-dusted ground at its feet, allowing him a second to take in his new surroundings. He saw the lines of black statues and lampposts that edged the elegantly arched balustrades of the bridge, framed against the indigo-gray of the low Prague skyline – and then witnessed the incongruous sight of a woman with fiery auburn hair and clad in animal skins approaching at speed, bearing weapons.

Bruneau blinked. He’d never visited the Savage Land in person, directing his egg-purloining operations from afar, but the uncanny echoes of the moment weren’t lost on him. A wild woman with a knife engaging a dinosaur in combat was likely an ordinary occurrence in that faraway, time-lost jungle; all Prague was lacking this night was a landscape of mangroves and gigantic, primordial ferns to complete the illusion. But that wasn’t his world, and he couldn’t escape the absurdity of it quickly enough.

Bruneau scrambled to his feet, ignoring the aches and pains about his ribs where the raptor’s teeth had clutched him, and prepared to run. It was only then that he realized that the reptile wasn’t done with him, and that it had positioned itself in such a way that he couldn’t sprint past it without leaving himself open to a blow from its nearside foreleg. He stumbled, eyes wide, his flesh even more ghastly pale than was customary for a fellow often referred to as Le Cadavre – the French word for corpse. A fitting name, Bruneau now reflected as he raised his hooked hand in a futile gesture of protection but exposing his gut in the same movement.

“No!” a woman’s voice cried. “Turn away! Don’t let it- ”

But it was too late. Bruneau was no jungle fighter, versed in the ways of an ancient foe like a raptor. The dinosaur snarled and flicked its leg, neatly ripping open its prey’s stomach with a single, teardrop-shaped talon. Just as it had intended all along. Bruneau screamed and fell, clutching instinctively at his intestines as they began to spill free from what remained of his gut like scarlet maggots escaping from a freshly cut sack of grain.

It was said that disembowelment – often a raptor’s killing strike of choice – was the most agonizing method of death outside of being burned alive. Philippe Bruneau was about to discover that this was true…

“Damn it!”

Shanna The She-Devil launched herself forward, knowing that she was too late to save Bruneau but swearing beneath her breath that she’d not let the raptor claim any more victims. She thought of Kevin and her heart stung. There’d been too much death already; it ended here and now, tonight, in Prague.

The velociraptor was aware of Shanna’s presence and turned to meet her, shifting its considerable weight onto its nearside and pushing forward on its powerful hind legs and whip-like tail. Shanna, unlike Bruneau, was experienced in dealing with such opponents, however; the raptor was quick and clever but its methods of attack and defense were predictable to someone who’d encountered such beasts in plentiful number and lived to tell the tale. Shanna was already twisting in mid-air and tucking her body at the waist as the raptor thrust out its neck and brought its powerful jaws together with the chilling retort of a steel trap, inches away from where it had expected its enemy to be.

Shanna arched her back and flung out both arms to maintain her balance as she passed the raptor, her lithe body gliding with all the power and control of a gymnast whose physique had been augmented over many years through the imbibing of heady jungle concoctions. She lashed out with her left hand and slammed her standard knife into the raptor’s momentarily exposed throat almost to the hilt, relinquishing her grip at the right instant so that her wrist didn’t snap, then angled her body away from her foe’s instinctive response of flailing claws.

It was a perfect maneuver, as was Shanna’s subsequent dive and tumble that allowed her to roll to her feet a short distance from the raptor before it could turn upon her… but she’d underestimated the reptile’s resilience. Velociraptors were traditionally faster and more agile than larger, deadlier predators, such as allosaurs and tyrannosaurs, but their hides were comparatively less armored and there was significantly less density to the flesh and muscles beneath the scaly hide. Just not in this instance, however. This specimen, unfortunately, hadn’t just gained greater size from when its eggs had been manipulated. It was sturdier too.

The raptor shrieked and flecked a claw to dislodge the knife from its throat but it didn’t keel. Instead it turned its head and glared at Shanna with such malevolence that she faltered, shocked by the burning intelligence in the creature’s eyes.

“My God,” she muttered, adjusting her grip on her remaining weapon. “What did these fools do to you…?”

The raptor threw back its head, its scarlet crest gleaming in the light of the bridge’s lamps, and let out a wail – not of pain or fury, but something else. A summons. Shanna glanced left and right, her eyes narrowed, her heightened senses alive. The other reptiles, the ones wreaking bloody havoc in the city; this was a call to them. That wasn’t good.

The crested raptor returned its attention to Shanna, furrowing its lips and baring its teeth in the frightening illusion of a smile. Shanna wasn’t in any mood to be intimidated, however. She was a survivor, always had been, and survivors became such by never being shy of taking the initiative.

The She-Devil sprang forward, feinting one way and then the other, coiling her leopardskin-clad body like a spring. The raptor anticipated each facet of her attack, its muscles rippling beneath its scaly shell, and whipped out its tail to bring the human woman low at the knees, pitching her forward. Shanna grunted and rolled with the blow, kicking out and planting the sole of her right boot square beneath the raptor’s chin as its head pecked forward and then sweeping her left leg across the back of its neck, attempting to execute a scissor lock. The raptor shrugged her away at the last second, however, ramming a pointy shoulder into her ribs and causing her to cry out.

Shanna slid. The raptor turned, so unimaginably gracefully for such a behemoth, neck straining and claws slashing. Shanna screamed as pain blossomed across her left haunch, followed immediately by a soaking of blood. She twisted, snatching up her legs to avoid a second blow, and flashed out her right arm.

The customized, double-bladed knife cut upwards and then sideways as Shanna flexed her wrist, one motion a thrust and the other a slice. Now it was the raptor’s turn to shriek as a sizeable chunk of lizardflesh was removed from its breast, like a meat joint separating beneath a butcher’s cleaver.

Dark blood misted the air. Jaws snapped. Shanna’s hair tangled and tore at the roots but she ignored the pain, keeping her head cosseted at her shoulder and giving herself bodily to sense and instinct. The velociraptor almost had her, pinning her, digging away with its teardrop talons, but she slithered free – oiled with a sheen of her own sweat and blood – and earned room enough for another thrust with her weapon.

The uppermost blade bit deep, sliding up through the softer underside of the raptor’s jaw and then on through its tongue and the roof of its mouth, then finally up through the crust of its spiny snout, right between the eyes in an eruption of blood. The knife wedged but Shanna immediately twisted it with all her considerable strength so that she could reverse her drive and pull it free once more with a wet, sucking sound, dragging much of the raptor’s tongue along with it out through the wound in its lower jaw.

The velociraptor reared backwards, belching a whine and choking on its own blood. Its tongue dangled from its ruined throat like a necktie. Its tail whipped and its claws reached. Shanna scrabbled clear with a half inch to spare, her hair and skin drenched in viscous filth.

Slaying dinosaurs was not an elegant affair.

But there was more to come. Even as Shanna watched the first raptor fall, its lifeforce leaking away in a dark flood, so a flurry of squawking cries and skittering claws caused her to turn and face the rest of the pack as they emerged from the narrow city streets behind her. There were three of them, approaching cautiously but determinedly, their eyes bright red in the shadows. They were smaller than the one Shanna had just slaughtered for these were true raptors rather than augmented specimens. For this the She-Devil was grateful; the raptors remained deadly, but she was fully confident in her own prowess. Besides, she wasn’t alone.

There was still something burning inside Ka-Zar, some small, flickering spark that refused to be exhausted. As Shanna looked on so the cloaked man lumbered forward and engaged the nearest reptile with his bare fists, clubbing the beast about the snout as much to draw its attention as anything else. Then there came a furious snapping and snarling and, from the shadows, a sabertooth cub rushing forward to clamp his budding jaws about the same raptor’s ankle. Zabu’s cub.

The raptor screeched and retaliated, and for a second Shanna feared for the cub’s life, but then a third figure entered the fray. Lithe and gangling of limb, with his distinctive black-and-white striped hide, Marty the quagga scurried forward with a cry of “Eisha, Eisha!” and began swatting at the raptor’s back like a furious, monochromatic stick insect.

It was strange, and it was foolhardy. Kevin Plunder was now a shadow of a man, and Marty and the sabertooth weren’t warriors. All three of them would have perished if not for Shanna’s intervention, sweeping forward and slicing open the throat of the raptor squirming in their midst and then turning her attention to the other two dinosaurs, her customized weapon swift and lethal in her grip and her beautiful eyes cold with absolute focus as she pursued the battle.

For most witnesses it would have been an enthralling sight, this jungle woman thriving against worrisome odds. For Ezlenza, The Red Priestess, observing the final cut-and-thrust of this particular skirmish from close by, the moment meant little.

She had traveled here, beyond the boundaries of the Savage Land, in search of revenge. That opportunity would now be realized.

Ezlenza smiled a fleshless smile and raised her hand. The severed head of the Mandragorgona Sister – decapitated by Shanna but kept alive by magic, and now eager to partake in retribution – began to glow in Ezlenza’s grasp, the snakes of her hair writhing and her fangs bared. In the decomposing sockets of the Red Priestess’s eyes, the pir’achai swarmed.

“The power of the Mandragorgona Helix – the power of the Nuwali themselves – is now mine to control,” Ezlenza hissed. “Hear me, She-Devil! The Helix is more than just a gateway between physical locations. It’s an aperture at the heart of reality itself. A fixed point in time and space, but a point through which the eternal vortex of time and space can be breached. Manipulated. Molded!

“Through extraterrestrial engineering, the Nuwali created the Savage Land by terraforming a solitary plateau into a perpetual, tropical paradise – a mere fingernail’s worth of transmutation on the body of the world. But why stop there? The Helix is integrated into the entire Nuwali system, utilizing the same alien technology as was employed to physically transmute reality. Why not use the Helix to elaborate? I’m no base nihilist, you see; I don’t want to destroy. I want to build, remake…”

Ezlenza the Red Priestess raised her arms aloft, and at her gesture the skies and the landscape began to shimmer and flicker and warp at her will.

“I wish to rule the Savage Land and I wish to rule the world as one!” she screamed. “The entire Earth shall be terraformed. Witness, Shanna, the birth of a prehistoric planet… all at my command!” Shanna The She-Devil swooned, buffeted by the sudden distorting of reality that was occurring all about her. She glimpsed a dozen seemingly unrelated images at once – her childhood in Africa… her arrival in the Savage Land… her first meeting with Ka-Zar, the man she would come to love… the death of that same man… the face of Madeleine Presley; and then more, unfamiliar snippets that somehow existed as memory nonetheless. A gleaming, spinning shield of red, white and blue adorned with an unblemished star… a small legion of multiple, identical individuals ranged against a threat from the skies… a hulking behemoth of emerald green and savage fury…

…and then the dinosaurs. The raptors, the stegosaurs, the pterodactyls, the tyrannosaurs… herbivores and carnivores alike, all nightmarish caricatures of their true selves and all rampaging upon the world at large, consumed by some unholy bloodlust. Because they weren’t living, any more than Ka-Zar or Ezlenza were, in truth.

These were dinosaurs of rotting flesh and exposed bone. Undead.

Zombie dinosaurs.

This was a vision of the future of the world, a future where the terraforming engineering of the Nuwali had been corrupted by the Red Priestess’s necromancy.

“No!” Shanna roared. “No, you can’t do this. You don’t understand, you’re not in control, you- ”

But it was too late.

In that very moment, Ezlenza the Red Priestess shrieked with the laughter of the deluded and the damned…

…and unleashed the full power of the Mandragorgona Helix upon the cursed world.

NEXT ISSUE: It’s the end of the world as we know it! Can Shanna somehow prevail over the machinations of the Red Priestess? And who – or what – can possibly stand firm against the terror of zombie dinosaurs? Yes, that’s zombie dinosaurs! Be prepared for guest stars and twists and turns galore!