There was blood everywhere. One the walls, the floor, the mouldering volumes left on the old shelves, everywhere. 

Out at the doorway, a silhouette of a man slipped out of the door, spreading a dusty light across the room, and to the body on the floor, a young woman in a dark jacket. She lay on the dusty boards in an expanding pool of arterial blood, struggling for breath through a ruptured trachea, watching as the man who had just shot her stroll off into the wastes, with her duffel bag in hand.

The trade had not gone well.

He hadn't even had a very good aim.  What she suspected had been intended to hit her head instead hit her in the side of the neck, blasting apart the carotid artery and causing far more mess than it needed to. Maybe being the one who got shot gave her a bit of personal bias,  but some of the last thoughts that flickered though Magdalene Atwood's mind as she bled out in the ruins of a pre-war bookstore,  was that the murder had been a very sloppy one.

[hr]

It was around two days that the corpse of Magdalene Atwood lay in the abandoned bookstore. The blood puddle had begun to become dry and sticky, though no flies or vermin had made any approach upon it.

About 48 hours after she had died,  the body gave a sudden spasmodic twitch, the back arching up before pushing back down as she flung up into a sitting position and let out a sudden gasp for air. Two more desperate intakes of breath before she threw herself onto her knees and violently threw up, splattering the already ruined floor with congealed blood and stomach acid. 

However many times it happened, re-animation was still impossible to get used to. Like even the body rejected such a violation of natural laws. Everything had to die. Very few things had made it a two way street. 

It took a while, but Magdalene was able to rise onto her feet.

 Her skull felt like it had been chipped out on the inside with a mason's chisel and her throat was burning with bile. All kind of par for the course, but she was pretty sure she was going to need to find something to drink pretty soon or this was going to get into a really unpleasant cycle.

'Don't pass out don't pass out don't-'

Clumsily, Magdalene reached round the bookshelves, blinking through fuzzy vision.
She just hoped that bastard hadn't found the-

Her fingers closed round a book. 

'Got it.' 

With shaky hands the book opened, revealing the hollowed-out inside and a concealed ID card with its chesspiece symbol sat within. 

The motheaten rug in the corner was pulled aside, and the white plastic crates bearing similar insignia that had been set into replace the floor beneath were revealed, and the first opened with  swipe of the card.  LED strips on the inside flared and lit the packages inside.

The bag, with a couple of day's worth of rations stuffed inside, was a decoy. It served its purpose very well. Apparently her trader buddy had completely missed the real prize.

Three crates of Erubesco field unit supplies. Freeze-dried rations, water purifiers, heat packs, medical supplies...all the kinds of things you might miss living out in the ashlands. Also worth their weight in gold. 

If anything gold was less important. You couldn't eat gold. 

Mags reached round in the interior until her trembling hands seized upon an orange carton, which she cracked and downed near enough in one, but for what she lost when it spilled down her bloodstained shirt. 

It would normally take a few days to be back up to standard after a reanimation. She was pretty sure she did not have that long before one of that scumbag's buddies got wind of the place and turned up to try and loot her corpse. One way or another she was going to have to move her cache without any of the wasteland's more colourful characters catching on. That would take strategy, cunning....all the kind of things you lost when you were short around half of your blood. Mags leaned back on the crate and groaned. Why could she never reanimate to good news?