Strange happenings are afoot as Elsa Bloodstone journeys the treacherous, fiendish wastes of Battleworld with her...not-so intrepid traveling companion/burden that, for some reason, she just can't bring herself to separate from. There are some great flashbacks to her time being trained by her emotionally barren, vicious father, but this issue's also about the Deadlands and what it takes to survive them as a ranger for the Shield (for more on that, check out this article on SIEGE #1).
Elsa's resourceful and brutal in her own right, but she's never cruel. Unless you consider the brutality she inflicts on creatures that'd just as soon snack on her as especially brutal, her methods are quick and effecient and fantastic at keeping her and her mysterious, diminuitive companion alive. But where his curiosity forces him to explore and ask, her pragmatism knows what must be done to continue living in this awful realm.
Undead flesh eaters lurk around every corner, (and even in the sky) and it's interesting to see both her tactics and how she follows her father's examples, but also blazes her own trails. She's got tactics for every encounter and knows what horrors lurk in the Deadlands to the extent that this issue is actually reminiscent of the monster hunting and knowledge seen in The Witcher. From a hideous, trapped symbiote to zombies that actually seem to have the gift of thought, there's very little that Else can't contend with.
While SIEGE #1 showed the all-out war on the other side of the Shield, this issue delves more into the trackless wasteland that the area beyond can be. It's not impossible to survive, but it surely isn't easy. Nor is it easy for its natural inhabitants, but as we see from the final page's reveal, there truly is more than one way to make a go of it and more than one way to survive.
The Marvel Zombies have, of course, been put through the absolute ringer in terms of their portrayal. Starting out as almost a joke from Robert Kirkman, or an excuse to do the absolute worst acts of violence imaginable to Marvel characters completely without consequence, moving onto B-movie style villains and fodder for Howard the Duck and NEXTWAVE-flavor Machine Man, now we're seeing them actually become sinister and even scary. They start out funny in this issue, but by the end Simon Spurrier and Kev Walker have given the reader a reason to fear the Deadlands.