by T. S. Frost
So the change of scenery was nice, and when they passed through this tiny blink-and-you-miss it town that the zoms had clearly abandoned long ago in favor of better hunting grounds, neither one was particularly adverse to taking a day off to rest in the relative safety.
There wasn't much of note in the town, but it did have a bookshop, and Alexa decided to poke through it just because. LS followed her, looking around the shop curiously, and they soon split up among the shelves to explore.
The place was a bit of a mess–other travelers had clearly been through here in the past. Alexa found ashes and the twisted remains of torn up pages, and her inner nerd cried a little at tomes of knowledge now being reduced to fire-starting fuel in the new age, but there wasn't much she could do about that.
She swung by the camping section first, but as expected, the survival guides, camping books, foraging and plant encyclopedias, and anything else of current value was long gone. She probably knew most of it anyway.
She poked idly through the comics, paged through a few sci-fi novels, laughed–not without an edge of bitterness–at the enthusiastic display for the 'latest' walking dead bestseller that had come out a couple a weeks before Z-day, and frowned in disappointment at the pathetically small selection of non-fiction regarding physics, biology, and chemistry.
Then, on impulse, Alexa searched through the store until she found the home and family section, and browsed the shelf until she spotted what she was looking for. Grinning, she snatched the floppy paperback from the shelf and searched for LS, intent on sharing her find.
She found the clone in the children's section, which came as a surprise. What surprised Alexa even more was the book LS was looking through almost longingly: The Velveteen Rabbit, the cover read.
Alexa didn't have to even guess which part LS was reading. Even without seeing the pages, it was fairly obvious, just by the almost wistful look on his face, and the way he focused on the book so intently; like he was trying to absorb every last detail.
“You can keep it, you know,” Alexa told him. LS blinked and looked up at her with little surprised. Alexa was sure the clone had known she was there, but had also registered her as safe and not bothered to pay attention.
LS considered her words for a moment, and then said slowly, frowning, “I thought we weren't supposed to carry what wasn't necessary?”
“No, I think what I specifically said was 'don't carry what you can't carry,” Alexa corrected, “But seeing as you can throw motorcycles around without breaking into a sweat, I think you're good carrying around a book or two.”
LS smirked a little at that, but his expression grew more solemn a moment later as he glanced down at the book. After a moment he closed it almost tenderly, as if taking a great deal of care not to damage it, and clutched it close almost possessively. “Yeah. I'll... just hold on to this, then.”
“Great,” Alexa said. “Trade you, though.” And she tossed her own find at LS, deftly (but carefully) snatching the children's book from the clone's hands when he flailed hastily to catch it.
He gave her a dirty look and then glanced down at the paperback in his hands. “'Baby Names of the 2000's'?”
“Yup!” Alexa said with a grin. “We're getting close to the settlement, and cool as 'LS' sounds, I don't think it's gonna fly so well around norms. You're gonna need a secret identity.” Her grin grew more conspiratorial.
He frowned, and flipped idly through a few pages of names, but did not seem particularly interested in any of them–or in renaming himself at all, really. After a moment he glanced up at Alexa again and said, “I don't know how to pick a name.”
Alexa rolled her eyes. “Man you gotta make everything so difficult, LS, y'know that?”
She traded books again, and started paging through the 'most popular' section from the back of the alphabet, reading names and meanings out loud while he watched. “Okay, let's see what we got here... 'Thomas,' means 'a twin'. Hmm, only found one of you, so I guess that's a bust. 'Nathan,' 'he gave'... he gave what? Yeah, no... oh! Okay here's something.”
She glanced up to make sure LS was still still paying attention, and then read out loud, “'Casey' says here it means 'brave one'. You definitely have that part down, almost suicidally so in some cases, so what do you think?”
LS blinked. “Uh... it's okay.”
“Great!” Alexa said. “Casey it is... long as you're okay with it, anyway”
“Casey,” LS repeated slowly, as though getting used to the unfamiliar name on his tongue. He cocked his head to the side as though listening, and said with a little more confidence, “My name is Casey.” Another pause, and then he nodded. “Yeah. It's fine. I like it.”
Alexa grinned. “There ya go! Nice to meet you, Casey. No need to bother with a last name, nobody uses them anymore. Or you can borrow mine if you want, families have been reworked so much in the past few years nobody would bat an eye even if we totally don't look like we're related at all.”
“Of course we don't,” Casey smirked. “You're way too short compared to me.”
“Hey!” Alexa groused with good humor. “Man, you rescue a clone from a pod and give him a name and this is the thanks you get...” She snorted, tossed the baby name book aside idly, and added almost as an afterthought, “Still gonna call you LS outside of the crowds, though.”
Casey said nothing in response, but his nod was agreement enough. He'd never argued against the nickname before, and by now it had layers of familiarity to it that just stuck for both of them.
They stayed in that little blink-and-you-miss it town for a full day, relishing in the rest, before pushing on at a faster pace. They were close to the refuge now, and Alexa was anxious to finally get there, now that they were on the final stretch.
But the journey had proved interesting, and there had been plenty of successes outside of pure survival. LS–Casey–seemed more alive than he had when Alexa first pulled him out of the pod, a little more natural, more... human.
Alexa realized with some surprise, the same could actually be said of her. She'd always tried to stay optimistic, as she searched for her parents and grandpa and her Aunt Kate; to believe they could still be alive, so that she could keep going. But she was starting to realize, after spending a month traveling with Casey, how much she'd just been merely going through the motions up until now.
Before it had been survival and little else: getting together the exact, precise physical needs in order to keep going for the next day, making sure she was physically capable of traveling safely and efficiently, making sure she had the physical materials necessary to barter for even more survival.
But now that she was looking out for somebody else, doing her best to make sure they didn't just survive but enjoyed life as much as possible, she was starting to realize how little of that she'd been doing herself. She'd been living for others before, but always in the future. Now that she was living for somebody else right now, she felt a lot more... alive.
She realized, the farther they went on this journey, that to really make it through the apocalypse, you had to do more than just survive: you had to live. Appreciate what you had, never waste a moment, and get what enjoyment you could out of life, no matter how bleak it might look.
So maybe it wasn't entirely a one-way rescue, after all. She might have pulled Casey out of Gentech, adjusted him to post-Z-day life, and taught him how to have fun–but Casey had, knowingly or not, given her a few lessons as well.
And somehow that left Alexa feeling a lot more light-hearted than she had in almost three years.
Chapter 5
“So, what do you think?” Alexa asked with a grin, as she and Casey stood on decrepit docks, next to the recently raised signal flag, one late afternoon and stared out over the water at the pleasant-looking island. She'd known where they were heading for weeks, but had kept the details to herself, mostly so she could see Casey's reaction when they first set eyes on the settlement.
Casey looked skeptical as he eyed t
he distant island. “That's the settlement? It's... it's very...”
“Impressive? Amazing? Terrifyingly awesome?”
“...Not what I expected.”
“It's because it's a vacation spot, isn't it,” Alexa said, with mocking disapproval.
The island was admittedly still a peaceful looking place years after Z-day. Its official name was technically 'Island Refuge', or sometimes 'Island Tradepost', depending on what part of the country you were in and how well their communications held up. But somebody had decided to paint over the welcome sign ages ago with New Avalon in bold red letters, and the name had just stuck with the locals ever since.
It was a fitting title: New Avalon was one of the most defensible, advanced, well equipped, safest refugee communities in America, second only to the military communities on the West Coast, and it was the most successful civilian-created community in the country, period. Alexa could say that with certainty. She'd been to many of them, and nothing held up to New Avalon when it came to preparedness, in her opinion.
When the quarantines went into effect the residents of the island were evacuated to the mainland for processing. It's hard to say what happened to them afterwards, maybe they moved west following the military during the mass exodus, maybe they were overrun by zoms, or maybe they were holed up somewhere safe just waiting things out. Either way, they never came back.
With the island sitting wide-open and abandoned, a few opportunistic survivors with their eyes on the future had seen its potential, and moved on in. The island was reclaimed, the few zombies that had managed to wander in and not find their way out again were destroyed and disposed of, and fences where put up anywhere that the bluffs didn't act as a natural barrier.
Just like that, the island was a fully defensible fortress of sheer walls sitting in the middle of a protective body of water, with all of the necessary space and facilities a colony of survivalists might need.
In the past two and a half years since its reclaiming a leadership had been established, systems had been hammered out, supplies had been gathered, and defenses and necessities were repeatedly improved upon, until it was what it was today: a fully operational settlement of hardy survivors, and a tiny sliver of hope at the chance of a better future.
“It really doesn't look that secure,” Casey told her flatly.
Alexa laughed, but then added more seriously, “I know it sounds kinda strange, LS, but I've been around a few settlements by now searching for my family. The ones that usually last are set up in prisons and military facilities, or sometimes schools. They're some of the most defensible locations, but they still have access to a lot of the stuff you might need. Despite its location this one is the best of all, trust me!”
Casey shook his head a little. “It's been a month,” he said, “But sometimes this world still makes no sense.”
“Not gonna argue with that, and it's been way longer for me,” Alexa told him. “Ah, there we go!” she paused and stared at the small sailboat that had appeared in the distance, circling around New Avalon. The island defenses included a number of regular patrols in the water that were active night and day, keeping an eye on the city's coastline for potential zombie threats and living travelers alike.
Alexa kept waiting for them to notice the raised flag that indicated travelers–shouting wouldn't help, and it might attract zoms, even though New Avalon was also pretty good about at least keeping the city's docks relatively clean. She was rewarded a minute later, when the boat turned suddenly and began to speed towards them.
Speed was the keyword, Alexa realized a moment later, eyes widening. The craft was moving for them quickly and without the use of it's sails, which she realized were not even unfurled. She'd have guessed it was a motorboat, except she hadn't seen one of those working in a long time, due to lack of fuel to keep them running.
The boat was closer now, and abruptly began slowing to a halt as momentum stopped being supplied by the engines and light reflected off a multitude of solar panels lining the deck. It drifted closer to the dock, but stopped a good ten feet away, bobbing on quiet swells of water.
There was nobody visible. Baffled, Alexa was just about to open her mouth and call out when a man with a wild head of hair popped up from behind a solar panel and focused an intense stare on them.
“Geez!” Alexa yelped at an embarrassingly high pitch, and backpedaled away from the edge of the dock. The intense eyes continued to watch them, reminding her uncomfortably of a wolf, and her heart thumped as, for one terrifying moment, she thought for sure that they were going to be attacked.
Casey let out a low rumbling growl that Alexa had learned usually preceded a fight. And if the situation weren't quite so serious, she'd have actually laughed at the way the clone shifted himself defensively, sidling an inch to the right to better put himself between Alexa and the watcher.
Then Alexa's common sense caught up with her, and she hissed, “Knock it off, man! He came with the boat, he's probably an ally, right?”
“Probably?” Casey questioned. His voice still rumbled dangerously, and his entire body was tense, still between Alexa and the watcher. “I thought you'd been here before!”
“I have,” Alexa said. “This guy is new though–oh! Um... hi?” The man had apparently reached a decision and produced a rope which he promptly lassoed around a dock post.
“Good afternoon,” the man said, in precise, formal English, as though it wasn't his first language. “My apologies for frightening you. I thought it best to be cautious; it can sometimes be... difficult... to distinguish true travelers from bandits.”
Alexa blinked as she tried to place the accent and the figure leaped the now diminished gap to join them on the deck. He was dark-skinned, fairly tall, and barefoot, but his most striking features were the faint scars on his neck and his fingers.
“Hey,” Alexa said, excitedly. “You're Russian, aren't you?”
Immediately after the first outbreaks Russia had closed its borders and cut off all contact with the outside world in an attempt to keep out the virus. They repelled all attempts at contact with deadly force and refused to answer any requests for help, considering the Z-virus not be their concern so long as it didn't make it within their borders.
“I am,” the man answered. He said it with a quiet, calm sort of pride, but also regarded Alexa carefully, like he wasn't entirely sure how the she would take the answer. The same careful look was given to Casey a second later, who was still crouched somewhat defensively, looking ready to fight.
Alexa elbowed her companion in the ribs and said, “Sweet! Sorry, you just caught me by surprise is all, I didn't expect to see one of you guys here.” The man stiffened slightly, and belatedly Alexa realized that maybe that hadn't exactly come out quite right–there she went again, mouth too fast as always.
“Geez, I didn't mean it that way, I'm not trying to be rude or anything, I just–y'know what? Take two. My name's Alexa. Nice to meet you.” And she stuck out her hand.
The other figure hesitated for a moment, but then slowly reached out to shake. “I am Piotr,” he introduced himself. “And your companion...?”
Alexa was about to introduce her friend, but Casey beat her to it. He'd drawn back into a regular stance at Alexa's warning nudge, still looking wary. But when the conversation turned to him, he hesitated only briefly before suddenly rattling off something in another language.
Alexa blinked–that didn't sound like anything she knew, other than the 'Casey' she'd heard somewhere in there–but Piotr looked shocked, and some of the rigidity crept slowly out of his body. He responded accordingly in the same language before switching back to English, saying, “It is a pleasant surprise, to find somebody here that speaks Russian. You are, perhaps, the most... interesting... travelers I have met in some time.”
He was markedly more friendly with them after that, portraying a calmness that was refreshing after some of the more cut-throat varieties of people Alexa had gotten used to meeting. As the man tu
rned to draw the boat closer to the dock for their benefit, Alexa hissed under her breath, knowing Casey would hear it anyway, “What did you do? He was ice cold until you said... whatever!”
“I gave him a formal greeting,” Casey muttered back, leaning close enough that Alexa could still hear him. “I told him we meant no disrespect and have no intent for aggression.”
Alexa shook her head in disbelief. Casey, showing no intent for aggression? And when the clone had said he knew at least five languages via brain downloads, he hadn't mentioned one of them had been Russian. She'd figured it'd just be French and Spanish and German and the like. “Nice call,” she muttered back. The ghost of a grin passed over Casey's face, but he said nothing.
Piotr had secured the boat more firmly to the dock by now.
“Get in,” he instructed. “I will take you to the island personally and with all speed.” They obliged, tossing their packs into the bottom of the boat and clambering on afterwards.