Age of Z: A Tale of Survival

by T. S. Frost

  “Uh-uh.” Blake shook his head firmly at the both of them. “You're not going anywhere for a week. According to my satellite hacks we've got a large number of big thunderstorms heading our way. You're holing up here until they've passed and I give you the okay.”

  “Oh, come on, Blake–”

  “Don't come on me. Getting stuck out in a storm like that is a potential death sentence. You know that,” Blake told her, with an accusing edge to his voice. “You've got shelter, so you're staying here until I say otherwise. Don't forget–you can't get out of here without my permission. Lewis's security protocols are a lot better than they used to be–you try to leave, I'll know it.”

  Casey raised an eyebrow at that. Until now he'd been silent, watching the back and forth between the two. But when Alexa spluttered indignantly at Blake's outright order, the clone said challengingly, “Oh yeah? And what are you going to do when you know, huh? Watch her walk away?”

  Blake's expression changed, becoming a wicked smile, but there was just a touch of a hard edge to his eyes–enough to know he wasn't playing around. “I've still got a jail here, you know. Most of the cells have been converted to dorms by now, but I've still got ways to make sure you don't wander out and kill yourself.”

  “You wouldn't–”

  “I would, and you know it,” Blake said. “Not gonna let you risk your life, sorry. Or, you can agree to behave yourself and stay here with me for the week, instead. I'll make sure you get as fully resupplied as possible and send you on your way when I say it's safe.”

  There was a tense moment of silence, but then Alexa laughed softly, and the weak smile returned to her face. “I'm always rushing ahead, aren't I?”

  “Wouldn't be the first time. You can see why I get worried,” Blake said, but he, too, was smirking a little. Casey looked back and forth between them, not getting the joke and looking rather confused again. “So. You gonna stay?”

  “Sure. We could use the break, I guess. Been going non-stop for a while,” Alexa said, settling back into the couch again. She felt... relieved. Even if she was being forced to wait a week, she had a new objective, a new course to act upon. There was hope again. And that put her more at ease than she'd felt in a long time.

  Chapter 8

  Blake looked about to inquire further into their travels, but the door cracked open again, and Lewis stepped back through. There was a basket in his hands that he dumped unceremoniously in Alexa's lap, before striding back over to the wall closest to Blake, once again leaning back against it watchfully.

  “I picked up dinner rations,” he explained flatly, as Alexa, stunned, began pawing through the basket. “Most of it is for Blake,” he added in a warning tone.

  “S'fine, I don't mind sharing,” the young leader said brightly. “Not feeling all that hungry right now, anyway. Too much on my mind.”

  Lewis did not look happy to hear that, but didn't comment on it for the moment. Instead, he said quietly, “I changed the guard shifts around tonight. I'm on duty here, in the complex itself. The closest guards are down by the gate. They are all trustworthy and are under orders to not approach unless there's an absolute emergency. We're secure.”

  “Great! Then we can get down to real bus–is this milk? I haven't had milk in ages,” Alexa interrupted herself, pulling the bottle free from the basket. Cows were hard to come by out in the wilderness after all. “And cheese? And fresh bread? Geez, Blake eats like a king, huh, LS?”

  Alexa calmly tore off some of the bread for herself, and handed another big chunk to her still confused-looking traveling companion. Both Blake and Lewis looked confused as they eyed Casey with new interest, and Blake mouthed slowly, LS?

  Alexa grinned at him, swallowed a bite of her bread, and then said, “Guess we should do some re-introductions... guys, allow me to introduce the one and only LS dash thirty-two, likely product of the Liberty Project.” And she gestured with a dramatic, over-the-top flourish at Casey, who gave Alexa a partly surprised, partly exasperated look.

  For a moment, neither Blake nor Lewis said anything at all. They just stared at Casey, Lewis with the same studying expression as before, and Blake with his head cocked slightly to the side, as if trying to figure out a puzzle. Just as before, Casey tensed under the scrutiny, although he seemed a little less uncomfortable than last time, probably because he was now familiar with the people observing him.

  But after a minute Blake finally broke the silence. “I thought you seemed a little odd,” he told Casey slowly, “but I get that feeling a lot these days, with all the eccentrics through here... But you're...”

  “No reason to jump to conclusions,” Lewis said flatly. “He could just be crazy.”

  Casey ground his teeth so hard Alexa could hear it, and said slowly, “No, I'm not. I'm a clone.” And a bit coldly, to Alexa, “Why are you telling them this?”

  Lewis did not appeared appeased, by this explanation. “I'm still not buying it,” he said bluntly. “A clone? Maybe a few years ago I'd have humored that story. Now?” He snorted, and then his eyes narrowed. “So what is it you're really here for?”

  Casey's eyes narrowed right back, and he looked ready to fight again. Alexa reached over hastily and put a hand on his shoulder to keep him still, and grimaced slightly at how tense the clone's muscles felt under her hand.

  “Trust me on this, Lewis,” Alexa said slowly, coming to her friend's defense. “I know it sounds really crazy, but it's real. If you'd seen some of the things I've seen LS here do, you'd believe me. Unless you can pick up entire motorcycles and throw them at zoms?”

  Lewis's look softened just a tad, eyes flickering with hesitation, and Alexa pounced on it, voice serious. “He's saved my life loads of times. Lots of times using abilities he couldn't fake. You know I wouldn't lie about this. I meant what I said earlier, I trust him with my back. He's good.”

  Lewis took a deep breath, and seemed to grimace a little. After a moment, though, he turned his head to the side and muttered, “Sorry... Casey. Just... can't be too careful, these days.” he wasn't looking at the clone when he said it, and Alexa barely kept from smirking; Lewis was almost as bad as Casey was when it came to apologizing.

  Casey was glaring daggers at Lewis's head, but after a moment, sat back again in the couch and muttered, “It's fine. I get it.”

  “Well,” Blake said, cutting through the tension with just a tad too much energy to be natural, “Now that that's out of the way...”

  “Right,” Alexa said, catching the cue. “LS, to answer your question from earlier, we're telling them this because they've found stuff before and can probably help.”

  Casey still looked a little irritated at the lack of an actual answer, but after a moment his eyes widened, and Alexa could tell he was putting the pieces together. “Found... hacker...” His eyes flicked to Blake, and he said flatly, “You've found out about other genetic projects.”

  “Bingo,” Blake drawled, but he was grinning at the same time.

  Casey smirked faintly, before his gaze swapped to Lewis. “What do you have to do with it though?” he asked bluntly.

  Alexa winced, expecting it to start another tense argument, but Lewis only shrugged. “Not much,” he said. “But any family I may have is still in on the West Coast, so if this is going to involve Blake it's going to involve me.”

  Casey looked thoughtful, but after a moment the clone nodded. “How did you end up here on the East Coast?”

  For a moment Lewis looked pained, and his eyes had a very far-away expression, like he was looking into the past. When he spoke, his voice was flat and emotionless, as distant as he could possibly make it.

  “I was nineteen when Z-day hit. It got messy fast, so my dad forbade me from getting too heavily involved. I tried to help anyway, but we ended up getting split up in all the mess. By the time I realized what was going on it was too late; the cities were already pretty much overrun. I didn't want to give up though. So I started heading east.”

  Lewis snorted
and shook his head. “Then I met this crazy kid out here coming up with the most insane plan I'd ever heard of... taking over an island and turning it into an impenetrable fortress. I figured, if this brat can think up a lunatic plan like that–”

  “Hey!”

  “–then I could at least lend him my strength to get it done. So I stuck around. Been helping with security ever since... and keeping an eye on him, since he won't do it himself.” Lewis shot another dirty look at Blake.

  “And... your dad?” Casey asked slowly.

  “What about him?”

  Casey frowned. “Don't you want to know what happened to him? Try to contact him?”

  “He's smart, when he wants to be,” Lewis said. “He could've survived, maybe. But I'm a realist if nothing else. He's probably dead.” He sounded dead too, when he said it.

  Blake looked pained. “We don't know that, Lewis,” he said. His words were optimistic, but his voice sounded a bit strained. “There are any number of reasons he might not have gotten in contact. There's no way for him to know you're over on the East Coast. Even if he did know, if he's still on the West Coast where you saw him last... that's all government and military occupied. He could just be keeping a low profile.”

  “Maybe,” Lewis said. He still sounded empty, like he didn't really believe it.

  Alexa winced in sympathy, and Casey looked sorry he'd asked, although Alexa wasn't sure if it was because he felt bad for bringing up a sore topic, or if he disliked that Lewis had written off his dad so easily.

  Alexa could relate, in a way. It was hard, most days, to try and believe her family was still out there alive and kicking, but she still liked having that microscopic thread of hope, and she couldn't imagine willingly snapping it like Lewis had.

  Things were too tense now, too unhappy, and Alexa didn't like that. So she endeavored to change it. “Anyway,” she interrupted, “the point is, all four of us have our reasons for being here; we all bring something to the table.”

  Casey raised an eyebrow at this, and said slowly, “Alexa, not that I don't want you here, but I'm looking for help and both these guys might be able to provide it... how exactly do you, uh...”

  Blake laughed. “Don't count her out just yet,” he said, and he genuinely sounded amused. “She's definitely earned her spot in this room. But I guess she didn't really tell you how we met.”

  Casey blinked, and looked back and forth between the two. Alexa looked sheepish. “Really, that was nothing–”

  “Nothing? Alexa, do I need to remind you that you took down six zombies when you were twelve, just to save my life?”

  “You saved him?” Casey asked, incredulous. “Not that I should be surprised after what you did for me, but... I thought we were supposed to run away when confronted with danger?”

  “Oh, come on! I wasn't gonna let some reckless idiot get eaten alive by dead heads, when I could stop it” Alexa said defensively.

  “Stop it, Alexa, you're making me blush,” Blake said, but he was still smirking. “But yeah, there was a huge attack of zombies at one of the child safety camps, which I'd been sent to at the time.”

  The smile fell off his face for a moment, and he went on more seriously. “I was trying to fight off some of the zoms to give a few kids a chance to run, but more came out of nowhere. They had me down and I was as good as dead, and then this girl just comes in and starts wailing on the things with a baseball bat so hard she dented it, screaming bloody murder at the dead heads the whole time.”

  “You called me crazy,” Alexa said with a pout.

  “You were. Casey's right, normal people run away from carnage and corpses,” Blake said dryly. Then he smirked. “Not that I'm complaining. If you hadn't I'd have a much paler complexion and be craving brains right about now.”

  “So you saved him,” Casey said.

  “I guess. He saved me too, though. Got me out of the thick of it and helped me escape,” Alexa said with a shrug. “We've been friends ever since, and help each other out. I give him reports and tech or supplies whenever I find it for the island, and sometimes I'll do short scouting missions for him. He keeps an eye out for my family, keeps me updated on stuff going around the country so I can plan my trips and makes sure I get everything I need when I stop in here.”

  “I also keep her from doing stupid things, but you already witnessed that,” Blake added with surprising cheer.

  “Yeah, yeah, stop rubbing it in...”

  Blake laughed.

  “Lewis helps out too,” Alexa added, gesturing to the self-proclaimed bodyguard. “Like you heard, he mostly does stuff here, but he's saved my butt a few times, too. He's a dead shot with a bow, I've never seen him miss. If zoms could feel fear they'd run every time they caught sight of him.”

  Lewis gave a slight nod to acknowledge the compliment, and Alexa grinned. “And now that you're part of this group, LS, they'll help you, too.”

  “Which brings us full circle,” Blake said seriously. “What did you need my help with?”

  “I need answers,” Casey murmured softly. “Alexa said you might be able to help me get them.”

  “I've got answers for a lot of things,” Blake said. “You'll have to be more specific.”

  “We'll have to have story time first,” Alexa countered. “Need to explain a few things.” And in between bites as she devoured the basket of rations with her friends, she told the New Avalon residents all about her exploration of Gentech, culminating with her discovery of Casey isolated on the very bottom floor with seemingly no explanation as to why he'd been abandoned there.

  Casey occasionally pitched in with minor details that he remembered about the facility from his waking onward, but mostly he remained quiet. Lewis and Blake were silent during the retelling, and the only interruption came when Alexa paused in the middle of her own story to wheedle Blake into eating a little dinner himself.

  Blake seemed a bit reluctant to try, but Alexa at least got him nibbling on a little cheese and bread, and she was not in the least bit surprised by Lewis's grateful look over the young leader's shoulder.

  When Alexa finally ground to a halt sometime later, both Blake and Lewis looked pensive. She glanced over at Casey next; the clone looked tense and a little anxious, hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. Alexa didn't blame him, now that they were so close to potentially getting answers. She'd be nervous too if their positions were switched.

  After a moment Blake said, “Gentech... I don't remember anything about a Gentech from before Z-day. I don't even remember seeing it when I was trying to find where the Z-plague originated afterwards. What about you, Lewis?”

  The archer shook his head. “No. Nothing. But most of my intel from that time would involve the West Coast”

  “Fair point.” Blake frowned. “Gentech was clearly up to no good, if all the stuff you reported seeing in their notes was correct.”

  “I thought the same thing,” Alexa admitted. “Some of the things they were doing were really twisted. And I can only assume they made all the weird monsters I kept finding in there, because they were like nothing I'd ever seen before...”

  Blake asked seriously, “Look, Casey, I notice you didn't have anything to add about Gentech other than what you and Alexa found when you left. Do you remember anything else about the place?”

  “No.”

  “We can't help you if you hide things,” Lewis told him bluntly.

  Casey scowled. “I'm not,” he snapped back. “I don't remember anything! Nothing useful, anyway. Bits and pieces. Color. Movement. Pictures in my head, like dreams but not. Information. Lots and lots of information all the time.” He shook his head. “But nothing useful!”

  “Okay, okay, that's fine,” Blake soothed again. “Just trying to figure out what's going on here. Any clues we can get will help.”

  “I'm pretty sure the information bit is stuff that was downloaded into his head in some way,” Alexa offered helpfully. “It goes up until close to Z-da
y, but then it just kind of cuts off. When I first found him he didn't know about the apocalypse at all, and none of the implanted images or memories in his head match the way the world is today.”

  “Something had to have happened,” Lewis said. “Too quickly and too suddenly for them to react. They wouldn't have left Casey behind if they'd been given a choice. This... Project LS was clearly very valuable to them, if they were going to set the project at the lowest, most defensible level. And you said these other... creatures, whatever they were... didn't look like they'd been in a fight. That all points to something internal, or some sort of panic.”

  “Agreed,” Blake said with a nod, “Something happened in there, suddenly enough to halt all productions and projects. You didn't see any human corpses, so it sounds like the scientists probably ran for it, but they didn't have time to pack up the important stuff. Which leaves Casey abandoned in a pod for three years.”