Age of Z: A Tale of Survival

by T. S. Frost

  But other times stood out far more sharply in Alexa's memory, so frighteningly and terrifyingly precise she knew she would never forget them for as long as she lived, and they would be added to the collection of nightmares always hovering in the back of her head ever since Z-day began.

  There was no avoiding zoms these days, for example; they were simply too populous to avoid, and many of their daylight hours consisted of outrunning the creatures. Dead heads could and would track prey for hours, if they still had their sights on you, or if they were downwind of your scent, or you were making too much noise.

  Alexa and Casey were both fairly skilled at giving packs of zoms the slip, by breaking up their line of sight, ducking around corners, throwing off the scents, or moving as quietly as possible. But sometimes it was just impossible to shake them before the darkness hit, and four times now–four utterly terrifying times, since they'd crossed into central U.S.–they'd been caught under siege for the night, as they were forced to take shelter with zoms still on their trail.

  It meant huddling in their chosen second or third-floor office building or home or abandoned store for hours at a time, while anywhere from ten to thirty zoms surrounded their meager shelter and battered on the walls and doors below, moaning and groaning with unrelenting regularity and without an once of restraint or fatigue.

  It meant waiting with increasing desperation for the daylight hours to come, looking almost pleadingly to the eastern horizon, waiting for the first tell-tale smudges of dusty colors to appear so that the very real nightmare could finally have a chance of ending.

  It meant being truly terrified enough to risk trying to escape from their self-made prisons in the darkness, even though it was practically a death sentence to travel at night with zoms on their heels; zombies were always superior when it came to hunting in the dark, and a human wouldn't stand a chance.

  The first time it had happened had been terrifying enough, when they ended up locked in a rotted-out third-floor apartment with a good thirty of the walking dead waiting below, especially since Alexa had been through night-sieges before and knew what she was in for. But it was infinitely more so when she had Casey with her, and began to realize that not even Casey's impressive abilities were enough to save them from this particular nightmare.

  In fact, those abilities mostly just emphasized how truly screwed they were for the next ten hours as they waited for the darkness to pass. Casey was just as blind as Alexa was in the true pitch-blackness that existed with no street lamps and headlights.

  He could jump them over the horde in the same way they had escaped other zom swarms, but without sight the chances were high that he would break something–most likely Alexa–with poor aim, or land smack in the middle of a pack of zoms, and the risk was too great to take.

  Worst of all, his hearing, while normally absolutely invaluable for early warnings, now proved to be a curse. He heard with heightened clarity every single moan, every scratch and claw and batter at the doors and walls below them, and every quickened heartbeat or harsh breath from his own much more experienced travel companion that Alexa couldn't suppress, no matter how much she tried.

  The last was what ultimately worried Alexa the most. While she knew the zombies did it instinctively and without any particular intent, that drawn out moan was one of their most potent psychological weapons.

  Alexa had seen it ruin other travelers before that were fit and skilled in every other sense of the word. It seemed a silly thing to be scared of–it was just a noise, after all, a silly wordless noise without curses or threats or even murderous, primal snarls. But zoms didn't stop making it, not when they had prey so close by.

  Dozens of groaning, hunting, hungry zombies moaning for several hours straight without pause had a way of getting under a person's skin and slowly driving them crazy. Especially when it attracted even more of the monsters and grew louder and louder as the night progressed, with all of them trying to beat down the doors at the same time.

  Alexa had, more than once, come across the remains of travelers that had simply lost it or snapped, killing themselves rather than deal with the psychological torture, or worse–taking their companions down with them, out of mercy or insanity.

  She'd seen siege victims at some of the bigger settlements in the past, the ones that survived but only in the barest sense of the word, as they whimpered and sobbed and shied away from the slightest noises or movements around them, eternally caught under siege in their own minds.

  Any kind of zombie siege was potentially deadly, and Casey, with his heightened senses, had it worse than most. Not only that, but Alexa was fully aware by now that the clone detested feeling helpless.

  Even when becoming his own person, Casey was often absolutely convinced that, he should be able to easily handle things that normal people couldn't. It was a pretty terrible combination, intense psychological warfare and people who didn't want to admit they were having problems with it–those were the people that snapped first.

  Alexa wasn't about to let it happen, not for anything. Within the first hour of their first siege she could tell the clone was already growing more tense from the unrelenting zom moans that he could hear better than anybody else alive, and withdrawing into himself to try and deal with it, becoming stony and unresponsive. Alexa refused to let him crack and challenged him into a fierce game of poker instead.

  “A game,” Casey said flatly, when Alexa first proposed it. “You want to play a... a game... in this.”

  “It's important to have some kind of entertainment or something, LS,” Alexa told him seriously. “You've gotta stay sane. This stuff kills people, and I don't mean they get turned into dinner. Just try it, it'll help, I promise.” I hope.

  “I can deal with it. I don't need help.”

  “No. Wrong. You say that and you're already dead, LS,” Alexa snapped back at him seriously. It was a mark of how much the zoms were getting to her that her own emotions were fraying, and her voice was sharper than usual.

  “You know how you survive this? The first step is admitting it scares you. Because it does, don't lie. Then when you admit it, you stop spending all your time and energy trying to save face and man up and hide it, and you let it scare you and you tell other people that you're scared, and you get it out of your system instead of keeping it in, and you don't die because you don't snap. Okay? Following me?”

  Casey looked surprised; Alexa rarely raised her voice like that, or got so snappish. Her usual response to all-out terror tended to be sarcasm, or just running away from it. “You're freaking out over this?” he asked slowly.

  “Yes,” Alexa told him without a shred of hesitation, “Not that it's a secret, because I'm sure you can hear my heart going about sixty miles an hour, but any sane person will be freaking out too. I've been through this before, so trust me on this, okay? This is going to mess with your head–don't bottle it up, especially when I know you can hear all this better than anybody. Okay? Promise me?”

  Casey hesitated a moment, and there was still a fierce grimace on his face, as if he didn't want to admit to weakness. But after a moment it fell away, leaving little more than an exhausted looking teenager, and he rasped softly, “Okay. Fine. It's... bad. I can hear... a lot. I...” A very long pause, and then he finished flatly with, “It's bad.”

  “Okay, so let's try to distract ourselves from it, then,” Alexa said. “They're not getting in, we're two stories above them and you totaled the stairs. We just gotta make it until it gets light, then you can jump us down from here and we can make a run for it, okay? We'll be fine, we'll make it.”

  She dealt out the cards, privately wondering if maybe they could find him some earplugs or headphones later, and started the game. Casey seemed to calm a little with the distraction, although his muscles were still clearly tense as he listened to zombie groans at the highest quality available to man.

  So Alexa chattered incessantly about absolutely anything she could think of, hoping to maybe drown out the nois
es outside at least a little, or give Casey something else to focus on. It seemed to work, at least in part.

  By the time dawn came they were both exhausted and shaky and neither of them had slept. Casey actually stumbled upon landing when he jumped them out of their shelter and over the heads of the zoms. But they'd made it through the night and the only thing they'd gotten out of it was nightmares. Alexa considered it a success.

  Over time they'd managed to work out a system for the future sieges, and Casey slowly got used to admitting when the unrelenting moans were starting to get to him, which gave Alexa a chance to distract him or give him something else to focus on.

  Even when they weren't talking or playing card games to keep their minds off the monsters waiting hungrily for them, Casey admitted that just being near another person, and being able to focus on a heartbeat, was a great help in anchoring his mind in reality and keeping the pressure off. Gradually the other sieges became slightly more bearable as they learned how to handle them.

  The sieges were never easy, they were always terrifying, and the two of them never slept through those nights, prompting them to escape the trapped shelters stumbling and run only long enough to shake their pursuit before holing up somewhere new to rest.

  Worst of all for Alexa, after those encounters, was how grateful Casey always seemed to be after the fact. When they were away in the sunlight and traveling in relative safety again, he would thank Alexa for helping him through those particular moments.

  Alexa couldn't help but think that, if she'd just pushed a little harder for Casey to remain behind in the safety of New Avalon with Blake and Lewis, instead of dragging him along on this wild goose chase, that he wouldn't be even dealing with this sort of thing to begin with.

  She also couldn't help thinking about how Casey could have escaped the sieges, if he wasn't dragging a far more fragile person around after him. Casey could still potentially evade zombies with his excellent hearing, but Alexa was utterly useless in the dark, and she was the one that would actually get injured if Casey missed-landed a jump.

  The guilt over that last thought only increased during their fourth week of travel, when she saw precisely what Casey was capable of in a pinch, during what was unquestionably the most terrifying part of the journey to date.

  By then it wasn't uncommon for them to get spotted and hunted by zoms, and it became a relatively regular occurrence to spend at least a few hours a day outright running from the walking dead. If they were lucky, they could shake the monsters once they were far enough away that the dead heads lost their scents or visuals, and if they were really lucky the hunting moans hadn't attracted more packs.

  It was never a pleasant experience, being hunted, but between Alexa's knowledge and Casey's abilities they could usually shake further pursuit after a few hours. Even when they got unlucky, and the zoms still had their trail by dark, they had, until now, managed to at least find shelter and buckle down for a siege.

  But one particularly bad streak of luck left them still running from a pack of zoms that was swelling to dangerous size, as the zombie moans attracted more and more of the walking dead. By dusk there was a horde of at least fifty zoms on their tails–too many to even turn and fight without a raiding party and a lot of guns.

  To make matters worse, they were caught in perhaps the worst terrain possible–wide-open, rolling fields that went on for miles. It was a bad place to be, because there wasn't a hint of anything that would suffice as cover or shelter.

  The trees were too small and gangly to be worth climbing, and a horde of determined zoms would knock them down in barely an hour. And the few buildings they had passed were dilapidated and worthless, or lacked significant height to keep unrelenting monsters at a safe distance.

  Worse, with the darkness rapidly approaching, it put the zoms chasing them at an advantage; in such a wide-open location the creatures would be able to see, smell, and hear them without obstructions for miles and track them for hours, while Alexa and Casey were at a severe sensory disadvantage at night.

  They spent that night literally running for their lives. It was one of the most terrifying things Alexa had ever forced herself to do.

  Alexa considered herself a pretty good runner at this point; she'd had hours of practice outrunning shuffling monsters, and she knew she was better than the average person. She figured that she'd be pretty good at marathons by now, if they actually had any these days, because she had the endurance to keep up a steady pace for hours at a time and still get some decent speed out of it, too.

  But this was beyond brutal. She and Casey were both already exhausted from a long day of travel and had already been trying to ditch the zoms for two hours before the sun started going down. Forcing herself to keep taking more steps–much less pushing herself at this pace–was grueling, and she could tell that Casey felt the same way even with his endurance.

  But worst of all, even worse than the already exhausting effort of outrunning their own walking death, was that it all happened with night falling.

  Before Z-day, Alexa had never realized how truly dark the night even was. Cities were always bright with street lamps and car headlights and perpetually lit buildings. Even her own home had never been completely dark, with the comforting glow of her alarm clock or the dim hall light that had always been on so nobody broke a leg tripping on something during a nighttime venture to the bathroom.

  And if the dark ever freaked her out after an infrequent bad dream, or when she stupidly watched a scary movie or something, she could always snap on a light to make herself feel safe.

  But those luxuries didn't exist in the apocalypse, and she lived in a scary movie now. There were no comforting hall lights, street lamps, or oncoming cars to light up the darkness. Those things were long dead.

  Darkness, real darkness, was so smothering and impenetrable that it was terrifying on a number of levels, from the logical, higher part of her brain that knew what the dangers out there were and what they could do, to the innately primal level buried deep in her brain that screamed of Bad Things and was desperate to get back to the light, whatever the cost.

  It was just their bad luck that this night of all nights had to be overcast, as well, meaning even the tiniest shreds of light from the stars or the moon were denied to them. So they ran, unable to see anything at all.

  Alexa felt like she was trying to push for a million miles an hour with a blindfold tied over her eyes, and her head was warring with itself. The logical part shrieked at her to slow down, if you go too fast you'll run into something, or trip and break a leg, or miss the signs and run smack into a zom, and then you'll be dead, while the primal instinct merely screamed, run, run faster, stop and die!

  She picked primal, and pushed herself for everything she had, because that instinct was right: stopping meant dying. She wasn't stopping or dying, not unless she ran so fast she keeled over dead from sheer exhaustion.

  So they kept going, and going, and the zoms didn't stop, just kept following them relentlessly, tirelessly, kept on moaning and groaning and shuffling along behind their prey. Alexa hated that sound with a passion, but it was a great motivator to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  The terror was enough to shoot her up with another burst of adrenaline and just keep going, even if it hurt, even if she was so tired part of her just wanted to drop to the dirt and go to sleep, and maybe she wouldn't even be awake or conscious when the zoms started chewing on her.

  She wished the things would just stop, but she knew they wouldn't. That was what made the walking dead so terrifying, their inability to feel this level of exhaustion or pain or fear, the way they could just keep going like machines until they walked down their dinner.

  As one hour passed, and another, Alexa started to wonder if the zoms would be successful here too. The moaning had increased, and she was sure the pack had swollen to more than sixty behind and around her, even if she couldn't see a single one of the ambling zombies. There was no way to hide,
and their prey was wearing down.

  Alexa started stumbling more and more often, tripping on roots and rocks and more often than not nothing at all, her pack felt like it weighed a ton and was dragging her to the ground, and she was breathing so hard she was choking on her own air. If they didn't find shelter soon, she was going to be zom food–no question about that. She'd never been so close to death before, not for all her years of surviving the apocalypse.

  Ultimately, it was Casey that was responsible for getting them through the night. Like Alexa, he was exhausted, blind, and running on pure survival instinct and determination by now. He, too, stumbled and panted hard and appeared very aware of just how many zoms were trailing them, and how close they were to joining the pack if they didn't find a way out of this.

  But he had other assets to draw on that Alexa didn't. His superior strength and endurance kept him going far longer, and more than once he hauled Alexa to her feet again when Alexa stumbled or crashed to the dirt when she tripped. And they navigated entirely by his hearing as they poured on the speed, relying on it more as the night progressed.

  Casey appeared to be straining it to the utmost, and although it had to be torturous to listen to sixty or more zombie groans at the highest quality available, it also let him listen ahead for potential threats and cast around for echoes to avoid dangerous obstacles.