Age of Z: A Tale of Survival (28 page)

He never,
ever
should have ignored his instincts.

Worried, Casey tossed the supplies aside and did a quick sweep of the room. There was always the possibility that Alexa had dragged herself up to relieve herself somewhere, or had gotten too hot by the fire, or something. But there were nobody in the room.

Now frantic, he did a more thorough search of the area, casting about for some sort of hint as to what had happened. There were no signs of a struggle, thank goodness, and no zombies laying about either, so probably no attack (because sick or no Casey was sure Alexa would refuse to go down without taking at least one dead head with her). But it didn't make sense. Alexa was just... gone.

Frustrated, Casey cast about again as he paced, trying to figure out what had happened. His eyes fell on the pile of supplies next to his pack, and he realized with a start Alexa's was gone. Not just gone, but emptied of most of the things it had initially carried.

Cold dread seeped into Casey's gut. Alexa hadn't just vanished, or run for her life–she'd left. Willingly and intentionally.

At first all Casey felt was shock. He just couldn't comprehend why Alexa would want to leave–much less without even the most basic of supplies. She hadn't even taken any of the food with her; Casey had been keeping track of that for the past two weeks now, and none of their meager food supplies had been touched.

He couldn't figure out how Alexa had managed it either, weak as she was. She could barely walk under her own power anymore, lift any substantial weight, or even force herself to eat–it was simply unfathomable that she'd be able to simply leave.

Worst of all, Alexa had abandoned him. And that hurt more than any physical pain he could possibly try to imagine.

That was ultimately what helped him shift to his next response: anger.

Why, after all of Alexa's numerous lectures and reprimands, would she make such a rash, idiotic decision like this? Why would she run and leave Casey behind, especially when she was so sick? Did she not trust Casey for some reason? Did she think she was proving a point, trying to handle this on her own? And she thought he was bad!

Then straight back to worry, because Casey didn't want to admit it, but the answers to most of his questions were boiling just below the surface, and had been for days. Alexa was sick. Really sick. Casey knew it, and Alexa knew it, and they were both perfectly aware that Alexa wouldn't survive long on her own without Casey's care, not in her current condition.

She'd admitted as much just the other night. Which meant she shouldn't run, but... Casey remembered, with a chill running down his spine that had nothing at all to do with temperature, that tired, fatalistic tone in Alexa's voice when she
had
admitted she wasn't doing well, when she insisted that Casey owed her nothing.

She'd gone off on her own to die.

There wasn't any other explanation for it. Alexa wasn't getting anywhere on her own and they both knew it. The only thing leaving on her own would accomplish was her death. She hadn't run away to return to her solo travels without having to deal with a partner. She'd hauled herself away because she knew she was dying and, for whatever reason, didn't want Casey to have to deal with it.

You know you don't owe me anything, for getting you out of that pod, right?

“As if that matters,” Casey snarled angrily. His voice echoed in the gloomy, wide-open second floor of the factory around him, and there was no answer, not that he expected one. It didn't matter to him–he wasn't doing this because he felt obligated to, even if he was grateful to Alexa for finding him in Gentech. But obviously Alexa thought differently, enough to prompt her to do something as stupid and terrifying as this.

He should have paid better attention. He shouldn't have brushed that question off as easily as he did. But he'd thought Alexa was just out of it again, and she'd been breathing so badly, she'd needed the rest, there was no way for Casey to know it would prompt her to do something like this... He'd been trying so hard to protect Alexa from the outside world he hadn't seen the danger right in front of his own face.

What had made her think this was the solution?

“Doesn't matter,” Casey growled decisively. Thinking about this was getting him nowhere. All he was doing was running in circles, and every second he wasted wrestling with his own worries and frustrations and mistakes was another second Alexa was out there on her own, in danger from everything from zoms to the weather.

He had to find Alexa–that was all that mattered for now. When she was safe once more Casey could drag the answers out of her. He wouldn't get those answers if Alexa was dead.

Eyes narrowed dangerously, teeth bared as though going into battle, Casey turned his back on their campsite and all their possessions and vanished into the storm once again.

Under normal circumstances, finding Alexa would have been easy. Casey's enhanced hearing would have let him track his friend for a great distance, no matter how stealthy Alexa tried to be. Unfortunately for Casey, the storm interfered with that–which was probably what Alexa had intended. He doubted his friend wanted to be found, at this point.

Too bad for her. Casey was going to track her down anyway, and when she was better Casey was going to ream her out big time for pulling a stunt like this.

His most useful tools were diminished severely, but that didn't mean Casey was helpless. He could still hear pretty decently at short distances, and the occasional distant lightening flash lit up the area enough for him to see where he was going.

If he was close to a building he could listen for signs of life within, and he could make pretty good guesses at which buildings weren't even worth checking due to being locked, collapsed, or just impossible to get into. He also figured Alexa had probably gone in the opposite direction of where Casey had been scavenging, just to avoid being seen or heard and hauled back to their safe zone.

Of course, unlike a normal human being, Casey wasn't hindered by the cold or the wet of the storm itself, meaning he could keep searching long after a physically fit human being would have had to retreat for safety.

Still, for all his advantages, two hours later he was still searching and growing more frantic by the second. The storm had started to abate by now, but night had truly set in, and his survival instincts were screaming that he needed to be indoors and out of sight of the all too real monsters that roamed the land.

As if in answer to his all too valid concerns, that was when Casey heard the first hunting moan far ahead of him, riding on the end of a distant roll of thunder.

For one second, on pure instinct, he froze. He'd gained a wary respect for zombies by now, and as much as he loved smashing their heads in when he was feeling particularly frustrated or broody over his purpose in the apocalypse, weeks of lectures from Alexa cautioned him against running headlong towards the monsters.

But Alexa was still out there. He wasn't going to abandon his friend because he'd been taught to avoid the walking dead at all costs. Alexa hadn't abandoned him outside of Gentech, after all, disregarding her own survival rules in the process.

Besides–zombies didn't moan like that unless they had sight or scent of prey. Although it was possible that there was another traveler out there trying to escape a few dead heads, it seemed far more likely that Alexa was the target. Especially when the number of moans increased, but did not appear to be coming closer.

So although it was dangerous, Casey tuned in on the noise, and threw himself down the nearly pitch-black streets towards monsters he should, by all rights, be running as fast as he could away from.

The storm clouds were just beginning to move on above, letting a little weak moonlight illuminate the area, when Casey reached the origin of the moans. It was just enough light to let his sharper-than-normal vision make out the most important parts of the scene before him, like the thirty-or-so zombies groaning and trying to smash their way into a little storefront on the corner of the small intersection they were all standing in.

Based on the thick cracks in the door and the shattered glass window the zoms were reaching through, they were succeeding rather well. There was something inside that they wanted, and the only reason they weren't already in was because they weren't coordinated enough to figure out how to climb through the window, but once the door was busted it wouldn't be too much longer.

It wasn't hard to figure out what they were after inside. Casey didn't have to hear the weak, ragged coughing coming from the interior of the building to know Alexa had holed up in there.

Casey was honestly shocked that Alexa had even made it this far; they were almost on the opposite side of the industrial area of this very large town, quite a hike from their shelter even when one was perfectly healthy. And now the zombies were going to undermine all that effort by mindlessly, hungrily ripping his best friend, to pieces.

Casey saw red.

He'd often been angry, in the past. Alexa had told him more than once he was a little overaggressive for somebody with his level of strength. He frequently found himself getting snarly and snappish over incidents or comments or misfortunes ever since he'd started traveling through the world and seen how broken and messed up it was.

He hated messing up at anything, he hated when people acted wary and distrustful around him, and he hated being weak enough that swarms of dead humans were a threat he couldn't do anything about, and when he hated something he showed it.

But all those times put together paled in comparison to the raw fury he felt at seeing those things surrounding his friend, at knowing Alexa was at their mercy from her own stupid decisions and too close to dead to protect herself from the threat.

Casey had never fought this many zoms before. Much less at night, when they had the advantage. Much less with the need to protect someone completely helpless while doing so. Any way a person looked at it logically, it was suicide to engage.

Casey was far past logic. With a primal howl, eyes blazing with fury and the promise of a very permanent death, he charged.

Chapter 14

Not long after they'd escaped D.C, when Alexa was first teaching Casey how to fight zombies, she'd repeatedly lectured the clone for yelling loudly every time he ran into battle. Casey just did it without thinking about it–he was angry, he wanted to fight, he yelled an incoherent, wordless battle cry.

“That's cool and all,” Alexa had told him in exasperation, “and I'm sure it'll scare anybody alive, but zoms aren't. All that's gonna do is attract all the walking dead in the area and attention's the last thing we want.” It had taken a lot of work to curb that natural, automatic response to throwing himself into the thick of a fight, but eventually Casey had learned to resist.

He didn't now. He wanted the zoms to know he was here. Maybe they wouldn't get it, but he wanted them to know just how enraged he was, and just how badly they were about to die. So he cut loose with a wild, furious scream as he hurled himself towards the mass of the walking dead, and didn't regret it for a second.

A few of them, the ones closest to the building, didn't even bother to turn and acknowledge the noise. They were too close to hearing Alexa's ragged coughs and pained moans, and too focused on their prey to be distracted. But the ones farther out in the pack, closer to Casey, shuffled and turned and began staggering towards their new prey as soon as they realized he was there.

Casey faced down a veritable sea of blank, sightless eyes, gnashing teeth, raised, grasping arms, and uncoordinated bodies, and his highly sensitive ears made out each and every whistle or air and raspy groan that clawed its way out of their throats.

All it did was make him angrier.

There was an old pickup truck parked halfway on the sidewalk, abandoned and rusted and glinting just slightly in the dim moonlight. Casey slammed into it like a sledgehammer. It had to weigh at least three tons, but he barely felt the resistance, and with another enraged roar he shoved the vehicle at the approaching zombies.

It was a slow attack, the wheels turned almost leisurely as the brakes gave out with a tortured squeal, and the truck started rolling downhill, gaining momentum. Any sensible human would have run immediately to get out of the way and save themselves. But zoms weren't people anymore, just monsters, and these things came on relentlessly–and died.

The truck smashed into the front line, knocking a number of the outlying creatures over and crushing several flat.

By the time the vehicle had finally rolled to a stop, dented, and with a single window shattered, at least ten zombies had been removed from the fight, heads completely smashed in. Several more writhed and moaned hungrily, clawing out towards their prey.

However, the truck had ripped off their legs or shattered their spines, or they were tangled up in the wheels, making it difficult if not impossible for them to continue to hunt. They were still dangerous, but as long as they were avoided, they weren't as much of a threat as the still mobile ones.

Casey bared his teeth at the remaining horde. “Come and try it,” he snarled, as the still standing zoms, unaffected by fear or the condition of their brethren, continued to shuffle forward tirelessly. “I'll rip you all apart!”