Age of Z: A Tale of Survival (29 page)

He fully intended to, too. These things had threatened Alexa, his best friend, his
family
–he was going to make them regret the day they had ever been reborn.

There were no more vehicles close at hand for him to use as convenient weapons, but that was hardly Casey's only trick. There were a number of
No Parking
signs lining the side of the road; and Casey had a purpose in mind for them.

He snapped one from the concrete as easily as a child picking a flower, and with another snarl he lashed out with his new improvised weapon. The first strike caved a zombie's head in cleanly with a single blow, as well as the head of the zombie standing next to it. The second strike was equally effective and the third.

By the time the metal sign had succumbed to his own massive strength and cracked in half, unable to withstand the sheer force of the attacks, another five zombies had been returned to regular old corpses. That was more than half the pack destroyed or disabled–and still they kept coming.

Casey was far from ready to give up, and he wasn't even winded, but he did realize through his red haze that he was in trouble now. The sign had been effective for killing from a distance, but the zoms were tireless and unrelenting, pushing closer and closer, and when he was backed into the narrower streets he didn't have as much room to maneuver.

Grabbing another sign would be useless without the room and the distance to wield it. He settled for snatching up a dirty length of timber, which let him break in another two zombie heads before it snapped.

Then they were on him.

Raw fighting instinct and sheer rage, a holdover from his Gentech origins, urged him to hurl himself forward into the fray and set about beating on as many of the creatures as he could with his bare hands.

Alexa's lessons, and his own intelligence, cautioned him against it. To enter a crowd of zombies on his own without a weapon was to die; there was just no way to keep from being bitten by at least one.

Instead he backed away down the street, snatched the closest reaching zombie by one wrist, and twisting quickly, hurled it at the others. They fell over backwards, unsteady already, and writhed and moaned as they attempted to regain their feet and reach their prey.

Casey used the space he gained to crouch low and hurl himself into the air. Long hours of practice paid off. It was hard to aim in the dark, with only a little moonlight and his hearing to go by, but he managed, leaping clear over the mass of walking dead and coming down on the opposite side of the horde. His boots impacted pavement with an audible thump.

The zoms turned almost ponderously at the noise, and the hunting moans continued relentlessly as they shuffled towards him once again, reaching arms raised. Casey ducked underneath the cold, dead fingers of a couple of the closer zoms at the back–now front–of the pack, and hurled another zom at its fellows to buy himself some time.

The tables had turned, and with his position change the situation favored him now again. He'd leaped straight into the intersection, giving him more room to maneuver and make use of his strength, and putting more improvised weapons at his disposal.

The first thing he snatched up was an abandoned motorcycle. This was smaller than the truck, and weighed far less, but it was still a useful weapon against a horde of zombies. The moon slipped behind a cloud as he shifted the vehicle to hurl it, and in the pitch dark his aim would be off; but he compensated by focusing on the moans he could hear in front of him.

He threw the makeshift weapon as hard as he could. There was another screech of metal and several loud bangs, and the zom moaning diminished significantly, so he knew he'd gotten at least a few.

Then there was a resounding crunch of wood and stone and the chime of shattering glass, and more distantly Casey heard Alexa's ragged gasp of surprise and what he was sure was pain. It took him a moment to put two and two together, but when he did his eyes widened in horror. He'd thrown the car hard enough to damage the shop currently functioning as Alexa's shelter.

He could have kicked himself. Stupid, to let his anger get the better of him! He should have been careful, waited for the moon to drift back out from behind the clouds, or something! Instead he'd let his battle lust consume him and could very well have hurt Alexa's chances as a result. Or Alexa herself.

He hoped he hadn't just opened the door for those things to get at his friend.

New fury and strength boiled up in him, but this time he focused it, channeled it, made it work for him. His life wasn't the only one at stake; he couldn't afford to lose control of this battle. As far as he could hear there were maybe three or four of the zoms left moving, and probably half a dozen that were still potentially deadly but less of a threat because they couldn't move.

He had to approach carefully–with the moon still behind the clouds there was almost no light to see by, meaning he had to hunt by sound alone. And he had to do it fast, because he could hear the groaning by the shop increasing, and knew that if those monsters hadn't already gotten through yet, they were sure to do so soon, with his inadvertent assistance.

He moved in for the kill.

His final weapon of choice ended up being another traffic sign. Casey ripped one from the concrete, snapped the far end off to make it easier to wield, and charged.

Killing zoms at night was not easy, he discovered–but it was doable. He had to put supreme focus into everything he did, make each and every movement was calculated and ensure every one counted, and it was difficult when he was so used to simply lashing out and bull-rushing his way through everything with sheer brute force.

He wondered if this was how people, regular people, felt when going up against dangerous opponents. It took all his concentration, but he found that if he focused, he could manage, and be mostly successful.

Casey zeroed in on a single zom moan, trying to separate it from the others, and figure out how far away it was from him and the ground. Then he'd swing the post, smashing out hard at the source of the vile noise in the distance.

Sometimes he missed, and the metal swung through empty air, useless, and he had to take a second to recover. But more often than not he felt the barely resisting thud of once-human skull and flesh at the far end of the pole, and heard the wet crunch and the profound silence when the creature suddenly stopped making noise.

Three times, the zoms resisting and groaning, and then falling silent, well and truly dead. The fourth was faster and inside his guard before he realized it, gripping his arm with unrelenting determination and a strength that would have been dangerously powerful up against anything other than him.

Casey snarled, wrenched his arm away from the cold, dead fingers, and lifted his leg to kick at the zom before he even realized he was doing it. The moan turned into a gurgle and it fell backwards onto the ground. Casey smashed its face in with the broken end of the pole, and it, too, fell silent and still.

And suddenly the horde was gone.

Casey stood, panting hard, as he glared around into the darkness and strained his hearing for any signs of further attackers. He wasn't winded physically–the fight had only been five minutes, ten at most. But mentally and emotionally, it was exhausting to have taken on so many walking corpses while running on pure fury, and–now that he thought about it–more than a little fear too, although for himself or for his friend he couldn't say.

When the moon slowly peeked out from behind the storm clouds again, shedding a little more dim light on the dark streets than before, Casey added shock to the list as well, when he saw what he'd done.

There were bodies strewn everywhere, broken and twisted unnaturally, with old congealed blood and brain matter spattered across the pavement and already draining away with the rest of the rainwater down into the old, unused sewers. Some of the bodies crushed by the vehicles were barely identifiable as formerly human, and the ragged moans of the surviving but immobile zoms almost sounded pitiful, even though Casey knew they felt no pain.

The post still in his hand was coated with gore as well, and he dropped the remains of it in disgust. The entire picture together in the darkness looked wrong. It was like a massacre had happened, and they'd never stood a chance. No wonder Gentech had wanted to make him a weapon. Over thirty zoms, and he'd torn them all apart, and he wasn't even sorry. It would have been so easy to do it to real people, too. It was so wrong.

Everything about this world was wrong.

Still grimacing, he turned towards the shop, ignoring the way the wet streets glistened darkly in the moonlight, and cast his attention towards the interior of the building. That was when he realized that Alexa's breathing was growing harsher, more frantic, and that not all the zombie moans he heard belonged to the immobile ones in the streets.

Eyes widening, he hurled himself across the street and smashed through the remains of the door, what little was left of it. He barely felt the impact as he crashed into the room and heard more than saw the two lumbering, groaning shapes that were shuffling towards the huddled form in the corner, the one that was coughing desperately.

Casey could have sworn he'd burned himself out with his furious assault outside, but he found he still had it in him to be angry. He was across the room in a heartbeat, and as the two zoms reached out with grasping, dead hands for their helpless prey he snarled and snatched them both by the backs of their necks.

They weighed nothing as he threw them into the wall. The first stopped moaning abruptly as its head smashed open against the concrete from the force of the throw. Casey heard a sharp snap-crack from the second's neck as it thudded against the wall and fell to the floor, and although the rest of its body stopped moving, its jaw continued to gnash.

Casey ended its hollow existence under his boot heel. He listened hard, but there were no further monster moans close at hand–the threats were gone.

For the moment, anyway.

A harsh coughing from the back of the room drew his attention away from his surveillance, and Casey was across the room in a heartbeat, crouching next to his friend and looking her over frantically. Alexa had collapsed against a locked door at the back of the room, one that Casey realized led up to the second level.

With a pang of horror the clone realized Alexa had been trying to escape to a safer, higher location, but had been too weak to get the door open before she'd fallen, effectively leaving her at the mercy of the walking dead. If Casey hadn't shown up when he did, she almost certainly would have joined their ranks.

Alexa was barely aware now–her eyes were half open, they looked hazy and unfocused. Part of her must have known the danger she was in, though, because although she was curled on her side against the door, she clung to her weapon of choice, her crowbar, like it was a lifeline. Casey was surprised at just how much force he need to use to pry the weapon out of Alexa's hands and sling it through his own belt.

“No,” the teenager gasped, and then began coughing hard as she scrabbled feebly for her weapon. Her expression was one of sheer exhaustion, and it shifted to desperation and fear as she tried to shove her perceived attacker away. “Not gonna... no...can't...
no
!”

“Alexa, it's
me
,” Casey snapped at her. It was harsher than intended, but seeing Alexa so out of it and so scared and sick actually hurt, and at the same time made him furious at his friend for doing this to herself. When Alexa didn't seem to recognize his voice and her eyes flickered, unfocused and unseeing in the dark, Casey added, “It's me. Casey.”

Alexa still seemed uncertain, and her brows knit together in confusion. She seemed to be struggling to put Casey's words together, but the clone could tell when Alexa finally recognized him, because he heard Alexa's heart jump, and the sickly teenager coughed, “LS?”

“Yeah. I'm here.” Relieved that Alexa was at least responding properly now, Casey set to work. Alexa's pack was a few paces away; he leaned over and snatched it up, slinging it over one shoulder before crouching to scoop up Alexa in his arms.

His friend looked and sounded terrible, but Casey wanted to get to someplace at least a little safer and with more light before giving her a more thorough look over. It would just be too easy for zoms to stagger in after them here.

He kicked through the locked door to the second floor easily, shattering it to splinters, and hurried upstairs into what looked like some kind of storage room or attic. It was mostly empty, other than a few broken crates and a lot of dust. But the moonlight shown through the far window well enough, and zoms wouldn't be getting up here without making a racket and being slowed down. It would do.

He set Alexa down again on the dusty floor near the window so he could see as well as possible, just in time for Alexa to cough and gasp, “Why're you here?”

“Are you stupid? You almost got eaten. Why do you think I'm here?” Casey snapped. A quick glance at his friend's body told him she'd gained a few minor cuts from some shattered glass, probably from when he'd thrown that motorcycle at the building–Casey winced slightly in guilt. But there were no major injuries or broken bones, and–most importantly–no bite marks.

He put a hand to her forehead, trying to determine if she felt any hotter than before. He'd felt that his friend's clothes were soaked through when he'd picked her up, and her cough sounded worse than before, that wet crackling noise in her chest more obvious. She was doing bad. Really bad. Any hopes Casey had of his friend making it a full week were dashed.