Age of Z: A Tale of Survival (21 page)

Foraging was still pretty easy at this juncture, especially with all of the abandoned fields and orchards that they passed, letting them load up on wild fruits and vegetables. Shelter was still relatively easy to find as well, if you knew what you were doing, which the both of them did.

It meant they could push for as much speed as they was capable of, walking for most of their daylight hours and only breaking off briefly for some minor scavenging and shelter-hunting, and Alexa was pretty happy with their progress.

More rare, but not exactly unwelcome, were occasional travelers they came across. It didn't exactly happen all that often, outside of major settlements, but there were other people out there just like Alexa–people searching around for family or news or something that couldn't simply let themselves be tied down to a colony.

They hadn't run across any people while traveling up from D.C. to New Avalon, but then again, Alexa had taken an unconventional route of backroads for the sake of trade scavenging. The freeways were still the most popular and most direct routes between settlements, and just the safest way to travel in general, which meant better chances to meet the living variety of people.

Alexa had been forced to restrain Casey (not very successfully, but she figured the frantic shouting of 'no' caught his attention well enough) the first time they'd come across living people, before he accidentally smashed in perfectly normal heads by mistaking them for zoms from a distance.

After that Casey had learned to approach cautiously, observing small scatterings of bipedal travelers from a distance and determining if they were alive or dead
before
attacking. If they were living people, they still approached cautiously, just in case; Alexa really didn't want an encounter with wandering bandits if she could help it.

But when they were alive, and safe, then they usually stopped briefly to chat, and Alexa introduced her anti-social shadow to the fine art of travel etiquette.

When you found other travelers out on the road, you typically traded information with them, free of charge: warned them of any zom sightings or other dangers you might have passed through recently, gave them tips on good foraging spots or decent shelters you might have used, and you could fully expect them to do the same to you.

Ultimately, good, friendly travelers were allies. Everyone was human and ultimately everyone was on the same side and all shooting for the same goal: survival. If all it took was ten minutes of sharing intel to keep your fellow human beings alive, it was worth it.

Alexa held nothing back as she described useful places to hide or warned of dead head packs behind them on the way to New Avalon, and she and Casey benefited enormously from the things other travelers shared with them, often saving them hours of time when they didn't have to go searching for food or safe spots to sleep for the night.

Sometimes it was possible to trade food or supplies too, if you needed something and they wanted something from you; you just had to be careful to keep an eye open, just in case they wanted it badly enough to do something drastic. It was typically win-win all around.

Even less common than travelers were the smaller fortified homes and communities they occasionally found along the way. These were never huge, usually consisting of anywhere from one to three families that had banded together and fortified a house or school or office building, in order to survive the zombie hordes without relying on a major reinforced colony like New Avalon.

Casey was baffled by these at first, not understanding why they would want to live that way.

There were a number of reasons, Alexa explained. Some groups just didn't want to submit to colony rules and regulations. Some trusted people they already knew, as opposed to the nameless, faceless masses that they didn't. Some groups simply had people incapable of surviving traveling through zom territory for whatever reason. And some simply preferred the solitude.

Whatever the reason, these groups were usually able to carve out a minor safe space in the otherwise dangerous world. And while not all of them managed to survive and many were wiped out over the course of a year due to attacks, infection, starvation, or sometimes infighting, many others managed to retain their little foothold and keep going strong.

They could be safe-zones for travelers as well, but Alexa cautioned Casey to always tread carefully when approaching minor settlements and communities. Even if they weren't outlaw zones–which was not always a guarantee, as Alexa had explained to him before–many of them were still close-knit and followed the rules of survival of the fittest.

A lot of inter-family communities looked out for themselves and their community first, and might not think twice about hurting or killing travelers in order to get much-needed supplies from the outside world.

A typical rule of thumb, Alexa had long since learned, was to only approach a settlement if she knew there were kids there–families would be more protective of them, but they were also less likely to mentally scar their children by beating or killing a traveler for their things, and typically had a little more humanity in them due to the presence of their offspring.

They were also more willing to let travelers stay for a meal and a night in exchange for labor or trade, or sometimes even combat assistance to take down small but potentially deadly packs of zoms wandering the area. Alexa and Casey made use of these safe zones once or twice, although they kept their eyes on their packs the entire time just to be safe, and were careful not to overstay their welcome.

But eventually all good things came to an end, and that included strings of good luck. About three and a half weeks into their travel, not long after they crossed the border into Ohio and officially slipped into central U.S. territory, things began to get significantly more difficult.

The East Coast, Alexa learned quickly in her first year, was like 'Intro to the Zombie Apocalypse'. It was still dangerous, very dangerous, if you didn't know what you were doing–but for the most part, if you were careful, you could avoid any major swarms of zoms and survive.

Central U.S. was like the Hard Mode in any zombie game Alexa had ever played, and there was only one life to work with and no cheat codes or shortcuts. If they screwed up, it was game over, and there was no respawning–unless, of course, it was as an undead monstrosity.

It started with a significant decrease–and then abrupt vanishing–of any and all centers of human habitation, as the travelers stopped coming and the communities became few and far between until they ceased altogether.

Then came increased zom sightings, as Alexa and Casey began to stumble more and more frequently across larger and larger packs of zoms, even outside of cities and large towns where one expected a large population of the walking dead.

The increased sightings of dead heads dropped their pace significantly as they were forced to spend more and more time avoiding them, and it took longer to forage, hunt, scavenge, or search out shelters while constantly watching for and evading the walking dead.

Safety, never a guaranteed thing to begin with in the apocalypse, decreased significantly as they were forced to abandon the relative protection of the freeways more and more to hunt for necessities. And when one took into account that everything became more difficult to come by, it meant that their pace slowed to an unbearable crawl as they began to spend more and more time looking for sustenance and rest and less and less time traveling.

Shelter was, by far, the hardest thing to obtain, and the deeper they went into heavily packed zom territory, the harder it was to find something reliable and safe that kept them protected from both the walking dead and the elements alike. Alexa was glad she'd prepped Casey for a lot of this stuff in advance, telling the clone stories and making him recite campsite rules.

Because things had never been this bad when they went to New Avalon together, and Casey had never experienced zombie attacks to quite this violent and terrifying a degree before; she wasn't sure Casey would have adapted as well as he had otherwise.

Even with all the preparations, they were rapidly entering some of the worst conditions Alexa had ever been forced to deal with, and what followed were some of the most harrowing days and nights either of them had ever experienced. Most of that time blurred together, in Alexa's mind.

She mostly just remembered days of running for hours at a time, with packs of zombies trailing them relentlessly, or nights curled up in old trees or huddled together on top of sheer boulders or broken buildings that Casey was forced to jump them up to.

Places that were 'shelters' and 'safe' only in the loosest definitions of the terms. The travel was exhausting and those nights were even more so, when they rarely slept and were always ready to run at the slightest noise, and even the few hours they did manage were not restful.

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.