Age of Z: A Tale of Survival

by T. S. Frost

  Age of Z

  A tale of survival

  by T.S. Frost

  Copyright 2016

  Chapter 1

  As the sun came up one cool May morning, Alexa Winters realized she'd been doing this three years now.

  She honestly couldn't believe it had been that long. It felt like so much longer, since the outbreak began on Z-day and the world changed forever.

  Alexa had been on a school trip to Washington, D.C. at the time. Which had promised to be a fun trip, too, because it would be a whole week on her own, without her parents telling her what to do, and for a twelve year old nothing was greater than that.

  Except she never made it home. Two days into her school field trip, the outbreak had started, and Alexa never saw her parents or her aunt and grandpa again.

  Nobody knew where the zombies came from, or why. Alexa heard all sorts of theories in the past: aliens, biochemical warfare, curses.

  Most people assumed it was related to the Liberty Project; a government funded program that had broke all over the news bare weeks before Z-day hit, when hackers infiltrated the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

  The Liberty Project involved experimental genetic modifications to try and make stronger, faster, more durable soldiers. Some of the animal testing seemed encouraging. But, as far as anyone knew human testing hadn't been started.

  The few government officials to comment on it tried to spin it as a positive advancement that would make things better for the armed forces, but it was obvious they were just trying to get a head start on a genetics arms race.

  The truth was, nobody really cared what caused Z-day anymore. The end happened and the zoms were there to stay. Life was hard, learn to deal with it or die.

  There had been a lot of dying.

  Things had happened so fast back then, the outbreak and the panic spread too rapidly, and then there was no way to get home. The school teachers and chaperones tried shipping the school kids to a fortified location near the Coast with hundreds of other kids that the country was desperate to protect, but it didn't last long, and neither did the teachers.

  Eventually the place was overrun, the walking dead swarming the gates, breaking down doors, and feasting on flesh, and only the fastest, smartest and most adaptable lived through it.

  Alexa was one of them. She taught herself how to survive fairly quickly, out of pure necessity. She'd always been pretty smart, and she'd always been a decent runner–enough to outrun shambling reanimated corpses, at least. She learned how to feed herself, how to travel safely, when to run and more rarely when to fight.

  Most importantly, she taught herself to hold on to a single, all important goal, and live for it. Because the world now was simply too depressing to try and live through, a post-apocalyptic wasteland of broken memories and old, false truths, and if a person didn't have something to keep going for it wasn't worth trying.

  For Alexa, her goal was simple: she would find her family again. She would find her mom and her dad and Aunt Kate–and possibly even her grandpa–and she wouldn't stop searching for them until she did. Which meant she had to keep on surviving, so that she could see them again.

  So she did. And she had. And three years later she was still surviving and had no intentions of giving up any time in the near future.

  But it is sort of ironic, Alexa reflected, staring in the distance carefully through a pair of binoculars she'd stolen from a camping store years ago, how three years later I'm back where it all started for me.

  Washington, D.C. sprawled out in front of her, impressive in its own depressing apocalyptic way with any number of broken houses, broken monuments, and broken historical buildings. It was an old, haunting reminder that a grand civilization had once existed here, full of history and innovation and progress.

  Now it was full of nothing but corpses, the kind that moved and the kind that didn't. And supplies. Lots and lots of supplies–probably–if one knew where to look. You just had to avoid the obvious targets, which would have been picked clean long ago.

  Alexa considered her options carefully. She had to be careful, because the higher the density of buildings and the former population, the higher the chances one would run into a pack of wandering, hungry zombies.

  Really, it would be smarter of her to skip D.C. entirely and keep on heading for the closest settlement. But she needed the supplies, both for herself and as trade goods for when she did reach a settlement.

  So before she could second-guess her decision she turned, stuffed her binoculars back into her ratty camping backpack, and hopped on the abandoned utility bike she'd found down in Florida two months ago, coasting down the first of the abandoned streets.

  Just a quick look, she promised herself. If you see any zombies you pedal like crazy and get the heck out of here.

  But for a while D.C. didn't have much of anything to offer Alexa, other than a massive case of the creeps. The teenager saw signs of people having passed through, but most of them were old, so old she wasn't even sure if they were of the living or dead variety of people.

  She kept her eyes and ears strained, but either saw nor heard any sign of zombies, no telltale moans or shuffling bodies. Alexa knew better than to jinx her luck, and traveled as silently as possible through the streets, keeping an eye out for possible scavenging opportunities.

  But there weren't any of those left, either; most of the shops and homes she passed have long since been picked clean by other opportunistic survivors like herself, with all traces of anything useful completely gone.

  Alexa poked around the houses and shops a little longer, but the more she stayed in the once great capital, tip-toeing around the dead streets that had once been so heavily populated, the more she began to grow nervous. Every second she spent there was another second she could be discovered by zoms, and if she got herself trapped in a house or a shop while scavenging she was as good as dead.

  The search was rapidly becoming pointless; after hunting for hours she had still failed to find anything of use. Better to cut her losses and run now, while she still had a chance, than to die looking for something that wasn't there.

  It was a frustrating conclusion to come to, but Alexa reminded herself again of her promise: stay alive, I have to find them again. So she grimaced, and turned her bike towards the only bridge still standing, hoping to make it across the water and put some distance between herself and D.C. while she still had a full day ahead of her.

  That was when she spotted the sign, as she zipped past it: Gentech, Advanced Laboratory Research.

  That gave her pause, and she screeched to a halt on her bike, spinning it around to stare back at the building she'd just shot past. It looked innocuous enough, a plain two-story building that was still in relatively good repair.

  It seemed inevitable that somebody already would have gone through it ages ago, though. Labs could be dangerous, since a lot of the outbreaks appeared to have originated or gotten worse in them, but they could also be a treasure-trove of valuable goods, which usually made the risk worth it.

  It's stupid, Alexa told herself. I should leave. This isn't worth it. It'll be ransacked already.

  But she had to try, as long as she was here. So she left her bike leaning up against the wall, slipped out her weapon of choice–a sturdy crowbar she'd found last year in Virginia somewhere–and carefully levered her way past the broken outer door, heart hammering.

  No moaning or shuffling met her ears immediately, but it was dark inside, even though it was midday outside. Like most of America, electricity had stopped working a long time ago here.

  Alexa pulled a flashlight out of her bag, hoping she'd find more batteries for it while she was here because she was running low on spa
res, and explored, always keeping one hand on the crowbar at all times.

  Like she'd suspected, the building had been picked clean a long time ago. On the second floor she found evidence of a make-shift shelter where the scientists, or maybe a few survivors passing through, had holed up for a while. But any supplies of value were long gone.

  Alexa sighed. It had been a long shot anyway.

  But when she did one last circuit of the first level she was surprised to discover a small hole in a sagging portion of the floor, near the rusty elevator doors. That in itself wasn't too surprising–buildings were always falling apart, these days–but what did surprise her was that there appeared to be another floor below.

  Baffled, Alexa doubled back to check the stairwell. The stairs only went up, not down. Intrigued, she went back to the hole, and after a little poking and prodding realized the damage was fairly recent.

  There was something down there, and more likely than not nobody had been given a chance to scavenge it yet.

  It was a golden opportunity. Grinning to herself at her good luck, Alexa wasted no time setting to work. She didn't know how long she'd be searching–if it had one hidden floor it could have others, potentially–and she didn't need company from a wandering pack of dead heads falling down the hole after her.

  She heaved and shoved several large desks and cabinets in front of the broken-down main door, just to be safe, and then set to work prying at the hole with her crowbar until it was wide enough for her to slip through.

  There was rope in her pack–she tied it off carefully against the still-fairly sturdy stairs, so she'd have a way back out. Then she tossed her pack through the hole and carefully lowered herself down after it.

  Jackpot.

  Alexa grinned at her success. She was standing in a hallway that was pretty much identical to the second-floor one above–besides the curious fact that it wasn't connected to the ground floor at all, other than by the elevator that she was sure was no longer operable. The place was coated with dust and clearly hadn't seen any visitors–human or zombie–in years. Perfect.

  To her surprise, despite being below-ground, there was light as well–dim, weak emergency lights, but lights all the same. Alexa made note of it with interest. Where there were lights, there was some sort of power source. Did this lab have it's own generator? Some other internal power supply?

  Whatever it was, if she could find it, it might be worth a lot, or extremely helpful to a few of her friends and contacts around the country. Snapping off her flashlight, she slipped her backpack on, hefted her crowbar with both hands–it paid to be careful, no matter what the dust indicated–and set off to explore.

  The first few floors were like any other office building she'd been in: clean and organized, other than the dust she kept kicking up, full of filing cabinets and office supply closets and rooms with cubicles.

  Alexa took her time going through all the desks, cabinets, closets, and bathrooms, and was rewarded for her diligence with a few great finds: batteries, a few hand-held tools, and best of all, a pair of undisturbed first aid kits still bolted to the walls.

  There was an abandoned iPhone with a dead battery on sub-level three. While most tech was worthless there was a bounty out on portable, modern tech at the nearest settlement, so she stowed that away too.

  Somebody's desk on sub-level seven had an even luckier find of several packs of cigarettes and a bottle of alcohol–this guy had vices like yikes, clearly, but it'd serve Alexa well. She didn't smoke or drink herself, but luxuries like these sold for a bundle in trade when they were so impossible to come by now.

  She'd be able to feed herself for a week or two just by trading for a single pack of cigarettes. She stowed everything away in her backpack, wrapping the alcohol bottle carefully in an extra shirt so it wouldn't break, and kept on exploring, now enthusiastic about her chances for finding more great stuff.

  Past sub-level seven things got a little more science lab like. Which only made sense, since the sign outside had said they did 'advanced laboratory research'. There were a few more finds here–some drugs that were still viable, and might do a settlement's medical facilities some good, as well as a few other medical tools that might also be of use. She packed these up with particular care.

  More exciting to Alexa on these floors, though, was the scientific notes she found everywhere. She found herself reading whiteboards with chemical formulas curiously, or paging through binders and notebooks of handwritten and computer-printed notes, idly decoding the meanings and intents of the scientists that had been here before her.

  It had been a while since she'd seriously toyed with any of the sciences, since zombies really were more impressed by your ability to run away from them than your ability to recite the entire periodic table from memory. But it was all still there in her head, and it didn't take her too long to pull apart the formulas for the hidden meanings beneath.

  At first it was exciting–she'd always loved this stuff, even at twelve–but the more she read, the more it became disturbing instead. Some of the things this facility had been up to were... well, sick, honestly.

  Genetic manipulation, forced mutations, cloning... it all looked pretty twisted, and the more Alexa read, the more she had questions. What had been going on here? Why was there some secret scientific facility below the capital? Was it part of the Liberty Project?

  Conspiracy theories flew through her head by the dozens, but Alexa had already come this far, and she wasn't about to turn back. Ignoring the warning voice in her head that told her maybe this place wasn't safe, she kept going, crowbar at the ready.

  At sub-level thirteen, things started getting really disturbing, because that was when Alexa started finding the bodies. The first one, she was not ashamed to admit to herself, scared the crap out of her.

  She saw something sprawled on the floor in the dim emergency lights, screeched in alarm, and had the crowbar up and ready to start lashing out before two seconds had passed.

  But the thing didn't move, and when she tentatively approached it, she realized it was dead. Definitely an it, too–the thing was only vaguely mammalian, and possessed gangly limbs, a whiplike tail, long pointed ears, and a set of wicked-looking teeth.

  Alexa grimaced, and tried hard not to think about it leaping at her and trying to tear her face off, because she was pretty sure that encounter would end pretty badly for her.

  There were others too, the farther down she explored, and not just like the first thing. She counted four different types of strange creatures, always dead, from horse-sized and built like a tank to tiny enough that one could have ridden on her shoulder.

  Perhaps the strangest was the entire floor dedicated to hundreds of glass tubes, filled with pink goo. A number of them still sparked with bright crackles of electricity, which explained why the whole facility still had emergency lights at least. The bodies increased the farther down she went, although Alexa couldn't fathom why.

  She'd gotten halfway decent at assessing fights and massacres after seeing so many of them, but these things didn't look like they'd been in any major fights when they died, and she hadn't seen a trace of zombies either. It was like they'd all just been... turned off, or something, had just keeled over and died.

  This is not weird or creepy at all, she thought to herself grimly. Whoever Gentech belonged to, clearly they'd been up to no good before Z-day. Maybe she could bring some intel back to the nearest settlement, see what her friends thought of it...

  The strangest of all were the last five levels. By now Alexa hadn't found anything of trading value for a while, but couldn't resist the urge to keep exploring, and when she saw the bottom of the facility she was shocked.

  There wasn't much to find on these floors, other than a heart attack when she looked at the wall once and realized one of the weird creatures was staring back at her. She'd screamed and backpedaled, bringing the crowbar up like a batter at plate, until she realized the thing slumped against the wall was dead as well, sig
htless and empty of life.

  That had almost been enough to make her turn around and head back up to the more normal levels. But she shook her head and kept going. “Don't be a wuss, Alexa,” she told herself out loud. “You're already here. Might as well go the whole way or you'll regret it.”

  Other than the weird creatures, most of the lowest hallways weren't much to speak of. Sub-level twenty-six, though–the lowest, final level, from what Alexa could figure–was a special case. There was a lot of machinery strewn around, and a few odd-looking, highly-advanced computer consoles, most of which looked to be in severe disrepair if they weren't broken already.

  It branched off into two smaller hallways. One of them was full of canisters that, after a brief glance at the formulas written on the outside, Alexa determined she wasn't going anywhere near–that stuff was explosive, and volatile, and who knew what would set it off after this long.

  So she headed down the other hallway, trying hard to ignore the dead creatures in the hallway until she reached a strange round door at the end, partway opened.