How Zombies Survive in the Apocalypse

In the final hours before dawn broke over LA, some children remained awake inside one particular home.

“…”

From the small bedroom on the second floor, Luna’s concerned gaze fell upon Sadie sitting by the window.

Though chaos still gripped LA itself, this residential neighborhood far removed from the downtown and outer wall perimeters remained comparatively quiet.

Sadie stared blankly out at that tranquil residential vista.

“Sadie…”

Luna’s murmured call went unanswered, as Sadie focused solely on the sporadic distant gunfire and explosions audible from afar.

An outward appearance of her body being present here while her mind wandered elsewhere entirely.

Witnessing Sadie’s demeanor, Luna’s expression fell slightly crestfallen.

Sadie had maintained this unresponsive state for quite some time now.

No matter how Luna tried speaking to her, Sadie would only offer a perfunctory ‘I’m fine’ dismissal in return.

Neither engaging in actual conversation nor retiring to sleep – just silently fixating her gaze toward some faraway unknown.

Unable to make any headway, Luna eventually turned an entreating look toward Taylor for assistance.

With a brief throat clearing, Taylor approached Sadie, well aware of where the child’s thoughts undoubtedly lingered.

At this very moment, her companions Arian and Aiden were embroiled in fierce battles at the northern wall and City Hall respectively. So it was only natural for Sadie to be preoccupied with profound worry over their fates.

Taylor had assumed offering some reassuring words would be a simple matter.

But no matter how he persisted in that vein, Sadie’s somber expression never brightened appreciably.

Because this child proved far more perspicacious than Taylor had given her credit.

“…Alright.”

The astute Sadie didn’t readily accept Taylor’s words at face value.

As if perceiving them as baseless optimism, she could only respond with brief acknowledgments and faint, mirthless smiles of her own.

“Umm…”

Seeing his attempts deflected so effortlessly, Luna shot her father a pointed look.

As if to say she could have tried those same empty platitudes herself.

Withering under that mild rebuke, Taylor cleared his throat once more to speak again.

But before he could, Sadie preempted him.

“They’re fighting right now… aren’t they?”

“It would seem so. You’re worried about them?”

Taylor asked that question in return.

Sadie nodded slightly.

“But worrying won’t change anything. Because now, all we can do is have faith and wait for them.”

Since mere reassurances proved ineffective, Taylor tried a different tack to console her.

Sadie shook her head firmly, as if to clarify she didn’t doubt their capabilities.

“Of course I do believe in them. But…”

“But what?”

“I don’t want to just stay here by myself.”

That unexpected response gave Taylor momentary pause.

Into that silence, his daughter Luna’s voice interjected, tinged with dismay.

“You don’t want to be at our home…?”

Meeting Luna’s crestfallen gaze, Sadie shook her head adamantly.

“That’s not what I meant. I want… to fight alongside them.”

Hearing those words from Sadie’s mouth, Luna’s eyes went wide with surprise.

She could scarcely believe the younger girl was voicing a desire to rush headlong into that zombie-infested warzone.

Regarding Sadie soberly, Taylor let out a brief sigh.

“But Aiden left you here precisely because he wished to keep you safe. You understand that, don’t you?”

“…I know.”

“Yet you still want to go?”

Though her expression clouded, Sadie nodded resolutely in affirmation.

A decision to defy her companion’s wishes, no matter how well-intentioned.

Taylor studied Sadie silently for a moment.

“Why?”

“I too…”

Sadie’s lips trembled slightly, as if carefully choosing her words.

But in the end, she didn’t verbalize her reasoning.

Because even Sadie understood, on some level, just how unreasonable her desire truly was.

“It’s alright, go ahead and say it.”

Taylor gently prompted her.

Finally, Sadie found her voice once more.

What that child wished to convey was her own desire to protect Arian and Aiden in turn.

Ever since that task in Pittsburgh, those two had safeguarded Sadie all the way to this LA without fail.

Initially, she had simply striven her utmost not to become a burden to them.

At first due to the harsh will of her late mother Rebecca’s – that to avoid abandonment by her companions, Sadie must prove her own indispensable worth.

But Sadie already knew the truth.

Neither Aiden nor Arian would ever discard her simply for being useless.

Instead, Sadie merely wished to repay them as they had steadfastly done for her all this time.

What began as mere obligatory duty had gradually transformed.

Now regarding them as family transcending mere companions, Sadie wanted to play her own role in their well-being too.

Perhaps that had been the true intent behind Rebecca’s parting words after all.

“You want to…”

Hearing Sadie’s desire rendered Taylor briefly at a loss for words.

He could scarcely have fathomed her contemplations reaching such profundity.

“…”

So at first, Taylor couldn’t find any reply whatsoever. Because Sadie’s words rang with undeniable earnest conviction, devoid of any petulance or caprice.

Yet simultaneously, she had acknowledged this wish as an unreasonable imposition of her own.

Sadie already understood, as a child, that aiding them directly would exceed her capabilities.

But her words had nevertheless moved Taylor’s heart.

He couldn’t bring himself to curtly dismiss this remarkable young girl’s heartfelt entreaty.

“Then… why don’t we go take a look?”

“Huh…?”

Caught off guard by Taylor’s sudden suggestion, Sadie blinked owlishly – her face finally adopting an expression befitting her actual age.

A reaction that drew a faint smile from Taylor.

Calmly retracing the route in his mind, Taylor determined the path northward should have been reasonably secured by now.

The initial zombie emergence had occurred hours ago, with military forces mobilized and redeployed to that northern perimeter some time since.

So the majority of troops would likely have concentrated there by now.

While the downtown area around City Hall undoubtedly remained hazardous, the path toward Arian’s location at least should pose minimal risk if they proceeded carefully.

Having judged the route sufficiently safe, Taylor continued.

“I can escort you to the northern perimeter.”

“Really…?”

“But on the condition you don’t actually participate in the fighting itself.”

For Sadie, that qualification merited no hesitation whatsoever.

An unexpected kindness she hadn’t even dared hope for.

“But… will you be alright?”

“It means deceiving Aiden, true. But he’ll understand – this was your own decision. And above all else, my vow to protect you both with my life remains unchanged.”

Taylor stated that with self-assured confidence.

In response, Sadie could only nod in silent gratitude, her head bowed slightly.

Thus, as dawn’s first light began peeking over the horizon, Taylor, Luna and Sadie set out toward LA’s northern sectors.

* * *

“Kiaaahh!”

The battlefield at LA’s northern perimeter where Arian stood vigil.

Combat still raged unabated there even now.

Bang!

Artillery shells and gunfire crisscrossed from every direction.

The number of zombies felled across this area had already surpassed the hundreds of thousands.

Causing the very ground to become a putrid, visceral quagmire of decaying remains – the stench alone overwhelmingly nauseating.

Yet the zombies’ numbers remained inexhaustible in the most literal sense.

The defense forces’ machine gun barrels glowed incandescent red, on the verge of melting from continuous firing.

Even their stockpiled ordnance, accumulated over years, had already depleted to the last rounds.

Still, the unending undead hordes kept surging forth from those mountain ranges, relentlessly carpeting the battlefield anew.

“They’re coming!”

“Aaahh!”

Inevitably, the defense forces suffered increasingly catastrophic casualties resisting that onslaught.

The stalwart defensive lines they had stubbornly maintained for hours finally crumpled and collapsed altogether.

As the defense forces’ rout became imminent-

“Ghrooooohhh!”

Arian charged straight toward Fear – that largest mutant presence dominating this battlefield’s epicenter.

Her machete lashed out as that monster reached the shattered barricades.

Kwadeuk!

Arian’s crimson blade cleaved through something.

But it was not Fear itself.

Without warning, the onster had flung a Rhino mutant like an improvised projectile to intercept the struck.

That hapless creature bisected midflight before it even realized its own demise.

“Tsk…!”

Clicking her tongue, Arian glared at the defiant Fear taunting her from behind the fallen Rhino’s mangled husk.

Stabbing her machete into the ground, Arian responded in kind.

Kupgugugu!

Crimson spikes erupted from the earth, skewering the entire area where Fear had stood moments before.

But just ahead of that impalement, Fear had sensed something amiss – leaping backward at the last possible instant.

The multitude of zombies occupying that space were unceremoniously shredded into chunks.

But Fear alone evaded that lethal strike through her prodigious evasion.

“So you are the real thing…!”

Arian muttered through a furrowed brow, unable to give chase.

Because Fear had already fled back toward the mountain range’s vicinity in that brief reprieve.

But Arian couldn’t abandon this battlefield herself, even momentarily.

If she did, the defensive line she currently shored up would collapse entirely.

“It’s coming! Block it!”

Punctuating that frantic call was the sight of a Big Foot rampaging through the defense forces’ own ranks unchecked.

The machine guns meant to neutralize such threats seemed to have their barrels literally melted into uselessness.

Immediately, Arian turned her back on Fear to rush toward those besieged soldiers instead.

Her crimson blade swept down, decapitating that Big Foot mutant.

But no words of thanks or refusals were exchanged – Arian had already moved on to assist other imperiled troops.

This had been an ongoing pattern from the very start.

Whether recalling its prior defeat or not, Fear adamantly avoided any direct confrontation with Arian itself.

Instead, while Arian focused on maintaining the defensive frontline, the mutant would launch sporadic attacks against the opposite flanks in a frustrating hit-and-run guerilla strategy.

Though preventing Fear from inflicting catastrophic losses in any one location.

Those incessant pinprick strikes only compounded the already tenuous battlefield conditions further.

“…”

Truly, this war had reached its inevitable climax.

Having just felled another cluster of mutant strains, Arian surveyed the battlefield with a hardened expression.

Her transcendent awareness perceived this cataclysmic situation with perfect clarity.

The battle was already decided – only its inevitable conclusion remaining.

The defensive line Arian struggled to uphold now encompassed merely a minuscule fraction of the overall frontage.

Any hopes of reinforcements stabilizing the other sectors had proved bankrupt – those positions had already been thoroughly overrun by the remorseless zombie deluge.

The initial wire fencing existed only as scattered debris underfoot.

Most fortified barricades lay breached and shattered.

Zombies poured through those gaps had overwhelmed the military’s staging areas within.

Disorganized soldiers found themselves cut off, picked apart from all directions in piecemeal sacrifices.

At this rate, the undead would soon breach into LA’s city interior itself.

Arian regarded that unfolding catastrophe with sorrow.

Not from any personal sense of failure on her part.

With humanity comprising one half of the defensive equation here, outright defeat had never truly been an impossibility for Arian herself.

Evidenced by the sheer magnitude of the ever-expanding blood torrent flowing toward her synthetically.

And the gargantuan crimson orb pulsating overhead – now swollen to solar proportions unlike anything she had witnessed since arriving in this zombie-infested world.

That prodigious vital fluid volume had finally surpassed even the utmost limits of her ability to accumulate naturally.

Enough to scourge this entire battlefield from existence, many times over.

But Arian felt no satisfaction from having access to such immense power. Because its existence represented the countless individuals across this doomed battlefield who had willingly sacrificed their very lives to grant her that ability to begin with.

This tragic outcome was never something Arian had wished for.

For her victory would be achieved not through her own intrinsic power, but by consigning those who entrusted their faith in her as mere sacrificial offerings.

“…”

However, no other recourse remained available anymore.

If only to preserve the city those sacrificed souls fought to defend until the very end, Arian’s sole remaining duty was clear.

Arian’s irises flooded entirely with vivid crimson hues.

From those bloodied eyes, vital fluid streamed like tear tracks spattering across the ground below.

Simultaneously, the immense overhead blood construct began dissipating from its apex downward.

Like a waning celestial body, that crimson spherical profile gradually shrank and dimmed.

And with every fraction it diminished, the exposed moon overhead stained a deeper shade of perverse vermilion.

The very moment that crimson moon waxed completely full, a torrential downpour of sanguine liquid rained from the heavens themselves.

Shhhhuuuaaaaahhhh-

A literal deluge of blood cascading from the sky.

The sudden, inexplicable phenomenon drove the few surviving humans into sheer panic.

Their already frayed grips on sanity utterly shattered by this eldritch onslaught of sheer, primal terror.

Soldiers dropped their rifles, artillery crews clutched their heads in despair cringing on the ground.

But their terror paled in comparison to the undead victims of that unnatural monsoon.

“Aaaaahhhkkk!”

Zombies caught in the downpour shrieked in anguished torment.

Not the typical vacant wails of a mindless, unfeeling corpse – but agonized howls of sheer, unadulterated torment.

Erupting from the undead forms drenched in that viscous, crimson rain were horrific, jagged crimson crystalline shards.

Like organic stalagmites composed of solidified blood bursting forth from every orifice.

Impaled by those self-manifested lances from within, the zombies’ cries of anguish abruptly choked into deathly silence once more.

Suspended in grotesquely contorted postures, pinned by those internally erupted spikes as the animating forces driving their undead existences dissipated.

A truly eldritch, unnatural form of obliteration.

The few human observers could only gape in sheer, dumbstruck horror at such an aberrant spectacle of carnage.

But this was no isolated phenomenon.

Whether lesser zombie or monstrous mutant, every single undead presence across that entire battlefield suffered an identical, sadistically gruesome fate.

Even the mighty Fear itself, letting out one final, anguished ‘Uhhhkk!’ before falling petrified – another crimson mineral statue amid that unnatural ossuary.

Then, as abruptly as it began, the deluge ceased entirely.

When the surviving humans finally regained their senses, the innumerable undead multitudes had vanished completely.

Only the shattered remnants of their forms remained – bizarre brittle statues impaled by their own crystallized vital effluence.

The only living beings left standing amidst that grisly scene were the traumatized humans themselves.

But neither celebration nor victorious euphoria came from those who witnessed this catastrophic obliteration of their undying foes.