Age of Heroes
Part eleven of a fanfiction by Velkyn Karma
Warnings: Zombie stuff returns in this chapter, so it may get disturbing and creepy or scary.
Disclaimer: I do not own, or pretend to own, Young Justice or any of its subsequent characters, plots or other ideas. That right belongs to DC, Warner Brothers, and associated parties.
"Run boy run! This world is not made for you.
Run boy run! They're trying to catch you.
Run boy run! Running is a victory.
Run boy run! Beauty lays behind the hills..."
~Run Boy Run, Woodkid
Now that Wally had a specific destination in mind and renewed hope in his goal, he wanted to get moving as fast as possible. And at first, for a little while, the trip went smoothly and according to plan, just the way he'd wanted.
It started almost as soon as they left New Batcave. Kaldur had been waiting for them on the end of the dock, and informed them that Dick had contacted him to make sure he was ready to transport some passengers. Upon learning his passengers were none other than Wally and Connor, he had given them that same soft smile as before and reiterated his promise to take them where they needed to go, and not just across the water to the docks.
Wally had felt a little bad about possibly taking Kaldur away from his duties, but Kaldur insisted it wasn't anything for him to worry about, so Wally gave him a brief explanation on where he'd like to head for. Kaldur agreed immediately and guided them into the same boat as before, detouring them only long enough to find companions of his swimming in the waters, apparently off duty but preferring the ocean to the crowded island. A girl with reddish hair and a young man with a ponytail answered his call, and the three had a hasty discussion in Atlantean ("He's asking them to take his patrol shift for him until he comes back, and mentioning his promise to us," Superboy translated for Wally under his breath). Then Kaldur nodded, and the other two offered polite greetings in English for Wally's benefit, before zipping off through the water at a shocking pace back towards the dock.
Kaldur was no slouch either, and set a breakneck pace over the water with the use of his...magic. However he managed the trick, his little boat was at least as fast as a leisurely moving car, which was more than Wally could say for himself or even Superboy's jump-flying. A trip that would have taken the two of them at least a day on foot—maybe two, if the zed packs had picked up—took Kaldur an hour and a half by water. Not only that, he barely looked like he was straining when he finally pulled the boat up to the dock of some unknown town to let them off. By then they were somewhere past Captain Harbor, some thirty-five miles from New Batcave but still safely far enough away from New York City's outskirts that they wouldn't risk hordes of zeds upon landing.
"Thanks, man," Wally told the Atlantean, as Kaldur helped them out of the boat and onto the (thankfully clear) old dock. "This is...amazing. You saved us a lot of time, it means a lot."
"Think nothing of it," Kaldur answered. "I am happy to know I have been of service. All I ask is that you remain safe, and return to the island in the future. I believe humanity requires more people like yourself, if you are truly to survive this undead plague."
"No pressure or anything," Connor said dryly.
Wally laughed at that. "No offense, Kaldur, but if we're supposed to be examples of the best humanity has to offer in order to survive, then I'm thinking we're probably doomed." It was intended as a joke, but it was a little on the dark side all the same.
The Atlantean merely shrugged. "A few months ago I might have agreed," he said, sounding perfectly serious, "But these days I am not so sure. The world you live in is quite dangerous, and yet people like yourselves, or Arkham's leaders, are enough to convince me that maybe there is still a little hope yet. And if you can continue to hope, then perhaps we, too, can make a difference."
"At least somebody believes in us," Wally said, and this time his smile was more genuine. "That means a lot, coming from you, Kaldur."
The Atlantean bade them farewell and left them on the dock to continue their trek by foot. Dick had provided them with the most up-to-date maps he could manage, using satellites and scouting reports to give them a decent lay of the land, for both physical landmarks and recent zed pack sightings. Between that and Wally's own knowledge of the country from all his time traveling, he had a pretty reasonable idea of where they needed to go next, and sketched out a rough outline of his plan to Connor as they made their way out of the tiny town.
The travel plan was relatively simple at its core. The mountain range Dick had hinted there might be a settlement in was located in the southeast corner of the state of Missouri, in central United States. But it would be foolhardy to head straight there from New Batcave; even without the increased number of zombies in the center of the country, the wilderness and the mountains could be dangerous without proper preparation.
So Wally intended to aim for another settlement a little closer to their actual objective: a converted military base located in southern Illinois that he'd traveled through once, back when trying to reach Central City. It was a secure safety zone, not quite as excellently equipped as New Batcave but backed up by some military support, and was one of the few military colonies in central/eastern United States that still had the trust of the civilians. This was probably in a large part due to the way civilians had been integrated into the military community even before Z-day, and when the outbreak hit both military and civilian factions had been able to effectively function as a team to provide safety to the residents of the base.
More importantly to Wally, it was located barely a hundred miles from the mountain region, making it the closest safe zone to his objective. They'd be able to stop in and resupply before beginning the hunt. And if winter hit before they could find the mountain settlement, they'd be able to hole up in the base for the duration of it in exchange for trade or labor—colonies were always looking for willing workers.
Getting there would be trickier. Wally intended to stick to freeways and roads as often as possible for this stage of the journey. "Back when the outbreak first happened, it was best to avoid major roads whenever you could," Wally explained to Superboy, on their second day of land travel. "They were totally packed with people trying to escape to anywhere that wasn't infested. Better to travel on less populated roads or even cross country.
"Now, though, it's better to use the roads when you can, especially with the center of the country so badly swarming with dead heads," Wally continued. "The roads are relatively open and it's a straight shot wherever you need to go; even gives you the option to ride a bike or run without any interference. They're also open, so more warning about incoming zombies, and a lot of the high-rises and bridges will keep us out of zed territory too. We'll still have to skirt around cities and big towns, and break off the freeways for shelter and scavenging, but this'll make travel a little faster at least. Just, um...just stay away from abandoned cars. Sometimes people die and reanimate still strapped into the seats and...well...just don't go near open windows."
Wally shuddered slightly as he finished. He'd seen one or two unfortunate travelers yanked into open vehicles by reaching, pale arms, kicking and screaming; it was just another bit of nightmare fuel for his already screwed up head, those memories. Superboy, fortunately, heeded the warning, and gave plenty of notice when they approached any vehicles with sounds of movement within, letting them give the rotting cars and trucks wide berth.
Caution aside, their first two weeks of travel went smoothly—as smoothly as any form of travel through zombie-infested territory could go, at any rate. They crossed over Connecticut's border, passed briefly into New York state, and were well into Pennsylvania within the first week. There were still plenty of zombies everywhere, but they were easy enough to avoid, especially since they typically avoided the cities and more crowded towns and stuck to the freeways when they could. Foraging was still pretty easy at this juncture, especially with the loads of abandoned fields and orchards that they passed, letting them load up on wild fruits and vegetables. And 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 a human (or Kryptonian) was capable of, walking for most of their daylight hours and only breaking off briefly for some minor scavenging and shelter-hunting, and Wally was pretty happy with their progress.
More rare, but not exactly unwelcome, were occasional travelers they came across that weren't zeds. It didn't exactly happen all that often, outside of major settlements, but there were other people out there just like Wally—real human beings 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 Batcave, but then again, Wally 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, or just the safest way to travel in general, which meant better chances to meet the living variety of people.
Wally had been forced to restrain Superboy (not very successfully, due to the Kryptonian's superior strength, but he figured the frantic shouting of 'no' caught his attention well enough) the first time they'd come across humans, before he accidentally smashed in perfectly normal people heads by mistaking them for zeds from a distance. After that Connor had learned to approach cautiously, observing small scatterings of bipedal travelers from a distance with both vision and super-hearing and determining if they were live or dead before attacking. And if they were real people with real heartbeats and actual body-heat, they still approached cautiously, just in case; Supey's bullet-proof body aside, Wally really didn't want an encounter with wandering bandits if he could help it. But when they were real, and safe, then they usually stopped briefly to chat, and Wally introduced his anti-social shadow to the fine art of post-apocalyptic travel etiquette.
When you found other travelers out on the road, you typically traded information with them, free of charge: warned them of any zed sightings or other dangers you might have passed through recently, gave them tips on good forage 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 (relatively speaking, in Connor's case) 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. Wally held nothing back as he described useful places to hide or warned of dead head packs behind them on the way to New Batcave, and he and Superboy 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 Batcave. Superboy was baffled by these at first ("Why would anybody want to try to survive out here in a community, if there's a much better equipped colony like New Batcave only a week or two away?") There were a number of reasons, Wally explained. Some groups just didn't want to submit to colony leaderships or rules and regulations. Some trusted more close-knit communities of people they already knew, as opposed to the nameless, faceless masses that they didn't. Some groups were just better at planning for and maintaining zed defenses instead of offensive or evasive travel techniques, or had groups of people simply incapable of surviving traveling through zed territory for whatever reason (mostly the elderly, young kids, or people with injuries or disabilities). 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 zombie-infested 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 Wally cautioned Superboy to always tread carefully when approaching minor settlements and communities. Even if they weren't outlaw zones—which was not always guaranteed, as Wally had explained to him before—many of them were still close-knit and followed the rules of survival of the fittest. Lots of inter-family communities looked out for themselves and their survival-mates first, and might not think twice about stealing from or even hurting or killing travelers in order to get much-needed supplies from the outside world. A typical rule of thumb, Wally had long since learned, was to only approach a settlement if he knew there were kids there—families would be more protective of them, but they were also less likely to 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 zeds wandering the area. Wally and Connor made use of these safe zones once or twice, although they kept 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, Wally learned quickly in his first year and a half of new-age survival, was like Baby's First 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 zeds and survive. Central U.S. was like the hardest Hard Mode in any zombie game Wally 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 zed sightings, as Wally and Connor began to stumble more and more frequently across larger and larger packs of zeds, 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 supplies and food became significantly less frequent and far 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 time traveling.
Shelter was, by far, the hardest thing to obtain, and the deeper they went into heavily packed zed territory, the harder it was to find something reliable and safe that kept them protected from both the walking dead and the elements alike. Wally was glad he'd prepped Superboy 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 Batcave together, and Superboy had never experienced zombie attacks to quite this violent and terrifying a degree before; he wasn't sure Connor would have adapted as well has he had otherwise.
Even with all the preparations, they were rapidly entering some of the worst conditions Wally 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 Wally's mind. He mostly just remembered days of running for hours at a time, with packs of zombies trailing them unrelentingly, or nights curled up in old trees or huddled together on top of sheer boulders or broken buildings that Superboy 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 if ever 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 Wally's memory, so frighteningly and terrifyingly precise he knew he would never forget them for as long as he lived, and they would be added to the collection of nightmares always hovering in the back of his head ever since Z-day began.
There was no avoiding zeds these days, for example; they were simply too populous now to avoid, and many of their daylight hours consisted of outrunning the creatures. Dead heads could and would track a human 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. Wally and Connor were both fairly skilled at giving packs of zeds 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 seven times now—seven excruciating, terrifying, mind-screaming 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 zeds 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 zeds surrounded their meager shelter and battered on the walls and doors below, moaning and groaning with unrelenting regularity and without an ounce 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 own self-made prisons in the darkness, even though it was practically a death sentence to travel at night with zeds on their heels; zombies always, always, were superior when it came to hunting in the dark, and a human wouldn't stand a chance. With the age of heroes over, they were the night now.
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 Wally had been through night-sieges before and knew what he was in for. But it was infinitely more so when he had Superboy with him, and began to realize that not even Connor's wide selection of abilities and powers 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. Connor did not possess the ability to see in the dark, and his infrared vision was useless against dead, animated bodies that had no warmth, meaning he was just as blind as Wally was in the true pitch-blackness that existed in a post-apocalyptic age with no street lamps and headlights. His super-strength could let them jump-run their way out of the siege in the same way they escaped any other zed swarms, but without visuals the chances were high that he would break something (most likely Wally) with poor aim, or land smack in the middle of a pack of zeds, and the risk was too great to take. Worst of all, his super-hearing, while normally absolutely invaluable for early warnings, now proved to be a curse. He heard with intense, heightened clarity every single besieging moan, every scratch and claw and batter at the doors and walls below them, and every single quickened heartbeat or harsh breath from his own much more experienced traveling companion's own terror that Wally couldn't suppress, no matter how much he tried.
The last was what ultimately worried Wally the most. While he knew the zombies did it instinctively and without any particular intent, that drawn out moan was one of their most potent psychological weapons. Wally 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 zeds didn't stop making it, not when they had prey so close by. And 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. Wally 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. And he'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.
Any kind of zombie siege was potentially deadly, and Connor, with his heightened senses, had it worse than most. Not only that, but Wally was fully aware by now that the clone detested feeling helpless, especially when he considered his origins. Even when becoming his own person, Connor was often absolutely convinced that, being Superman's clone, he should still be able to handle things easily that normal humans couldn't. It was a pretty terrible combination, intense psychological warfare and people who didn't want to admit they were having problems with it—those were the people that snapped first.
Wally wasn't about to let it happen, not for anything. Within the first hour of their first siege he could tell the clone was already growing more tense from the unrelenting zed moans that he could hear better than anybody else alive, and withdrawing into himself to try and deal with it, becoming stony and unresponsive. Wally refused to let him crack and challenged him into a fierce game of poker instead.
"A game," Superboy said flatly, when Wally first proposed it. "You want to play a...a game...in this."
"It's important to have some kind of entertainment or something, Supey," Wally told him seriously. "You've gotta stay sane. This stuff kills people, and I don't mean they get turned into dinner. Just try it, it'll help, I promise." I hope.
"I can deal with it. I don't need help."
"No. Wrong. You say that and you're already dead, Supey," Wally snapped back at him seriously. It was a mark of how much the zeds were getting to him that his own emotions were fraying, and his voice was sharper than usual. "You know how you survive this? The first step is admitting it scares the shit out of you. Because it does, don't lie. And then when you admit it, you stop spending all your time and energy trying to save face and man up hide it and all that crap, and you let it scare you and you tell other people that, and you get it out of your system instead of keeping it in, and you don't die because you don't snap. Okay? Following me?"
Superboy actually looked surprised; Wally rarely raised his voice like that, or swore, or got so snappish. His usual response to all-out terror tended to be sarcasm, or just running away from it. "You're freaking out over this?" he asked slowly.
"Yes," Wally told him without a shred of hesitation, "Not that it's a secret because you can hear my heart going about sixty miles an hour, I'm sure, but any sane person will be freaking out too. I've been through this before, and I'm telling the truth, so trust me on this, okay? This is going to mess with your head—don't try to hide it and pretend it's not, that's going to be the part that kills you. I know you hate doing this but if something's really bothering you talk to me and I'll help, but don't bottle it up, especially when I know you can hear all this better than anybody. Okay? Promise me?"
Superboy hesitated a moment, and there was still a fierce grimace on his face, as if he didn't want to admit to weakness. But after a moment it fell away, leaving little more than an exhausted-looking teenager, and he rasped softly, "Okay. Fine. It's...bad. I can hear...a lot. I..." A very long pause, and then he finished flatly with, "It's bad."
"Okay, so let's try to distract ourselves from it, then," Wally said. "They're not getting in, we're three stories above them and you totaled the stairs. We just gotta make it until it gets light, then you can jump us out of here and we can make a run for it, okay? We'll be fine, we'll make it."
He dealt out the cards, privately wondering if maybe they could find him some earplugs or headphones later, and started the game. Superboy seemed to calm a little with the distraction, although his muscles were still clearly tense as he listened to zombie groans at the highest quality available to man. So Wally chattered incessantly about absolutely anything he could think of, hoping to maybe drown out the noises outside at least a little, or give Connor something else to focus on. It seemed to work, at least in part. By the time dawn came they were both exhausted and shaky and neither of them had slept, and Connor actually stumbled when he jumped them out of their shelter and over the heads of the zeds. But they'd made it through the night and the only thing they'd gotten out of it was nightmares. Wally considered it a success.
Over time they'd managed to work out a system for the future sieges, and Superboy slowly got used to admitting when the unrelenting moans were starting to get to him, which gave Wally a chance to distract him or give him something else to focus on. Even when they weren't talking or playing card games to keep their minds off the monsters waiting hungrily for them, Connor admitted that just being near another person, and being able to focus on a living human heartbeat, was a great help in anchoring his mind in reality and keeping the pressure off. Gradually the other sieges became slightly more bearable as they learned how to handle them. But they were never easy, they were always terrifying, and the two of them never slept through those nights, prompting them to escape the trapped shelters stumbling and run only long enough to shake their hunters before holing up somewhere new to rest.
And worst of all for Wally about those encounters was how grateful Connor always seemed to be after the fact, when they were away in the sunlight and traveling in relative safety again, and how he (awkwardly, hesitantly) thanked Wally for helping him through those particular moments. Because Wally could never help but think that, if he'd just pushed a little harder for Connor to remain behind in the safety of New Batcave with Dick and Roy, instead of dragging him along on this wild goose chase, that he wouldn't be even dealing with this sort of psychological punishment to begin with. Or wonder about how Superboy probably could have escaped the sieges, if he wasn't dragging a fragile human around after him. Connor could still potentially evade zombies with his excellent hearing, but Wally was utterly useless in the dark, and the one that would actually get injured if Superboy mis-aimed a jump or accidentally smashed through a wall or into a vehicle.
The guilt over that last thought only increased during their fourth week of travel, when he saw precisely what Connor was capable of in a pinch, during what was unquestionably the most terrifying part of the journey to date.
By then it wasn't uncommon for them to get spotted and hunted by zeds, for all their combined skills at evading the creatures, and it became a relatively regular occurrence to spend at least a few hours a day outright running from the walking dead. If they were lucky, they could shake the monsters once they were far enough away that the dead heads lost their scents or visuals, and if they were really lucky the hunting moans hadn't attracted more packs. It was never a pleasant experience, being hunted, but between Wally's knowledge and Connor's powers they could usually shake further pursuit after a few hours. Even when they got unlucky, and the zeds still had their trail by dark, they had, until now, managed to at least find shelter and buckle down for a siege.
But one particularly bad streak of luck left them still running from a pack of zeds that was swelling to dangerous size, as the zombie moans attracted more and more of the walking dead. By dusk there was a full horde of at least fifty zeds on their tails—too many to even turn and fight without a raiding party and a lot of guns. To make matters worse, they were caught in perhaps the worst terrain possible—wide-open, rolling dead fields of no-man's land that went on for miles. It was a bad place to be, because there wasn't a hint of anything that would suffice as cover or shelter. The trees were too small and gangly to be worth climbing, and a horde of determined zeds would knock them down in barely an hour. And the few buildings they had passed were dilapidated and worthless, or lacked significant height to keep unrelenting monsters at a safe distance. Worse, with the darkness rapidly approaching, it put the zeds chasing them at an advantage; in such a wide-open location the creatures would be able to see, smell, and hear them without obstructions for miles and track them for hours, while Wally and Connor were at a severe sensory disadvantage at night.
They spent that night literally running for their lives. It was one of the most terrifying things Wally had ever forced himself to do. Wally considered himself a pretty skillful runner at this point; he'd never be anything like Uncle Barry, of course, but he'd had hours of practice outrunning shuffling monsters, and he knew he was better than the average human. He figured that he'd be pretty damn good at marathons by now, if they actually had any these days, because he had the endurance to keep up a steady pace for hours at a time even in full survival gear, and still get some decent speed out of it, too. But this was beyond brutal. He and Connor were both already exhausted from a long day of travel and had already been trying to ditch the zeds for two hours before the sun started going down. Forcing himself to keep taking more steps—much less pushing himself at this pace—was grueling, and he could tell that Superboy felt the same way even with his Kryptonian DNA.
But worst of all, even worse than the already exhausting effort of outrunning their own walking death, was that it all happened with night falling.
Before Z-day, Wally had never realized how truly dark the night even was. Central was always bright with street lamps and car headlights and perpetually lit buildings. Even his own home had never been completely dark, with the comforting glow of his alarm clock or the dim hall light that had always been on so nobody broke a leg tripping on something during a three-AM venture to the bathroom. And if the dark ever freaked him out after an infrequent bad dream, or when he stupidly watched a scary movie or something, he could always snap on a light to make himself feel safe.
But those luxuries didn't exist in the apocalypse, and he lived in a scary movie now. There were no comforting hall lights, street lamps, or oncoming cars to light up the darkness. Those things were long dead. Darkness, real darkness, was so smothering and pitch black and impenetrable that it was terrifying on a number of levels, from the logical, higher part of his brain that knew what the dangers out there were and what they could do, to the innately primal level buried deep in his brain that screamed of Bad Things and was desperate to get back to the light and damn the costs.
It was just their bad luck that this night of all nights had to be overcast, as well, meaning even the tiniest shreds of light from the stars or the moon were denied them. So they ran, and ran, and ran, unable to see anything at all. Wally felt like he was trying to push for a million miles an hour with a blindfold tied over his eyes, and his head was warring with itself. The logical part shrieked at him to slow down, slow down, slow down, if you go to fast you'll run into something or trip and break a leg or miss the signs and smack right into another pack of zeds, and then you'll be dead, while the primal, survivalist instinct merely screamed, run, run, run, run faster, faster, faster, stop and die, die, die!
He picked primal, and pushed himself for everything he had, because that instinct was right: stopping meant dying. He wasn't stopping or dying for anything, not unless he ran so damn fast he keeled over dead from sheer force or exhaustion, whichever came first.
So they kept going, and going, and going, and the zeds didn't stop, just kept following them relentlessly, tirelessly, hungrily, kept on moaning and groaning and shuffling along behind their prey. Wally hated that sound with a passion, but it was a damn good motivator to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The terror was enough to shoot him up with another burst of adrenaline and just keep going, even if it hurt, even if he was so tired part of him just wanted to drop to the dirt and go to sleep, and maybe he wouldn't even be awake or conscious when the zeds started chewing on him. He wished the things would stop, but he knew they wouldn't. That was what made the walking dead so terrifying, their inability to feel this level of exhaustion or pain or fear, the way they could just keep going like machines until they walked down their dinner.
And as one hour passed, and another, Wally started to wonder if the zeds would be successful here too. The moaning had increased, and he was sure the pack had swollen to more than sixty behind and around him, even if he couldn't see a single one of the ambling zombies. There was no way to hide, and their prey was wearing down. Wally started stumbling more and more often, tripping on roots and rocks and more often than not nothing at all, his pack felt like it weighed a good ten tons and was dragging him to the earth, and he was breathing so hard he was choking on his own air. If they didn't find shelter soon, he was going to be zed food—no question about that. He'd never been so close to death before, not for all his years of surviving the apocalypse.
Ultimately, it was Superboy that was responsible for getting them through that night. Like Wally, he was exhausted, blind, and running on pure survival instinct and determination by now. He, too, stumbled and panted hard and appeared very aware of just how many zeds were trailing them, and how close they were to joining the pack if they didn't find a way out of this. But he had other assets to draw on that Wally didn't. His superior strength and endurance kept him going far longer, and more than once he hauled Wally to his feet again when Wally stumbled or crashed to the dirt when he tripped. And they navigated entirely by his super-hearing as they poured on the speed, relying on it more and more as the night progressed. Connor appeared to have turned it up to the max, straining to the utmost, and although it had to be torturous to listen to sixty or more zombie groans at the highest quality available, it also let him listen ahead for potential threats and cast around for echoes to avoid dangerous obstacles. Twice he hissed angrily and grabbed Wally's wrist, jerking them aside just in time for Wally to literally feel cold fingers brushing at his shoulder or leg. And once he had wrapped an arm around Wally's torso and launched them into the air without pausing in the run, to avoid what Connor later said he thought might have been an abandoned truck on the road.
Part of Wally, that survivalist instinct still screaming at him to keep running until he died, wondered why Connor didn't just abandon him in the dark. It had to be close to impossible for him to navigate by himself to begin with, much less dragging a blind, exhausted, much weaker human around behind him. Wally knew Connor had to be restraining himself least in part—he didn't have Superman's own impressive super speed, but his physical strength would still let him outrun any normal human easily, and yet he kept pace with Wally. It would be so easy for him to save himself, bolt ahead into the night, avoid dangers with his own hearing and outrun the hungry moans behind them. And Wally honestly wouldn't have blamed him if he had, even if it would have meant Wally's own death in the process; he wanted his brother to survive through anything, especially this.
But maybe that was the reason he stayed behind, suffered through grueling mental and physical torture alike simultaneously—because family was worth it, something that needed to be protected and gave you the strength to keep going no matter what. Wally knew that because it was the reason he was still going by now, even though he was so tired and scared and his throat burned and his stomach rumbled and he could barely breathe. He wasn't going to give up, but by now he wasn't going to give up for Connor's sake, because it was so much easier to survive and keep pushing yourself when you were doing it for somebody else running alongside you.
In the end they ran for a brutal four hours before they managed to reach what passed for shelter now: an abandoned single-story farmhouse that Connor was more-or-less responsible for sensing out in the dark. They couldn't hide inside of it, but the roof was mostly stable, and it had just enough height that it would deter zeds—at least long enough for them to rest and gather strength so they could flee again when the light came. Connor had to jump them up onto the roof, and it was a mark of just how worn down he was that he barely managed the ten-foot distance, and collapsed onto his side as soon as they found a sturdy portion of the roof that would hold their weight. Wally was tempted to join him, except that he was first inclined to lean over the edge of the roof and violently throw up everything in his stomach, which by this point was pretty much nothing. Then he collapsed onto the broken shingles and focused entirely on breathing, which was more amazing and more painful than he ever remembered before.
The zeds didn't take long to catch up to them, and within an hour the entire house was surrounded as the monsters groaned and clawed at the walls and pressed against each other in a mass of walking death. But by now the chase had turned into a siege, which was just as terrifying but at least familiar, and Wally and Connor knew how to handle it. They retreated as far into the center of the tiny roof as they safely could—ten feet was just not a comforting height with a horde of zeds surrounding you. The rest of the horrible night was spent huddling together, shaking from a combination of exhaustion and fear. All attempts at bravery and dignity were abandoned in favor of tactile comfort, and that desperate need to know that even in the pitch black there was still somebody alive there with them in this hellhole.
After another hour of listening to the unrelenting moans Wally attempted to convince Superboy to sleep, and even in the dark Wally knew the clone was giving him a dull-eyed, incredulous look, as if to ask, sleep, with this? But Wally was insistent, and pointed out that with well over seventy zeds surrounding them, they were going to need Superboy at the top of his game to get them out of there (he did not voice his guilt at shoving all the responsibility on Superboy's shoulders, but it was there, in the back of his head).
Connor eventually reluctantly agreed, but even with relatively well-planned sieges it was impossible to truly sleep, and this was a worst-case scenario if there ever was one. In the end Superboy only managed by curling up and burying his head in Wally's chest, as close as he possibly could to his companion's heartbeat, while Wally wrapped an arm around him and covered the clone's other ear with his sleeve to deaden the noise as much as he possibly could. It was awkward, both to manage physically and just in general (Wally solemnly swore that if they got out of this he was never speaking of this to anybody, and he was pretty sure Superboy would agree). But it worked, and Superboy managed a weak-but-viable four and a half hours of sleep while Wally kept watch before the first smudge of light bloomed in the east.
Wally had never been so excited to see the sunrise in his life, although the sight of well over a hundred zombies surrounding them had dampened the enthusiasm somewhat. By then he was beyond exhausted, functioning entirely on pure terror and loyalty alone. But Connor's rest had done him some good, at least, and when woken he was able to jump them with renewed energy away from the surrounding horde of zombies and down the road towards freedom. Then the running again, as the zeds inevitably turned to give chase. But it was daylight now, and while still horrible not nearly as terrifying, especially when they could see buildings—and potential shelter—far in the distance. During the final hour Wally had finally collapsed, unable to push himself any further and not even running on fumes anymore after no food, no sleep, and too much tension in the past twenty-four hours, and Connor had been forced to carry him. Wally didn't remember much of that, other than blacking out and waking up on the fourth floor of a worn but serviceable office building, with Connor standing guard. They were both as dead on their feet as they could be without literally being dead after that harrowing encounter, and spent two days in that office just resting, trying to build up their strength after that horrible night.
The recovery period gave Wally plenty of time to think, and that was when he really started to realize just how badly he was screwing things over for Connor. Because when he thought back to all the mishaps and near death experiences they'd had since beginning the journey out to central US, Wally started to realize that the vast majority of their problems were on his shoulders, not Connor's. The guilt from the sieges was already bad enough, and after that death run they'd forced themselves to endure it grew even more. Because as honored as he was to know Connor was there for him, and had risked everything to stick by his 'older brother' to keep him safe, the fact of the matter was Connor would have been much better off in that fiasco if Wally hadn't been there at all. It was nice to know he wouldn't be abandoned, that Connor had chosen to follow him to begin with instead of staying safe and sound in New Batcave, and stuck with him out of loyalty. But that made him feel worse about the fact that Connor was still around even when it was clearly starting to be more hazardous to him, because Wally felt like a ball and chain more than anything useful.
And it got even worse when he thought of everything else they'd been through. Because the long exhausting nights and zed chases were only part of the trip, and if he just couldn't keep up with a Kryptonian when the gloves were down and there was serious action at stake, well, he wouldn't have been all that surprised. Connor was part Superman, after all. But Wally was useless in pretty much every other regard, too, he was starting to realize. Before, when he'd first found Superboy and was guiding him to New Batcave, there had been an obvious division of skills—Connor had the powers and the strength, but Wally had the skills and the experience. Wally was, in essence, the brains of the operation, while Connor clearly supplied the brawn, and between the two of them they made a good team.
Except that wasn't the case anymore. Wally had been diligently teaching Superboy for weeks now, and once he'd gotten Connor over that hurdle of believing he was well nigh invincible as a superhero's clone, he'd been a quick study. Superboy learned fast, and rarely did lessons have to be repeated anymore. Wally didn't have to remind him of things habitually, and the longer they travelled, the less he had to teach at all. Superboy adapted quickly and skillfully to most survival situations, rarely needed advice for foraging or hunting or searching out safe spots, and after all those terrifying nights under siege had even developed a healthy, wary respect for the zeds and was becoming less inclined to throw himself into a fight with them for the hell of it. By now Superboy was a veteran survivalist in his own right, and had both the brains and the brawn to manage it solo, if he really wanted to. Wally's experience was hardly an asset anymore, making him virtually useless in that regard. And he couldn't even pull his own weight literally anymore—Superboy already carried four times what Wally did, handling the majority of their supplies, and when they had to jump-run to escape he even went so far as to carry everything, including Wally himself. As if it wasn't enough for him to be doing most of the other survival work, he was doing most of the physical work as well.
Wally felt terrible for shoving all that weight and responsibility onto Superboy's shoulders, literally in some cases. He was, at the barest level, forcing his adopted little brother to do almost everything on this trip, from handling supplies to managing their survival to getting them out of deadly scrapes. How was it any better than what Cadmus had planned for him, using him as a tool instead of a weapon? And what did Connor get out of it in return? Nothing but bad memories, horrific nightmare fuel, exhaustion, stress, and extra baggage in the form of a useless human he apparently felt obligated to escort out of a stupid promise or some belief that he owed him one. Wally was even horrified to discover, the longer they went, that Kryptonians could even start to deteriorate from those things the same as any human. He wasn't sure if it was Connor's partial human blood or not, but he was shocked to find that for all his Kryptonian heritage and invulnerability to nearly everything, the clone was starting to sport the same dark, near-permanent lines under his eyes that Wally knew he himself had, and Wally could have sworn he'd lost a little weight as well from all the running they'd done on top of not enough food.
Superboy never voiced any complaints on the matter, but Wally knew he wouldn't, because he still had that stupid Superman complex and figured he ought to be able to handle it all, and that was just wrong. And while Wally was still responsible for the occasional bit of useful but obscure apocalypse survival advice, or talking Superboy through the worst of the sieges, or attempting to be optimistic even in some of the darkest moments, he couldn't help but feel that if he'd just worked a little harder to convince Superboy to stay behind, he wouldn't have been forced to deal with those things to begin with because he wouldn't be here at all.
It was an infuriating and frustrating conclusion to come to, and Wally hated the thought that he could be holding Superboy back, or causing him more trouble when Superboy could do so well on his own. So he resolved to work harder, so he'd be as little a burden as possible. He couldn't do much in the way of the super strength or powers, but he hurled himself into their other survival necessities with newfound determination. He worked twice as hard as before to ensure they were able to scavenge or hunt up enough food, find appropriate shelters, and make it through every terrifying night by keeping watch more often so Supey could get his rest, or talk him through the bad nights as best as possible.
And for a few days, it worked. But then things got worse, much worse, as fate decided to screw with their heads and throw everything it had against them, throwing their life straight into the depths of hell.