I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

The balcony caught the afternoon light at an angle that barely qualified as warm, just enough of the October chill to still justify staying outside and looking over the city with a coffee mug floating beside you.

Tikki was asleep on my lap, occasionally twitching one ear when the wind shifted, having long declared all available furniture to be personal property, which in his case was accurate across every surface within reach.

I took a sip of the floating coffee and let the city sit in front of me for a while. The shit-show below had already settled into the backdrop I was familiar with.

Yesterday morning had felt profoundly strange, to say the least.

Riding my long-lost Diavel through traffic, stopping at red lights, paying for things online like a functioning member of modern civilization, seeing familiar faces at the campus, sitting in a park while eating Kara’s chicken sandwiches, and everything else that had seemed enormously important at the time... it all felt like a dream.

Like visiting a childhood home after decades. A home that used to be mine, but not anymore.

Now the city burned in seven visible places from the balcony. The streets sat empty of traffic and people, occupied by the infected who wandered below, letting out snarls that reached even up here.

And yet I felt at home. Relaxed even...

I looked out along the road stretching straight ahead, apartment buildings lining both sides for several blocks before the area opened into bakeries and convenience stores and small restaurants.

Most vehicles sat exactly where their owners had parked or abandoned them.

The city had grown significantly quieter since day one.

Distant screams had become rare, gunfire had dropped to almost nothing, and engines, horns, and human voices had all vanished.

The first night had sorted most of the people who were going to die through a process that the wise and elderly called natural selection.

The ones who panicked and ran outside. The ones who gathered in loud groups and made too much noise. The ones who got caught in the open when darkness arrived. And the ones who fired guns from apartment windows without thinking about what noise discipline meant in a city full of stimulus-chasing infected.

All of those people had either become infected or were inside someone’s stomach by morning.

The ones still breathing were the ones who had gone quiet immediately and understood early what staying that way was worth.

Fresh infected operated entirely on stimulus. Sound, movement, light, smell, any input that registered got pursued hard and immediately.

Take the input away, and they wandered without direction. Theoretically, you could sleep with your front door open as long as you didn’t snore.

The survivors had clearly worked that out fast, possibly by watching what happened to everyone who reached the opposite end of the conclusion first.

The horde density below the building had also thinned noticeably since yesterday, constantly chasing new stimuli across wider areas, following whatever noise or movement they pick up. But still, there were more than enough to make everyone inside sick.

I breathed in slowly and caught it again.

The October air smelled like smoke and ash and something underneath both of those, something sweet and chemical and artificial, like someone had pumped a cheap strawberry vape juice into the atmosphere at industrial scale.

And my mind immediately floated up Leo’s face from fifteen minutes ago when I’d explained where that smell was coming from.

The man had gone visibly pale in a way that was genuinely impressive given his tanned complexion.

And I couldn’t help but start laughing again, only to immediately wince as the swollen chest reminded me of its existence.

Tikki opened one eye, evaluated me, and went back to sleep.

Each Infected’s lungs operated as biological factories for the airborne strain, producing and exhaling concentrated first strain with every breath. One infected was negligible in terms of air quality impact. But twenty or more infected gathered together created a concentration field roughly ten meters around them that even immune survivors needed to think carefully about.

The immunity prevented turning, yes. It didn’t prevent the body from getting overwhelmed by prolonged exposure to heavy concentrations.

Spend enough time around a large infected gathering, and the symptoms arrived in full. Fever showed up first, then weakness and shortness of breath, then coughing, nausea, jitters, followed by a migraine behind both eyes like it was intending to stay permanently.

The exhaustion that hit the joints made all the other symptoms worse.

Any single one of those things could get someone killed while operating in the field. But the universe had thoughtfully arranged for all of them to show up within hours of each other simultaneously.

Two options existed for dealing with the problem.

Respirators were the first option, simple and effective, and entirely dependent on a supply of replacement filters that would eventually run out.

Resistance was the second, built through repeated exposure over time. The first contact hits fast and hard. The second would require more or longer exposure before symptoms appeared. The third would require even more.

Veteran survivors could eventually move through heavy Infected concentrations for hours before the body registered a meaningful objection.

And our current situation happened to be ideal for building exactly that kind of tolerance.

The penthouse was on the tenth floor, and we had food, water, medical supplies from the System, a veterinarian in residence, along with a substantial horde sitting directly below, providing the first strain exposure at essentially zero personal risk to anyone on the inside.

The group could get as sick as they wanted up here and simply recover in bed between sessions.

The loop I had in mind was simple: get exposed while training with firearms out on the balcony, feel rough, come inside to the sick bay, recover, gain a small increment of resistance, go back outside, and repeat.

By week two, everyone should handle several hours near horde-level concentrations without significant symptoms arising, and that would massively change what operations would actually be possible.

[Going to need an isolated sick bay first...]

Air filtration, dedicated medical supplies, somewhere people could properly recover without constantly inhaling more of the first strain.

And my answer to that was the Base Building Module.

[Let’s get to it...] I pulled the System Shop up.

[Wait... Almost forgot about the quest reward.]

-Ding!

{

Quest Completed!

Rewards Received: Custom Firearm Token

Bonus Reward for Excellent Completion: Accelerated Healing Stim x2

}

[Would you look at that...] My eyebrows shot up.

The Custom Firearm Token was already a significant find on its own.

Custom firearms that used System-exclusive attachments like the Enhanced Universal Suppressor were expensive enough that I had been treating them as a future goal rather than a current one.

But with that, I could build myself a one-of-a-kind bulshit gun that might as well be using alien technology.

But the stims held more immediate interest.

[System. The token gets me a custom weapon at no credit cost, I’m assuming...]

-Ding!

{

Correct.

Observation: The assumption displays more intelligence than yesterday’s behavioral record suggested was consistently available.

}

[Right... And the stim. How much acceleration are we actually talking about?]

-Ding!

{Approximately ninety percent.}

”Damn...” I said to the empty balcony, doing the math in my head. ”That’s months of recovery in a week... Alright, redeem those stims.”

Both appeared in the Inventory almost immediately. Pulling one out, I found a sleek black auto-injector roughly the size and weight of a thick marker, one button at the end, nothing on it by way of labeling or instructions.

I lowered it toward Tikki, and the quality control department opened both eyes at once, sat up, and immediately began sniffing the injector with the serious analytical attention of a war vet who felt fully entitled to weigh in on all pharmaceutical decisions about him going forward.

[System. Will this hurt?]

-Ding!

{No.}

[Can anyone use it?]

-Ding!

{Yes.}

[Where do I inject it?]

-Ding!

{Anywhere.}

[Cool...]

”Hold still, Booger.”

”Mea?”

Not giving him time to figure out what I was up to, I pressed the injector against the loose skin along his back and clicked the button.

-Tlish-!

Tikki jerked up hard before immediately licking the injection site exactly twice. He then turned his head and looked directly up at me with an expression that combined genuine personal injury with a clear statement of intentions regarding future consequences.

”Oh, don’t be dramatic...” I told him, reaching over to scratch between his ears.

And he bit my hand with full commitment, and held on for two full seconds, before releasing.

Justice, by any reasonable standard, had been served.

I pulled the second stim from the Inventory, pressed it against my own forearm, and activated it.

The button clicked under my thumb, and the stim fired.

After that, absolutely nothing whatsoever...

No warmth spreading from the injection site. No tingling moving up through the arm. Or any dramatic glowing aura.

[Don’t feel any different...] I turned my forearm over and looked at the site. [Fair enough. We’ll see what it does by morning...]

Both empty injectors went off the balcony while I turned back toward the penthouse interior and actually looked at the space properly for the first time since arriving.

The main hall was large enough to house a functional medical bay with significant room remaining. The balcony stretched long and open in both directions, making it a natural shooting range without any structural change required for a shooting range.

The rooftop had the solar array already running, a flat usable surface area, and a water tank already connected, which made a small rooftop garden to grow tobacco viable without major investment.

We were gonna be here for two weeks, maybe more depending upon the situation. I needed this turned into a proper base rather than a borrowed luxury apartment with good views and a rope going over the railing.

After all, two weeks in the shit show was practically a geological era.

”Okay...” I said, the grin arriving on its own. ”Let’s handle these three first.”

And that grin kept widening as I opened the Base Building Module for the very first time.