I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

-Ding!

{

Quest: Investigate the Shooter, Completed!

Rewards Unlocked!

Accelerated Healing Stim x1

Cognition Enhancer x1

Bonus Reward Condition Fulfilled: Do not kill the Shooter.

Bonus Reward Unlocked!

Accelerated Healing Stim x1

Note*

Rewards are ready to be redeemed.

}

I could not see the notification because I could not see anything.

Both eyes had swollen shut somewhere in the last hour, the lids fused into puffed slits that let through just a smear of gray light and nothing else.

My whole face had gone tight and hot and wrong. The nose sat crooked in the middle of it, packed solid, forcing every breath through a torn mouth that had split open in three separate places and did not appreciate the traffic.

Several teeth felt loose in the gums when my tongue found them.

My cheeks had ballooned, and my jaw filed a fresh complaint every time it moved. Both sides of my neck had puffed up thick enough that turning my head even a few degrees pulled hot wire down into my shoulders, so I kept it still and stared up as I lay on the bed.

The back was the worst of it, or tied for it.

Five beanbags, back to back, into a plate that ate most of it and passed the rest straight through to muscle and spine, and now my entire back felt like a truck had reversed over it and then thought better of leaving.

The chest bruise had torn back open under the front plate and turned every breath into a decision. My kidneys throbbed in time with my pulse. My stomach kept cramping in slow waves, and it had already won twice, which was why the room smelled the way it did.

My torso was one continuous bruise from head to hip.

Lying still hurt. I had tried four positions on the mattress, and every single one of them hurt, and I had run out of positions.

So I just lay in the one that hurt the least and breathed shallow through my mouth and let my thoughts arrive in whatever broken order the pain allowed them.

The gear sat off to the side. Nia had pulled it. I was fairly sure.

Tikki was a warm weight at the foot of the bed that shifted every so often.

”So...” A voice from the other side of the double bed, sweet and worn thin around the edges with its own pain. ”You got a game-like interface.”

”I can’t shee...” My mouth would not move all the way around the words.

”You can buy stuff from it... Store shit in it.” A slow exhale beside me. ”And it gave you literal telekinesis...”

”Shome of my teeth are looshe...”

”And we both have memories of our past lives...” The mattress moved as she settled deeper into it. ”And the timeline’s accelerating, for some reason. The shit-show wasn’t supposed to kick off for two more weeks...”

”My noshe...” I dragged another sip of air through the ruin of it. ”Can’t breathe...”

She laughed, and the laugh cost her something audible on the way out.

”You still can’t clear a damn room.” Half a groan rode under every word. ”You came in off the balcony... and I genuinely didn’t detect you... But you went target-fixated... and didn’t clear the kitchen. You had a shotgun, literal magic, every advantage under the fucking sun. And I still beat the shit out of you.”

”I wasn’t trying to kill you...” I got out.

”Neither was I.” Another cackle, cut short by her ribs. ”Why d’you think I never once reached for a gun. I wanted to know how you got to the balcony...”

And with that, we both went quiet.

Not the quiet of two strangers who’d run out of things to say. The other kind. The kind that came from years of lying somewhere dark and wrecked next to the same person, listening to each other breathe, letting the silence do the work that words would only get in the way of.

And I let it sit because I did not want to break it.

Somewhere in the middle of it, my brain finally got enough slack from the pain to run a full thought end to end.

I was always going to find her. That part had never been in question. Two years into the last run, she’d walked into my life carrying a war and a rifle.

But in this timeline, she was supposed to be a stranger. I was supposed to be that weird guy who knew too much and smiled at her too easily and kept steering her toward a group she had no reason to trust.

I was never going to tell her about the last life. She’d have thought I was insane, and she’d have been right to.

The plan was to be there, be useful, and get her to join us the slow way, one earned inch at a time.

Except she remembered. Same as me. And she remembered all of it.

There was a whole storm of things moving through my chest at once, and I could not have named half of them even in the best of days.

But above every one of them sat a strange, quiet, enormous relief.

I wasn’t carrying this alone anymore.

”This is nice...” she said. ”Better than nice, actually.”

”Tell that to my face.”

She cackled again, and this time I felt it move the mattress.

[System, redeem the two healing stims...]

-Ding!

{Rewards: Accelerated Healing Stim x2, redeemed.

Items stored in the Inventory.}

I pulled them into my hand, and even that hurt before I weakly lobbed one across the mattress in the direction her voice had come from.

”Shove it in...”

I brought the other one up to my own face. Injecting close to the wounds might drive the effect where it was needed fastest. Worth the gamble, it wasn’t like it would worsen the situation.

So I found a spot along my jaw by feel and pressed the button.

”Where?” Her voice came from the side.

”In your...!” My jaw flared. ”Hands. Or wherever it hurts.”

A soft hiss of the injector already firing on her end. ”What is it, anyway?”

”Accelerates healing by around ninety percent...”

”Huh...”

And the quiet came back, softer now, and somewhere inside it the pain in my face began to loosen its grip one degree at a time, and the mattress stopped feeling like a rack, and my breathing evened out, and for the first time in more days than I wanted to count, I felt my whole body let go at once.

And then, for the first time since the world ended, I actually slept.

I didn’t know how many hours had passed when my eyes finally opened. Both of them opened all the way, the gray light resolving into a real ceiling with real corners.

The pain had gone dull and distant, a background ache instead of a house fire, and for one long beautiful second I had no idea where I was or how I’d gotten here.

No shitshow or regression or memories... Just a ceiling and a warm bed and the blissful feeling of slowly coming to after a good night’s sleep.

My hand moved across the mattress on its own, reaching for the other side of the bed, and found nobody.

[Holy...] My chest seized before the whole of it flooded back in behind my eyes at once, the fight and the flashbang and the apartment and the voice that said my name.

[Nope... That wasn’t a dream...] I let out a slow breath.

I tried pushing myself up onto my elbows, and it worked, my body cooperating in a way it had no business cooperating after what had happened.

Bringing a hand to my face, I felt the swelling had gone down to almost nothing. The nose too, somehow sat straight. My jaw opened and closed clean, and when my tongue found my teeth, they were all seated where they belonged.

[So it does work fast if you inject near the wound...]

And before I could properly look around, radio noise pulled at me from somewhere past the bedroom door, along with a voice under it. I knew that voice too.

Walking out, I found her sitting on the sofa with her back to me, black hair falling to the nape of her neck, my radio held up in one hand while Kara’s voice came out of the speaker mid-sentence, wound tight and climbing.

”...and you listen to me, whoever you are, if you have done anything to him, if this is some kind of trap, I swear to god I will find that building, so you had better start praying you’re telling the truth-”

”He’s asleep, woman...” Nia sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. ”He’s literally in the next room breathing.... I’ve been telling you this for an hour.”

”BULLSHIT! That’s exactly what a liar would say-”

”Ma’am-”

”Do NOT ma’am me you-”

Nia heard my footsteps, turned her head, and without a word tossed the radio backward over her shoulder at me.

”That’s a goddamn volcano you’ve got there...” Her head dropped back against the cushion. ”I’ve been on the radio for an hour. And that is the most insults anyone has thrown at me across two entire lives...”

”Heh...” I caught the radio and keyed it, ”I’m here.”

The line went dead silent for half a second.

”Oh my God, Nikki!” Kara’s voice cracked straight down the middle. ”Where the hell were you! You’ve been silent for an entire day! We, we were so worried, a-and I thought-”

”Hey, easy...”

”Don’t you easy me! Do you have any idea, we didn’t sleep, none of us slept, Leo has been standing by that rope for hours saying he’s going out to find you, and I’ve been talking him down since dawn, and Nora keeps checking the radio every five minutes, and you, you just went dark, you don’t get to just go dark on us-”

I stood there and took it. All of it, because she was right about every word of it.

”-we agreed, we agreed on a check-in window, and you blew straight through it, and I sat here running through every single thing that could have happened to you out there-”

”I know,” I said, when she finally ran low on air. ”You’re right. I’m sorry.”

A shaky breath came down the line.

”Look. We fought, and I basically got knocked out cold,” I said. ”The shooter turned out to be a friend... And I just now woke up.”

”So she was telling the truth.” She replied after a beat, having recalibrated the entire last hour. ”So. With all your magic powers, the fancy guns and the System... you got beaten black and blue by a bare-handed woman.”

”That bare-handed woman is...” I glanced at the sofa. ”Look. I’m fine now. Let me go clean up and check how the wounds are healing, and I’ll call you guys right after.”

”Okay...” The fight drained out of her voice, leaving only the thing that had been under it the whole time. ”Just... call back. Alright?”

”Yeah.”

I set the radio down. And my eyes finally landed on Nia properly, and the Booger tucked between her thighs.

She sat leaning all the way back into the sofa, both hands laced behind her head, watching me with a smirk already halfway up her face and something bright and mischievous sitting in a pair of green eyes that I don’t remember the last time I had seen going dim.

Messy black hair reaching her neck. Sharp features. And an athletic build that carried an easy, coiled stillness that could go from resting to lethal without a wind-up.

She looked dangerous a full beat before she looked like anything else, and I knew for a fact she’d earned every bit of that read the hard way.

I’d genuinely believed I would never see this exact face again. If she hadn’t remembered, she’d have been a stranger I happened to have memories of, close but never the same.

But here she was, giving me a look I had given up on ever seeing again.

”That’s proper wife material you’ve got there...” she said, tipping her chin at the radio.

”That was Kara.” My mind was a storm, and I had no idea what my expression was doing.

”Ah.” The smirk widened. ”So that’s the Kara girl you used to mumble about in your sleep.”

”I-I did not-” I stammered.

”Dude.” She gave me a slow side-eye. ”I used to sleep on your arm. I know everything you mumbled in your sleep...”

I died several deaths internally and couldn’t stop any of them from reaching my face.

But eventually, I took a long breath and sat down across from her before looking at the only other person alive who understood exactly how broken the world had gotten and exactly how much worse it was about to get.

”We need to talk.”

”No shit.”