I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

The hook was buried in the building next door before that damn thing’s feet even left the ground, and the line snatched me sideways out of the air its claws were about to occupy while I hit the wall boots-first three floors up and fired again, the second pull ripping me higher while the whole face of the building shuddered from whatever had just happened to the street below becuase I did not look back.

My Awareness carried it for me instead, a mass of two-story-tall heat and muscle hauling itself out of the crater and turning its head up along six floors, while a laugh climbed out of me somewhere around the fourth floor, high and thin and completely unauthorized, because while it had two stories of jump, I had a grapple gun and psychic powers that cheated.

[It can’t fly... I can! Sort of...]

Gravel hit my boots at the top of the last pull, and I was running before the line finished retracting, which was the only reason the next four seconds didn’t kill me, because my Awareness shrieked about incoming mass half a breath before-

-CRASH-!

A sedan came down through the roof’s edge behind me, a ton and a half of it blowing concrete into the air and pinwheeling up off the impact, its landing spot arriving in my head in the same instant my legs reported there was no time left to turn, so I shoved the only mass on this roof light enough to listen-

[Move!]

-and my own will slammed into my ribs and threw my stride one full meter left while the sky came down where my next two steps should have been.

-CRASH-!

Glass and gravel raked across my shoulders, and I kept running, because that thing had just thrown a car onto a six-story roof from the street, flat-footed, without a windup, and the far edge was still five strides out, and I knew it wouldn’t stop at that.

And I was right-

-CRASH-!

The whole building bucked as the Tank hit the front of the building behind me, and it had already reached the roof in the time I took just two strides, claws punching through the parapet and tearing trenches through the roof while it hauled itself up, snarling close enough that I felt it in my spine. And under its massive weight, underneath both of us, the building gave out.

-CRASH-!

The front columns gave out, and the horizon tilted, the roof turning into a ramp while gravel and vents and the dead sedan slid backward past me toward its claws, while I sprinted up a floor that was rapidly becoming a wall.

Finally hitting the high edge, I jumped off the collapsing building, and in the same accursed moment, Tikki slid up out of the pocket with a yelp, paws paddling air, Telekinesis barely catching him mid-slip and shoving him back into the pocket in the same breath I had jumped with nothing to grapple except the elevated water tank a roof away.

-Disssh-! -Woosh-!

The hook took the water tank, and the pull snatched the fall out of me, and six stories of apartment block came down on the monster at my back, dust erupting outward in a wave that ate the street whole.

I came up on top of the water tank with my lungs tearing, turned around, and gave that rubble the full respect of not believing for one second that it’s gonna put even a scratch on it.

-GRRAAAAAAAAHHHH-!!!

The pile moved, and it rose out of six stories of dead building, shrugging slabs the size of a car off its shoulders, dust sheeting down purple hide that carried not one single mark, and around it the street was moving too, loose knots of infected trickling in from every side road at once, heads up, shrieking.

The entire horde stacked below Nia’s old nest had scattered off its stack.

The Tank reached down without taking its eyes off me, picked one of them up, and ate it, one bite, half a person gone, the legs dropped and forgotten while it swallowed and stared.

[Big boys gotta eat...]

Running sat right there, and my legs kept voting for it, and I couldn’t, because I’d watched those red eyes track the Cybertruck around the corner, and a thing that eats while it stares does not wander home when its toy disappears, it goes and finds the next toy, and the next toy was a truck five minutes out carrying everyone I’d just torn a police station apart to save.

Nia needed ten more minutes of the Tank looking at me.

And I could buy ten minutes, if nothing else.

Probably...

The shorty 40 came off the shoulder rig, and I laid the sight on its face from about thirty meters with a wide split grin, because if Tikki and I were going to be bait, we were going to be the annoying kind.

-Thunk-!-Boom-!

The HEAP round burst dead on its cheekbone in a flash of flame and grey smoke, the crack slapping off the buildings while every infected on the street shrieked at it.

For a few seconds, the smoke enveloped everything, and as it rolled off, all I found were black soot streaks on a face that didn’t even change its expression.

No split, no blood, hide not so much as opened, and my grenades formally demoted to a very loud wave.

”Got any ideas?”

”Mea.”

”Yeah, of course we run! What the hell kinda of- Woah-!”

Tearing a chunk of dead building bigger than me out of the rubble, rebar whiskering off the edges, its arm blurred, and I was already jumping as-

-CRASH-!

The water tank detonated behind me, steel and a few thousand liters of water and half the support frame erupting through the space my knees had just left, spray chasing me off the roof while I took aim d mid-glide.

And the very next instant, Awareness lit up as it jumped out of its own dust cloud and came down onto the face of the exact building I was gliding toward, claws in, concrete bursting off in sheets, climbing to meet my landing.

[It read the glide! It fucking READ the glide!]

I slammed TK against my ribs, wrenched sideways off the arc it had already solved, the next few grapples low instead of high, as I yanked down into the alley between the blocks, wall walking across the buildings more than once on absolute improvisation, while somewhere above and behind, its weight finished what its claws had started and dragged that building’s entire face down into the road.

[Need to figure something out fast!] The thought shoved itself up as I zipped into another alley to break its line of sight again for a moment to create distance.

But it came out of that collapse changed and stopped climbing things entirely.

And now what it couldn’t jump onto, it now went through, shoulder-first, one wall at a time, and as I cut behind another corner block, a dumpster came at my face through that corner one second later at highway speed, and I barely dodged it.

[It knows the hiding trick! It’s COUNTERING the hiding trick!]

The next street ended in a mid-rise, no alley, no gap, no time, its footsteps landing close enough behind me now that I felt each one, and I needed to break the line of sight again because the damn thing was just as fast as it was strong. So I put the hook through a third-story window ahead and let the line rip me straight off the open air-

-Crash-!

-through the glass, through somebody’s curtains, shoulder-rolling across a dining table into a dark apartment that still smelled like a family had lived there, Tikki pressed flat in the pocket, and I was up and sprinting the hallway past a fridge still covered in cute magnets while the entire building took the hit.

-BOOM-!

And the wall behind me stopped being a wall, rooms folding, doorframes snapping one after another, the floor beneath me buckling while dust filled the corridor at my heels.

It was in the building with me, coming through apartments while I came through the hallway, the window at the far end a grey rectangle growing while the ceiling started dropping in slabs behind my shoulders, and I went through the glass without slowing.

-Crash-!

Open air, three stories of it, and i had already shot the grapple gun, its line snapping taut on a fire escape across the street, and behind me the whole building exhaled its own insides out as that thing barraled out of the dust with somebody’s living-room wall draped across its shoulders and threw it at me.

[MOVE!]

A TK shove into chest, one meter, before the wall section ripped through the air inches beside me.

And I instantly abandoned the fire escape and switched directions as its next throw came in, already leading me higher, aimed at where I was going to be.

But this time, it threw three things, all hitting the walls around me, all three of them alive, at least in the biological sense they were.

A clawful of its own kind flung as a spread, one going through a window on my left, one bursting against the wall a floor below, and one passing close enough that its teeth snapped shut on the air beside my cheek, its eyes catching mine before it went shrieking all the way down into the street.

[IT’S THROWING INFECTED LIKE BUCKSHOT!!]

Because why not?

I landed on the rooftops and ran with its footsteps never more than a breath behind, every grapple buying one street that the shortcuts it used took the distance straight back.

Tikki’s ears were my rear-view mirror. I jinked whenever they flattened, and somewhere in the pounding of both our hearts, my brain coughed up the fact about Variants even children knew a month after the Variants showed up.

Alphas think like fifteen-year-olds. Tanks think less than Alphas but more than enough.

Enough that the Tank you fought at minute one was no longer the same Tank you fought by minute five.

I was somewhere around minute four or three maybe, and every trick I owned now got exactly two uses before it had an answer waiting.

[I should’ve been a good little regressor and bought a stupid fucking railgun with that token!]

An engine block took the corner off the parapet beside me and bashed past the smoking crater where the police station used to be.

[But noooo! I just had to be all tactical and shit! Excalibur, my booty!]

My eyes fell on Nia’s old nest, six floors completely rigged with C4.

[Let’s try this...]

I circled around the police station, dodging cars and Infected thrown at me, more often than not by inches, and led the Tank home,

Landing on the nest’s roof, I planted my boots on a building I had personally wired to disappear and stopped running, because bait works best when it holds still and lets the monster commit.

But it didn’t commit.

It stopped at the street with infected eddying around its ankles, red eyes pinned on me, head lowering at the building under my feet, and my stomach dropped through all six floors, because I knew that look, and the first car was airborne before my brain put two and two together.

-CRASH-!

The car crashed into two floors below the roofline, and the whole building rang while the second car left the ground before the first finished landing.

-CRASH-!

And this one crashed onto the roof itself, my half of it, gravel and quartered concrete spraying while my will slammed my ribs sideways and threw me off its line.

But I stayed on that roof anyway, screaming inside my own skull, holding ground on a booby-trapped building while a monster field-tested it, because one step off this roof and the trap died.

It had thrown the cars first because the last building it climbed had fallen on it. And at some level, it knew I was baiting it to come to me.

But still, an infected at the end of the day is nothing but a slave to its instinct. Except for the Alpha Variant, of course.

-GRRAAAHH-!!!

The street cracked under its launch, two stories of muscle leaving the ground with both arms reaching for my roofline, and I jumped the opposite way, off the far parapet into open air above the next building, thumb finding the detonator at the top of the arc while its claws found roof and-

-BOOOMM-!!!

The building went up underneath it in one thunderous explosion, the entire street lighting orange for a moment, while the pressure slapped my back, sending me hurtling across to the roof of the next building.

Pieces of the roof I’d stood on two seconds ago went screaming across the block, while I turned and watched the column of smoke climb into the sky.

And the calm came back in stages, dust sifting orange, scattered infected shrieking somewhere under the cloud, my own heart the loudest thing left in my ears.

Even Tikki eased up out of the pocket.

For one whole breath, it looked like I’d won.

And then-

-GRAAAHAHH-!!!

The roar tore up out of the rubble, angrier than ever.

[Of course...]

The smoke ripped open around the sound just long enough to show me its face.

Head tilted back, it roared at the orange sky as ropes of drool swung off its open maw, sheeting between teeth longer than my forearm, eyes burning red through the dust.

Every line of that face was appetite, the drool running faster the longer it roared.

It was the face of a thing that had just taken six floors onto its chest and face, along with tens of C4, and come out the other side hungrier.

And my eyes went wide before my brain even finished making sense of what I was seeing.

[This is it!!]