I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

The drool was the tell.

My brain was already sprinting through everything I knew about it while the Tank stood hip-deep in six collapsed floors of rubble and roared at the orange sky, because I had seen that exact face before, across a year and an apocalypse, and it had never once meant anything good.

-CRACK-!

A slab the size of a garage door slid off its shoulder while it wrenched one leg free of the wreckage, and I stayed put on my rooftop, lungs heaving, and let the memory run, because for once, monologuing inside my own skull was the most tactical thing I could do.

The knowledge had come late in my last life, at one of the big military camps, during my old group trading stories with folks who’d seen a Tank actually get pushed.

All we really knew about the Tanks at that time was that you met one and either it killed you inside seconds, or you buried it in an obscene amount of ordnance within seconds, and both endings taught us nothing except funerals.

So we, for the most part, avoided the Tank. Hell, we avoided every Variant. If we got even a whiff of a Variant nearby, we hauled ass and straight up changed zip codes.

It wasn’t a weakness they revealed. Tanks didn’t have weaknesses.

But a limitation.

That body was a furnace with legs, and every second of its operation had a cost.

Running had a cost. Jumping had a cost. Throwing cars did, going through a building instead of around it did, and the bill came due in calories and heat, and a heart the size of an engine block hammering hard enough to burst itself while muscle burned fuel faster than anything else on the planet did.

Which was why every Tank anyone ever tracked lived close to water.

Urban areas with rivers, lakes, reservoirs, or the ocean.

The Tank needs massive amounts of water, and it ate where it drank. Normal Infected also gathered by the very same bodies of water, and that gave the Tank the perfect all-you-can-eat buffet.

After all, only a special Infected that keeps on cannibalizing other Infected, bypassing the last-resort instinct that the virus encoded into it, has a chance of evolving into a Tank.

So the general rule of thumb in case of such Infected was: Humans were prey. Infected were food.

Learning that distinction had cost more lives than anyone could remember.

-CRASH-!

Half a wall came off the rubble pile before me and powdered a parked van, while I kept thinking, faster.

The real crux of the limitation was when a Tank burned past what its body could pay for, when the calories ran out mid-hunt, it did what every starving apex predator eventually does.

It goes all in.

Strength up, speed up, every scrap of processing it used to spend on tactics stripped out and re-spent as pure violence, foam at the mouth, drool in ropes, lungs going like bellows, one single item left on its list: kill the threat, reach water, eat, and collapse into a deep slumber that ran four to five days.

From the outside, it looked angrier than ever.

Underneath, its clock has begun ticking.

If it ate, it lived.

If it didn’t, that overworked heart would burst inside its chest, and one of the strongest things on the food chain would drop dead, same as anything else with a heart.

This also meant the earthquakes from before had more to them than I initially thought.

That thing had come up from under the city, through storm drains and sewer mains and reinforced concrete, digging for hours before it ever laid eyes on me, having already accumulated an energy bill I couldn’t even estimate.

Since Variants weren’t supposed to exist for another year... This one a newborn.

And every newborn predator on this planet arrives the same way, human, wolf, lion, all of them.

Hungry... Hungry to consume and grow.

This one hadn’t eaten enough to operate for as long as the Tanks I remembered.

Simply put, this one hadn’t eaten enough and long enough to give its form the nourishment it needs to be a true Tank.

[I lucked out... no wonder compared to the Tanks I remember, this one seemed oddly clumsy...]

Fate had handed me the weakest possible version of the physically strongest thing alive.

But still, none of that luck changed the arithmetic. The time it takes to go from that drooling mess to dropping dead is measured in hours, not minutes.

It meant surviving a faster, stronger, madder version of that thing. And I still wasn’t delusional enough to believe I could survive it. This thing would pulp me long before its heart got around to quitting.

And I couldn’t just sprite myself away either.

That’s when it hit me, and I looked north, past the rooftops and the smoke.

Twenty kilometers out to the city’s northern edge, there was a lake with a boat club rotting on its shore, the one patch of map I’d been avoiding like the plague since day one.

Water pulled infected.

By now, half the city’s Infected should be at the lake’s shoreline to drink and cannibalize the weaker and the injured Infected, the world’s ugliest ecosystem, a nightmare zone no human should get within a kilometer of.

A fully stocked pantry with a lake attached, for a Tank running on fumes...

[Maybe I just... lead it there... Break the line of sight...]

After all, nothing hunts a hiding rat while standing next to a buffet.

And the best part, the penthouse was at the city’s southern edge, which meant every meter of this plan dragged the monster one more meter away from them.

[And in four days it wakes... yeah that’s a problem for future me, and future me is a resourceful bastard who-]

-Woosh-!

Rebar the length of a flagpole ripped past my face close enough to part my hair, and I was already diving stomach-first onto the gravel as it-

-Crash-!

-speared through the rooftop door behind me in an eruption of brick dust.

[At least let me monologue!]

-GHRRRAAA-!!!

It was out of the rubble, and it was done waiting. I jumped off the parapet into open air with Tikki’s claws sunk through jacket and skin, and fired the hook, and went north.

What came after had nothing in common with the last chase.

That one had been a duel, feints and reads and counters, a monster running experiments on me and learning how to hunt.

This one was a landslide with a target. It didn’t test buildings anymore; it shoulder-checked them, whole corner blocks folding around its charge while it came through the dust without losing a step.

It didn’t circle for angles anymore; it just barreled, in a straight line, through everything.

A lamp post came at me sideways, torn out concrete-root and all, spinning end over end through the space a TK shove had just emptied of me.

It went through a parking garage instead of around it.

The streets weren’t empty either.

Loose knots of infected kept spilling toward all the noise, the same easy calories it had been snacking on a few minutes ago, and it went through them without so much as turning its head, bodies bursting under its stride, because the animal had one item left on its list and nothing else mattered until it was crossed off.

[Welcome to the Shit-show channel. And here we observe an apex predator in full metabolic collapse... note the drool... the trampling... majestic... Now, RUN.]

It tripped on a city bus mid-stride and went down, two stories of monster hitting asphalt like an avalanche of limbs, and it rolled through the fall, came up already running, having barely lost even a second.

A Tank no longer learning and predicting my movements should have felt like winning. But it didn’t.

It wasn’t about eating me anymore. Once metabolic collapse begins, a Tank’s entire cognition narrows down to kill the threat/prey, drink water, eat, and then cllapse.

Note how I am at the top of that list.

An HVAC unit the size of a shed came off a rooftop and burst against the corner I’d just cleared, coolant hissing down the brick, while somewhere behind me a water tower went over with a groan.

And the very next second, its two-story mass crashed onto the rooftop I was on off a single leap, close enough that its exhale fogged the air between us.

I stared into a red eye the size of my head, still at full sprint before a TK shove and a low hook ripped me down a side street with a scream I will deny to my grave.

Tikki lay curled and tucked deep into the pocket, no longer even daring to peek out.

Ten streets into the straight line north, between one hook and the next, my brain finally did the piece of math I’d been putting off.

The lake was around twenty kilometers out. And I checked the back of my skull the way a rider checks a fuel needle.

No headache yet. No pressure behind the eyes either. But I’d been burning TK since the police station, feathering every glide and zip, dodging cars and walls and flying infected.

I wasn’t running on fumes, yes, but I wasn’t far from that point either.

[Twenty klicks...]

Even fresh, even fat on a full night’s sleep with every reserve topped off, my battery just wasn’t big enough to zip and glide across twenty kilometers.

The weightlessness that made the whole Batman act work was the most expensive thing I did.

A dull headache first, then a migraine, and then the detonation that’d drop me blind, disoriented, and powerless with no TK or Awareness.

[Maybe a car, then... I have the Ascender... the streets are full of them too...]

But the very next second, the realization hit that one of them was a coffin on wheels, because the thing behind me ran faster than anything I could get started.

And what it couldn’t catch, it would bury under thrown traffic.

Not to mention every block between here and that lake was seeded with infected who’d pile onto a running engine from every alley at once.

On foot, all of the same, only slower.

The grapple and the TK were the only reasons I’d survived this long.

And as far as I could see, they were the only way to cross the next twenty kilometers.

I had the answer, the whole shape of it, the lake, the dinner, the four-day coma.

But I just couldn’t afford it.

-GHRRRAAA-!!!

The roar came off the rooftops behind me, closing in fast, and I fired the hook and pulled north anyway, while my brain went deeper into arithmetic that came out dead every way I ran it.

[Think, dude... there’s gotta be something you can do!]

[THINK!]