I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

”What’re you on about? Tikki hasn’t voted yet.”

I turned to the railing, where the last undecided member of Parliament sat in his loaf with the morning wind ruffling his fur.

”Alright, Tikki.” I got down to eye level with my electorate. ”You’ve heard everything, didn’t you?”

Tikki blinked slowly at me once.

”Atta boy... Now, meow once if you want just the two of us to go on that trip... twice if you want Nia to join us, and thrice-”

”Mea-Mea.”

”Hell yeah!” Nia’s cackle ripped straight out of the radio.

”No-No-no!” I waved both hands at him as though that had ever once worked on a cat.

”This is stupid...” Nia’s father’s voice arrived flat over the channel.

”I’ll have you know, I had given Tikki a cognition enhancer that increases cognition by a factor of 1.2... He’s smarter than most people I’ve met.”

”You have such a thing?!”

I ignored the man entirely and leaned in closer, because clearly my electorate had suffered some confusion at the polls.

”Meow only once if you want... just the two of us to go on that trip... just the two of us, on the bike...” I let the bike part hang there doing its own campaigning, ”...meow twice only if you want the scary lady to come with us... And thrice if-”

”Mea-Mea,” Tikki said, looking me straight in the eye.

”Hehea...” I fake-laughed. ”Maybe Tikki still doesn’t fully get it...”

I cupped his little face in both hands, dropped my voice to a whisper, and went full corruption on him.

”Fresh fish and wet food booger at the truck stop... an entire trailer of it, all yours... Just meow once...”

”Is he...” Nia’s voice went flat with disbelief. ”Are you BRIBING a voter? On the record?!”

”Everyone can hear you, Nikki!” Kara’s laugh broke through somewhere behind her.

”Look, booger... meow just once-”

”Mea-Mea.”

”Dude...”

”Nikki, the little man has made his choice, and he’s done it with more integrity than you got balls...” Nia declared, savoring every single syllable of it. ”Now, unless anyone would like to recast the vote, I expect Nikki to be at the penthouse in an hour.”

Nobody recast a damn thing.

And I deflated right there against the railing, because I’d run the vote count in my head the second I’d brought up his vote, and in every single version of it, he’d picked me.

[You think I don’t know what’s going on in your head... You little pervert!]

Tikki blinked at me slowly, one last time, then hopped off the railing and strolled toward the food dispenser I’d set up for him, face raised as high as his tail.

While I just stood there rubbing my face with both hands to the sound of him crunching away at his breakfast, the whole parliament thing already a solved problem somewhere behind him.

”One hour, Nikki,” Kara signed off first, in the exact tone mothers use for curfews. ”I’m timing you.”

”Yes, mommy...”

”Young man, about that enhancer...” Nia’s father came back in, ”...would it happen to work on-”

I thumbed the radio off.

And the balcony went quiet around me, nothing left up here except the cold breeze and the low, distant churn of the shoreline far below.

I stayed at the railing a while longer, looking north at the water.

The thing sleeping down there wasn’t supposed to exist for another year, and if it had jumped the calendar, then every date in my head was up for debate... when the next Variants come, whether The Bastion still rises at all, whether the math I’d built around reaching Lexie before the snow was still math or just wishful thinking.

My foreknowledge had been my biggest gun since the morning I woke up in this timeline, and yesterday it had its biggest misfire.

But then again, it’s been misfiring since day one.

Yesterday I’d emptied my TK reserves, burned every gadget and strategy on my me, and still walked away on what was basically a coin flip.

The answer wasn’t panicking about it... the answer was getting stronger, permanently, in every way still on the table, and sitting on an upgrade for a rainy day stopped making sense the moment yesterday turned out to be the rainy day.

I opened the Inventory and pulled out the reward the System had handed me for the ’Investigate the Mysterious Shooter’ quest... the same quest where the shooter in question beat me unconscious with her bare hands.

Its two Accelerated Healing Stim siblings were long gone, spent patching the two of us back together in her nest, but this last reward had been sitting in its slot ever since.

The Cognition Enhancer.

A matte-black auto-injector the length of my palm, featureless except for one raised button, the same ugly little design as the one I injected Tikki with.

[Head?]

-Ding!

{Temple. Five minutes.}

[Any chance it hurts less? I mean I already have a Physiological Enhancer-]

-Ding!

{No.}

[...gotta love the honesty.]

My reserves were back to full this morning, and all that was left of yesterday was a light ache between my eyebrows, the kind of soreness a muscle keeps the day after you work it half to death.

So naturally, I was about to make it so much worse.

The master bedroom was the one room in the whole apartment with a bed that wasn’t splinters on the floor, so that was where we went, and I locked the half-door behind us, which frankly meant absolutely nothing, but I did it anyway.

Tikki padded in right behind me before I could even decide whether to ask him to.

And he didn’t hop onto the bed either; he walked to the foot of it, sat down facing the door, wrapped his tail over his paws, and went completely still.

Guard duty.

He knew exactly what that injector was, because it had been jammed into the back of his own head once, in a park washroom, by the same idiot now locking himself into a bedroom with one.

”...You remember this one, huh?”

”Mea.” He said it low and flat without turning around.

”If I start screaming...” I told the back of his head, ”... you keep it to yourself. And absolutely do not tell Kara.”

”Mea.”

I checked the clock on the nightstand as I lay back onto the previous owner’s very expensive bed.

[Five minutes of hell, fifty-five to get south... plenty.]

-Ding!

{Observation: A mattress. Progress.}

”Everyone’s a comedian,” I muttered, pressing the capped needle against my right temple with my thumb resting on the button.

I gave it one breath, same as last time.

Then I hit the button.

-Kshk-!

The needle went in, the compound followed, and for two full seconds nothing happened at all, long enough for the same old stupid hope that maybe this one would be gentler.

Then the first heartbeat arrived.

And every fold of my brain lit up at once, thousands of tiny jaws closing inside my skull, biting down in one synchronized wave that rode in on my pulse, let go, and bit again on the very next beat.

The heat built right behind the biting, my brain swelling and pulsating against the skull that had nowhere to give, heating toward what felt like melting while pressure stacked behind both eyes until the sockets ached, and from the temple inward, heat and weight of molten lead kept pouring into every space my skull had left.

I clamped my jaw shut and breathed through gritted teeth in short, ragged pulls, hands twisting into the sheets, heels dragging across the mattress, while I refused, absolutely refused, to scream.

And my own heart betrayed me next, because the pain spiked the pulse and the jaws rode the pulse, every panicked beat bringing them down faster, so I did the only thing left on the menu and started combat-breathing against it, four counts in, four counts out, trying to drag my heart rate back down by force.

[Slow the heart... slow it down... four in... four...]

I lost the count by the second cycle.

Somewhere past the wall of it, Tikki still sat at the foot of the bed without moving a single hair, facing the door.

While every thought I tried to hold started costing me to hold, words dropping out of sentences halfway through, and each heartbeat brought the jaws down again while my own memories strobed past without being asked, Tikki’s scream in that public washroom when I injected him, Kara’s laugh through a radio, a red eye sliding past a table’s edge... my brain flipping through itself while it rewired.

[Four minutes... maybe... four... Don’t... scream... don’t...]

Words went next.

I lost the thread of what I was refusing to do, then the word for it, then the shape of the word, until the last thing still working in my head was the part counting heartbeats.

Then it stopped counting too. And all I was left with was the feeling in my brain pulsating and pushing against the skull while being pricked down to the cells, and the agony that followed each pulse of my heart.

I lay there without moving for a long while, soaked straight through, chest dragging in long, shaking pulls while the cold October air crawled over the sweat on my skin.

But slowly, it receded, and I opened my eyes.

And immediately felt something was wrong.

No...

Something was very right.