I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

Somebody had turned the world down to a hum.

That was the first thing, that flat single note filling my whole skull with no top and no bottom to it, and underneath the hum was something ticking, slow, like a kettle giving up.

My face was in something soft.

And as I lifted my head off it, my entire neck lit up all the way down into my shoulder blades, and the soft thing turned out to be an airbag, deflated across the wheel like a dead jellyfish, powder all over it.

Powder all over me.

There was a smell of diesel, and hot coolant, and burnt plastic from the airbag charge, all of it coming in through a windscreen frame that had no windscreen in it.

Steam went past the frame in a slow white curtain, lit orange from somewhere up above.

For a long moment, I couldn’t work out where I was.

That’s the honest answer. For maybe eight or nine seconds I sat in a dark cab with my ears screaming and looked at a bent steering wheel, and my brain offered me absolutely nothing.

Then the ticking got louder, and I recognized it as an engine cooling down.

[...Engine... Truck... My truck?]

And then it all came back at once, the way water comes back into a hole you’ve just dug.

The argument. Her hand shaking with the pistol up against her own head. The white thing coming out of the dark. The shots. The wheel going hard left with everything in the galley coming off its shelves.

”Nia.”

I turned my head.

Only to find an empty passenger seat beside me.

The door beside it stood wide open onto the road, hanging off its hinge at a bad angle, with the cab light doing nothing at all because the cab light was dead.

Just an empty seat, with the belt hanging slack down the side of it.

”Nia?”

The hum in my ears went on humming while I hit the buckle release, and it didn’t work, so I hit it again with the heel of my hand before it let go, and then I got the door handle and shoved it with my shoulder until it went, and I stepped out into the night.

But my leg didn’t take it.

The whole left one folded at the knee the second it had weight on it, dumping me onto the road on my hands, and the impact ran straight up through my wrists into a head that could not afford it.

I stayed down there for a second on all fours with my helmet sagging and drool coming out of my mouth onto the road.

[Get up.]

But my body didn’t move.

[Come on! GET UP!]

Slowly, I got one hand on the door frame, taking it in stages, while the highway swam sideways.

And that’s when I got my first proper look at what I’d done.

The semi was sitting dead across most of the eastbound lanes, unhitched trailer and all.

My ram wedge had gone into the back left corner of that trailer and folded around it like wet cardboard, three hundred pounds of ASTM A36 structural steel wrapped in on itself, the whole front end of my truck driven back and up.

One headlight was still on, and it pointed off into the treeline at nothing.

And above all of it stood a single highway light on its post, still working off whatever solar unit they hang on those things, dumping orange down over the wreck and the glass and the steam.

Both sides of that road were forest.

Black, thick, unbroken, running off in both directions further than the light reached.

I put a hand on the flank of the Ascender and started walking around the back of it, my boots crunching through what used to be my windshield.

And when I got to the other side, I found Tikki.

He was sitting in the middle of the road on the far side of the truck, a few feet out from the open passenger door, upright with his tail wrapped around his feet.

Not moving.

Not one hair of him.

And he was looking into the forest.

”Tikki,” I called.

But he didn’t turn, as though he didn’t even hear my voice.

”Where-” My voice came out wrecked, so I swallowed and tried again. ”Where’s she?”

And that’s when he looked at me. Just one flick of his head, both eyes coming around to mine for less than a second.

Then he turned back to the trees and kept looking.

And I stood there in the middle of an empty highway at two in the morning and felt every bit of blood in my body go cold.

[No. No, no, hang on. Think. THINK.]

There were two ways this went, and I made myself stand there and walk through both of them.

One. She turned.

The timeline’s been wrong since the first day.

The outbreak came in hours instead of a week, Variants showed up a year early, and now there’s a second kind of them out here that nobody was supposed to meet for eighteen months.

If the clock on everything else got shoved forward, there’s no reason on earth the clock inside a bite didn’t get shoved forward too.

And Nia knows exactly what she is.

She’s disciplined, she’s got two deployments, and she is not the kind of person who sits in a cab and waits to see what happens to the man beside her.

She’d have got out and walked into the trees on her own to keep it away from me.

Two. It took her.

And that’s the one, isn’t it?

Because that’s what they do.

Those things don’t kill you and eat you where you fall like the rest of them.

Doesn’t matter if they kill you or they don’t kill you; either way, they pick you up and carry you home, and then they eat you over the next few days whenever they get hungry.

Sometimes the carrying part happens while you’re still awake.

She was on the side with the door already sprung, unconscious, bleeding, weighing way less than I did.

Anybody would take her first.

[Awareness... right!]

I threw it out before I’d finished the thought.

Thirty meters, every direction, through the trailer of that semi, under my own truck, out across the tarmac and into the first rows of trees on both sides of the road.

I got the engine block still cooling. I got the fuel in the tanks. I distinctly felt the cold weight of that abandoned trailer, and the road, and the roots, and one small warm shape sitting on the asphalt a few feet away from me.

And nothing else.

No second person anywhere inside thirty meters of that crash.

But still, I did it again, only to get the same answer.

And my legs just simply stopped working.

I didn’t fall over dramatically or anything.

My knees simply went out from under me and put me down on the road in front of my own wrecked truck.

The hum still went on in my ears.

The engine still went on ticking.

And somewhere off in the trees an owl said something, twice, then quit.

She’d been mauled, beaten unconscious by the only other person on her side, and then bitten.

She’d taken all of it, and she was still telling me to turn the truck around.

She’d had a gun to her own head to stop me killing a million people I’d never met.

Both my trembling hands slowly came over my face, while something came up out of my chest that I had no word for.

My whole body wanted, badly, the way you want water. Wanted to be somewhere else.

Wanted a kitchen and a wooden floor and sun coming through a window and a voice complaining about snow on the stairs, wanted it so hard my hands were shaking with it, and I sat in the middle of that highway shaking and told myself that’s just the craving, a chemical imbalance.

I don’t know how long that lasted.

But somewhere in the middle of it, my breathing changed.

It went from that ragged wet thing into slower, in through the nose, out through the clenched teeth, over and over.

The tears stopped.

They just stopped, like a tap.

And slowly, I wiped my face with the back of my glove, smearing powder and blood across it and making it worse, and I stood up.

And the moment I turned around, Tikki’s whole back shot up in an arch, every hair on his tail standing straight out until it was three times its normal size, ears flat to his skull, and he skittered back a full body length across the road, away from me with his eyes locked on my face.

He’d once done that before, back in that mafia compound.

”...It’s me, booger.”

But he stayed still, not coming any closer.

I didn’t have anything to give him, not even patience anymore, so I got up and walked to the open passenger door instead.

Both rifles were on the seat.

My 200k Credits SR-25.

And the M110A2 lying next to it. Sixteen inches, polymer worn smooth in every place I wore it smooth, a suppressor threaded on the front and two names carved into the side above the magwell by a drunk woman who has never once admitted to doing it.

I took hers without hesitation, slung it, checked the chamber, thumbed the magazine release far enough to see brass, and pushed it home again.

[The nest...]

That’s what it should be. They carry their kills home, and home for that thing is a truck stop back down this road with a wall of trailers around it and more than a hundred graves in the middle.

Not a forest.

Nothing about a forest fits.

But I looked at Tikki, still low on the asphalt, still watching me.

He’d told me she was in there.

And that cat has been right about every single thing since the day the world ended.

He has never once been wrong, and I have been wrong more times than I could count today alone.

So the trees it was.

”Let’s go.”

I took two steps toward the treeline and stopped, because there was no sound of paws behind me.

Tikki still hadn’t moved.

He was sitting up again, tail down, and looking at me.

Then his gaze went past me at the open door of the truck.

Then back at me.

Then at the door again.

”Tikki. Come on.”

But he kept his eyes on the seat, not moving an inch.

And I did not have one single thing left in me for this.

My leg wouldn’t hold, my hand and my calf and half my face were opened up by his claws and teeth, I’d lost enough blood to feel it in my fingers, and every second I stood on that road arguing with a cat was a second somebody was carrying her further away.

”Fine!” It came out of me way too loud and much too sharp. ”Stay in the truck!”

He still didn’t move.

And I turned to the trees, dropped the NVGs down off the rail on my helmet, thumbed them on, and the whole world went green and grainy, the treeline resolving out of the black into a wall of trunks with gaps between them going back and back into nothing.

Then I adjusted the respirator up over my mouth and nose, made sure both straps were seated, and checked the seal with two fingers the way you’re supposed to.

Rifle went up next, safety went off after, muzzle came low while I felt for the spot right between my eyebrows and pushed.

And the Barrier bloomed out of it and closed around me in a sphere I couldn’t see, the way it had on a bike doing a hundred and twenty.

And with that final deep breath, I walked into the forest without looking back, leaving Tikki behind for the very first time.