I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

Within ten steps of the treeline, the road behind me stopped existing.

Mist hung between the trunks in slow grey sheets, thick enough that my NVGs bloomed against it, the tubes rendering the whole world as green grain with a soft glowing wall sitting maybe fifteen meters out in every direction.

Past that wall, nothing.

My eyes were close to useless in here, so I leaned on the other sense instead, throwing Awareness out the moment the dark closed over me.

Left. Ahead. Right. Behind.

Then again.

[Everywhere... Keep it everywhere.]

A while ago, I narrowed this sense down onto a pile of corpses while seven feet of Variant walked up behind me.

Before that, in her nest, the same mistake nearly blasted me apart with my own grenade launcher.

I’m never making that same mistake again.

So it stayed wide, all directions, never once settled on anything, while I moved through the trees at just under a jog with her rifle up and my finger resting along the guard.

But wide had a price.

Wide comes soft at the edges, shapes instead of details, a smeared painting where a photograph should be.

But I needed no high definition to understand the forest wasn’t right.

It took me less than fifty meters to name what was wrong with it, because it wasn’t anything present; it was everything missing.

No insects, no owls, no rodents working the litter, no far-off snarl drifting between the trunks the way it does everywhere now, in every dark, in every quiet.

Just mist, trees, my own boots pressing into wet loam, and my own breathing moving through the respirator’s filters in a slow rasp.

The last place I heard silence like this had a hundred graves in the middle of it.

Somewhere in these trees was the reason for the quiet, seven feet of it with a caved-in forehead and at least thirty rounds of 10mm shoved in that non-Newtonian thing under its skin.

Every sweep I made was hunting two bodies at once, the one I was praying to find, the one I was praying not to.

It could be five hundred meters out.

It could be standing five meters past the edge of my reach, perfectly still, watching a green-eyed helmet stumble through its forest.

There was no trail either.

That was the part that kept climbing up the back of my neck.

I was reading the ground through Awareness as I went, thirty meters of soil and roots and undergrowth in every direction, hunting for anything: blood, a drag line, crushed bracken, a boot print, one single broken stem.

But I found nothing.

A creature that size carrying a grown woman leaves signs the way a truck leaves tracks.

There was no sign anywhere.

All I had was the line Tikki’s eyes had drawn off the edge of that road, so I walked that line, zigzagging it, widening the corridor, sweeping.

My reach is thirty meters.

Thirty meters each side of me, in a forest that ran on for kilometers in every direction, which meant I could pass her at forty meters without ever knowing she was there.

I ran that arithmetic exactly once, then made myself stop running it.

To rub salt on the wound, the kitchen kept arriving.

Not the whole thing. Just pieces of it, sliding in through the seams while I walked, sun lying gold across a wooden floor, a chipped mug warm in my hand, long chestnut hair, a jar of small white flowers on a dresser, each one landing for half a second before I bit down hard enough to feel it in the molars before driving it back out.

But it kept coming anyway. Patient as a tide.

My right shoulder was too light.

I kept catching myself starting sentences over it, quiet ones, half-formed, aimed at a pocket that wasn’t carrying anybody, and every time it happened I got to remember that the smartest creature I know tried to tell me something on that road, so I screamed in his face and left him sitting on the asphalt.

He has never once been wrong.

I’ve been wrong all night.

Somewhere in there I started building what I was going to say to her.

The first words, for the moment I found her, because there would be a moment I found her, and I was not walking into it empty-handed. I’m sorry came first, then got thrown out for being nothing, four letters of nothing.

Then the very same words came back because there wasn’t anything better, then got it rebuilt with more words around it, then fewer.

I kept revising it, step after step, like the sentence mattered.

Like getting the sentence right would matter.

Fifteen minutes in, maybe a few hundred meters of zigzag, the forest finally made a sound.

And I stopped dead in my tracks, breathing in deep to calm the pounding heart that was beating like a drum in my ears.

It came from ahead and left, far off, badly muffled, a dull soft knock, then a pause long enough that I’d half decided I’d invented it, then the knock again.

Spaced... Even... Patient.

And every ounce of blood in me went very cold, and before I knew it my legs were already moving to a dead sprint.

I could probably sprint every meter of this forest end to end without my breathing changing; that’s simply true, the enhancers made it true.

But my breathing changed anyway.

It went ragged inside the respirator within fifty strides, sawing in and out of me with a shudder on the exhale, while my heart climbed up into my throat and stayed there, and underneath all of that speed some other part of me hauled backward on every stride like a passenger grabbing at the wheel, wanting to slow down, wanting to arrive never, afraid what it might find.

Awareness got there first.

At the far soft edge of my reach, a presence came up out of the blur.

Human-sized, upright, and stationary, no approach, no aggression, no wandering, just motion, a single motion, mechanical, repeated, a slow lean toward something followed by a slow return, over and over, keeping time with the sound.

Hope came up through me so hard it physically hurt, flooding in my chest while I ran.

I could have narrowed the sweep right then; half a second of focus would have handed me everything down to a heartbeat.

But I still kept it wide.

Because after tonight I’m not narrowing that sense for anything on this earth.

The sound gained texture as I closed, a wetness arriving inside the knock that hadn’t been audible at distance.

...

-Thud-!

...

-Thud-!

The mist thinned between one rank of trunks and the next, and my NVG finally resolved a shape: twenty meters ahead, standing at the base of a big old tree, was a woman, facing the trunk, close against it, almost leaning into it, shoulders moving.

Her messy black hair down to her neck, green and grainy through the glass, stirring a little each time her shoulders rocked.

And everything in my chest detonated at once, the whole apology leaping up loaded and ready, every word of it standing in order behind my teeth.

”Nia!”

It was out of me before one single part of my brain voted on it, way too loud, ringing off through a forest with that thing somewhere in it.

But I did not care even slightly.

Yet she didn’t answer.

-Thud-!

Her forehead went into the trunk again.

”Nia...”

I kept walking, slower now, while my head shoveled explanations at me as fast as it could dig, concussed, dazed, half-conscious from blood loss, leaning on the tree because her legs won’t hold, hurt, just hurt; people do strange things when hurt.

As I got to within ten meters, I recognized the dressing on her right shoulder was mine.

My work, the tail ran under her armpit, back over the top, the pressure bar cranked to the last notch, all of it exactly where my shaking hands had put it, soaked through black now, a slow line of blood still moving down her arm to drip off the fingers of a hand that hung completely wrong.

-Thud-!

”Nia, hey... hey, it’s me...”

My voice had stopped being my voice as I closed the distance, and what came out was a croak.

She stopped mid-lean. Held there against the tree for one long breath, shoulders going still.

Then she turned slowly...

The way a person turns when they hear their own name, unhurried, and for one second, one entire second that I will be living inside for the rest of my life, everything in me believed it.

[She heard me... She’s in there, she heard me, she still has time... she-!]

Then her face finished arriving.

Pale under every bruise I’d put on it, both swollen eyes strained wide open inside their swelling, showing white all the way around, drool running off her split lip in a bright string, her broken nose still packed with my gauze gone dark, and behind all of it, in it, through it... there was no trace of Nia.

Her eyes found me, and nothing in them knew me.

Not one flicker in that whole ruined face had my name anywhere in it.

”N-Nia...”

It barely made it out of my throat as my legs quit somewhere in the middle of it, dropping me half a step, while the rifle with our two names carved into it sagged off my hands until the muzzle pointed at the dirt.

Then a sound started in her chest.

Low, wet, climbing, building up through her throat until it came out of her ruined mouth, the same sound I’ve heard from thousands of throats across two lifetimes, and never once, not one single time, from hers.

Her weight shifted, heels rising, shoulders dropping, fingers spreading wide, her whole body loading down into that coil every survivor on earth has learned to read, the fresh one, the fast one, on full tank.

And then, Nia lunged.

-GRAAAHH-!