I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

Petey was already awake when Mara found the comms shack, because of course he was.

He was twelve years old, and had appointed himself, with no authority whatsoever, the fort’s unofficial dawn radio watch, and he took it more seriously than half the grown soldiers took anything.

Mara had set him up with a dead man’s handheld, a corner in their tent, and a schedule she’d invented out of nothing, because a boy who has watched his parents turn needs a job more than he needs sleep.

”You’re up early, sis,” the kid said, not turning around, headphones half off one ear. ”Are you going out?”

”Yeah...” she agreed, and dropped into the crouch beside him.

He was small for his age and getting smaller, had their mother’s ears that stuck out and their father’s habit of chewing the inside of his cheek when he was working a problem as he was doing now, staring at the dial like it owed him something.

”Where?” he asked.

”West... Little flight, in and out. Powering something down before it breaks.” She kept it light, which he saw straight through, like he always did. But he chose not to expose her.

”Will you be near a city?”

”Nowhere near, and I’ll be on a roof the whole time watching everybody else do the scary part.” She bumped his shoulder with hers. ”Boring overwatch. You know how I feel about boring overwatch.”

”You love the boring overwatch.”

”I love boring overwatch.”

He almost smiled, then didn’t, and chewed his cheek, and she let him have the quiet because pushing him never worked, he was too much like her.

”Same rules,” she said, after a while. ”You stay on the fort net... You do your watch. You do not touch the tactical channels, and when I call in on the way back, you’ll be the first voice I hear...”

She stood, and ruffled the ears he hated having ruffled, and he swatted at her hand and missed on purpose. And with that, she turned around.

”Mara.” He turned around this time, and for a second he wasn’t twelve, he was just the last of her family looking at her in a dim room. ”Come back.”

”Always do,” she grinned.

It was the kind of promise you made because the alternative was unspeakable, and they both knew it was worth exactly nothing, and they both pretended otherwise.

Then she went and got on the helicopter.

.

.

The Ghostbird, their ride, was a blacked-out NH90 TTH Tactical Transport Helicopter, fitted with three .50 BMG M3M Heavy Machine Guns covering their left, right, and rear.

And what covered their front were two missile pods.

The one on the left carried four Spike ER missiles. And the right carried nineteen 70mm HE Rockets.

It came up off the flight line into a grey pre-dawn sky with all twenty of them packed into its belly.

Mara sat with her back against the fuselage and her rifle across her knees and watched it go by through the open door, because she always watched, because the ground below, from a god’s point of view, told you things.

She saw the dead towns strung along the roads.

She saw one whole field, miles of it, black and burned to the dirt, and didn’t ask, because everyone had stopped asking about the burned places a days ago.

Inside the cabin it was warm and loud and, for the moment, almost ordinary.

Rourke ran his checks as always, a low murmur down the line, each man answering off.

The two door gunners sat on both sides behind the M3Ms. Ellison had his aid bag between his boots and his eyes closed, not asleep, and Mara knew he was somewhere in the family block with a woman seven months along, and she left him there.

Across from her, one of the operatives, a young sergeant named Del, had his helmet off in his lap and was looking at something tucked into the liner.

Mara caught the corner of it before he tucked it back. A kid’s drawing. Crayon, a stick family under a yellow sun, done by a small hand that had pressed too hard and torn the paper in one corner.

Del saw her see it, and didn’t hide it the second time.

”Daughter,” he said, over the rotor noise, almost laughing. ”She’s six. Draws me every letter. I got about forty of ’em now. Same picture, basically. Me, her, the dog... Dog didn’t make it, but she keeps putting the dog in.”

”Keep it in,” Mara gave him a smile.

”Yeah.” He looked at it a second longer, then seated it back in the liner and put the helmet on over it, so that the drawing rode against the top of his skull where it always did. ”Keep it in...”

She looked back out the door, a faint smile still on his lips.

That was the thing about all of them.

Every single one had a drawing in the liner, or a name they said in their sleep, or a chair at a table somewhere that they wanted to get back to.

They didn’t talk about it much. But it was in the cabin with them, all of it, riding along, and it was the reason any of them were any good at this.

You didn’t fight this hard for nothing. You fought this hard for the drawings your six-year-old won’t be able to hand you if you never came back.

”Ferrow Point in ten,” the pilot called back, and the mood in the cabin shifted, the ordinary draining out of it, the professionals coming up to the surface.

Gunners charged the M3M, the big bolts racking back with a resonating clack.

Others checked what was already checked while Rourke came down the line one more time.

”Listen up, quick!” He raised his voice over the noise. ”Site’s been dead seven days. That means it’s full of the turned turned. Expect them slow, expect them clumped, expect them where it’s dark... and most of all, expect them to not go down in a single shot... We’ll move to the reactor building, we’ll hold the corridors... Brandt’s people will do the real work... We’re here to make sure they get to do that. Nobody’s a hero. Nobody goes off the buddy line. We are here to power down a machine and go home, nothing more.”

He paused a second before-

”And if we see any survivors on that site, anybody still human out there, we don’t leave them. If the timeline gives us room, we bring them home too. So! Ready?”

A low chorus of acknowledgment ran down the cabin.

Mara moved up toward the door to get her eyes on the site as they came in, because that was her job and it started now, and she brought her rifle up and glassed the ground as it rose to meet them.

Ferrow Point came out of the forest like something dropped there, grey and hard-edged against all the green and the wide flat shine of the river beside it, the dome of the reactor building, the tall stacks, and the low sprawl of everything else.

Off to one side, across a stretch of cracked road, a cluster of smaller buildings stood, staff housing full of windows, an ordinary little neighborhood for the people who needed to be here 24/7 to run the place.

She swept it out of habit, roof by roof.

And as she swept at the flat roof of the nearest one, her breath locked up, eyes widening by themselves.

A man was standing there.

He was standing perfectly still, in gear, a black silhouette against the pale concrete, and he was not looking at the plant or the river or anything else on that whole site.

He was looking straight up at the helicopter.

Straight at her, it felt like, though that was impossible at this range, and there was something small on his shoulder, some shape she couldn’t make out.

For reasons she herself couldn’t decipher, the wrongness of it went down her spine before her brain even had words for it, because he was watching the gunship come down on the pad at the top of the plant without either waving or screaming for rescue.

”Contact, my three...” she said, keying up, calm, professional. ”Rooftop, staff housing, single figure, upright, doesn’t read as infected. Possible survivor. Stand by, getting a better-”

She blinked to clear her eye, one blink, half a second, maybe even less.

And the roof became empty.

Nothing on it. No man, no shape on his shoulder, no movement at the edges, just pale concrete and the long morning shadow of the building lying across it, as though there had never been anything there at all.

”...Say again your last, Voss?” Rourke’s voice.

Mara kept her rifle on that roof, and her stomach as though dropped to the deepest depths of the abyss for reasons she couldn’t have been able to defend to anyone.

”...Disregard,” she said slowly, taking in a long breath to calm her hammering heart. ”Thought I had a survivor. Roof’s clear.”

But she did not lower the rifle, and she did not look away from that building, all the way down.

All the while the feeling that she was being watched by something became louder and louder.