I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

Day Four.

Standing on the rooftop at noon with my hands buried in my hoodie pockets, I tried to remember the last time I had stood somewhere this high without actively trying to escape something below me.

The October wind had opinions about my hair and was not keeping them to itself.

I wasn’t exactly dandy as I’d like to be; the pain was still there, but at least I was off the damn wheelchair.

Turning my attention to the rooftop itself, I couldn’t help but let out a satisfied smirk.

Twenty rectangular planting beds now ran along the eastern edge in neat rows, ten planted with carrot seedlings and ten with cabbage, tiny green shoots barely visible above the dark soil.

Snow was three to four weeks away, and carrots and cabbages were the only filling things I could think of that’d grow through cold.

They kept nutrition going when everything else gave up. They weren’t exciting, and frankly they were ugly, but the shit-show had a way of making ugly useful things extremely attractive.

I technically did not need the garden.

The Shop sold food. Fresh vegetables, meat, dairy, anything I could possibly need.

But setting up that garden was my little impulsive obsession.

Three years of surviving the previous timeline had beaten that principle into me with considerably more enthusiasm than necessary.

Redundancy kept people alive, and that garden was redundancy. My soul simply refused to feel settled unless crops were already in the ground.

The space beside the vegetable beds sat empty.

That was where tobacco was supposed to go.

Growing quality tobacco, drying it properly, rolling it by hand into actual cigars rather than cigarettes, that had been both my hobby and my sanity across most of the previous three years.

The difference between a cigar and a cigarette mattered more than people assumed.

With a cigar, you kept the smoke in your mouth, and you let your mouth absorb the nicotine. You’re not inhaling smoke into your lungs, so your stamina stays intact. Not saying Cigars are not injurious to health. But when the going gets tough and your group is sitting in a circle, not knowing where the next meal is gonna come from, you’d rather have a Cigar than a pack of cigarettes.

One cigar lasted long enough to share with several people, burned slowly, and was traded for nearly anything once the world ran out of salvageable supplies.

Cigars were therapy, and high-quality homemade cigars were premium currency.

After all, the smoker’s gonna smoke, doesn’t matter if the world has ended.

Same goes for moonshine, which was also my jam.

But tobacco needed warmth to grow. That meant either a greenhouse or waiting until spring, and neither option was available today. Carrots and cabbages were going to need to satisfy my farming compulsions until one or the other became possible.

Give it a few months, and the only things keeping people from putting a bullet into their own heads would be nicotine, moonshine, books, and sex.

I, for one, was lucky enough to have access to all four.

Almost automatically, I pulled out the M110A2 from the inventory, and my thumb drifted toward the magazine well.

Just above it, carved in letters that were crooked and slightly oversized and absolutely not her finest handiwork, two names sat exactly where she had put them three years from now.

Nikki×Nia.

She had laughed for five straight minutes after carving them with a rusty shiv and said it gave the rifle character.

”Gonna find you...” I said quietly. ”Real soon... not for the sex and stuff... y-you get the point.”

With that and reddened cheeks, I sent the rifle back into the inventory and moved on, because there would be enough time for nostalgia, hugs and... stuff, once I’ve found her.

The city below stretched toward the horizon in all directions, apartment buildings and shopping districts and restaurants and pharmacies all sitting exactly where they had always been, none of them touched yet, all of them waiting.

The smoke from the first night’s fires had thinned down to faint columns rising from a handful of buildings still smoldering on the western side.

But the most glaring thing was that the water got shut off yesterday morning.

Internet was gone too.

Mobile service was intermittent at best, gone at worst.

Electricity was still technically running, but I gave it maybe a couple more days, and that was optimistic.

None of that had touched us directly yet.

The solar array covered our power. The rooftop tank covered our water, holding enough of it for several weeks even without rationing.

Heating, lighting, medical equipment, air filtration, all of it ran on the battery bank now, and the battery bank ran on the sun, which had not yet declared bankruptcy.

Nora still owed me a radio network.

Every time I brought that up, she launched into a complaint catalogue that covered her shoulders, her feet, her soul, the backpack I had assigned to her, and the general concept of physical exercise.

The complaints were fair, though.

The couch potato had been shooting, drilling, and running on the treadmill in full gear.

Though I agreed, I also intended to keep pestering her about the radios until she set them up, because the network needed building and that was her territory, and people needed to own their territory.

My eyes slowly flicked back to the reason I had climbed up onto the roof and had suspended today’s firearm training.

Far to the east, a black mass moved through the cloudy sky in that particular way that made your brain insist it was looking at something wrong.

Not quite a cloud, not quite smoke, neither moving the way any collection of birds moved.

The whole swarm flowed and shifted and folded back on itself continuously while crossing the sky, thousands upon thousands operating as one enormous organism.

[Fuckin’ crows...]

Infected crows were not individually dangerous. A single Infected crow had poor eyesight and worse hearing, and could be managed without much drama.

But they travel in swarms and descend onto their prey like rain.

One peck, and you’re one. Welcome to Team Infected

The only two effective responses were a bunker or an overwhelming quantity of birdshot, and I only had significant amounts of the latter. Almost half of the penthouse walls were glass.

Fortunately, the swarm was traveling away from the penthouse, drifting eastward with the wind. So long as nobody on the balcony started flashing lights in its direction, we were irrelevant to it.

[Far enough... So long as we behave...]

Then, because the universe runs on very specific scheduling:

-THARD-!

The Win Mag shot rolled across the city from the northern districts, the same caliber, the same direction, the same distance, and the same persistence it had been running on for two straight days.

I watched the crow swarm flinch as one enormous organism in the direction of the shot.

Then watched it continue eastward rather than reversing course.

”So long as you’re not shooting at me...” I sighed.

I had suspended firearms training today specifically because of the crows, and that guy was still going at it, which either meant he could not see them from his position or he had decided not to care.

Neither option spoke particularly well of his intelligence. I was also now fairly certain that dude didn’t have a System. Sprinters gave 200 Credits per kill, and if that dude actually had a System, he would’ve certainly switched to something else.

The reasoning was simple. There were calibers out there that were cheaper than Win Mag and killed Infected in one or two shots despite their armor, all the while running on semi-auto platforms. The cost to profit to conveinence ratio simply wasn’t adding up.

Whatever the case... Not my problem until it became my problem.

I walked toward the roof’s edge, kept walking without slowing down, and stepped off into the open air.

The fall accelerated exactly the way falls do, hair whipping upward, hoodie snapping behind me, the balcony one below coming up fast, and then Telekinesis wrapped around me like a cocoon, and the descent became something else entirely.

The velocity bled off in the last two meters, and my boots met the balcony tiles with less force than stepping off a curb.

Three days ago, that move would have broken something in my body.

Today, my attention barely moved in its direction.

The .22 LR barrel sat near the shooting table at just under half-empty thanks to the group actually training proactively instead of needing me to drag them out like childern.

But then again, shooting is hella fun, so it didn’t come as a surprise.

Not to mention, when it comes to shooting, repetition matters more than anything else.

Those little rimfire cartridges were paying for their own existence in muscle memory that would transfer to the group’s actual guns, whether or not anyone realized it.

Walking in, I found Nora on the treadmill in full kit, jogging with a deeply committed misery.

She glanced toward me without reducing her pace while the plate carrier, helmet, and hearing protection all practically dripped with sweat.

”You suck,” she said, between breaths.

”Noted. Now, keep running.”

She muttered something and turned back to the Greyman documentary on the screen in front of her.

Kara was in the kitchen, also in full kit, while Tikki supervised the food’s quality control, cast finally off.

Leo was in the isolation ward, visible through the transparent polymer walls, lying on one of the gurneys with the fever that had finally caught him yesterday afternoon.

He still had his plate carrier on, while his backpack sat beside the gurney rather than on it because he was lying down and not an idiot.

The man looked both absolutely miserable and extremely stubborn about it.

He raised one hand in greeting when he noticed me looking, and I nodded back.

The exposure had been inconsistent.

The horde below sat far enough down that shifting winds carried most of the concentrated first strain away from the building before it reached our floor.

Leo had simply been the first to accumulate enough to trigger symptoms. Hopefully, everyone will go through it eventually.

After all, better here, in a climate-controlled sick bay with Kara monitoring, than halfway through a supply run.

Having swept a gaze at everyone, I headed for the master bedroom.

The room had developed into something between a training facility and a storage unit for increasingly heavy objects.

One corner held dumbbells from five to forty kilograms, arranged by weight.

Barbells occupied the floor space beside them, with weight plates leaning against the wall in organized rows.

And in the center of it all sat the 120 KG Olympic barbell on its rubber mat, which had become the current ceiling of my lifting capacity.

[Alright... let’s get to it...]

Sitting at the edge of the bed, I closed my eyes and focused.

And the very next instant, Awareness unfolded outward from somewhere behind my thoughts, spreading in every direction until the full twenty-meter radius filled in with information that was not quite sight nor quite touch but carried the precision of both.

The room existed around me in its entirety. Every piece of furniture, every dumbbell, every scratch in the floor, every minute detail of the entire room was there for me to witness if I focused on it.

Even beyond the bedroom walls, I could feel Nora’s footsteps striking the treadmill in their steady rhythm, Kara moving from the island to the stove and back, and I could feel Tikki’s small, light footsteps on the countertop, along with Leo’s stillness in the sick bay broken only by the occasional shifting.

As I shifted my attention onto the barbell, the connection formed the way it had started forming naturally over the last two days, with thoughts and intentions becoming tangible before spreading outward and across the barbell’s surface until every centimeter of it existed within one enveloping grip.

And the next second, the barbell lifted.

Heavy, and genuinely demanding, taking the mental effort that was not exactly concentration in any conventional sense.

It was something that spent itself, that had a real and finite supply, that left a very specific and recognizable kind of tiredness when pushed too far.

[Okay... let’s move it...]

Slow circles first, the barbell tracing the room’s perimeter at a consistent height while I tracked every centimeter of its path through Awareness without needing my eyes open.

Then I added the rotations.

And the barbell began spinning on its own axis while continuing the circular path, a 120 Kilogram solid metal, spinning at increasing speed while navigating around the wardrobe, the television stand, and the ceiling-high glass walls overlooking the city without clipping anything.

Strength, stamina, and precision, three aspects of Telekinesis, and I was training them all simultaneously.

And after a few minutes, the first faint pressure behind my temples arrived right on schedule.

I had learned to recognize it like a car’s low-fuel light. The moment it appeared was the moment to begin winding down after pushing through just a little bit.

The gap between the faint pressuer and the headache was where the real gains were.

Push past that, the migraine would arrive.

Push past even that and the Telekinesis entered actual cooldown, which I had already experienced once in the worst possible circumstances and had no interest in repeating.

I continued the training, completely in the zone, having forgotten everything except the barbell when-

-THARD-!

My eyes snapped open, and focus ruptured, and the spinning barbell lurched sideways hard.

I caught it before it could obliterate the glass wall, which took the full remaining reserves in a single sharp grab, while that warning headache went from faint to genuine in approximately zero seconds.

”Goddammit!”

Setteling it onto the floor with a dull thump, I pressed two fingers against my forehead and sat there for a moment.

”This is getting beyond annoying... ” I fell on my back, and looked up at the ceiling. ”Maybe i should just go and put a bullet into the fucker and be done with it...”

And just then-

-Ding!

{

Quest Received!

Objective: Investigate the mysterious shooter.

Rewards:

Cognition Enhancer x1

Accelerated Healing Stim x1

}