I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

Nia and I lay fifteen meters up on a billboard, flat on its steel catwalk, with the cold of the October night coming through the grating and straight into my chin.

Above us, in letters taller than I was:

FOUR CORNERS

And under that, smaller, running the whole width of the board: TRUCK STOP · DINER · MOTEL · 24 HOURS.

The three floodlights that were supposed to light all that up now hung dead off the bottom. And lucky us, since it meant we were lying in complete darkness.

Tikki was also crouched right beside my face, staring unblinking in the same direction as I was, ears turning in two different directions like a pair of radar dishes.

”Comfy back there?”

”Wea.”

”Yeah, me neither.”

I had the plain binoculars.

Nia had the thermals.

And she also had my rifle.

And I was still not over it.

And every so often her hand would wander over and pat the receiver like it was a dog.

”Stop that.” I gave her a side eye.

”Stop what?”

”Stop petting my rifle.”

” We’ve talked about it... and she’s very happy with me. You can expect divorce papers anytime... She’s mine now.”

”Bullshit!”

”Right back at’cha~”

I put the binoculars up before I said something I’d regret and adjusted the M110A2 in a more comfortable position, and my hand landed in exactly the right spot without asking me first.

Sixteen inches, polymer worn smooth in all the places I’d worn it smooth, our two names carved right above the magwell by the thief beside me.

[But still, it’s like getting back on the Diavel after a weekend on somebody’s rented hyperbike.] I couldn’t help thinking, [Doesn’t mean I’m not getting MY Excalibur back...]

Sighing, I put the binoculars back up.

They were both fresh out of the Shop, mine plain and hers thermal, and mine only worked where the Truck Stop had chosen to spend its electricity, which turned the whole camp into islands of light with black water between them.

The gates came first.

The access road came down off the highway and hit the north fence at a sliding chain gate, and that gate had a truck backed up against the inside of it, tractor and full trailer both, forty-odd tons of steel parked nose-out with the trailer sealing the gap.

”Smart.”

”Very smart,” Nia agreed.

South of it were the trucks with reefers attached to them.

Eight of them lined up in two neat columns down the middle of the lot, the big ones, the ones with real sleepers and aftermarket living conversions, every last one hitched to a refrigerated trailer, and every last one pointed north at the exit.

”They sleep hitched and facing out...” I said. ”Shit goes down... they roll without needing to pack anything. That’s not bad thinking at all.”

”Except they parked a truck across their own front door~”

”Except they parked a truck across their own front door...”

Which meant if that fence ever came down, thirty people would be sprinting for eight cabs in the dark while one driver did a nine-point turn to unplug the exit.

These people were smart... But they were still just people. Not survivors. For now at least.

I moved east, to the buildings.

The diner/motel came first, two stories, lit up on both floors, and every window on that upper floor had plywood over it.

And I already knew what those rooms were for.

One bite and you turn, every single time. It might take you in forty seconds, or it might sit inside you for four months.

Day one this lot would have been full of them, a hundred or so trucks with sleepers and a diner full of staff, ninety percent of everybody turning where they stood, and the ones who didn’t turn had to take this place back meter by meter with whatever was in their cabs.

You don’t do that without losing skin.

So somebody got bitten and turned quick.

That made somebody else make the only call available, which was to put bitten ones upstairs in rooms with doors, board the windows, and wait to see what happened.

”Second floor’s a quarantine ward...” I said.

”That’s another ticking time bomb,” Nia replied. ”Whoever’s up there might be fine... Or they might have gone off six hours ago and be standing behind that plywood right now.”

”Mm...”

Tikki’s ears rotated forward while I panned south and zoomed in on the convenience store.

It sat both lit and stripped, shelving units visible through the glass with nothing on them, not one bag of chips, not one bottle, cleared down to bare metal and swept.

”They emptied it into the trailers...” I said.

”How convenient ~” Nia sang. ”Pre-packed. Bagged and tagged. Truly, thoughtful people.”

Past that, the gas station was also lit, but intact.

Then the mechanic shop at the south end, lit, roller doors up, and the inside of it still full of things: two lifts, a welder cart, a compressor, tire machines, a parts wall.

[... no sense packing these things up in trailers when you got a small fleet of trucks and trailers to maintain...]

Every one of those four buildings had solar on the roof, which explained why any of it was lit, and it also explained the thing that had been bugging me since we climbed up here.

Nobody lived in those buildings.

And given how the biggest trucks with RV conversions were parked in proper formations, with their trailers, I was certain those guys lived in their trucks. After all, it was safer, more comfortable, and familiar.

So every light burning in every empty room down there was burning for no tactical reason whatsoever, and I figured out exactly why.

Because it had barely been a week and these were normal people, and normal people can’t do without light.

My eyes then moved to the roundabout, right beside the little fleet of moving homes and right outside the gas station, a circle of grass inside a knee-high curb, the only soil on the entire property, put there so eighteen-wheelers could loop the pumps without reversing.

And it was full of graves.

Mounds in rows, dug and refilled and patted down, each one with something stuck upright at its head, and the gas station’s light reached across enough of them for me to start counting in tens.

I got past a hundred before I stopped.

Most of the markers were just boards, but many had trinkets.

”They buried them,” Nia said quietly. ”All of them... Including the ones they had to shoot.”

”Yeah.”

”Nikki, they’re still people. Smart, hardy people who did everything right with what they had. But they’re just... normal people.”

”Hmm.”

”Maybe we can use it against them...”

”I’d rather just snap their necks from 30 meters away...”

”Right...” Nia chuckled, ”I almost forgot...”

I moved off the graves and went to the fence.

And that was the part that made me grin up a little.

They’d taken every trailer they didn’t need, and backed them parallel against the inside of the chain link fence, all the way around, hub to hub, no gaps.

”Look at that.”

”I see it.”

”They walled the entire perimeter with cargo,” I said, grin still up. ”The fence can’t fall inward because there’s a loaded fifty-three-footer sitting against it... and they can’t be seen through, and every one of those things weighs more than the crowd pushing on it. That’s genuinely impressive... That’s better than impressive.”

”They used the junk cargo, too...” Nia snorted. ”... Sorted their own inventory and spent the useless stuff on walls.”

”I’d have done the same thing.”

Beyond the wall, off to the west, the rest of it just sat there in the dark.

Ninety or eighty-some trucks in long rows across the main lot, unclaimed and untouched, exactly where their drivers had parked them on the last normal night of the world.

[Everything I came ninety kilometers for is sitting in that lot with the keys still in it...]

Then I panned back over the main trailers and reefers, up onto their roofs.

And there was the rest of the story.

Camp chairs up there, four or five of them, plus a mattress dragged flat against the roof and a folding table with a lantern still standing on it, and around all of it were the sediment of people living in that truck stop.

Beer bottles standing in a row along the edge. Crushed cans. Food wrappers weighted down under a wrench.

There was blood on the asphalt below, in wide dried-out smears where the light reached, dozens of them, some scrubbed at and some just left.

”That’ll be day one...” Nia said. ”Day two and three as well, if they cleared it in stages.”

”That’s what it looks like.”

Everything about Four Corners truck stop said at least thirty people lived here, worked here, drank here, took shifts on those roofs, buried their dead in the only dirt they had, and kept the lights on in empty buildings because dark still made people scared.

But... in two hours of lying on that billboard, watching damn near unblinking, we had not seen one single human being.

Not one.

No boots on a trailer roof. No door on a cab opening. Nobody walking to the diner, nobody at the pumps, nobody crossing between the light and the dark.

Two chairs up on the north trailer had rifles leaning against them.

Hunting rifles, propped where a man would leave one if he were coming right back.

And in two hours, at a truck stop full of long-haul drivers, in the middle of nothing, ninety kilometers from anywhere, I had not heard a single dog bark.

That was the one that had gotten to me since minute one.

A lot of truckers keep dogs. And as per my estimation, there should’ve been at least twenty.

And a trained dog would have had us made twenty minutes into this, barking its head off at a billboard across a highway.

And yet, we didn’t even hear crickets.

Just the reefers, humming away on their own diesel, keeping food cold for seemingly nobody.

By the campfire ring beside the roundabout, in among the dragged-over dining chairs, one thin line of smoke was still going straight up into the still air off a bed of ash that had otherwise given up hours ago.

”Now what?” Nia said, and held out the thermal without looking at me, trading binos for the fourth time.

The thermal turned truck stop into a map of machines, reefer exhaust stacks glowing whites, the campfire ring a dull grey disc, engine blocks reading as warm ghosts.

And nothing else.

No human shapes standing in the dark. No bodies moving between the buildings. No small hot outline of a dog anywhere on that property.

The sleeper cabs gave me nothing either, which was the single most infuriating fact in my life at that moment.

[They didn’t run... There’s no breach anywhere in the fence. I’ve scanned that fence three times... four actually... that gate truck doesn’t look like it moved either... there’s no gap, no wrecked link, nothing pushed in from outside.]

I couldn’t help biting my lip.

[And they didn’t all go to bed either... No chance. Nobody who parks a wall of cargo around their fence and boards a quarantine ward decides tonight’s the night to skip watch entirely... Those chairs are set up for a rotation... And you don’t leave your rifle out in the cold either... what is going on?]

”Why don’t we just fly something in?” Nia asked. ”Little drone, straight down over the lot, twenty seconds and we’d know.”

”No... a drone makes noise, and out here there’s no noise left to hide it in,” I said, eyes not leaving the truck stop. ”... No traffic, no aircon, no people, nothing... Those reefers cover a lot, but not a rotor sitting fifteen meters over somebody’s head. And the genuinely silent ones are eye-watering. I’m not spending that when I’ve got options.”

”And the options are?”

”Awareness... Thirty meters, in every direction,” I said, ”If I go inside that wall, and I can clear half this camp without moving my feet.”

”How about we watch till sunrise?” Nia let out a breath that shook at the end.

”We don’t have that kind of time.” I checked the clock. ”It’s past ten... We’re four days out with a Tank on a four-day nap, and this is stop one of three... Sitting here till dawn’s gonna cost us the whole schedule.”

”I...” She stopped before taking a deep breath in. ”Look, I just got a real bad feeling about this...”

I didn’t tell her that the back of my neck had been crawling for the last seventy minutes.

Instead I looked back down at that lot one more time, at ninety trucks and a hundred trailers and a mechanic shop with the doors up and enough food in cold storage to carry six people through a winter, all of it sitting there with the engines warm and the lights on and nobody home.

”Fuck it, I’m going in...”

I got my knees under me on the catwalk, got the M110A2 in my grip, and turned my head to the only man I’d trust anything and anyone with.

”You’re staying with her...”

Tikki’s ears went flat, mouth already opening for the loudest objection of his career.

”Her complete focus is gonna be on covering me,” I added in before he could open his mouth. ”I need you to watch her back, and to tell her if something shows up.”

He held there for a second, looking at me with those wide eyes doing a full audit of what I just said before-

”Mea,” Tikki said before crossing to Nia and settling into a crouch beside her with his ears already turning like satellite dishes, on duty.

”Nikki.” Nia’s hand caught my sleeve just as I turned, her eyes boring into mine with a hint of very rare pleading. ”Maybe we skip this...”

”No.”

And I swung out over the rail.