I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

I woke up warm.

The whole-body kind, the sort that comes from a heavy quilt and a room that has been kept warm all night on purpose.

The morning light came in low and gold across the bed from the window on my left, and past the glass it was snowing, thick and slow and straight down, settling on the sill in a soft ridge that had built up sometime while I was asleep.

The walls of our room were logs.

Big honest ones, stacked and chinked, the grain of them lighting up amber wherever the sun landed, while the whole room smelled like flowers.

There was a jar of them on the dresser, the little white ones she liked, and I lay there for a while looking at the ceiling beams and doing absolutely nothing at all.

But eventually, I got up, absolutely not because I heard the sound of something frying and the smell of pancakes swirling in from downstairs.

The third floorboard from the bed complained under my foot as I walked, and I stepped over the fourth one out of habit because that one was worse.

The stairs came down into the hall where the fireplace hearth was going, and Tikki lay flat out in front of it on his side with his legs stretched toward the heat, fatter than he used to be with grey coming in around his muzzle, and he did not so much as twitch an ear at me.

”Morning, old man~”

But he just kept sleeping. Not so much as a twitch in his ear.

Small boots sat by the door, red ones, next to my work boots and her boots, while a coat about the size of a pillowcase hung off the lowest peg.

The kitchen right beside the hall was full of the smell of pancakes.

Kara stood at the stove with her back to me, long brown hair pulled up into a ponytail and an apron tied at her waist, moving a pan around with one hand while the fridge hummed away not far from her in that low steady note it had made since the day we bought it.

There were crayon drawings stuck all over its door.

Suns with faces. A cow with too many legs. A cat, orange and white and black, drawn about four times bigger than the house next to it.

And once again, just like every day, something went warm right through the middle of my chest as I stood there in the doorway grinning at a refrigerator like an idiot.

As if detecting me, Kara turned around, her eyes lighting up a shade of amber as they caught sight of me.

”Morning.” She smiled gently.

”Morning.” I grinned wide.

”Take a seat, the pancakes are almost done.” And with that, she turned back to her pancakes, humming the song we danced to on our day.

I crossed the kitchen instead and kissed her on the forehead, my hand finding her hip on the way past exactly where it always went, while I got the mugs down out of the second cupboard without looking.

One of them was chipped on the rim. And that chipped one was mine.

”You tracked snow all the way to the stairs last night,” Kara said, not turning around.

”I did...?”

”All the way to the stairs, Nikki. I mopped it at midnight.”

”In fairness, I could not see the floor.”

”In fairness, you were so drunk that I was surprised you saw the door. You really need to stop hanging out with those hooligans...”

”Also true.” I chuckled, ”But those hooligans also hold a thirty percent share in the company... Can’t exactly shoo them away. Especially after taking that early retirement.”

She flipped one over, and it came up a shade past golden on the underside.

Outside, one of the cows let out a long complaining bellow, and then did it again with more feeling.

”That’s the black one.”

”That’s the black one,” Kara agreed. ”She’s been shouting since six.”

”She’s got a whole barn.”

”She wants the good hay.”

”She’s a cow.”

”She’s a cow with standards.”

”Obviously,” I grinned, hugging her from behind, ”All my cows have standards~”

Kara jerked her head back, smashing it into my nose.

”Oww!”

”Fix the fence after breakfast,” Kara said without turning back, ”The back stretch by the shed. It’s been leaning since the storm, and I’m not doing another winter of your cows walking into the Petersons’ yard.”

”They walked in there once.”

”They walked in there and stayed the night and pooped on the porch, Nikki.”

”And what a glorious poop it was...” I sat down, snickering, ”You remember that hag’s face?”

Kara let out her own evil little snicker as she set the plate down before me.

The pancakes had a floral note under the butter, and the first one was slightly overcooked, but I ate it anyway because that is the tax you pay for not getting up earlier.

Halfway through the second one, I looked up.

There was a small plastic spoon in the drying rack, and a booster seat pushed in against the far side of the table, and a pink backpack sitting on the chair with one strap hanging off it.

”Where’s Tiera?”

”At her friend’s... ” Kara turned around, leaned back against the counter with her arms folded, and gave me a look with a whole lot of trouble in it. ”Which means we have the entire morning to ourselves.”

”Hmm...” I rubbed my chin and gave her one right back. ”Such a rare opportunity. I wonder if we couldn’t do something very productive with it.”

She rolled her eyes and went pink across the cheeks doing it, before turning back to the pan.

After a whole lot of ’trouble’ later, I was out in my yard, with a shovel in my hand, and went to work, going in long even scoops, working from the porch out toward the gate the way I do it, throwing everything to the left where the pile builds up against the fence, and by mid-morning that pile stood taller than I was.

The lake out front had frozen over solid, flat and white all the way to the trees on the far side.

To my right was the shed, with the cows shifting around inside it and a bell going every so often when one of them moved her head.

Flower boxes ran along the front windows, snowed under, the way she insists on keeping them all winter because she says an empty box looks like nobody lives here.

And I was humming something without meaning to.

”Hot chocolate?”

Kara stood on the porch in her coat with a mug in each hand, and the steam was coming off both of them, and she was smiling at me the way she does.

”Yeah,” I smiled back. ”Gimme two minutes, I’m almost done.”

”You’ve been almost done for an hour.”

Chuckling, I got back to it, and I put my back into it, moving a great deal more snow in the next forty seconds than I had in the previous ten minutes.

While behind me, the porch boards creaked.

And the birds in the treeline stopped.

They had been going all morning, that ragged winter noise they make, and then they weren’t, and the whole yard went so quiet I could hear my own breathing.

Then her arms came around me from behind.

Slowly, she put her cheek against my shoulder blade and held on, and I got this close to melting right then and there, in negative degrees.

”But I don’t wanna wait two minutes,” she said, low, right against my ear, and she started kissing my neck.

Slow ones, soft, working up under my jaw while my heart went stupid in my chest and everything in me stopped caring about a driveway, while I took her scent in deep, rapid breaths; she smelled like flowers, she smelled overwhelmingly like flowers, and it went into my head and made the whole world lovely and slow.

She opened her mouth against my throat for the first little bite and-

-Tish-!

A rifle went off somewhere, and Kara was off my back, hard, and I heard her land in the snow behind me.

The sound of her body hitting the snow was louder to me than the rifle itself.

I stood there frozen for a solid second, mind incapable of wrapping around what just happened, eyes wide, mouth just open.

Slowly, I turned around.

Kara lay on her back a few feet from me with her arms out, and her eyes open; the snow underneath her was going red, spreading out in a wide, slow circle, the color of it obscene against all that white.

My mind simply couldn’t comprehend what I was looking at, and as I began to reel, footsteps crunching snow came from behind.

Slowly turning around, hyperventilating, feeling my heart thudding in my chest louder and louder, I found Nia standing at the end of my driveway with the rifle still up her shoulder and smoke still coming off the barrel.

Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen, and her face was doing something I did not have room to think about.

She looked like a woman being pulled apart from the inside.

And I was not surprised. Somewhere deep inside me, some ugly part of me had been expecting to see her standing there one day.

... Just not with a rifle in her hands.

But in that very moment, I swore I’d kill her even if it was the last thing I did.