I'm The Only Psychic In The Zombie Apocalypse

The corridor swallowed the red lights one by one ahead of them, and Mara walked into it with her M110 up and her whole body feeling wrong.

Brandt was two steps ahead, his shotgun low, his lead technician Petrov beside him with a radio and a flashlight whose beam looked thin and stupid against all that black.

Ashby covered their left. Mara had the rear again, half-turned, watching the way they’d come, watching the dark fold shut behind them like water.

"Primary loop’s another forty meters," Brandt murmured, voice level. "The valve I want to see is at the far end. If it’s been touched, we’d know for sure-"

"We already know," Mara said quietly. "So just turn it back on... we’re exposed here."

Nobody answered that. The flashlight beam swung and shivered, their every step loud, because the plant had gone so silent around them, all the little machine-sounds dying section by section as they walked, until there was nothing left but the pump in the floor and their own breathing and the one radio hiss in her ear.

Then the radio hissed differently, and Rourke’s voice came in, "... say again, who’s not accounted for? Count off. Count off now!"

And Mara’s stomach dropped.

"Hold!" She keyed up. "Captain, say status."

"-Del’s not-" Static ate the rest.

Then Rourke’s voice came again through the radio, harder, closer to the mic. "We’re one short. Nobody saw him step off. He was on the door, and now he’s-"

And then-

-AAAAAHHHHA-!

A tearing scream ripped through the corridor.

It came from behind them, from the dark they’d walked out of, from somewhere back toward the control room, and it was Del.

She knew it was Del, and it was not the sound of a man being bitten or shot. It was the sound of a man being taken.

High and disbelieving and cut through with a wet dragging noise underneath it, boots scrabbling on concrete, a body moving fast the wrong way, away, into the black, and Del screaming the whole way down with a terror in it she had never heard from a soldier.

"DEL!" Ashby spun toward it, rifle up, weapon light stabbing down the empty corridor.

But there was nothing there.

Just darkness, lit faintly by red light on the ceiling above, and the scream getting further away, faster than a man could run, dragged, and then-

It stopped.

Not faded, it just stopped, cut off clean in the middle of a breath, like a door closing, and the silence that came down after it was so total that Mara could hear the blood in her own ears.

"The hell was that, what was that!" one of the technicians shouted, high and cracking, over the net.

"HOLD POSITIONS!" Rourke’s voice came over the comms, roaring now, and she could hear the control room coming apart behind him. "Nobody moves. Nobody chases. Lights up, back to back, hold the-!"

-Tish-!-Tish-!

Ashby fired.

Two rounds down the black corridor at nothing, muzzle flash strobing the walls white, and in the half-second of light Mara saw the corridor was empty, completely empty, no shape, Infected, nothing.

"Ashby!" She grabbed his shoulder. "You’re shooting at nothing!"

He stopped, chest heaving. Petrov’s light was shaking so hard the beam jittered across the walls.

Brandt had his back to the wall, shotgun up, and even his face had gone white now; the old calm cracked straight through.

"We’re going back," Mara said, fast, low, hard, holding them together with her voice because it was the only thing she had. "Together. Back to the control room, back to the others, we do not split up again. Move. On me. Ashby, our six. Go."

They went back up the corridor fast, a tight shuffling knot, four people trying to watch every direction at once and failing. Mara walked in the front now, her M110’s light sweeping the darkness ahead, and the whole way she felt it, the thing every animal feels, the weight of being looked at, of something in the dark that could see her when she could not see it.

They came back into the control room, and it was chaos held together by one man’s voice.

Rourke had everyone in a rough circle, back to back, rifles out at every door and every dark corner, and he was walking the inside of it, low and hard, saying the same things over and over.

Hold. Watch your sector. Nobody’s alone.

But Mara counted as she came in; Del was gone. And one of the younger soldiers, the thin fast one, he was gone too, and nobody was saying his name, which meant nobody had seen him go either.

Sixteen. They’d walked in with eighteen. Now there were sixteen, and two of them had been erased out of a moving formation without a shot that hit anything, without a body, without a sound but one scream that stopped like a switch.

"Chief." Rourke’s voice came as soon as they saw them, ragged at the edges but holding. "Tell me you can do this fast. Tell me there’s a fast version."

Brandt went to his panel. His hands weren’t steady anymore, but he put them on the console and made them work, because that was who he was, and Mara loved him a little in that moment for it.

"There’s a fast version," Brandt said. "It’s not a good version. But if it’s a choice between a rough shutdown and staying in this building another hour, I’ll take rough."

He pulled his folder open. "I need ten minutes on this panel. Ten minutes, uninterrupted. Keep it off me for ten minutes, and I’ll put this plant to sleep."

"You heard him," Rourke said. "Ten minutes. Wall of guns. Chief works, everybody else watches the-"

-Crack-!

And the three technicians in the center of the formation dropped.

All three at once, in the same half-second, in the middle of the circle, in the middle of the light, surrounded on every side by armed men facing outward.

And they just fell, folding straight down where they stood. Mara saw the last of it, saw the way their heads were turned, all three, wrenched around too far on their necks, the exact wrong angle, and there had been no shot, no sound, no hand, nothing; they were standing, and then they were on the floor with their necks broken inside a ring of soldiers who saw nothing at all.

Someone started screaming. One of the soldiers just went screaming, spraying rounds into the ceiling.

Mara spun, sweeping her rifle and weapon light across the dark edges while her heart tried to climb out of her throat. And for less than a second, high up on the catwalk grating, she caught it.

A small shape, and beside it, low, a pair of blue eyes catching the light, round and calm and watching.

She blinked on instinct.

And it was gone as though it was never there.

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