Yesterday's Gone: Season Three (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER) (21 page)

I’d have to be an idiot not to get your drift. You’re as subtle as a forest fire.

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna bang on Callie’s precious backdoor. Remember, I’m in your head. And well, let’s just say, that makes
me
part of
you
, and you know she ain’t gonna have any part of you in any part of her, so I’m sorta screwed, fuck you very much.” Boricio shook his head.

Charlie watched the light on top of Boricio’s hat turn back and forth and wondered why he’d imagined Boricio wearing a miner’s helmet — a broken one, at that.

The man in yellow reached Charlie’s cell, then pressed something on the panel outside his door.

The voice above Charlie crackled to life. “Remember,” it said, “be a good boy, or—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Charlie shouted as the man in yellow entered his cell.

The man looked Charlie up and down, then spoke, his voice now coming through the speakers above. He wasn’t the same man who’d been taunting him over the speakers, but his voice was oddly familiar.
 

“That was some show you put on out there,” the man said from inside his hazmat suit as he continued staring at Charlie like some kind of lab animal.

Something about the man’s accent was unsettling in its vague familiarity, as was his appearance, though Charlie couldn’t quite place where he might have seen the man before.

Boricio jumped up and down behind Charlie. “Holy shit, Charlie Brown! What the fuck is this?”

What?

“You don’t see it?” Boricio said, pointing frantically at the man’s mask. “Look closer, you dumb lanky pile of shit, squeeze those beady fucker eyes of yours together and tell me you don’t recognize who in the fuck-all you’re looking at!”

Charlie examined the man’s face. He was in his early to mid thirties and bald, with an eye patch over his left eye and a long ugly scar running in a deep ravine from the high above his patch to the low of his cheek below.
 

Something about him
was
damned familiar, like a word on the tip of Charlie’s tongue he simply couldn’t remember.
 

“Dude,” Boricio said stepping right beside the man in yellow, pointing manically back at the man and then himself. “Look, Charlie! It’s me! It’s me!”

Charlie’s jaw dropped.

It was beer-battered bullshit, no doubt, but Boricio was right.

TO BE CONTINUED…

YESTERDAY’S GONE

EPISODE 15

“Team Building Exercise”

* * * *

CHAPTER 1 — Teagan McLachlan

In the dream, the sun had kissed Teagan’s skin. But when she woke, it was darkness that met her. Darkness and the sound of whistling. Above her, a dark cloud engulfed the inside of the car.

But the dark cloud wasn’t a cloud; it was something else — pulsating with serpentine motion, shifting form, and hovering its attention toward her as if it were alive.
 

Her eyes widened in fear, and the cloud seized her terror, using it to multiply its mass into a swiftly spinning billow, melting through the air on its way toward Teagan’s trembling body, crackling with a cool current of live electricity that made the tiny hairs on her arm dance.

Teagan was paralyzed, unable to move.

Her father was asleep, slumped over the steering wheel, and her mother an echo beside him. The car slowly rolled forward, the headlights slicing through the inky silence of the highway, flashing on a guardrail quickly growing larger as the car rolled forward.

Teagan panicked. She wanted to scream, but had to move first, needed to reach across the front seat, but couldn’t. The cloud started spinning faster and whistling louder — an angry tornado tearing through the tiny interior of the car.
 

The whistling kept screaming, splitting the sanity inside her head. Teagan reached up to cover her ears and cried out as if that might mute it.

Light suddenly appeared — brighter than anything Teagan had ever seen.

The bright light was then enveloped by something blacker than the darkness outside, and in that instant her parents were gone. The car smashed into the guardrail with a grinding crunch, and then a thundering thud before coming to a jarring stop. The darkness above her had evaporated into wisps with her family.

Something seemed familiar,
too familiar
— flooding Teagan with a sense of Déjà vu she couldn’t shake.
 

Trembling and confused, Teagan leaned forward and looked at the clock on the radio: 2:15 a.m.

The odd, familiar current grew stronger inside her.

She’d been here before.

Teagan heard the sound of a baby crying. Her baby, Becca. She frantically searched every seat in the car, but her baby was nowhere. She swallowed hard, realizing the sound was bleeding into the car from outside, somewhere in the dark.

She looked out the window but couldn’t see her. Teagan was terrified of the darkness outside, thinking of the black cloud that had crackled to life and taken her parents away.
 

What if it’s out there — waiting?

Teagan couldn’t leave her child out there alone, though. Becca was only one month old and defenseless against the darkness.

Teagan forced herself into bravery, then threw the rear door open and launched herself into the night, moving with a fluid grace she could only find in her dreams.
 

Yes, this is a dream.

None of this is happening.

Becca’s cries dragged Teagan’s attention toward the trunk of the car. Her baby was in the trunk. Milk spotted the front of her shirt as she ran to open the trunk.

Where are the keys?!

She looked up and through the rear window of the car where she was drawn to the keys dangling from the steering wheel. But that wasn’t the only thing Teagan saw in the car — the dark cloud was back as well, churning fast, spinning in furious circles as its mass spread throughout the cabin.
 

The keys were held captive in the icy heart of the darkness. Teagan had no choice but to swallow her fear, then reach inside and grab them.
 

Hurry. Do it!

Becca’s cries echoed louder inside the trunk as Teagan’s heart furiously pounded. She forced herself toward the car’s front door as her fingers trembled at the handle.
 

Open the door. Reach in. You’ll be in and out before it can do anything to you.

Teagan watched as the mass spun even faster, growing inexplicably darker. Something from the center of the vortex smacked hard against the window, leaving a red bloody smear before it was pulled back violently into the vortex.
 

Something else hit the window, a torn chunk of flesh which used to be wearing her father’s watch, but now wore only his fat and tarnished silver wedding band.

Every window exploded at once — an eruption of a million shards, spitting a swarm of glass and black from the car, where the cloud instantly gathered into an even larger mass above the car, spinning and growing with intensity.

Teagan screamed and ran from the car — away from her child, still crying in the trunk — slicing her heart into a hundred guilty ribbons.
 

How can you leave your child to that?

Teagan could leave her child because she was too terrified to go back, even though she hated herself further with every fresh step she took from the trunk. She stopped for a moment, turned and looked back at the growing darkness.
 

Go back. Save her!

What kind of mother leaves her child to die?

She’s safer in the trunk. I’ll go back to get her.

The darkness began to shake the car as its tendrils reached down and ripped the lid from the trunk and tossed it into its vortex where it spun with the darkness and then shot out into the woods off the side of the highway.

Teagan screamed as it reached in to claim Becca.

Teagan woke to the sound of her daughter sobbing.

Black Island, New York

April
 
2012

SIX MONTHS AFTER THE EVENT…

Even with Becca crying, she was relieved to be away from the dream, and safe in her bedroom. A soft blue light beside Becca’s crib illuminated her weeping infant. Teagan was at the crib in seconds.
 

“You need to be changed,” she said, lifting Becca to her lips, giving her a kiss, then setting her back in the crib. “I’ll be right back Baby B. Just one sec.”
 

Teagan fumbled in the dim light, and gathered the diapers, cream, and wipes. As she changed Becca, named after her older sister, Teagan couldn’t help but feel the stain of guilt left to linger after her dream’s decision. What should have passed moments after waking was soaking deeper into something inside her.
 

Teagan started to cry. “You okay,” Ed asked from bed.

“Yes,” Teagan said, nodding even though he probably couldn’t see her in the dark, wiping her eyes and feeling like a fool. She had been so hyper-emotional since delivering Becca in February, and hated feeling so raw all the time, always at the edge of every emotion. Having such limited control over her emotions made Teagan feel even younger than sleeping with a 44-year-old man did.

She finished wrapping Becca in warm clothes and swaddling her in a blanket like a baby burrito, then returned to bed and started to nurse. The frail infant’s lips sucking away, fingers curled and eyes closed, made Teagan feel even guiltier for leaving her baby in the trunk, regardless of whether it was a dream.

She tried to tell herself that she’d never do that in real life.

I would die to protect her.

“What’s wrong?” Ed said, wiping his eyes and sitting up beside her, then wrapping a long arm around her and drawing her and Becca closer.

“Just a nightmare,” Teagan said, laughing at how silly she felt. “It’s nothing, really.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”
 

Teagan suspected Ed didn’t really want to discuss her dream, though. While he was far more communicative than the Ed from her world — the one who had saved her life —
 
this “other Ed” was still rough around the edges with talking about stuff like feelings, dreams, and other things that weren’t black-and-white and made of logic.

She turned to face Ed in the dim light of their bedroom, thinking how much safer she felt with him beside her. Their friendship had only recently blossomed into something more — almost in spite of them each denying the feelings they had both developed over the course of a few months. Teagan wasn’t sure if she could call the feelings inside her
love
; they weren’t as pure or true as what she felt for Becca — that feeling that she would do anything and kill anyone to protect her child. But still, the feelings were stronger than anything she’d ever felt before, even if they were born from sorrow and a bounty of mental baggage.
 

“Nah, it’s just a silly nightmare,” Teagan said, nudging herself closer to Ed.

“Well, you’re safe now,” he said, kissing her forehead. Ed leaned over and kissed Becca’s nearly bald head.
 

He’s so sweet to Becca.

He would never leave her in a trunk!

The new thought pushed Teagan into a fresh batch of tears, which then pulled further concern from Ed.

“You
sure
you’re okay?” His brows were now furrowed enough for Teagan to see in the dark.

She was about to answer when sirens outside started to wail, scratching the silence into an agitated scream, as the one screech quickly turned to chaos.
 

Ed’s phone rang and Becca started to scream.

“What’s that?!” Teagan shouted over the loud siren. She had never heard a siren on the island before.

Ed didn’t answer. He had the phone in his hand and his lips at the receiver, and his expression had already gone from concerned to something she’d never seen on his face before, or the other Ed’s for that matter. His eyes were dilated wide with a horrible fear. He hung up the phone and set it on the nightstand.

“What is it?”
 

Ed said, “They broke out.”

“
Who
broke out?”

He leaped from the bed, threw on his clothes, then turned to Teagan. “The infected.”
 

* * * *

CHAPTER 2 — Boricio Bishop
   

Black Island Research Facility

Black Island, New York

Other Earth

August 17

TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT…