Yesterdays Gone: SEASON TWO (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER) (Yesterday's Gone) (34 page)

“That’s weird,” Adam said, looking up.
 

Their eyes went to the sky and saw what Adam had already seen. The clouds weren’t just moving fast. They were … forming into something. In the distance, they heard what sounded like a train gathering velocity and volume.

“What the fuck is that?” Vic said.

The clouds swirled and churned, blacker than clouds had any right to be. There were some weird storms and clouds after the world vanished, but Charlie hadn’t seen anything like this. The clouds looked like snakes slithering and weaving in and out of one another, spreading across the sky and racing toward them. The snakes began to reach down, forming into an inverted triangle, reaching down to touch the tree-line about a quarter mile on the other end of the highway.

No, not a triangle. A funnel.

“Shit!” Charlie said, “It’s a tornado!”

“Get in the truck,” Vic said.

“No, it’s going too fast; get in the store!” Callie said, and began to run to the front doors, which were closed since the store’s power was out. She forced the doors open and called out, “Come on!”

Charlie, Vic, and Adam couldn’t tear their eyes away from the scene. As the funnel hit the ground, it grew wider, and objects began to get caught in the vortex of swirling darkness and destruction, then sucked into the ceiling of the churning abyss above.

The wind around them howled louder, sounding more like wolves than wind. “Come on!” Charlie shouted, leading the way into the store as Vic and Adam followed. Charlie pulled the doors shut once they all crossed the threshold.
 

“We supposed to get in a doorway or something?” Adam asked, looking around the store in a half daze.

“Find something heavy to get under,” Charlie suggested, though he wasn’t certain of the what-to-do-in-a-tornado advice he’d heard, and ignored, a few dozen times in his life.

The wind outside intensified, whistling loudly as it found its way into the store through vents in the ceiling. Rain began to pelt the windows, doors, and roof. Something slammed hard into the doors, cracking, but not breaking the glass, and was whisked away by the wind again before Charlie could see what it was.
 

The howling grew louder as the concussion of a train thundered through the store.

The four of them looked at one another, no one saying a word.

The sound grew so loud, it hurt to hear it.

“Do you hear that?” Callie asked, her head tilted to the side.

“Who can’t? This twister shit is fuckin’ loud!” Vic said.

“No, no. Not the train sound, or the howling! It’s...it’s something else!” Callie shouted.

Charlie adjusted the frequency of his ears and heard something just above the sound of the howling storm. It was barely there, like the faint crackle and static of a distant radio. But it was familiar, too familiar, in a very unnerving way. Charlie couldn’t put his finger on what made the sound so familiar, but it made his flesh pimple with goosebumps and jolted his heart-rate into overdrive.

The mysterious sound grew louder, like the storm outside. Then the lightbulb went off.

Oh my god! Oh my fucking god!

“What
is that?
” Adam cried, his face perplexed with confusion and dread.

“It sounds like . . .” Callie began.

“CLICKING!” Charlie finished. “The monsters!”

“What the fuck?” Vic said, aiming his rifle at the windows, toward the unseen enemy lurking in the storm.

Something slammed into one of the windows, shattering it as if it had been blasted by a bazooka. Vic trained his scope at the impact site and squeezed off a round that sailed straight through the new opening into the raging whirlwind of rain and debris outside. No kill. No hit. Nothing. Instead, the air pressure vacuum created by the blown-out window channeled flying chunks of glass, dirt, rocks, and other wreckage directly down upon them. The onslaught of winged shrapnel tore at Charlie’s face and eyes, scratching him like a demon-possessed razor with a million blades. The rain joined the debris in drenching him from head to foot. “Find cover!” he bellowed as he pulled his shirt over this face and dove behind a foodstuff display stand.

After a few moments reprieve, he pulled his shirt down and looked around, searching for Callie. But shrapnel found his eyes again instantly, stinging his sight and sending him to the ground, wiping his lenses through his shirt as another explosion of glass triggered behind him. Shards of glass and wind lashed his back, and threw him forward into an overturned shopping cart, knocking the wind from his body. Charlie gulped at the air, trying to catch his breath, crawling over the cart and along the ground, body soaked in rain and blood and wracked in pain as if a hundred hammers and knives had struck him.

The storm howled louder as torrents swept into the store with the force of thunder. His eyes closed, he could only hear the damage, but it sounded like the world was being ripped apart. Shopping carts clanged into shelving; shelves fell like dominoes; objects slammed into the front of the store, and all about the interior walls. Charlie felt like he was the unwitting passenger in a hellish amusement park ride, locked into a death chamber where he couldn’t see where the danger was coming from because it was coming from
everywhere
. He cried out for Callie, but his cry was more of an animalistic wail than an assembly of words.

Please, make it stop!

He stopped in his tracks and balled up on the ground, trying to shrink his moving target. The wind and water, however, had other plans and propelled him forward, sliding him into the dark rain of debris at the velocity of a steep water slide. He didn’t travel far before colliding with something hard, banging his shoulder and hip into an eruption of pain.

He choked on a scream as his shirt slid from his face and water went into his open mouth. The wind and clicking grew louder as another sound emerged from the chaos.
 

Metal crunching.

Charlie wiped at his eyes, spit out the water, and felt himself slipping again, carried by the wind and river of water now pouring into the store. The sound of metal crunching amplified. He closed his eyes as he tumbled and slid deeper into the store, slamming into overturned shelves and clothing racks, each banging and bruising him, until he stopped with a hard thud, slamming back first into a solid structure midway through the store, a wall, door, or, maybe a changing room station.

The chaos crescendoed: the storm at its most violent, the whistle of wind at its most menacing, the clicking of godknowswhat terrors close at hand, and the sound of crunching metal deafening. He held tight to the wall and door behind him, and managed to stand and look up, searching for the source of the crunching metal.
 

That’s when he saw it, dark tendrils of storm cloud that looked so solid they could be the curling fingers of some ungodly tornado beast, reaching into a tear in the roof and peeling back the top of the store like the tin of a sardine can.

As the roof tore away in chunks of charred sky, the swirling darkness gathered the debris into itself, feeding itself. Charlie stared in horror as the dark storm sucked items up from the store and swallowed them upward into itself like some kind of unholy vacuum from hell.

“Callie!!” screamed Charlie.

More debris slammed his body from all sides, making his struggle to hold onto the door with one hand while pulling his drenched shirt over his face with the other near-impossible. The moment his shirt was over his face, his fingers were yanked from the door. He flew backward and slammed headfirst into something solid and unmoving.

The last thing he felt was his body flying up and into the terrible storm.

**

Charlie woke up choking, gasping for air, face down in a cold puddle of mud. He turned over, afraid to open his eyes and see whatever was left of the store and his companions.
 

He was soaked to the bone, battered, and his mouth filled with the copper of blood. Around him was nothing but silence, save for a gentle breeze, which seemed a comical cousin to the hell they’d just faced.

There was a comfort in the darkness of keeping his eyes closed. Something urged him to just go to sleep . . .
surrender
.

No more pain.
 

No more suffering.
 

No more bullying, ever again.
 

No more life in a world of monsters.
 

Just let go and succumb to the everlasting peace.

The peace seemed so real in his head that a smile cracked his face. His first genuine smile in as long as he could remember. His body felt as if it were rocking gently back and forth in an ocean without a care in the world. He felt that if he kept his eyes closed, and allowed his body to float, it would eventually drift into the everlasting peace that the darkness promised.

So easy. That’s it. Just let go.

He wanted to more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life. Let go. The smile on his face spread and he began to cry, at the thought of everlasting happiness.
 

Not a care in the world.

Just let go.

He thought of his dad, flashing back to a time when he was really young, sitting with his dad on the couch as he read him a story. Something about a train. A smiling happy train. He remembered looking up to his dad with such awe. This man was His Daddy! Daddies lived forever. They didn’t die. They didn’t leave you.

Daddy.
 

Tears streamed from Charlie’s eyes.

Let go, son. I’m here. Be with me. We’re waiting.

“Dad?” he cried.

“Hello?” a man’s cracked voice called out. Not in the darkness, but in the real world, where Charlie lay in a puddle of mud.

“Charlie? Is that you?” It was Vic. He sounded bad.

No, don’t go, Charlie. Stay. Close your eyes. Come back to us.

If Vic were alive, though, perhaps Callie was too.

Charlie turned away from the calm sea of ghosts and sat up, pain pinching his ribs, chest, back, and head simultaneously. He opened his eyes to the blinding white light of what was left of the morning. Assuming it was still morning. He had no idea how long he’d been out.

His eyes adjusted to the milky gray fog hanging thick around him. Wisps of gray thinned, allowing him to see maybe 40 yards in any direction. That’s when he saw that the ground beneath him was all dirt and mud. No grass. No vegetation. No asphalt. No debris, even, as if the storm had lifted the top layer from the ground and delivered it to hell. He looked around, trying to see beyond the fog, but could find nothing to indicate where he’d been dropped. He assumed if Vic was close by, they couldn’t be too far from the store, and maybe Callie and Adam.

“Vic?” he called out as he stood up, triggering an injection of pain throughout his body. He was banged up, but nothing that would keep him from walking.

“Cha-Charlie?” the man said, from somewhere in the fog. His voice sounded pained, but there was something else there, too. Joy that Charlie was there. That he wasn’t alone. So Vic
did
need others.

“Is anyone else with you?” Charlie called out as he stepped toward the direction of Vic’s voice. “Have you seen Callie or Adam?”

“No, I ain’t seen nothin’,” Vic said. “Please, help me.”

Charlie saw Vic on the ground, sitting up, but holding his left forearm, bleeding onto the man’s pants.

“You okay?” Charlie asked as he stepped forward.

Vic looked up, the giant bald steroid case suddenly seemed fragile, eyes worried. “Something cut me, but I think I’ll be okay. I need to find something to stop the bleeding. You got a knife or something? Can you cut my shirt, tie it around my wound?”

The knife.

Charlie reached into his pocket, felt the blade and pulled it out. “You think that’ll work?”

“Yeah,” Vic said, “I’ve had worse than this. We’ll just need to get home or find a place with equipment, and I’ll show you how to stitch this up.”

“Stitches?” Charlie said, “I don’t know how to do stitches!”

“Don’t be such a pussy, man. Just cut my shirt before I bleed out, okay?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said as he walked behind Vic and leaned down, looking at where the man’s shirt ended and his massive biceps began.
 

What would Old Charlie do?

Fuck that; what will New Charlie do?

He pushed the small button on the knife and the blade popped out with an inviting click.

“Come on, man, hurry! I’m gonna bleed out,” Vic said, turning back and looking up at Charlie.

Charlie dropped to a knee, grabbed Vic under the chin with his left hand, and twisted Vic’s head back, exposing his neck.

Vic tried to escape, but he was too late.

Charlie dug the blade deep into the man’s Adam’s apple, and then jerked the blade sideways, as hot blood shot all over his hand.