Yesterday's Gone: Season Three (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER) (15 page)

“We’re all sinners, my dear. Just some of us are more honest than others. In answer to Mr. Rojas’ question, I can only say that God works in mysterious ways. Perhaps He is testing you as He is testing me.”

Brent wondered how in the hell The Prophet had picked up on Rojas’ name. He didn’t recall any proper introductions. Maybe he’d gathered it like Brent had, from the man’s name tag on his tactical vest.

Still, something’s weird.

Brent caught Ed, sitting beside him and wearing the same set of black handcuffs, nodding subtly, as if in silent agreement that the old man was definitely suspicious. If Ed felt suspicious too, then Brent felt a hundred times better about his hunch.

“I know it’s hard to have faith, especially in the End Days,” The Prophet said, speaking to everyone. “Believe me, I’ve grappled with my own faith from time to time over the years.” He laughed as though delight were in his secrets before raising the sad in his voice. “I grappled again after He took my family. Then again after I lost my congregation, followed most recently by The Good Lord setting demons upon my church.” He shook his head. “Though, I was wrong on that last one. He did not set the demons upon me. That was Satan. The Lord is the one who told me about the air horn. Told me in a dream the night before my church was plagued. Do any of you ever have weird dreams?”

Although Brent thought The Prophet learning of the air horn’s use as a weapon against the aliens in his dream was interesting, it was hardly divine intervention. If anything, it was dumb luck. But he wouldn’t argue with the man, so long as The Prophet didn’t try to sway Brent’s beliefs.

Whatever gets you through the night.

“I think we’ve all had weird dreams,” Lisa said. “Most people call ‘em nightmares.”

Brent flinched at her briskness, wondering why she was being so prickly. Though he shouldn’t have been surprised, she’d been the same way with Ed. Still, he didn’t want to see religious debate erupt in the car. He wanted to get to Black Mountain so that whatever was gonna happen could finally be over and done with.

Brent had been wondering what was next for some time. Ed seemed anxious about Black Mountain, but Brent figured that with all the chaos in the streets, he’d happily take his chances with another government entity, even if it were at odds with Black Island’s Guardsmen. Differences like these were usually political, and if Brent had one area where he was most confident, it was in his ability to navigate tricky political currents.
 

He despised politics, but Brent had plenty of experience playing the game as a reporter. Even though he worked features, politics had a way of invading nearly every section of the paper, from the front page to the sports page. People were political animals by nature. Brent hoped his skills would still be useful when the bullets from Ed’s one-gun-fits-all solution thudded into a brick wall.

Brent was easing tensions when The Prophet slowed the car to a crawl, and stared into the darkness ahead.

“What’s going on?” Rojas asked.

Brent looked up to see why they had stopped, his jaw nearly dropping at the shadows barely illuminated by the wagon’s high beams.
 

The highway was blocked with tall dark towers of stacked cars, trucks, and debris, soaring 10 stories and higher, vaguely visible in the moonlight.
 

“Holy shit!” Lisa said, leaning forward and shaking her head. Then, “What in the hell? This wasn’t here the other day.”

The Prophet stared for an eternity, as if he were trying to wrap his head around who or what might have made the impossible possible. Something in his expression seemed to indicate that he didn’t think it was divine work.

“I saw the same thing in New York,” Brent said. “Except with bodies.”

“Bodies?” Rojas asked.

“Yes, thousands, maybe tens of thousands, all stacked in Times Square.”

“I wonder if those were the sinners or the saints,” Lisa said, glaring at The Prophet.

“Where do we go now?” The Prophet asked, still preoccupied with the stacks of cars, still visibly shaken, maybe all the way to his core.

“Turn the car around,” Lisa said. “We’ll get off at the last exit and find another way.”

The Prophet put the car in reverse just as the engine died. The car began to roll backward and he slammed his foot down on the brake pedal, jerking the car to a halt.

“What the hell?” Lisa said, leaning over. “Out of gas?!”

The Prophet leaned forward and stared at the gas gauge, seemingly as surprised by the red as he was by the stacks in the road. “Sorry. It’s been a while since I’ve had to drive myself anywhere.”

“Great!” Lisa said, opening the door and stepping from the car. Everyone followed, Brent growing more certain that Brent would make a break for it soon. Rojas was tasked with keeping an eye on him, but the Black Mountain Guardsman was distracted, if not outright spooked, with everything else happening. Brent watched Ed for any brewing signs for action. If he were going to make a move, it seemed like the right time.

But Ed was quiet, perhaps biding his time.
 

“Shit,” Lisa said, looking down from the overpass railing to the road below, or the crumbles that were left of it. Though dark, they could see enough detail to know that the landscape below was littered with jagged crags of debris as far as the eye could see, as if an earthquake had split the road into thousands of chunks of asphalt and earth.

“I think there’s aliens down there,” Billy said, his first words since they’d left the shopping center.

Brent didn’t see any signs of life, however.

“We have two options,” Lisa said. “We can go down there and try not to break our asses. Or we go through this pile and hope that the towers don’t fall on us. Anyone have an opinion?”

Brent was surprised she was asking anyone for input, but the question seemed mostly directed at Ed. Perhaps Ed had earned a bit more respect back at the grocery store than she was verbally willing to acknowledge. Brent stared at the road ahead of them. His eyes had adjusted a bit to the darkness, so he could see that the towers of cars sprawled for a few hundred yards or so, with just enough room to walk, or maybe drive a motorcycle through. It reminded him of the vehicle piles they’d found as he and Luis were trying to make their way to Times Square, except those cars were only jammed side-by-side, not
on top
of one another too.

What the hell could have done this? Not the aliens?
 

They can’t even climb; surely they’re not stacking cars like toys.

Ed’s eyes narrowed as he looked down from the overpass and then back toward Lisa. “I don’t like the looks of anything down there.” He shook his head, then turned to the stacks. “I say we head straight through the maze and hope there’s a working vehicle on the other side of this maze.”

Lisa stared at him as if trying to read what else he may have been thinking. Maybe she was wondering if he were looking for an exit too. Hell, maybe she didn’t even have it in her anymore to care. Perhaps with everything else going on, a prisoner was the last thing she had the time, or the ability, to look after. Brent thought about Mr. Ebers, his eleventh grade shop teacher who would often turn the other cheek, pretending not to notice as several of his students fled his classroom when his back was turned. Mr. Ebers didn’t seem to have the energy to care anymore, figuring his life was easier if he just let the people who didn’t want to be there, leave. Lisa’s life would be far easier if she didn’t have to deal with Ed.

But perhaps Ed had proven himself so valuable an ally against the aliens that Lisa couldn’t stand to lose him, and therefore wasn’t about to look the other way — for even a moment.

“Alright,” Rojas said, gesturing with his rifle. “Let’s move forward.”

As they headed into the maze, The Prophet stood beside the stalled station wagon, unmoving.

“You coming?” Lisa asked.

“I don’t know,” he said after a long moment spent slowly shaking his head.

“We’ll be fine,” Lisa said. “Bring your air horn.”

Something flashed inside the Prophet’s eyes, and for a moment, Brent could have sworn the man’s face went blurry for a split second. Brent blinked and rubbed his eyes. The Prophet was looking at him. “You okay?” he asked as he reached into the car and grabbed the air horn.

“Yeah,” Brent said, not wanting to meet the man’s eyes.

They headed into the maze together, with the old man walking in the middle, and Brent feeling more uneasy than he had since their excursion into the city.

* * * *

CHAPTER 4 — (Other) Will Bishop

Other Earth

Paddock Island, New York

Saturday July 9, 2011

night

THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT…

Will waited in a chair next to Luca’s bed waiting for his son to return from the bathroom down the hall.

Will had decided to test Luca at home from now on. Will tried his best to mask his emotions — both the excitement of discovery and the fear of the unknown — never wanting the boy to be afraid, or get too deep inside a mind where getting lost was too easy to do.
 

At least they weren’t in the lab. Level Seven put Luca on edge, a feeling that Will could understand given the sheer number of people who were following Luca’s progress. Luca was the first human subject of an alien technology that their best scientists barely understood. Yes, the boy had healed completely, but he’d come out of his coma enhanced, a possibility easily predicted from the animal testing. But Luca’s abilities had grown beyond simple enhancement of latent human abilities.

 
Luca was already doing things Will, whose proximity and early exposure to the vials had changed him, had never done, but now he was doing stuff Will didn’t even think was possible.
 

Luca told Will that he had been going to another world, like theirs but different. A world where his mom and dad and sister were all still sleeping in their own beds and living the life fate had stolen from Luca.
 

Of course, that was a scenario any child in Luca’s position would want to create. So while Will believed Luca was seeing what he said he saw, he had a rather large question about whether Luca was the architect of that world.
 

Teleporting to another dimension — if that was in fact was what Luca had done — was beyond the scope of anything they were prepared for. Will was torn between his commitment to science — he couldn’t allow future testing on others without divulging this information — and protecting his son. Once Black Island Research found out about Luca’s new side effect, he would go from child to lab rat. And even though Will was valuable to Black Island Research, particularly in dealing with the vials he’d discovered so many decades ago, not even he could protect Luca from that fate once the truth was out.

Could Luca really be visiting a parallel world?
 

If true, the possibilities were enough to cripple his mind. Not counting a parallel world, two possibilities existed: Either Luca was imagining the other world entirely, or he was somehow traveling back in time.
 

Will didn’t want to consider time travel. That rabbit hole was just too goddamn deep, worse than string theory and the infinite worlds that went with it.
 

Believing Luca was manufacturing it all was easier for Will, especially since Luca’s mind was able to bleed color onto empty canvas. More than he, or anyone at the island, had ever seen. But things that had happened over the last several weeks made Will wonder if the impossible could be true.
 

He was slowly starting to believe that it probably was.
 

It started with the subtle but obvious changes in Luca. Level Seven was pulling too much from him, drawing on too much of his power. Luca’s mind seemed stressed, yet when he returned from what he said was the other world, he seemed refreshed, almost like a new boy. Will wondered where he was getting his energy, and if he were somehow pulling from the mind of his doppelgänger to make himself stronger.
 

 
Will theorized that if Luca could truly establish tangible interaction on another world, maybe he could return with evidence. It was a crazy long shot and utterly ridiculous, but wasn’t that always the way — today’s science was yesterday’s magic? Luca certainly seemed to be waving a wand.

“Are you ready?”
 

Luca nodded as he returned to his bed, wiping water from his lips with the back of his hand. He sat on the edge of his bed, legs folded.

“And I can bring back anything I want?”

Will said, “Whatever you want, Luca. I think the more special it is to you, the more likely you’ll be able to bring it back with you. But don’t tell me. Let it be a surprise.”
 

Will didn’t really believe that it mattered
what
Luca brought back — the idea was to keep Luca from planting any thoughts in Will’s mind to taint the results.
 

Luca said, “Okay, Dad. Should I go now?”