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

by Platt, Sean

  Boricio stared at Charlie like his eyes were lie detectors. After a long moment, he asked, “Which of my men did this?”

  Charlie remembered the man’s name clearly on his badge. “Foster.”

  Boricio pushed a button on the side of his helmet and instructed someone over the radio to send Foster to Level Nine.

  Moments later, Foster appeared, in his black uniform, gun holstered at his side. He wasn’t wearing a helmet like some of the other Guardsmen on the block.

  “Yes, sir, you wanted to see me?” Foster said, looking at Boricio. If he’d noticed Charlie at all, he wasn’t showing it.

  Boricio turned to Charlie, “Is this the man?”

  Foster turned, meeting Charlie’s eyes. Charlie swallowed as the man’s steely gaze almost dared Charlie to say something. He wondered if Foster knew why he’d been called by Boricio — if he knew that Charlie had ratted him out.

  Imaginary Boricio piped up, “Yeah, that’s the fucker, right there! Only a dick with no balls would be pussy enough to shoot a kid!”

  Charlie nodded. “Yes. That’s him.”

  “What?” Foster said, his facade cracking.

  “Did you shoot a child in the back of the head?”

  Foster swallowed, saying nothing at first.

  “And don’t you dare lie to me. You know I can sniff your lies like shit in your crack,” hazmat-suit Boricio said.

  Foster swallowed again, his eyes wide and unable to break from Boricio’s gaze.

  “Yes, sir. But . . .”

  “No buts!” Boricio shouted, so loud Charlie leapt back involuntarily.

  Foster zipped his lips.

  “Give me your gun,” Boricio said.

  “Why?” Foster asked.

  “I said, GIVE ME YOUR GUN!” Boricio shouted, spittle flying from his mouth and coating the inside of his helmet.

  Foster cowered. If Foster could have shrunk and run away, or melted into a puddle on the floor, Charlie was sure he would have. He handed Boricio his pistol, his hand trembling. Only when Charlie saw the trembling hand did he realize what was happening. Boricio wasn’t asking him to turn in his gun like a police chief would ask a cop to turn in his badge and gun.

  “Why would you kill a child?” Boricio asked. “Who the fuck do you think you are to go around killing children?”

  “I dunno, sir, I was just . . .”

  “No!” Boricio said as he pulled one of his bulky yellow gloves from his hand. Beneath that glove he wore a slimmer, skintight black glove. Boricio took the gun, then checked the chamber.

  “You are a Black Mountain Guardsman, not some mercenary thug! Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Foster shouted like he was in boot camp.

  Boricio stared at the man while Charlie wondered what was going to happen. The tension was a fog in the room, and his heart a machine gun emptying its clip.

  Finally, Boricio said, “No, I don’t think you do understand, turn around.”

  Foster cried, “Why?”

  “I said, turn around!” Boricio snapped.

  Foster turned, slowly, his whole body trembling, waiting, and unable to see what Boricio was going to do next.

  “Leave,” Boricio said.

  Foster’s eyes widened, though Charlie wasn’t sure if it was a sign of relief or a deepening fear as he began to walk away.

  He made it six steps before Boricio took aim at the back of the man’s head and pulled the trigger.

  The gunshot crackled in the speakers above Charlie as Foster fell face first into the concrete ground, blood splattering on impact.

  Charlie jumped, but held his scream inside.

  Boricio looked back at Charlie. “There. Problem solved.”

  “Fuck yeah!” Imaginary Boricio shouted, pumping his fist in the air and prancing around the cell. “I fucking LOVE this guy! Now THAT is how you handle personnel conflicts! That right there was the goddamn Robocop of human resources!”

  Boricio leaned closer to Charlie, returning the yellow glove to his hand. “As I said, we’re not the bad guys. We’re here to help. And I won’t condone my men murdering anyone — especially children.”

  “What do you need from me?” Charlie asked.

  “Just work with us. Allow us to take your blood, and don’t pull any more stunts like you did. I now understand your fear of the men you attacked, but I assure you that we’re not going to hurt you. We need to keep you alive. You might be our only hope.”

  Charlie glanced at Imaginary Boricio, who was staring at the still-sleeping Callie in the next cell.

  “I’ll help you under one condition,” Charlie said.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing happens to her. No tests. No infection. Nothing.”

  Boricio looked over at Callie, then back at Charlie. “Deal.”

  “I can trust you?” Charlie asked.

  “Yes. But can I trust you?” Boricio asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to believe you, Charlie. But I am having one problem.”

  Charlie felt a knot in his gut as if the carpet — or illusion — of safety were about to be pulled from under him.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m wondering why you didn’t tell me about the other Boricio — the one standing beside you.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 4 — Mary Olson

  Dunn, Georgia

  Boricio’s Compound

  March 29

  sometime after midnight…

  Midnight was made for regret.

  Even before the world had whispered itself to nothing, it was always in the bony middle of midnight when Mary found herself hating every wrong turn she’d ever made. Tonight it seemed especially easy to hate her latest — agreeing to stay at Boricio’s compound despite every alarm bell inside her ringing in unison.

  It was another mistake; turning her back on her instincts, just like she had ignored them when surrendering to Desmond and Will by agreeing to stay at the Sanctuary.

  Staying at The Prophet’s compound was the worst decision Mary had ever made, and she paid for that poor decision with her life, and the lives of her children, both Paola and the new life inside her. Luca had somehow brought them both back, but Desmond wasn’t so lucky. Desmond, the father of the baby growing inside her, was dead and he was never coming back.

  Now, following Boricio to his compound was another massive mistake, and Mary knew it. The man was clearly some sort of monster. Coming with him was like agreeing to load Paola into a Volkswagen Beetle, then drive it at 90 into a tall brick wall.

  Boricio was obviously a man who hadn’t been truly loved a day in his life. All humans were capable of atrocity. It was simply a matter of falling into a sequence of events that would drive them from timidity to terror. When violent instincts weren’t properly channeled, they easily erupt. Most violence was the result of a mind fooling itself into believing internal pain came from something, or someone, else — a someone or something that deserved to be punished. And typically these people were able to cast anyone into the role of that someone which deserved their wrath.

  Mary came up with this theory on Boricio while still standing in the ashes of The Sanctuary and deciding what to do and where to go. She should have listened to her whisper. She would have, too, except Luca had just aged what looked like a thousand years to save her and her children; and she couldn’t tell him no.

  Luca insisted that Boricio was there to protect them, and that he would do what he was supposed to, whenever it was time to do it. Mary was used to the mystical I know what I know because I saw it in my dreams, science-fiction weirdness by now, but she didn’t buy the balderdash for Boricio, at least not enough to keep herself from sleeping fitfully through the night.

  Mary could eventually forgive what Boricio had done to Desmond, and could even forgive that he had helped the crazy cultists holding them prisoner. If that was what Luca wanted, it was the least she could do. But even if she could forgive, Luca couldn’t ask her
to forget what Boricio had done. Forgetting was impossible. Her Desmond was dead. How could she be expected to simply forget someone who had become so much of her light in such a bleak world?

  Luca said the boy inside Boricio was broken, at least until Luca had fixed him. But she didn’t believe that Luca had “fixed” Boricio at all. Once broken, one could never truly be fixed, Mary believed.

  When Mary pulled Luca aside to plead with him privately, and maybe convince him that he’d be better off going with her and Paola alone, the ancient child refused, insisting over and over that Boricio was no longer broken. He said it would take time for his healing to “show up.” Even if that were true, and Mary wasn’t convinced it was, Luca clearly didn’t seem to understand the danger Boricio posed until then.

  “Luca, we’ll take care of you,” Mary said. “Boricio won’t.” She squeezed his hands. “And you’re in no shape to survive out there on your own. That man will leave you the second he thinks you’re slowing him down.” She held the old child’s eyes, begging him to believe her. “That won’t take long to happen in your condition, and we would never, ever do that to you. Please,” she said. “Come with me and Paola.”

  Luca shook his head. “I can’t, Mary. I’m supposed to go with Boricio.” Then he repeated, “He will protect us. I know it.”

  Mary looked into Luca’s sad, empty eyes, bleached from their blinking youth. “There’s nothing I can say to convince you, is there?”

  Luca shook his head.

  And that was that.

  Mary could never let the 90-year-old boy who had saved her life ride into the sunset with a repugnant creature like Boricio by himself. But just because Mary had managed to avoid making the wrong decision, didn’t mean she made the right one.

  She hated how Boricio looked at her, with what seemed like a sour brew of perversion and hate. He hadn’t been much better when dealing with Paola. He wasn’t rude, exactly, nor had he ogled her. As foul as Boricio was, he was probably smart enough to understand that the wrong string of words, or perhaps the wrong look, would send Mary into a fury that was sure to end with one of them dead. But Boricio clearly didn’t want a kid around, and made no effort to shade his impatience.

  Luca knew Mary was upset, and was trying to sooth her in the only way he knew how. On the ride to Boricio’s compound, Luca leaned into her ear with a whispered promise that everything would be okay. Mary was doing the right thing. Luca needed Boricio around, and that meant they all did. Something had happened inside The Hole, and whatever that something was, it had altered things between the two men, and led Luca to trust the monster with a line of reasoning that had nothing to do with logic.

  Even if Luca weren’t anywhere near eight years old — and Mary had to believe his mind was mostly stunted — he couldn’t possibly have the lifetime’s worth of experience one earned from decades worth of navigating the best and worst of humanity.

  Mary had known plenty of raging assholes and con-men, from the days before she went freelance with her cards, where everyone in the copywriting offices carried a penis and the asshole personality to prove it, to the marketing department, where no one ever spoke without seeming as though they were pulling a long con.

  A large part of Mary felt as though Boricio was playing the long con on Luca, getting on his good side so he could somehow screw the ancient child somewhere down the road. She had no idea how or why, or what Luca could possibly offer a monster like that, but then again she had no idea what they had exchanged inside their minds.

  Mary was here now, and there was no turning back. She couldn’t imagine getting a decent night’s sleep until they were finally far away from Boricio and again on their own. Even then, without Desmond, Mary didn’t imagine she’d ever find a peaceful night’s sleep again.

  Resting well with one eye open was impossible, and there was no way in hell Mary trusted the predator not to sneak into her room, or her daughter’s, which was why she and Paola were sharing one room, and why Mary slept with a loaded gun under her pillow — just in case.

  She glanced over at Paola, as she had every few minutes since she set her cheek to the pillow, and continued to do until finally falling asleep, probably sometime between two and three in the morning.

  **

  Mary woke up several hours later to an especially bright morning sun beating its way through the blinds. She rubbed her eyes, then looked over to the empty spot in her bed, where Paola had been. Her heart instantly sank to the pit of her stomach as a flashback of the Drury Inn and all that happened there flooded her morning with acid.

  Gun in hand and no shoes on her feet, Mary bolted outside to find her daughter.

  Everyone but Mary was standing in a semicircle in back of the house. Paola and Luca were side by side, with Luca leaning on a cane, while Boricio stood by himself slightly to the side. Paola was holding a pistol and looking toward a row of bottles, lined on a precarious looking shelf that Mary imagined Boricio had set on the top of a wooden fence post which neatly divided the spacious back yard from the forest beyond.

  “Paola!” Mary screamed. “What in the world do you think you’re doing?”

  The girl’s finger pulled the trigger and thunder crashed through the early morning quiet, sending a flock of birds from distant trees. Mary looked again at the fence. Not a single bottle was broken, and she hadn’t woken to the sound of a shot, so Mary figured target practice had only just started.

  Paola didn’t turn her head toward her mother, just pulled the trigger two more times, then wrinkled her nose at the trio of missed shots. Boricio ignored Mary as well. He turned to Paola and said, “You’re giving your shots way too much thought. Don’t blink and don’t think. Just squeeze that fucker like you were popping a zit.”

  Boricio cackled. Mary was still walking from the house. “Don’t speak to my daughter like that,” she said, stopping just three feet from Boricio. “And she’s too young to be out here playing with guns.”

  Boricio laughed again. “Are you kidding, Mary May I?” He looked at her like she was the one who was fat with crazy. “Did you already forget about the early Fourth of July show back at the Sanctu-Fairy Fuck-all? Because if you want your little lamb to go bo-peeping into battle seconds from good and dead, well then, by all means keep on batting your pretty blind eyes.” He shrugged and said, “What’s one more corpse to me? And we’re not playing with guns — I’m teaching her, something your Desmond Do-Right might have thought to do before the figurative shit hit the literal fan.”

  Mary shuddered, remembering the pair of bodies — one a mutated looking thing that had been a man that Boricio had known and the other an apparent victim of said man — they found in the house when they first returned to the compound, and how Boricio dragged them out back like they were soiled laundry waiting for the machine. She still had no idea where they went, or what Boricio had done with them.

  Paola looked back at Boricio, her mouth hanging open in shock at Boricio’s ‘one more corpse’ comment. He grinned, then winked and shook his head with a light smile before turning back to her mother. “I prefer that all my compadres learn to be good little commandoes, and since right now I don’t see anything else pressing on our agenda, I’m not really seeing any reason not to hold a little morning session of Blowing Fuckers Heads’ Off 101.”

  “She’s my daughter,” Mary said. “And that means that I’m the one who gets to decide whether she’s old enough to handle a gun.”

  Boricio shrugged. “You know what?” he said. “You’re right.” He walked over to Paola and held out his hand, nodding at her to hand over the gun. She did.

  Boricio shoved the gun in his pants, then said with a grin, “Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your daughter grow? Like all the whores, on all their fours, lined all nice in a row.”

  He stood a few inches from Mary, while she tried not to cower.

  “Your daughter’s an awful pretty thing, Miss Mary,” Boricio continued. “You really want her out there without a gun? Yo
u think monsters are the only thing you’ve gotta worry about? Hell no,” Boricio shook his head, almost snarling, his voice settling somewhere between a growl and a hiss. “You’ve gotta worry about monsters like me, and worse than me, Miss Mary — men who didn’t even wait for the proverbial ‘grass on the field’ to ‘play ball,’ three weeks before Hallo-Fucking-Ween, and sure as the Great Pumpkin’s orange ball sack, ain’t gonna start caring now, ya’ dig?”

  Boricio pulled the gun back out of his pants and offered it to Mary, holding it by the barrel. But Mary kept her hands at her side, ignoring the invitation.

  Boricio said, “You sure you don’t want your baby girl to have this?” He raised his eyebrows. “Seems like you’d at least want to keep her armed against anything like me.”

  “If you so much as look at my daughter with an impure thought, I won’t need a gun to fucking kill you,” Mary said, eyes boring into Boricio’s.

  She grabbed the gun roughly from Boricio, then handed it gently to Paola.

  Boricio smiled a big grin, ignoring her threat.

  “Much better!” Boricio started clapping. “I need Team Boricio fit and ready for a fight if we expect to get our asses up and over to Mordor. Rip Van Creepy ain’t gonna do shit to help us, since unfortunately he’s used the last of his voodoo to bring you all back from Zombie Island, instead of Black Godzilla like I suggested, no offense to any of you estrogen carriers. I’m glad we can get started. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Boricio said, patting his stomach. “I’m gonna go inside so I can make my morning grunt sculpture.”

  Luca looked confused and said, “Huh?”

  Paola said, “He means he’s going inside to take a crap.”

  Luca smiled, then lightly laughed.

  Mary said, “Paola!”

  Boricio grinned, then turned his back to the crew and headed inside, slamming the screen behind him.

  Once Mary was certain Boricio was inside and halfway to the bathroom, she took Luca gently by the arm and turned him toward her. “Are you still sure about all of this, Luca?”