by Sean Platt
“Whoa,” Wan said. “You OK?”
“Yeah, I’m … ”
And then Sullivan wasn’t fine.
**
Sullivan woke up lying on the ground. It was dark out. Waves sloshed nearby.
What the hell?
He sat up, head aching and dizzy. He sat on the shore — Black Island in the distance — still on Paddock Island.
The last thing Sullivan remembered was feeling tipsy after dinner, then slipping. Wan caught him.
Wan! Did he leave me here? Why?
“Hello, Mr. Sullivan,” Wan said from behind.
Sullivan turned. Wan stood behind him, as if he’d been waiting.
“Why are we out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“We were waiting for you to wake up, Mr. Sullivan,” Wan said. His voice was absent its normal giddiness, its normal matter-of-fact tone.
“What’s going on?” Sullivan asked, standing, still dizzy. “Did something happen?”
“Oh yes, something’s happened,” Wan said, stepping toward Sullivan as if in conspiracy.
Sullivan was confused, uncomfortable, wondering if the man was about to make a pass at him, or worse.
“You’ve been looking for me, Mr. Sullivan. I figured I’d come to see you.”
“What do you mean looking for you?” Sullivan realized that he wasn’t dealing with Wan, just as he said it.
Wan backed him toward the ocean, “You think you can hide from us, Sullivan? We have people everywhere.” It’s smiled. “You will be so much more useful to us in finding the vials.”
Sullivan’s foot hit the surf. He had two options: run around Wan, or turn and dive into the ocean. Swim away. He wasn’t sure if Wan, or Wan’s alien-infected body would overpower him in the water, where he’d be even more helpless.
Before Sullivan could move, Wan’s hand shot out and grabbed him hard by the neck. Sullivan brought his arms up, trying to break free from Wan’s grip. Wan’s hold was too tight — he lifted Sullivan to his dangling toes with superhuman strength.
Sullivan kicked, hard, into Wan’s chest, face, and arms — none of it affecting the infected man. Finally, Sullivan’s boot knocked Wan’s jaw loose. Wan screamed and dropped him.
Sullivan hit the dirt, then scrambled to stand. Before he got even three steps, Wan leaped on him, flipped him over, and shoved him into the ground, lowering his bloodied, broken face to Sullivan’s.
What was left of Wan’s mouth opened further, and the black alien fog poured from one maw, trying to enter another.
Sullivan gritted his teeth and twisted his neck, not allowing the thing to enter his mouth. He’d seen the aliens infect too many others.
It didn’t enter his mouth.
The alien poured into his nose and choked him with Darkness.
* * * *
EPILOGUE
October 19, 2011
The J.L. Harmon estate
Marina stared in disbelief as her father sat up in bed, rubbed his eyes, and looked at her, slowly blinking.
“Daddy?” she whispered, choking on both words and breath as she ran to his bedside, stopping short of throwing her arms fiercely around him, afraid she might hurt him.
He opened his arms and pulled her closer into a giant hug with surprising strength, especially for a man who had been dead for days.
“How?” she asked, “I thought you … ”
“Weren’t coming back?” he asked. “You didn’t believe me, did you?”
Marina pulled away to meet her father’s eyes, expecting him to appear wounded by her doubt. Instead, he smiled, “It’s OK, Honey, I might not have believed me either. How long have I been … gone?”
“Four days,” she said, sitting beside him on the bed, holding his hands and feeling the warmth flooding his flesh.
“Ah, so I was full of shit,” he said. “I said two days, didn’t I?”
Marina laughed, staring into his eyes, wondering how it was possible, how he’d come back. Again, she asked, “How?”
The doorknob rattled, followed by a knock. Dr. Phillips: “Mr. Harmon?”
Marina remembered the camera feed, watched not just by people on the Internet, but also by the people downstairs. They wanted to get into the room, probably run tests, find out what prophecy he’d been told to deliver. But first, Marina wanted — needed — to say what she’d almost lost the chance to say forever.
“Tell them to wait, please,” she begged.
“Hold on, Doc, give me a few minutes with my daughter.”
The doctor said nothing, probably slinking off with his tail between his legs.
Marina stood, went to the camera, and hit a button to stop the recording.
She then returned to her father, tears in her eyes, “I thought I lost you, Dad.”
“It’s OK, Honey, I’m back. I had to come back to bring the message from the Great All Seeing. Can you turn the camera back on?”
“Yes, but first I want to say some things I thought I’d never get a chance to say again.”
“OK.” he took Marina’s hands in his as she sat back on the bed. “Go ahead.”
“First, I want to say thank you for raising me after Mom died. I know you were scared, and it couldn’t have been easy to do alone. You did a helluva job.”
“Thank you,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes.
“And I’m sorry for any grief I gave you during my ‘wild years.’ And for all the horrible boyfriends I dated.”
“Even that Vinnie kid?”
“Especially Vinnie,” she said, smiling through an eye roll. “Ugh, he was such a jerk. Anyway, I also wanted to … ”
Suddenly her father’s eyes went spooked. Marina turned, expecting the door to have burst open behind them or something, but there was nothing.
Her father started shaking, his face burning red.
“Dad?” she said, sudden fear in an icy current through her veins. “Dad?”
He pointed up and behind her.
Marina turned, desperate to see what he was pointing at, but all she saw was the camera.
“Turn it on,” he said.
“Why?”
“Turn it on!” he shouted, his words collapsing into coughs.
She ran to the door instead, opened it, and screamed, “Doc! Something’s wrong with my dad!”
The doctor ran into the room, saw her father pointing, and saying, “Turn the camera on,” over and over between coughs.
The doctor, turned on the camera rather than running to her father.
“Help him!” Marina screamed.
Once the camera was on again, the doctor rushed to her father’s bedside, feeling his head.
“You’re burning up, Josh.”
Marina’s father ignored the doctor, pushed him aside, and stared at the camera with a gaze so severe it sent chills like snakes through her body.
“I’ve come back with a message,” he said, coughing into his hand. Blood sprinkled the sheets. Marina ran forward to try and help him, though she didn’t know what she could possibly do.
He pushed her aside, staring into the camera, intent on finishing his message, “The Darkness is coming. The Great All Seeing has showed me how close it is. Fix your Current now, for Darkness is coming to claim us.”
Her father coughed again, and more blood spewed from his cracked lips; the dark-red spatters were thick, relentless, a certain and too-colorful sign of a second death only so many seconds away.
“Doctor, help him!”
Her father began to violently shake, like a seizure amplified by an electric current through his entire body. He jerked his head back hard into the headboard, repeatedly, each time leaving a deeper, more sickening crunch.
“Daddy!” Marina screamed, throwing herself between the headboard and his head, trying to stop him from bashing his skull into squash.
But it was too late.
He slumped into Marina, looking up at her with wide, scared eyes. Blood gurgled from his mouth.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save them,” he said, though she had no idea who he meant by “them.”
Four days after passing for the first time, Josh Harmon died again in his daughter’s arms.
TO BE CONTINUED …
YESTERDAY’S GONE
::EPISODE 22::
(FOURTH EPISODE OF SEASON FOUR)
“Bullies”
* * * *
CHAPTER 1 — Boricio Wolfe
By the time Boricio realized what in the fuck was happening, he had a holy trinity of bullshit approaching at once.
Right in front of him, some gash of a waitress wielding a knife, yanking it from her apron like it was a pad and a pen and she was waiting for Boricio to snap for biscuits and gravy. A fat fuck who looked like a skinhead version of Ralphie May was swinging a machete like he was hacking sugar cane, and an Ichabod Crane-lookin’ cocksucker, whistling air with a crowbar.
Boricio stepped in front of Mary and said, “Trust me?”
Like she has any choice.
Her swallow was almost louder than her words. “I trust you.”
“Good, then stay the fuck back.”
Boricio charged off from Mary, headed for the fat fuck with the machete first. The fucker swung. Boricio ducked, falling hard on his ass in front of Ralphie May. He kicked up with his right leg and collapsed the fat fuck’s left knee, bringing him down in a scream. He dropped his machete, and Boricio grabbed it, and thrust the blade up into the fucker’s gut, twisting the handle as he wrapped his left hand around the asshole’s neck, picked the fat fuck up somehow, and spun himself behind Ralphie’s giant body just as the crowbar and knife both hit it.
The crowbar landed with a wet-sounding squish — awful enough to draw a smile on Boricio — as the knife hit his flesh with a sickening THUNK!
Boricio cried out, “Yee-haw!” from behind Ralphie, to let Mary know he was fine, then yelled, “Get behind the fagmobile!” meaning the Mini-Cooper, the closest car to Mary.
Even with a machete decorating his chest, Ralphie kept growling. Boricio stepped back, dragging the fat fucker behind him, still using his giant body for cover with surprising strength, then a few feet away pulled out the machete and plunged it back in, repeatedly until the fat fuck stopped squirming on the ground.
Boricio smiled at the remaining pair, daring a quick stare around the garage, more worried that someone else would step into their skirmish than he was about losing his life to either of the others, both still staring at Boricio with eyes as empty as any he’d ever seen.
He wanted to take out Ichabod next, but the waitress came on him faster than Boricio anticipated. He ducked under another whistle of her blade, this one slicing a hunk of his hair, sending it fluttering like a feather to the ground as he swatted the waitress’ hand with the machete, severing it at the wrist and delivering both it and her knife to the asphalt.
He turned toward Ichabod, plunged his machete straight through the wobbly gobbler’s heart, then froze when their eyes met. In an instant, Boricio was deluged with images, coming from the Ichabod fucker like a broadcast:
A man stared into the mirror, his eyes red and milky as he shoved the barrel of a Magnum under his chin — behind the curtain of a foot-long beard — and pulled the trigger, sending chum from his freshly opened skull into an arc of red slop, erupting from his head like a volcano onto the wall behind him as his vision turned black.
A woman leapt onto a baby carriage, opening her mouth like a shark to tear into a baby’s neck. A huddle of women yanked her away, but she gnashed and tore at them like an animal as they wrestled her to the ground.
A man screamed his way through a department store, flooded with shoppers, through the store’s bottom floor filled with shoes, up one escalator then another, and into a top-floor lingerie department, waving a hatchet and dropping bodies as he ran, until he was finally felled by a guard who lost his life leaping on top of the monster.
The atrocities were all connected, and each somehow strung to the bullshit before him. Boricio knew it as fact because the truth was bleeding from the trio’s connection and out of Ichabod’s eyes.
Boricio cried out again, this time in an icy fear he wasn’t used to, then stopped Ichabod from breathing with a twist of his blade, and pulled it out to give the gash of a waitress what she had coming.
Three more swings, then bodies lined the ground in a row.
“You OK?” Boricio called out to Mary.
She shook her head, peeking up from behind the faggot mobile, then timidly stepped out in front of it, shaking.
“What … happened?”
Boricio tightened his grip around the machete’s handle, sweating, his heart racing, and mind still more concerned about someone else joining the fray — good, evil, or otherwise — than anything else.
“I don’t know,” he glanced around, “but I’m feeling all sorts a shit that ain’t making sense.”
“What do you mean?”
Mary sounded more scared than Boricio had heard since the dead world. He swallowed, still looking around. Seeing nothing, he turned back to Mary. “I don’t know,” he said, searching for words, trying to explain. “It’s … ”
After too long of nothing, Mary said, “It’s what, Boricio?”
He swallowed again. “IT’S here.”
“What do you mean, ‘it’s here?’ What’s here?”
“No, Mother Mary, not it’s, IT’S: Whatever IT was we thought we left behind, IT’S back, here, on this world. And IT’s after us, sure as a second season of a show called, Rich People Fucking. The three of them,” he waved his machete at the bodies. Ichabod twitched, and Boricio plunged the machete into him again, like spiking a football. “They’re all connected … somehow … and they’re targeting us, as in you and me, or at least me.”
“How can you know that?”
“I just do.”
Mary looked like she was killing a scream. “So what now?”
“First,” Boricio said, “we’ve gotta get rid of these bodies.”
“How are we going to do that?”
Boricio laughed, a wicked, cracking guffaw. “Do I ask you how to make blueberry muffins?”
“No,” Mary said. “And I’d probably have to ask you anyway. Paola says I shouldn’t try to bake.”
Boricio pointed to a Chevy Tahoe with Utah plates. “That one, we’re gonna shove ‘em in the back for now.”
“What if the driver leaves?”
“Then we’re in more shit than the crap we’re in now, but we’ve got seconds to do something, sister, and not a lot of choices in our bowl. We need to buy time, but it ain’t cheap, and the price is climbing by the minute. We’ll stash the cadavers, go upstairs, grab the girls, and get the fuck out of this hotel. Fortunately, I don’t see any cameras here, so maybe we’re fine. I’ll get these stiffs to the Tahoe while they’re still soft, you make sure I’m not dripping. I’m counting on you to clean up after me.”
“With what?” Mary asked, sounding uncharacteristically helpless.
“You’ll figure it out.” Boricio reached down, flung the waitress over his shoulder like a bag of nothing, then went to the Tahoe, broke in — American cars were easy as fuck — and tossed her into the back. He went back for Ichabod, lifting the man like he, too, was nothing, then finally Ralphie May. The fat fuck was bloodiest and required Mary’s help.
After the bodies were stashed, she gestured toward Boricio, then to herself. “We can’t go in there like this, we’re covered in blood.”
“No shit, Watson,” he said, already making his way down a long row of cars, peering through windows one at a time until he found what he was looking for and helped himself inside the car, this time by breaking a window, then grabbed a suitcase from the back.
Two minutes later they were both changed and walking through the hotel, Mary in clothes that were way too big, and Boricio in clothes that were way too small. They matched, with Boricio’s small, purple shirt saying SOUL and Mary’s large one saying, MATE.
Mary said, “What if we run into the soul mates these belong to?”
“Then we’ll have to kill them for not knowing when shit’s stupid.”
Mary surprised Boricio by laughing.
A minute later Boricio slid his keycard into their room door and opened it wide. Parted halfway, Rose said, “I was getting worried … ”
Before she could finish her thought, Rose was looking from Mary to Boricio and back, calculating.
“I’ll explain everything on the way,” Boricio said.
Rose said, “On the way where?”
Paola, suddenly frantic, cried out, “Are you okay, Mom?” Then, “What happened?”
“Dealing with dead bodies wasn’t a part of tonight’s agenda,” Boricio said, like he was talking about emptying garbage, “so we need to get the fuck out of here 15 minutes ago.”
“Bodies?” Rose said, “What are you talking about? What’s going on, Boricio? Are we in danger?”
Boricio waved his hands like it was nothing.
“You watch too much TV. This ain’t nothing. We’re not disposing so much as fleeing.”
“Fleeing?”
“Tell her it’s okay,” Boricio said to Mary.
Mary said, “It’s not, okay,” then turned and set her hand on Rose’s shoulder. “We’ll explain everything as soon as we can, but right now, Boricio’s right. We have to get out of here and don’t have much time.”
Boricio looked over at Rose, and for the first time realized he was moving too fast to think on shit proper. His lady’s bottom lip was quivering, and though he hated to admit it, his Morning Rose was shaking like a dog in the rain.
Boricio stopped, forcing himself to think smarter, stronger, and more for her. He turned to Rose, gently planted one hand on each of her arms, then turned her toward him. “You trust me, Baby?”
She nodded, slow but there.
“Have I ever let you down?”
After a second’s hesitation that Boricio didn’t like, she shook her head.
