Yesterday's Gone (Season Four): Episodes 19-24
Page 21
“Just … please,” Luca said, giving his all to not losing a whimper. “I don’t want to fight.”
Johnny stepped toward Luca, eyes wild and filled with something between rage and glee that chilled Luca to his bones. “Come on, Luca. Show me your new skills. I want you to hit me.”
“No,” Luca said.
Johnny smacked him hard across the face.
Luca stumbled backward, his left cheek on fire, though he dared not touch it. He balled his fists, thumbs out, and raised them in front of his face, watching Johnny approach. Unlike Trevor, Johnny wasn’t bouncing or weaving or moving his fists like a boxer. He just stood still, staring at Luca, laughing.
“Come on, you little bitch. I said I want you to hit me!”
Luca stayed frozen in indecision, trying to determine what he should do. He was surrounded by Johnny and his friends. Trevor met Luca’s eyes, giving him that same intense stare he gave him during their “training.” Luca shook his head, a silent condemnation for tricking him.
Luca couldn’t believe he’d been stupid enough to fall for Trevor’s scheme. But he didn’t have time to feel stupid or sorry for himself now: he had to fight for his life.
“Come on!” Johnny said, this time shoving Luca back.
Luca stumbled, but stayed on his feet, thinking he should have swung at Johnny when the boy had reached out to push him.
“Come on, Faggot!” Johnny taunted.
Luca kept his fists in front of him, not wanting to make the first move. Some part of him was hoping if he didn’t initiate the fight, maybe it wouldn’t happen.
Maybe he could still walk away unharmed.
Johnny moved like lightning, his fist striking Luca in the center of his chest, and sending him to the ground gasping for air.
On his hands and knees, Luca reached up and clutched at his chest, as if he could somehow will air back into his lungs. He felt like he was going to die right there, surrounded by bullies. He remembered how Johnny had crushed a rabbit to death. Would he, could he, do the same to a person? Maybe rabbits were just the start for a monster like Johnny Thomas.
Luca finally caught his breath and stood as the kids around them began to chant, “Fight, fight, fight.”
Luca’s heart pounded in his chest, every hair on his body seeming to stand on end, as an overwhelming sense of doom tightened around him.
Johnny moved in to swing.
Luca dodged, managing to bring his fist around to a wallop at the back of Johnny’s skull.
Yes!
Johnny stumbled forward, grabbed the back of his head, then turned to Luca, screaming.
Whatever tiny victory Luca might have felt evaporated into Johnny’s bellow. Their eyes met, and Luca knew in an instant:
He’s going to kill me!
Luca turned to run.
He made it maybe five steps before Johnny tackled him from behind, wrestled him to the ground, and pulled him into a vicious choke hold, twisting Luca around so his belly was facing the dark sky. Luca imagined one of the other kids rushing forth with a knife or something, looking to slice his belly open and leave him to die.
Luca screamed, desperate to wrangle free. Johnny’s arm twisted around Luca’s neck harder, squeezing tight. Luca kept trying to break free, reaching up to pull Johnny’s arm off and digging his nails deep into the bully’s flesh, trying to hurt him so bad he’d have no choice but to let go.
Johnny grunted in Luca’s ear, “I’m gonna kill you, you little bitch.”
He squeezed tighter, despite Luca’s fingernails now drawing blood.
Luca flailed, kicked, and elbowed back at Johnny’s face, trying to break free. Nothing worked. Johnny’s leg wrapped around Luca’s, pinning him in place.
Luca looked up at the others, pleading with his eyes. “He’s going to kill me. Help!”
Surely, they don’t actually want me dead!
But maybe they did — their eyes were glazed over, like wolves watching a meal stumble into sight.
Luca met Trevor’s eyes, pleading. Surely, the boy wasn’t faking everything. Someone couldn’t pretend to be that nice only to be so cruel, could they?
Please, Trevor!
Trevor turned from him, as if too ashamed to see what would happen next.
Luca gasped for breath as Johnny’s vice-like grip tightened on his neck. Luca was certain death would find him in seconds; he thought of his parents and sister, how he would never see them again.
Something flashed through his mind — memories that weren’t memories that he’d dreamed: the car crash, his family dying, and the old man, Will, who adopted him. And then there was more … a sickness that wouldn’t go away after his family left him.
The sickness that sent him to the hospital.
Then Luca was cured. His brother had asked the doctors to use this weird, blue, glowing vial. Then in the vision, dream, or whatever it was, Luca writhed on the floor, choking, hoping that each of his breaths wouldn’t be his last. Finally, Luca was better. Better than better, able to teleport, away from danger or sadness or lonely, and into … places. Then his brother … Boricio was his name … asked him for a favor.
To go and get another one of the vials.
He needed it to save his girlfriend.
But the old man, Will, wouldn’t let him.
So Luca did, and then …
The vision finished, and Luca was back with Johnny Thomas’s hands circling his neck, convinced that if he didn’t break free, he’d be dead. Memories would come true if he let them, if he didn’t get up — now!
Urgency and anger surged through Luca like fire. It crackled in his veins and nearly exploded, bursting from his body, thrusting him out and away from Johnny’s hold. Luca stood upright, staring down at the bully, whose eyes had gone wide with surprise.
“What the?” Johnny Thomas said, jumping to his feet, then falling backward.
Luca barely registered the bully’s surprise, as some primal almost other part of Luca took control. Luca’s eyes seized on the dirt, and a tree branch a few feet away, then blazed toward it so fast, Johnny could barely track his movement.
Johnny had no chance to prepare a defense.
Luca seized the branch, flipped it so its sharp end was pointed out, then brought it forward, driving it through Johnny’s gut.
As the makeshift spear pierced him, Johnny’s eyes went even wider. He gasped through his final breaths, blood spurting from his mouth. Luca met his eyes, then drove the spear deeper, doing as much damage as he could to Johnny’s internal organs.
Screams raged around Luca as the other three kids took off, fear palpable and fueling Luca’s rage. From somewhere deep inside, something Luca couldn’t recognize, and didn’t know existed until it was screaming inside him, demanded that Luca answer as it surfaced to take full control, mind and body.
They can’t leave here alive.
Kill them.
Kill them all.
Luca obeyed.
* * * *
CHAPTER 7 — Paola Olson
There was something … off … about the man Steven.
Paola felt something rising inside her, both as he stood in the doorway, and after he left. It lingered in the room like a rotting stench.
She turned from her mom to Marina, then to Rose, none of who seemed to notice anything odd about the man. Paola didn’t want to be the only one to say anything, so she didn’t. She turned back to Marina and nodded as she settled her back into the fabric and waited for the doors of the machine to close.
As the doors sealed and Paola felt the silence start to grow heavy, a small panic swelled inside her.
Calm down, calm down. It’ll be fine.
Paola decided to count down from 100, just like she’d been doing since she was a small child, exactly like her mom had taught her. She didn’t want to be scared like a child. She wanted to find a confidence befitting her new body, rather than the mind that was still so comparatively young.
Am I thinking older?
The Capacitor whirred, the air feeling as if it were somehow sparking to life with an energy. She thought of a microwave and hoped the machine wasn’t about to cook her.
Don’t be silly. It’s completely safe. Rose used it, and she’s fine.
Paola’s body rattled, harder than she expected, and banged her back against the machine, shaking her from the inside out: throat humming, hair feeling on fire, tips of her toes feeling like ice; shocks of trauma coiled her ankles and legs, pounding Paola’s body with a crackle so sharp she couldn’t tell whether it was filled with hellish heat or arctic freeze.
Crackles snapped and sputtered up Paola’s body until they sizzled at her shoulders.
Something’s wrong!
I’ve gotta get out!
She wanted to scream but couldn’t. The darkness inside the tube went suddenly bright, filling Paola’s eyes with more stars than the sky, pinpricking ebony around her. Black got blacker, bright got brighter, and the machine’s whir turned into something like a scream.
Paola wanted to meet it with a bellow of her own, but still nothing bled from her mouth but a horrible mocking hush. She tried to reach her hands up to bang on the tube, but her hands disobeyed Paola as surely as her mouth.
Surely they knew she was trying to cry out, they had to know she was dying. Paola expected the doors to fly open but they didn’t. She pictured herself collapsing into her mother’s wide, parted arms, but her coffin stayed sealed.
Instead, time turned to tundra, and Paola felt a familiar darkness slither inside her.
The same Blanket of darkness that had claimed to itself as her father before claiming her mind outside the Drury. The same darkness that had nested itself inside her, refusing to leave until Luca — a boy she didn’t yet know — pulled her from the horror.
The Blanket was back.
This time, the undiluted blackness oozed from the pores of a horrible shape that hovered before her, shifting between the dripping darkness and the man who had been standing in Marina’s doorway, just before the machine’s doors sealed Paola inside.
“What are you doing here?” The Blanket demanded.
Its voice was dark, heinous, horrible, not quite a voice, more like a rasp of thunder echoing through the tube, caroming against metal walls with a menacing reverb. Paola didn’t know if she was inside the machine or her mind, but wherever she was, The Blanket had followed to swallow her everywhere.
The world changed, and The Blanket dragged her back to where she’d been before, into the endless hallway past the Drury’s kitchen and out onto the neverending road and flattened landscape, over the small gray hills at the front to the larger ones in back, toward what might have been forever, tugging her to the charcoal mountains under churning clouds of cruelty.
The thunder repeated, “Why are you here?” Its voice echoed in ripples around her.
Paola tried to fight, but felt helpless.
Why won’t the doors open?
Like before, The Blanket draped her face and threatened to eat her until Paola’s memories were molecules belonging to it. Like before, Paola knew death was seconds away.
The Blanket hovered above her, eyes red and lips curled into a snarl. Its skin started to shift as if a thousand bugs were crawling beneath it, changing its face, first to a bald Boricio, then into The Prophet, and finally, into John, Paola’s old neighbor.
With endless nothingness around her, Paola tried to run, but just as sound wouldn’t come from her mouth, motion wouldn’t propel her legs.
Finally, she felt lava in her throat; the heat seemed to make words.
“What do you want from me?” she cried out through déjà vu.
The Blanket laughed, chortles like flame licked Paola’s skin. She cried out for Luca, knowing he was her only hope.
If she couldn’t find him, all would be lost.
Not just her body and sanity …
… but mind and body for all of the world.
A horrible vision, worse than The Blanket, swung like a curtain in front of her eyes, displaying the plague as it spread like butter across the Earth’s bread, swallowing all as it soured the landscape and turned everything into an endless sea of bleakers — just as it had before, on the world that could no longer breathe. And then the vision was gone, replaced by the broken landscape ahead.
Paola cried louder for Luca.
The world flickered, and The Blanket began to flap against a cold wind which pushed it farther above her, threatening to take it away into the swirling clouds, which were alive with crashing blue lightning.
Paola felt its anger as it tried to overcome the wind and reclaim its hold.
A royal blue crackle of sparks surrounded her body, dancing to the machine’s whir which she could hear even if it was naked to her eyes.
And then she saw it, a light ahead — a bright whiteness at the end of a long endless brick path ahead of her.
Luca!
She ran toward it, along the long, winding path that stretched into infinity, toward what had to be the boy — it was so, so wonderfully bright — as The Blanket surrendered its chase, thrashing in anger behind her, venting Its rage at having been bested, doing all it could to keep her frightened, though she knew it was only for show: churning clouds and raining acid, the barbed grass swaying from both sides, each blade reminding her it could bite.
The Blanket no longer had shape, losing ITS form to the white.
Then, The Blanket got blacker and meaner, determined not to lose.
The blue sparks lost some of their blue as IT tried to curl inside Paola’s nostrils and seep into her eyes, bleeding into the girl’s pores like backward sweat.
“Luca” was a wisp from her lips as the white fought to keep Paola alive.
* * * *
CHAPTER 8 — Luca Harding
Luca wasn’t sure where he was, or how he got there, but the sky was ugly and black. He was somewhere in the woods, naked in a stream, washing blood from his body.
Whatever had taken his mind from him, and turned him into a killer, felt like it was gone, leaving Luca alone to deal with an aftermath of fear, guilt, and confusion.
“What have I done?”
Luca whispered over and over to no one, scrubbing so much blood from his skin. He vaguely remembered what he had done: killed them all — Johnny, Trevor, Gus, and Kiyor. It was their blood staining his body. But it was as if he had seen the murders from the eyes of another, watched as it happened, rather than making it happen himself. He heard their screams in his ears, but it was as if the screams were TV, rather than Luca making the show.
Like someone else was playing Transformers, and he was the toy.
What happened after that, Luca couldn’t remember. But it seemed late outside, and his parents were probably worried sick. And there was no forest by his house. The only forest Luca had ever seen was the one where they went to for camping in the San Gabriel Mountains every summer. He had to get home and tell Mom and Dad everything; maybe they would understand what he didn’t. Luca’s parents loved him, and if anyone could make this somehow better, it was them, and maybe Anna.
Luca finished washing blood from his clothes, then put them back on, soaking wet, before starting to walk, hoping to leave the forest he never should have been in, so he could find a familiar landmark that might help him find his way home.
He walked for a long time, as icy wind bit his skin, through his soaking clothes and freezing scalp until he finally stepped out of the woods and into his neighborhood as trees disappeared behind him.
Most of the houses still had light inside their windows, so Luca didn’t think it was too late in the night. That meant his parents should still be up. He was in so much trouble already for whatever had happened — he would probably lose all of his Transformers and Legos, plus TV for the rest of his life — that being up past his bedtime couldn’t make it worse.
What if they don’t know it was an accident
, and I go to jail forever?
Luca stuck to the shadows, avoiding streetlights and alternating between sidewalk and road. He wished he was invisible. He didn’t think that anyone had seen what he’d done, but people would probably know he was guilty of something as soon as they saw him. Luca was never good at hiding stuff he wasn’t supposed to hide.
His legs were achy, and he shivered nonstop, teeth chattering by the time he finally found his block. As Luca rounded the curve, and saw his home six houses away, he froze on a crack in the sidewalk, staring at the glow of flashing red and blue lights illuminating the street and windows of the houses and cars on the bend.
He slowly approached, peering past the lights as his heart pounded, almost as fast as his chattering teeth. There were police cars, at least three that he could see, outside his house.
They’re looking for me! They know I did it.
Luca’s family was so close, and yet never felt so far.
There was no way he could go home. The police would grab him, take him away, and throw him in jail. Probably forever. Then he would never see his family again. Luca slunk back into the shadows, safe in the dark under overhanging trees, watching his house, and searching for any sign of his family.
But they were all inside, with the police.
Suddenly, a light went on behind Luca, and a woman’s voice, one of his neighbors, though he wasn’t sure who, said, “Luca?”
Instead of turning, he ran as fast as he could.
**
Luca wasn’t sure how far he’d run, or how far he kept walking after his legs were too achy to race. He was cold, in pain, and felt like he might die if he didn’t find a warm place to rest.
Luca had no idea where he was walking, only that he had to put distance between himself and the police who were probably definitely looking for him. He wasn’t sure about his next step. Maybe he could find his way back home tomorrow, and the police would be gone.
That seemed like a good idea.
But for now, he had to keep walking.