Yesterday's Gone: Seasons 1-6 Complete Saga

by Sean Platt

  That was a month ago; after they’d found the house and farm but before Will started acting weird. Luca thought Will was weird most times now, even though no one else really seemed to notice. Will hadn’t acted weird today, though. Will had been all business. Like the old Will who found him in California and flew him to Missouri.

  He’d come up the stairs a step behind John, just after Luca healed Scott. There was no mistaking the looks Will traded with Desmond. Neither knew what to think about John coming back, but one thing was certain – neither liked it. Luca overheard Desmond saying, “This scene seem a bit too well written for you?” Will barely nodded, but his eyes were burning.

  Luca moved his rook to the top of the board.

  John had been insistent:; They had to leave immediately. They weren’t safe. The bleakers who breached the gate were only the beginning, he said. More were coming, too many to count. It was easy to believe. The outside looked like burned food. The black bodies of the dead bleakers were in gross piles everywhere. Bullets usually ripped them to pieces because their bodies were so soft. All their arms and legs and insides on the ground looked like a nightmare exploded.

  John told them about a place in Alabama where he had been living for the last few months; a place where they would be welcome and safe, with plenty of food, supplies, and good people – some of whom had come to help them today. They would be well taken care of, he promised.

  Luca listened to everything John said, just like everybody else. He couldn’t tell what Desmond and Mary were thinking even though he tried to read their faces. Paola didn’t like it at all, he was sure of that. This was her new home, and she wouldn’t want to leave. It didn’t take Luca long to decide he didn’t like it at all. Listening to John talk about Alabama only made him suddenly miss Jimmy all over again. And worse, it got him thinking about Dog Vader.

  Just like the nightmare piles outside.

  Luca’s rook disappeared; Black Pieces had infiltrated the back row and put Luca’s queen in jeopardy.

  Paola told Luca that after John left she heard Will whispering to Desmond and her mom. Will said he’d been dreaming of the place John was talking about; said John showing up was odd, no doubt, but the place John was talking about seemed like the same place they were supposed to go. It’d been the place he’d been thinking about night and day for nearly a month but didn’t know how to get to. Luca protected his queen with his remaining knight, then waited for the Black Pieces to tell him their next move.

  Paola sounded scared when she told Luca what she overheard. Luca said not to worry, it was a good thing John had come back. They were going to be saved. Paola believed him, even if he didn’t even know whether or not he should believe in John himself. John made him think about Dog Vader an awful lot, and several of the voices agreed that John shouldn’t be trusted, which was funny since the Black Pieces rarely agreed on anything.

  Thinking about Paola made the funny feeling come back. Though, if Luca really thought about it, it had never gone away. Ever since healing Scott, and him getting old fast again just like he had back at the Drury Inn, the feeling had never left. But now it was stronger than ever. It used to feel like part of his body was waking up from sleep. Now it kind of hurt. Luca felt a need to touch himself, which is why he kept his hands at the edges of the chessboard.

  Luca thought of Paola, and for the millionth time wondered what she would have thought of him if they met under different circumstances. He imagined her standing a few feet in front of him, so pretty, with her dark hair and big eyes and lips. Her lips were usually ready to smile and loved to tell the jokes that made him laugh. Her lips were also fierce with her mother, but in a way that Luca liked. Paola said the sorts of things that Luca felt, but would have never been able to say to his own mom.

  He hadn’t thought much about her body before, but waiting for the Black Pieces to make the next move made Luca imagine the slight curve of her hip. And that made him feel the uncomfortable tingle below his waist again.

  He turned his attention to the chessboard - moving for the Black Pieces and then immediately moving for himself, getting his queen to safety again - when there was a slight knock on the door. Mary poked her head inside.

  Luca looked up, surprised. “Just checking on you,” Mary said behind her smile, laced with its usual little bit of sadness. “Are you coming out? Desmond told everyone you needed a minute, but the natives are getting restless. There’s seven cars ready to take us.”

  Mary glanced at the board and saw both sets of pieces. Luca could feel her eyes on his right hand hovering just above the Black Pieces’ queen, ready to make his next move; could feel her trying to ignore it. Luca suddenly realized how pretty Mary was, how much she looked like Paola. He felt the funny feeling again, followed by a wave of guilt.

  “The clothes fit okay?” she asked.

  “They’re a little big,” Luca said, “but not too bad.” He smiled awkwardly, trying to ignore the funny feeling, waiting for Mary to leave and hoping the Black Pieces wouldn’t get impatient and disappear again.

  There were plenty of grown-up clothes in the house. Even though Luca had grown several inches, he was much skinnier than everyone else and swam in the grown-up clothes.

  “I’m glad,” Mary said. “Let’s give it another five minutes, okay? We’re loading up now. We’re in the last car, the burgundy van at the end of the line.” Mary smiled once more, then shut the door behind her.

  Paola’s mom was harder to read than anyone else in Luca’s new family. She loved Desmond and had an overwhelming need to look out for everyone else, but the only thing she ever really thought about was protecting Paola. Other stuff mattered, but not as much. It reminded Luca of when he was 5 and the only thing he wanted to watch was Return of the Jedi. Other movies were good, too. And he liked them when they were on, but he was always thinking about the Ewoks and Luke’s final battle with the Emperor and his dad, Darth Vader.

  Luca moved for the Black Pieces, then quickly made his own move to keep the game going so the Black Pieces wouldn’t have to wait.

  Luca closed his eyes and waited for the Black Pieces, but they seemed to have disappeared. Luca called out in his mind but heard no response.

  Luca wasn’t sure what to do. If the Black Pieces were done playing, he could go downstairs and get going. Maybe they would finish later. But if the Black Pieces came back and still wanted to play but Luca was gone, they would be mad. And that wouldn’t be good.

  The Black Pieces were usually nice. Luca had only seen them get mad twice before. The first time was back during February’s incident; the one Desmond promised they would never have to talk about. The second was earlier this morning, right before the bleakers came.

  When the Black Pieces got mad, they didn’t even act like the Black Pieces anymore. They acted like the Man in the Center instead.

  He couldn’t help but notice that he was just a couple moves away from checkmating the Black Pieces. Luca wondered if that was why they had disappeared. The Black Pieces hated to lose.

  The Man in the Center had been in Luca’s head ever since the Drury. The Man wasn’t the boss of all the other voices, but he seemed to always be in the middle.

  Luca scratched his head. This was always so hard, trying to figure stuff out and have it make sense.

  The Man in the Center was like the sun. The sun wasn’t the boss of the day, but if it didn’t come out, the day didn’t exist. The voices liked to tell him stuff, especially about Will, but Luca somehow knew they weren’t allowed to say anything without the Man’s permission.

  Except for the Black Pieces. Luca was pretty sure the Black Pieces were allowed to say whatever they wanted.

  The voices had told Luca a lot, but they hadn’t told him what he should tell the rest of his new family. He didn’t want to tell them anything, really. It would only scare them. And everyone was already scared enough. So, he would continue to wait. He could always tell everyone if it looked like they were about to step into any dang
er. Besides, Will knew everything already.

  The Black Pieces returned to the board.

  Luca moved the Black Pieces’ queen into his white rook’s square.

  Check.

  If Will wanted everyone to know, he would have told them. There was a good reason he hadn’t, Luca was sure. Will had to know that Luca knew, too. He would’ve seen it in the dreams. Hardly a night went by that they didn’t share the same dreams.

  Luca moved his king a square to the left, then moved the Black Pieces’ bishop.

  Check.

  Unless Paola, or anyone in his new family, was in danger, Luca would stay quiet. After all, Will knew the secret, the same secret the Black Pieces and The Man both knew.

  The secret they said would change everything.

  Luca realized he was trapped. He moved his king one final square to the left, two away from one of the Black Pieces’ more aggressive pawns.

  Checkmate.

  Six

  Boricio Wolfe

  Dunn, Georgia

  March 21

  6:29 p.m.

  Boricio, Charlie, and Vic roared down the highway in what Charlie had nicknamed “The Boriciomobile” a few minutes after it was first unveiled by Harry, their resident welder back at the compound.

  There couldn’t have been too many assholes left breathing who could do what Harry could do. When it came to tricking out cars, the fucker made the impossible possible, and did it with a shit-eating grin. He used to have a warehouse-sized garage in Houston, but his last customer picked up their custom Porsche Cayenne — iPad console freshly installed — on Oct. 14. Boricio was happy to make his acquaintance about two months after that. Harry had made it to Alabama with his own pimped-out Land Rover, but Boricio wanted something custom-made and Harry was happy to comply.

  Harry got started with a Ford Expedition chassis, then leaned on Boricio’s scribbles and profanity-filled instructions, followed by hundreds of hours of welding.

  Harry was building the first car they’d need; the one that was safe to travel in as a group. Now that it was finished, the real Boriciomobile was also being finished — built on the body of a beautiful, gloss-black BMW Z8 Boricio had brought back from a luxury dealer in Montgomery. Boricio spent a lot of the seconds when he wasn’t lamenting the lack of fresh, pink meat to think up new ways to make the Z8 cooler than anything that little bitch James Bond had ever driven. But until then, he’d stay slap happy with the current model Boriciomobile.

  The Boriciomobile was bulletproofed from head to toe and outfitted with side-mounted machine guns on each side. The car only had four homemade missiles in its rear launcher, but that was all they’d been able to make and enough to demolish anything in their way. And like they were playing an old game of Spy Hunter, the Boriciomobile had a built-in oil slick that dropped a thick layer of oil on the road behind the truck, giving any dumb shit dumb enough to follow a detour onto Fuck You Road. The Boriciomobile also had a smoke screen and spiked wheels; the only thing Harry said was a no-go were the caltrops. Boricio insisted Harry figure out a way to make the spiked metal motherfuckers launch from their built-in chamber in the Expedition’s side panel, even though Harry didn’t have the springs he needed. He worked on it for two weeks straight, but Boricio finally listened to reason once Harry told Boricio that, yeah, he could eventually figure it out, but it would delay him getting started on Boricio’s Z8.

  Boricio said, “Do the fuckers still drop?”

  Harry said, “Yeah. They’ll drop. Tear the tires behind you to shit.”

  “Well then,” Boricio winked, slapped Harry on the back, and laughed loudly. “Let’s call this project complete, fully gassed, and ready to drive 95 miles an hour to Fuck-All.”

  They’d been driving all day, searching for the gang of bitches who had robbed Boricio’s boys. Boricio wanted revenge, and hell if he wasn’t happy to get the fuck out of the compound for a hunt. And a group hunt at that! Boricio hadn’t really allowed the rest of the team to see the real him, the one that killed or fucked anything he wanted. The one that would scare the shit out of all of them except maybe Vic. If he ever allowed the fully unfiltered Boricio to be seen, he could have a hard time holding onto them all. And while he had originally intended to fly solo in the post-apocalypse, he was sort of enjoying this new role as leader. Plus, given enough time, they wouldn’t think twice about his predilections. Or so he figured.

  Tonight would offer him the opportunity to kill with unbridled glee and nobody would think twice. They were there for revenge, after all. And in the guise of revenge, Boricio could do whatever the fuck he wanted short of skull fucking a corpse. That might draw some odd looks.

  Boricio laughed when they found the truck and motorcycles parked in front of a warehouse, 17 miles east of his compound.

  “We’re heeeere,” he said to the passengers and took out his binoculars and surveyed the area.

  Shit.

  Boricio handed the binoculars back to Charlie. “We need to go.”

  “We’re not doing anything?” Charlie said.

  “What the fuck?” Vic shouted in the back seat.

  “Did you see those fuckers out there? Cocky as a bunch of bayou crocodiles, what with four guards standing in front of the warehouse in broad daylight. Must think themselves the Justice League. We could’ve popped those four fuckers into the ever-after without even getting out of the truck. But we ain’t got no idea what’s waiting inside. And I’d like to know what the hell four guards are waiting for. Makes me think they know something Boricio don’t. If we don’t know what’s in their playbook, we should probably just piss on the pages. So, let’s lay out what we do know: dumb shit fuckers usually don’t know how to get four, even when they’ve got two and two staring them in the titties. If we want them drinking, we’ve gotta give ‘em Cinco de Fucking Mayo in their backyard.”

  Vic and Charlie nodded. Even if they didn’t know exactly what Boricio meant, and they looked like they didn’t, they’d been with Boricio long enough to follow his lead. Fuck it. They would figure it out one way or another before shots were fired; that was all that mattered.

  Vic was a born hunter. Daddy gave him a .22 for his 10th birthday, and the giant fucker had been shooting into the trees ever since. The dude brought down his first deer before he turned 12; the bullet had struck home right between Bambi’s pretty little eyes, he’d said. That made his daddy proud. Unlike the rest of Team Boricio, Vic actually liked his old man, and in a way that made Boricio leave him alone. The other boys would’ve been heckled to death, talking about how they loved their daddies. But when Boricio had asked Vic if he swallowed his daddy’s spunk, or just spit it into a napkin like his baby brother, Vic looked at him with the same brand of boiling rage that washes the face of someone about to put a bitch six feet beneath the daisies.

  “How many you think are in there?” Charlie asked.

  “You ain’t scared, are ya?” Vic asked, laughing. “Shit, Boricio, maybe you shoulda made Charlie stay home instead of Callie.”

  “I’m not scared,” Charlie said. “Just trying to think of the best way to do this.”

  “Good point, Charlie Brown, which is exactly why we’re gonna liven this party up a bit,” Boricio said. “And nothing livens a party up like a few dozen uninvited party crashers. And I’ve got just the plan.”

  An hour later, Boricio and the boys were descending rapidly upon their designated sides of the warehouse, each behind the wheel of his own steel stallion: an old Honda Prelude, a new Honda Pilot, and a shiny, red Dodge Charger Boricio had a hard time not just taking back to the compound.

  With all three cars parked, they bolted back to the Boriciomobile, hit the alarms on the key chains, and waited as the sirens wailed.

  Two more bikers came outside to investigate the noise. One looked Hispanic and the other even darker. A half-black? That surprised Boricio; the group he’d seen on the bikes looked like skinheads who generally didn’t take to partnering up with brown people. Boricio look
ed through the binoculars. “Two shit smears added to party,” Boricio said. “Looks like we hit our minimum.”

  Boricio’s minimum, conveyed to Charlie and repeated to Vic, had been: No less than six dumb fuck bikers before we start shooting, got it?

  “Now?” Vic asked.

  Boricio nodded.

  Charlie was the first to pull the trigger, though only by a half second. His shot was good, hitting the biker closest to the door directly in the shoulder. He fell back as Charlie’s second bullet tore through the guard’s skull. Vic nailed three in a row, sending the two soldiers on the roof spiraling over the side before training his sights on the ground, clearing the fourth soldier before sending an unnecessary bullet into the fifth Charlie had already finished.

  “Well lookie who’s been learning to bull’s eye something besides Callie’s face,” Boricio said, slapping Charlie hard on the back. Charlie grunted and turned to the warehouse.

  Boricio had called dibs on “whichever fucker was stupid enough to talk into a walkie-talkie.” Vic and Charlie were silent as he took careful aim.

  Boricio pulled the trigger, and the walkie-talkie flew to the concrete, followed a second later by its handler. The scream was deafening as the team leader’s kneecap shattered, pooling the already bloody parking lot with a new, wider river of blood. Boricio pulled the trigger again, turning the guard’s hand into a sloppy slab of meat. Boricio started to laugh. “You see that fucker flapping like his hand was made of fish. That’s what happens to stupid fuckers who start shit they don’t know how to finish.”