Yesterday's Gone: Seasons 1-6 Complete Saga

by Sean Platt

  It could feel the man’s rage burning inside, could see his primitive thoughts playing themselves out in his stupid brain. He was angry at his ex-wife. So angry he could hardly pay attention to his insipid film.

  He thought only of violence; all the things he wanted to do to the “lying, fucking bitch.”

  Yes, he will make an excellent acquisition.

  It looked over to the old woman again. She wouldn’t notice if It removed Its clothing and proceeded to shit in the aisle’s center.

  Humans were so easily placated.

  It opened its mouth, allowing part of Itself — just a wisp, so small she might not have noticed even if she had been paying attention — to float out and then over the seat in front of It.

  The Darkness crept into the man’s mouth so subtly he hardly noticed.

  Then, in seconds, It infiltrated the man, burrowing deep inside. Infecting him.

  The man was just one of 300 so far.

  But it wouldn’t be long before It had an army at Its disposal.

  Then, It would find Luca.

  To Be Continued

  In Yesterday’s Gone: Season 4

  Author’s Note

  Welcome to Season Three of Yesterday’s Gone.

  We’d like to begin by thanking you, the reader, for making this series such a success!

  When we started this story last summer, it was an experiment in serialized fiction — an experiment we hoped would work — but an experiment nonetheless. We mentioned our influences in prior author’s notes, and why we wanted to do serialized fiction, and how now seemed like the time for serials.

  But we weren’t certain how well serials would work.

  We’re thrilled to say that thanks to you, we’re now able to write fiction full time — which was merely a dream this time last year.

  You supported Yesterday’s Gone, plus our other serials, ForNevermore and WhiteSpace.

  Thank you!

  While we’re able to make a modest living from our writing, we’ve not signed any book or movie deals, or anything else that would eliminate the stress from our weekly production or turn our business model into a certainty. We’re working hard to create the kind of work that gets people talking, like 50 Shades of Grey. Once that happens, we’ll be able to write with the confidence that comes with knowing we can make a living from our stories for a while.

  We are so close, yet still so far.

  BREAK-OUT SEASON!

  Season Two of Yesterday’s Gone was the season that showed us we had something special, though.

  More readers were finding us. Daily e-mails started pouring in, asking when Season Three would start. And we started getting our first haters! You know you’re doing something right when the haters start hating.

  People were suddenly paying attention to our story. And we felt pressure not to drop the ball! This season combines our lessons learned from Seasons One and Two of Yesterday’s Gone, plus the first seasons of WhiteSpace and ForNevermore, so that we could bring you the perfect blend of character, scares, action, pacing, and, of course, our WTF cliffhangers!

  Like LOST, we’ve accumulated many questions over the previous 12 episodes. This season answers the question: What happened on Oct. 15?

  We’ll also be answering many more questions and connecting the dots of many of the mysteries. The main storyline for Season Three is our favorite so far.

  OUR GOAL

  While we haven’t yet “made it,” we’re on the right path. You’ve told us in sales, reviews, and e-mails.

  We’re still working writers and writing our asses off, sticking to the goal we set for ourselves in January — to release a new book every week in 2012 — either an episode of our serialized stories, or a short story.

  We want to make 2012 the year of the serial!

  And thanks to you — it might just happen.

  Thank you for taking a chance on a couple of indie authors and allowing us into your heads to tell you our weird, little tales each week.

  Please enjoy, and remember, every review matters.

  Sean Platt &

  David Wright

  July 2012

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: Sean Platt

  Hard to believe it’s been a full year since Dave and I first decided we wanted to write a serial. Actually, it’s been nearly four years since we first decided we wanted to write a serial, and more than three since we first tried. It’s been one year since we took our first giant step toward getting it right with Yesterday’s Gone.

  Late last summer, with the possibilities now present with e- publishing, we decided we wanted to give the serialized fiction model a go. We were coming off of several years’ worth of blogging, a mind-numbing online sport that requires a relentless sort of write-your-face-off mentality to do it at all, let alone do it well.

  In addition to blogging, I was ghostwriting a lot; writing approximately 42 million words per month, or at least that’s how many words it felt like as my best friend and wife, Cindy, rubbed the knots from my fingers each weekend.

  Despite the brutality of the pace, I never really minded it. Loved it, actually.

  I like writing fast because I feel like it’s too easy to let your ideas linger otherwise. I don’t believe that creativity is finite, or something that can be used up. That well is bottomless. We live each day, and that means that capturing our thoughts and turning them into stories through the alchemy of the keyboard can keep that well from drying.

  The more you write, the more ideas you have; the more ideas you have, the more you can write; the more you write, the easier it gets to articulate those ideas.

  And so the circles spin.

  I never minded the pace, but I did mind that I was writing seven figures’ worth of words each year, with too few raining on work that I loved.

  Once Dave and I decided to revisit the serial idea that we started (and fell short) with writing Available Darkness online, we needed to develop a concept. We both love post-apocalyptic fiction, and felt that the open world rules of the genre would allow us to make things up as we went along, thus allowing us to get started almost immediately.

  Ready, fire, aim.

  Beyond our setting, we also needed a model. Kindle was a new medium, and we didn’t want to write the same sort of books we would have written before it existed. We thought it would be a good idea to shake things up, so we ignored convention and modeled our first series after scripted television, with LOST being one of our biggest inspirations.

  We used words like “episodes” and “seasons” as a shorthand broadcast to our readers that would help them immediately understand where we were coming from and where we were going – let them know what sorts of stories we were planning to tell so we could sell tickets to the right sort of adventurer.

  We had the name, premise, and a giddy green light, with each of us at our keyboard and a week to deliver our side of the story.

  The first episode of Yesterday’s Gone was written in the dark, neither of us having a clue what the other had written until pages were traded. Dave started with his three characters: Ed, Brent, and Charlie, and I started with mine: the Warson Woods Crew, Luca, and Boricio.

  Boricio wasn’t premeditated as the force of nature he’s become.

  I knew only that I wanted a wild card. Boricio was born when his feet hit the cold wooden floor with the words, “Well, this is some beer-battered bullshit.” The line came to me while I was in the Think Tank (the bathtub) a day or so before I sat to write, and the name Boricio was born from my son, Ethan. He made it up based on a kid in his grade named Mauricio. I’d loved the name Boricio for about a year, and figured it would find a home eventually.

  Even our most loyal readers probably notice that the first episode of Yesterday’s Gone is the roughest of everything we’ve written. But I love it for its raw edges. After that episode, we couldn’t get away with ready, fire, aim anymore – we owed it to our readers to plot, and plot we did.

  One thing was nonnegotiable: Each sea
son of our work must improve upon the season before. We want each of our series to be exceptional, and each series to substantially improve from season to season, building on what came before while losing none of what made it what it was. More Breaking Bad than LOST, which had a few hiccups. That improvement from year to year is one of, if not the most important things, to us as creators.

  Season One started as an adventure, and it was a helluva fun ride. As was Season Two. But it wasn’t long before some of our story threads began to require our immediate attention, threatening to tear the tapestry we were trying so hard to sew.

  LOST wasn’t just one of our favorite shows, it also happened to be one of our best teachers. We both love that show, but also appreciate it for the many lessons it taught us – not just with what to do, but what not to do.

  Perhaps only diehard fans of the show are aware of the “Hurley Bird,” but the Hurley Bird for Dave and me was almost like a North Star in our creative sky.

  In the second season finale of LOST, just when the show was going from the coolest show on TV to possibly my favorite show ever, one of the characters, Hurley, is crossing the mysterious island with a small handful of the show’s main characters. Just shy of their destination, a bird swoops in front of his path, crying, “HURLEY!”

  For the next four years, many fans waited for an explanation to this singular event.

  Alas, an explanation never came.

  Yesterdays’ Gone was not allowed to have any Hurley Birds.

  As we entered our third season, it was essential that we wrapped our loose threads, closed our open loops, and made sure that those readers who stuck with us for two seasons had all their questions answered.

  All Hurley Birds must be shot from the sky.

  Yet, because we started without any definitive plan as to our ultimate number of seasons, we started snagging our story on simple questions such as how much of our story to tell, and when precisely to tell it. We didn’t want to drag the story a page past its welcome, nor did we want to leave the world of Yesterday’s Gone before we were ready.

  We all have our favorite shows that we would have loved that much more if they’d only had the sense to end a season or two earlier. Yesterday’s Gone would not be one of those shows.

  We started Season Three with the loose idea that we would write Yesterday’s Gone for four seasons. That was the number Dave was happiest with. I wanted five.

  We knew how we wanted Season Three to end, but had a ton of heavy lifting to neatly tie a bow around the third season. Our story was slightly scattered, and we had to start threading elements so we could pull them into something tight enough to be unforgettable.

  We spent the first several episodes of this season drawing everything closer, conscious of how much story we wanted to deliver, how many questions we wanted to answer, and how important it was to give everyone a satisfying conclusion.

  No Hurley Birds.

  We were so focused on shooting the Hurley Birds from our story, that by the time we got to the final two episodes, their bodies were littered all over Black Island, and floating in the ocean around it.

  This presented us with a brand-new problem.

  WHAT NEXT?

  With so many of the original mysteries now resolved, stretching the series into a fourth season would seem ludicrous, an add-on, unnecessary; stealing time from our readers and ourselves, and delivering redundancy when we could be delivering a different story altogether. After all, Dave and I write and publish a new story each week — there’s no sense in delivering something that doesn’t serve our readers, and us, 100 percent.

  As we neared the end of this season, we found ourselves with a phenomenal idea — a way we could finish our time in the world of Yesterday’s Gone while serving all masters.

  We know exactly how we plan to end the Yesterday’s Gone saga. And while it’s great to have an end in mind, what matters most is how you travel. For us, it’s always been about the characters and the adventure of it all. And we weren’t ready to leave this world. But staying inside without a story to serve us is like staying a houseguest after you’ve been asked to leave.

  We appreciate readers who gave us their time through the first three seasons, but wanted no one to ever feel like they had too many unanswered questions, so we’ve crafted a scenario that, we believe, does all things well.

  But, in order to continue the series, it must do a few things moving forward.

  It MUST be a different story. We don’t want to repeat ourselves. We believe we’ve come up with a great idea that keeps some of the characters you’ve come to know but allows you to see their worlds differently and to experience a new phase of the tale.

  It MUST be easier for you to return to. Season Three by its nature was a complicated beast. We had a lot of dots to connect and mysteries to resolve. And the shifting timelines and alternate universe characters made things a bit confusing to wade through. You had to remember details from early on in the series. While we included Author’s Notes and new chapter headings which stated when something happened, (before or after) “the event” on Oct. 15, it was still complex.

  But we don’t want you to feel like you’ve gotta remember everything that happened before in order to return for Season Four. Yes, it will make the book more enjoyable, but we’re writing it in a way that’s friendly to newcomers and for those who don’t remember every detail of the story so far.

  We want you to be able to jump right in, whether you read the whole series or are just starting it, and enjoy it.

  So, we’re making what comes next simpler through a more standard timeline, and without all the alternate versions of people running around. The story will still be epic, but it won’t require you to keep your own set of notes just to follow along.

  The only problem, and it’s actually a good one to have, is that we can’t tell the rest of the tale in just one season.

  So we’re taking Yesterday’s Gone to six seasons.

  THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

  In other words, if you only wanted to stick around to see what happened on Oct. 15 and see the original mystery resolved, this season should leave you satisfied. If, however, you’re excited to return to the world of Yesterday’s Gone to see what happens next, you’re gonna love that even more.

  We’re giving to our readers exactly what we would want for ourselves.

  This is my proudest creative accomplishment of 2012 so far, and I’m already looking forward to Season Four next summer.

  In the meantime, if you enjoyed Yesterday’s Gone, please try one of our other series on for size. We’re just now getting started on revisiting the world of Available Darkness. In August, we’ll be rewriting the first book as a proper season, using what we’ve learned in Yesterday’s Gone to tinker with the book without changing actual events that happened. We wanted to make the book better without punishing people who already read it. Then we’re going into Season Two of Available Darkness, which we’re excited to finally return to.

  WhiteSpace is our most tightly plotted series to date, a sci-fi paranoia-laced character-driven story that some readers have said would be right at home on AMC. ForNevermore is a wonderfully dark fantasy, and the second season I’m looking most forward to seeing. And our anthology series, Dark Crossings, is a home run for anyone who grew up loving The Twilight Zone, or sees the narrative beauty of the short story form.

  Thank you so much for reading.

  I look forward to a lifetime of writing for you.

  Sean Platt

  Season 4

  ::Episode 19::

  (FIRST EPISODE OF SEASON FOUR)

  “The Darkness Is Coming”

  Prologue

  Eva Flores

  Duncanville, Ohio

  September 2013

  Eva fastened her 1-year-old daughter into the jogging stroller, kissed Maria on the forehead, and looked up to see the other mothers in the Mommy and Me Pound the Pounds group waiting at the head of the jogging trail that wound through
their neighborhood park.

  It was a beautiful day, the sun still low in the sky and not yet blazing as it had been through most of summer. A cool breeze blew through the park’s many elms and buckeyes, blowing Eva’s long, dark hair into her eyes. She stopped for a moment, grabbed a purple scrunchie from her wrist, pulled her hair back, then wrapped it in a loose ponytail as she continued toward the path.

  “Hey, sorry I’m late,” Eva said as she met the group: 12 women and their children, most with one, except the blonde mom with twin boys. The mothers all stood waiting behind jogging strollers similar to hers, except for Ellen, whose daughter, Bianca, was now 4, and old enough to ride along on her Barbie bicycle.

  “Hi, Ellen,” Eva said, as the little redhead met her with a giant smile.

  Ellen leaned toward the stroller and smiled at Maria. “Aw, she looks so cute in that shirt.” The shirt, a light-blue tee, sporting the Octonauts characters from Maria’s favorite show.

  “Thanks,” Eva said. “Her grandma bought it for her birthday.”

  “OK, ladies, are we ready?” Kensie asked.

  Kensie, a cute blonde (as short as she was perky) who looked like a former cheer captain, was the group’s leader and founder. When they first met, Eva thought she was a superficial bitch. After a year of knowing her, she still did.

  Kensie started running, and the rest of the mothers fell in line behind her. Eva’s best friend in the group, Lacy, ran up beside Eva, then held her pace as Robbie, her 2-year-old son, babbled from his seat in the stroller.

  “Are we better today?” Lacy asked, smiling at Eva.

  Eva had been feeling blue for a while and couldn’t shake it. It started when Tom’s ridiculous schedule started sucking the blood from their lives. She put up with the hours in med school, then again through the hell of his internship, but it was supposed to stop. He promised it would. Yet, after Maria was born things had gotten even worse. Eva knew she wouldn’t have the house, or the car, or anything else without the endless hours it took for Tom to earn them, but what good was having all these things when she felt alone more often than not?