by Sean Platt
Eighty-Seven
Luca Harding
Luca stood in the elevator, watching his friends fall in a hail of bullets and felt a merging of memories, his own, the other Luca’s, and now Paola’s melting into his brain’s soup.
Another memory surged forward — October 15, 2011, when he’d seen what had been unleashed after Luca had given the vial to his adopted brother, Boricio Bishop.
Luca had reached out and collected these souls, ushering them into his world in an attempt to fix what he’d been responsible for breaking.
Little did Luca know he’d only broken things more by bringing future friends to a dead world.
He could never make things right. Nearly all of his world’s population had perished on October 15. He couldn’t bring them back.
But he could try to help these survivors.
Luca wasn’t sure how he’d done it the first time, or even how to do it again. He turned to The Light inside him and surrendered, begging It to help.
And then, in a blink, they were all gone.
He turned to see Desmond, the carrier of The Darkness, who now possessed all of the unopened vials.
Desmond glared at Luca as the Guardsmen emptied their guns into Its burning brightness.
But Desmond could not kill him any more than he could kill The Darkness.
Not now anyway. Another clash, like the one on Black Island on the other world would unleash more destruction. Better to run — and live to fight another day.
Luca blinked, and was back inside his own body on the operating table as surgeons sewed his wounds and stabilized his body.
Luca could hear them talking even as he was still under, remarking on how different he looked now — how they could swear he’d aged on the table.
Little did they know where he’d gone or what he’d done with the survivors of October 15.
Eighty-Eight
Brent Foster
One moment Brent was screaming and cradling his dying son in a hail of gunfire. The next he was holding Ben in a wide-open field of tall grass swaying in a gentle breeze beneath a nearly full moon.
He looked down to see Ben crying and looking around.
He pulled at his boy’s bloody shirt, to find the wounds on his stomach.
They were gone.
He was healed.
How is this possible?
“Daddy! Where are we? What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Brent looked around trying to make sense of things. He heard Becca’s sobs just seconds before he saw her and Teagan materialize beside him.
What the hell?
Moments later, they heard Keenan screaming, and gunshots before he appeared, his rifle blasting into the empty night.
Keenan stopped, realizing he was no longer in the elevator, turning with rifle in hand, searching for whatever enemy was to be found, whoever had somehow brought them here.
And then the woman, Marina, appeared, standing there, looking as confused as Brent felt.
They all stood in the darkness, staring at one another.
“Where are we?” Marina asked, confused.
“We’re back,” Keenan said. “We’re on the other world.”
“We are?” Teagan asked. “How do you know?”
He pointed at the distance, at dark shapes reaching into the pure black sky. “That’s a city. Not a single light is on.”
“No,” Teagan cried out. “No, no, no!”
“Shh!” Keenan rushed over to Teagan and put a hand on her mouth.
Becca cried out, “I’m scared, Mommy!”
“Don’t be scared,” Brent soothed. “He wouldn’t have sent us here if it weren’t safe.”
“Who wouldn’t have?” Marina asked.
Brent suddenly remembered, and things were starting to make sense.
“Luca. I saw him in the elevator just before we vanished. He must’ve healed Ben, too.”
Marina had started to say something, maybe ask who Luca was, but was interrupted by Keenan.
“And me,” Keenan said, looking down, patting his chest. Holes in his uniform showed where he’d been shot, but his skin, like Ben’s, was no longer marred.
Marina looked down at herself and saw a large bloodstained hole gaping in her shirt. She reached down, tearing at the hole, making it wider, feeling around.
“I’m healed, too!”
Tears stung Brent’s burning eyes. “He did it. He saved us. Again.”
Keenan shook his head. “Wait a second. Where’s Mary? And Boricio?”
Brent looked around, seeing no sign of anyone else.
“Hello?” Brent called out, his voice echoing in the night.
“Keep it down! We don’t know what’s left on this world. Might be full of them aliens.” Ed said.
“Maybe Mary and Boricio are still being healed?” Ben suggested.
“Maybe,” Brent said, though that didn’t feel right.
“What do we do? Where do we go?” Teagan asked, voice high pitched with worry, rocking Becca in her arms. “How will we survive? Do y’all think those aliens are still here?”
Ben clutched Brent’s leg. “I’m scared, Daddy.”
The last sound any of them wanted to hear filled the air — the awful, alien clicking somewhere in the distance.
“Oh God,” Teagan cried. “No. Not again.”
Keenan lifted the rifle, turning it, searching for the source.
Brent searched for his shotgun, but realized it must not have accompanied his crossing. He was holding his son, not a weapon, when Luca teleported them out of the elevator.
The clicking grew louder and more abundant. Another horrible sound joined the brutal symphony — hundreds of running somethings, like a herd of buffalo.
“There!” Marina whispered, pointing toward the tree line a couple of hundred feet to their left.
Shadows within shadows, moving fast, quickly closing in.
Keenan raised the rifle and fired. There was no way he had enough ammo, even if he had enough time, to take them all down.
Shrill screams as one, or perhaps a pair of creatures fell; it was tough to see clearly even with the bright moon bathing the swaying field. But what he could see — hundreds of shapes coming from the trees — rattled Brent’s body with raw fear.
He grabbed Ben and Becca. “Come on!” he said, running with Teagan at his side.
The children screamed in his ear, high-pitched cries, shrill to match the aliens’ intensity.
Brent kept running forward, unsure where he was headed, heart pounding so hard he felt certain it would either explode or surrender its beating. His legs were fire, his back aching with the exhausting weight as he raced across the uneven ground, praying he wouldn’t trip and kill the kids.
Come on, Ed! Take these fuckers out!
Keenan’s shots suddenly stopped.
Icy fear splashed his insides.
Oh God, Brent’s dead!
He didn’t dare look back. Stopping to do so would slow or trip him.
He heard Teagan at his side, barely keeping pace, her breath so ragged it sounded like torn.
Brent couldn’t tell if either Ed or Marina was also behind them, had taken off in another direction, or were already dead in the grass.
“No!” he heard Teagan cry out, followed by a thumping.
Brent peeked back, though still running forward, to see she’d fallen to the ground, half concealed by flowing grass.
His ankle twisted, and pain pierced his leg, sending him, and the children, flying forward to the ground.
No!!
The galloping, along with the aliens’ awful clicking, grew louder, closer.
Brent looked up, searching for his son.
“Ben! Becca!” he cried out.
Thunderous movement, clicks, and shrieks were all Brent could hear.
He had to find them, grab them, and keep running.
He stood, but collapsed as pain screamed through his ankle.
No, no, no, no! Fuck, I c
an’t walk!
Brent turned, looking for Teagan, to see if she’d gotten up and tell her to take Ben and run. He’d serve as a distraction, take as many of the fuckers out as he could.
But Brent couldn’t see Teagan through all the tall grass.
He saw only darkness.
And then, a blinding light came from above — a helicopter.
Brent heard shrieks all around him, and chaos — running, ground being torn from the Earth, alien screams, and a different kind of clicking as tracer fire ripped into the aliens, sending them scurrying back toward the tree line.
Brent sat up, staring in shock. The helicopter hovered above, firing until the aliens had all turned away.
Ben stumbled forward through the grass, holding Becca’s hand, both faces dirty and each of them crying.
“Come here.” Brent opened his arms and hugged them, watching the helicopter land. The thing was huge, like a military chopper, though Brent wasn’t familiar enough to know a Blackhawk from a Chinook.
He heard movement behind him, and turned to see Keenan approaching, gun over his shoulder, Marina by his side.
“Shit, I thought you were dead.”
“Not yet, old friend,” Keenan said.
They both looked at the helicopter as two people outfitted in black uniforms hopped out. They wore all black, like the Black Island Guardsmen, but their uniforms were slightly different. Different but familiar, though Brent couldn’t place it at first.
The two soldiers approached, and Brent was surprised to see that one was a woman as she lifted the dark visor.
The woman looked at them, smiling. “Well, holy fucking shit, where the hell have you two scumbags been?”
It took Brent a moment before he recognized her as the Black Mountain Guardsman who had taken him and Keenan hostage before teaming with them at the battle for Black Island.
“Lisa?” Keenan said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“We were making a routine sweep of the area, searching for a stolen supply truck. We saw you all pop up on the radar, and came out here.”
“Did you see anyone else? We came with two other people.”
“Nobody else. Came from where?” Lisa asked.
“Back on our world,” Brent said. “It’s a long story.”
“OK, well, tell me on the way to the chopper. We’re heading back.”
“Back where?” Keenan asked. “Black Mountain?”
“No. We have another base.”
“Where the hell are we?” Keenan asked.
“Montana,” she said. “Camp’s a few miles away.”
“How many of you are there?” Marina asked.
“Twenty-five,” she said, “down from fifty-one.”
“You tell us your story; we’ll tell you ours,” Brent said, following Lisa and the other Guardsmen to the chopper.
Epilogue
Three years later …
Ed Keenan bumped along in the van’s passenger seat as they raced down the ghost town’s street, pursuing one of the thieving bandits on motorcycle who’d stupidly tried robbing their truck.
“You got a shot on ‘em yet?” Harry asked as he attempted to keep pace with the bastard.
“Not yet,” Ed said, attempting to aim with the AR-15.
The motorcycle was weaving back and forth, and the van was jostling hard on the broken roads, rendering every shot impossible.
They had to catch this bastard to find out where the raiding party was holed up before they struck again. By Ed’s estimation, there were ten, maybe twenty of the bandits nearby. If there were more, they would’ve already attempted a more direct attack and tried to take over their compound rather than coming after their trucks when they went out to find supplies. They’d already lost five drivers in the last six months, and Ed wanted to end it before winter threw the compound into lockdown again.
The cyclist turned down an alley between two large warehouses, speeding up, and taking the turn too fast.
The bike and driver went down, sliding along the road.
“He’s ours now!” Harry turned into the alley and slammed on the brakes.
Ed prepared to hop out of the van, gun in hand, and chase the guy on foot — assuming he wasn’t too injured, or dead, from the crash.
But Ed stopped with his hand on the door handle as he looked straight out the window at the thing that shouldn’t be.
Hovering in the middle of the road was a violet square of light about ten feet by ten. The bike lay on the ground in front of the light, but the cyclist was nowhere to be seen.
“What the fuck is that?” Harry asked.
Ed didn’t like the looks of it.
He stepped out of the van and raised his rifle, carefully approaching the light.
He saw something move from within it. A dark shape coming closer.
Ed took aim, readying himself to open fire on whatever the hell emerged from the light.
Harry was out of the still-running van, also aiming his shotgun at the temporal disturbance.
Suddenly, the cyclist’s body came flying from the light, landing ten feet in front of Ed.
Harry took two shots at the cyclist, but missed both times.
The man’s face and arms was scraped to hell from his wreck, but he was still alive, barely.
“You really shouldn’t go leaving your garbage all over the place,” a man’s voice said from inside the light.
The voice was familiar.
Another dark shape drew closer, and then the man stepped through the portal.
“Boricio?” Ed said, dumbfounded.
“The one and only, at no man’s service but happy to see you,” Boricio said with a shit-eating grin. He had two pistols hanging from holsters at his side and a sword’s hilt sticking up from behind his black leather jacket: a cowboy ninja on meth.
“How?” Ed asked. “Where the hell have you been?”
Another figure stepped through the portal — a man who looked around forty, with dark curly hair and a thick beard. Something about his eyes looked familiar.
Ed realized he was looking at an older version of the kid, Luca.
“Luca?”
“Hi,” the man said, soft spoken.
“You know these people?” Harry asked, his gun still on them.
“Yeah,” Ed said. “They’re OK. You question this scumbag while I catch up.”
Ed walked over and shook their hands. “Where have you two been?”
Luca said, “Preparing.”
“For what?” Ed asked.
“It would be easier to show you,” Luca said, nodding toward the portal.
“How do I know I can trust you?” Ed asked. “How do I know you’re not infected?”
“You’d already be deader than dead, Double-O Dipshit,” Boricio quipped. “Come on, we ain’t gonna cornhole yer pucker.”
Ed followed them into the light.
As he stepped through, he felt his body vibrating, and a loud hum filled his ears. For a long moment, Ed felt like he was stuck in time or space, everything a blur around him. And then he was out, on the other side, in what looked to be a long, dark studio apartment with brick walls. Black curtains were drawn tight over the far wall. The portal hummed and glowed behind him.
“Where are we? Are we … back on Earth?”
“Yes,” a woman’s voice said from his right.
Ed turned to see Mary, her hair cut short, dark circles under her eyes. A black tank top revealed ripped biceps, as if she’d spent the past three years pumping iron in a prison yard.
“Mary,” he said, offering his hand to shake, “how are you?”
She shook his hand firmly, “Welcome home, Keenan.”
He noticed the tattoo on Mary’s left bicep: Paola’s name in a heart. Beneath that, another heart with no name.
“We’ve gotta go back and get Brent and the others,” Ed said. “They’ll be glad to know you’re alive.”
“In time,” Boricio said. “First we need to see how y
ou’re gonna take this.”
“Take what?” Ed asked.
Nobody answered. Mary, Boricio, and Luca exchanged glances as if they were trying to decide whether to share their secret with Ed.
There were two other people Ed didn’t recognize, a young blonde in her twenties, sitting at a table working on some sort of large black circular contraption. Perhaps a camera. Beside her was a thin black guy who looked around forty, working on a large gun that look like nothing Ed had ever seen.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“We’re getting ready,” Mary said.
“Ready for what?”
She walked toward the curtains at the far end of the apartment and pulled them aside.
Brightness flooded the room. Ed drew closer to the windows and gasped at the city’s skyline, filled with large hovering black spaceships cutting through a thick smog.
“What the hell is this?”
“They took over. They turned this world into something you ain’t gonna believe. Enslaved a lot of us, killed even more.”
Ed felt sick to his stomach, scanning the skyline before he looked down to the streets below at the perverse abominations walking the streets — a cross between infected and aliens.
Boricio asked, “So, Keenan, you ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“To join Team Boricio and take this big, blue marble back?”
Keenan thought of Jade. He’d lost the only thing that meant a damn to him. He had nothing to lose, and three years of imprisoned rage to unleash.
He met Mary’s eyes, a partner in loss.
“Hell yeah, I’m ready.”
To Be Concluded
In Yesterday’s Gone: Season Six
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Phew, the season is over!
While Season Three remains the most difficult season we’ve written to date, this was the season that intimidated us the most as we were preparing to write it. I’m using this author’s note to give you our mindset and concerns both going into the season and as we wrote it.
Obviously, if you haven’t read Season Five, you should stop reading as there ARE spoilers ahead. That’s why we put it AFTER the season! You didn’t just jump to the Author’s Note first, did you?!
