by Platt, Sean
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 you’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 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?!
Don’t worry, I used to do that, too.
From very early on in the first season of Yesterday’s Gone, we knew the war between the Light and Darkness would come home, and it would be an all out alien invasion. No, scratch that — an alien occupation.
And we knew bits and pieces of the things that would lead us to the sixth season and the ending we have in mind. But a lot of the in-between stuff wasn’t clear. We needed to pave the road to the ending we want to tell.
Given that YG is our flagship series with the greatest number of fans, there’s also that pressure to deliver a story that makes you glad this went six seasons rather than wrapping in three. And we want you to finish wishing we wrote ten more! (Not that we have any plans for that.)
This seasons tasks:
Tell an awesome big story
Bridge the gap between Seasons Four and Six
Continue to develop and surprise you with Collective Inkwell’s brand of deep, complex characters.
Because while Yesterday’s Gone is a big action-packed spectacle, we always put our characters at the front of everything we do. And this season we needed to really put our favorite characters in some uncomfortable spots — especially Mary and Boricio.
On the subject of Mary, I noticed a few comments from people who thought that our female characters weren’t very strong in Yesterday’s Gone — something to the effect of the female characters suffering a lot of torment, and relying on men to save them.
This wasn’t a frequent comment, but even a few mentions will get us to look at what we’ve written and see if maybe there’s something we overlooked. It’s hard to see your own stuff objectively, particularly so close to publication.
So do I think our women are too weak?
No, I don’t.
Why?
Because we don’t subscribe to the current fad of creating super women (or men) who can do anything and kick all kinds of ass with a machine gun even if prior to the story they’d never handled a weapon.
I think there should be strong female role models in fiction, and that women in books shouldn’t be relegated to cliched “women in distress” roles or used solely as romantic interests, or props for men. However, I think that when you go too far in the other direction, you wind up being patronizing, and creating a wholly unrealistic character that nobody identifies with!
And here’s the thing — everyone suffers in our books. Men, women, children — everyone.
If you’re a lead character in a Collective Inkwell book, you’re going to have a rough time. Your hopes will be dashed, your fears will be realized, and … you might just get killed off.
Happy endings are a guarantee for no one.
I happen to think Mary is a very strong character, particularly given the shit she’s been through. But she’s not military trained, a secret agent, or a serial killer. She’s a mother pushed to the extremes in pursuit of protecting her child. But she still worries whether she’s doing the right thing. She still second guesses herself. Because she is NOT a super hero. She is human — like all our characters.
There’s a scene we wrote for Season Four where Mary and Boricio were attacked by the infected in the motel parkin
g lot. Boricio told Mary to stay back while he took on the enemies.
Now, I can see how that might make Mary look like she’s letting the man take over, but you have to consider two things. One: Boricio told her to stay put. Boricio is pretty damned convincing when he tells you to do something. Second, even if Mary can kick ass (and she’s had weapons training), she still has to consider one thing: if she dies, her daughter is on her own. In other words, just because she can do something doesn’t mean it’s an easy decision to put herself at risk. Sometimes running or hiding is the wisest move.
While that might be seen as Mary being weak, many of our other characters (except maybe Ed Keenan) would’ve done the same thing in that position.
Hell, one of our weakest characters in the book is Brent Foster. If he were a female character, I imagine we’d catch all sorts of hell for all the fretting he does in the series. Hell, we have gotten flack for Brent being too whiney. But here’s the thing — he’s not unlike many men I know. Guys who aren’t fighters. Who aren’t skilled killers. Guys with more book smarts than street smarts, who tend to overanalyze themselves into analysis paralysis.
Like I said, we write human characters — warts and all.
But most of our characters aren’t warriors. They’re regular people put into difficult positions, fighting for their lives.
Boricio was another character we thought a lot about this season. Last season, a minority of readers felt that he’d been neutered a bit. “Boricio finds love and is hanging out with Mary and Paola? What a pussy!”
But I don’t think I’d want to read a series where the main characters were the exact same in Season Five as they were in Season One. We don’t want Boricio to be a one note character. We love the complexity of him having to reconcile his killer side with the now “fixed” part of himself.
He’s not a good guy by any means. But he’s also not the psychopath from the first season.
This season, we were tempted to push Boricio back in the other direction. But then, as the story unfolded, we said no, fuck that noise. We’re going to break him down even more.
Last season he faced his past in the form of a father of a young woman he’d killed. This season he faced his greatest weakness — the death of a love he’d finally allowed to flourish inside him.
Losing Rose (again) has done something to Boricio which turns him into the force he’ll be in the final season. It was a necessary journey, and one we enjoyed writing as much as Mary’s.
Lastly, this season saw us exploring Luca more. He’s still a kid, but a bit wiser for all he’s been through.
He’s also not the Luca we first started with (that boy had become The Light at the end of Season Three.) This Luca is even more complex, riddled with guilt, and struggling with the power growing inside him and The Darkness’ plans for domination — something Luca doesn’t think he can stop.
We originally planned to make Luca the embodiment of The Darkness. We were going to take our most innocent character, Luca, and turn him into the big bad guy while making our baddest character, Boricio, into the main good guy.
But as we were writing the story, it just didn’t feel right — at all.
Luca didn’t WANT to become the main bad guy. While he’d suffered at the hands of bullies, and had a few rough spots, it hadn’t changed his core. And in fact, the alien inside him responded as much to his kindness as anything — preventing Rose’s Darkness from carrying out It’s plan.
When we decided that Luca wasn’t going to be the main bad guy, and Desmond was instead, we briefly considered killing Luca off. However, we had plans for him in the sixth season. Paola wasn’t so lucky.
Given where the story was going, and what she (and her mother) had already endured, it felt like we’d be cheating if she had made it out of this season alive.
It was tough killing her. She was a resilient kid and we particularly loved writing the scenes with her and Boricio.
I think the only regret in killing her now is that we didn’t give her more point of view chapters. We considered upping her chapter counts this season but thought that doing so might give away our plan to kill her off. We’ve all seen the TV shows where a secondary character is killed off and you can see it a mile away because all of a sudden that character starts getting plenty of screen time.
We didn’t want to telegraph Paola’s death.
I admit to quite a bit of glee when we planned this out. First pretending to kill her when Desmond hid her away. And then we returned her to Mary, only to have her die almost out of the blue during their escape.
George R.R. Martin has nothing on us when it comes to killing main characters!
All of this is to say that we love our characters, and hope that it shows — even when we kill them off.
And here’s the thing about readers’ opinions: remember how I said that some people thought Mary was too weak, Brent was too whiney, and Boricio had been neutered? Well, they’re perfectly entitled to think those things. There are no perfect characters, just as there are no perfect people.
Our characters are all flawed in some way, just like us.
These are as much your characters as they are ours. And we’re honored that you care enough about the people in our world to develop strong feelings — good and bad.
We hope you enjoyed this season as much as we did writing it. Thank you for continuing this journey and inviting us into your lives — it’s an honor that continues to humble us.
We can’t wait to show you what’s in store in the final season, which you’ll see early next year.
As always, thank you for reading,
Dave (and Sean)
October 4, 2014
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* * * *
::OUR OTHER BOOKS::
//SERIES//
Yesterday’s Gone: Seasons One - Five
WhiteSpace: Seasons One & Two
(Season Three coming soon)
ForNevermore: Season One
(Season Two coming soon)
Available Darkness: Season One & Two
Season Three Coming Soon
Z 2134 - Z 2136
Monstrous
//STANDALONE BOOKS//
Crash
Threshold
::OUR SHORT STORIES::
Dark Crossings: The Collection
Visit our website to find all these books, and more!
Visit www.CollectiveInkwell.com/our-books
* * * *
The Most Important Thing You Can Do To Spread the Word
We thank you for reading our book.
You’ve already rocketed to the top of our Favorite People In The World List, currently populated by J.J. Abrams, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Craig Ferguson, and whoever first thought to put cookies in ice cream (someone give that person a Nobel Prize!)
But there’s one more thing we’d appreciate if you have a few minutes…
If you enjoyed this story, or even if you kinda liked it, please LEAVE A REVIEW TODAY.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OC9097O/
WHY REVIEWS MATTER
We hate begging you like an NPR pledge drive, but we’re new writers, still making our name. In today’s publishing world, with so many great writers out there trying to get noticed, reviews are one of the primary ways writers free themselves from obscurity.
We would both write no matter what, even if we only had five readers. And we have. Dave wrote for years while working graveyard at a gas station, dreaming of a day he’d have people wandering the worlds of his design. Sean spent 30 years sucking movies, books and TV through a pop culture straw, thinking the entire time that he “could never d
o that” until the day he wondered if he could.
We’re writers. We have stories to tell, and want to tell them to you forever.
Our books are what we do when we get up to go to work each day. The better our books do, the better we do. The more we can write, and the more ambitious we can be.
Will You Be a Part of Our 1%?
About 1% of people who read a book review it.
Some people don’t like leaving reviews.
Some people don’t realize how much it matters to a modern author.
Some people have never left a review and have no idea what to say.
Some people never even consider it.
Most people don’t have time.
If you can’t leave a review for whatever reason, or even if you don’t want to, we totally understand. We are thrilled you’re reading, and appreciate the time you spend in our worlds.
But if you do, please know that you’re part of that 1% who really drive us to get noticed, since we know you want to see a What Would Boricio Do? Show on HBO as much as we would.
The biggest challenge for indie authors is finding an audience. Word-of-mouth and reviews at Amazon, Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Goodreads, and similar sites can make all the difference in the world between whether a new reader will find and buy our books.
If you have a few minutes, you will make a huge difference in how our story as indie writers continues to unfold. It doesn’t have to be long, just honest. Three sentences saying why you liked the season will read like pages of thank-you to us.
Click here http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OC9097O/ to leave a review at Amazon.
Thank you for reading,
Sean Platt & David Wright
* * * *
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sean Platt is a speaker, founder of Sterling & Stone, co-host of the Self-Publishing Podcast, and author of more than five-million words of published fiction. Together with co-authors David Wright and Johnny B. Truant, Sean has written the series Yesterdays Gone, WhiteSpace, ForNevermore, Available Darkness, Dark Crossings, Unicorn Western, The Beam, Namaste, Robot Proletariat, Cursed, Greens, Space Shuttle, and Everyone Gets Divorced, the traditionally published titles, Z2134 and Monstrous, and the standalone novels, Axis of Aaron, Crash, and Threshold. Sean also co-wrote the how-to indie book, Write. Publish. Repeat, writes for children under the name Guy Incognito. Sean lives with his wife and children in Austin, Texas, and has more than his share of nose. Follow him on Twitter @seanplatt.