by Platt, Sean
Charlie didn’t even want to have sex. He just wanted to lie beside her and feel not so alone. So devoid of hope.
The fire died inside the old man’s cell and the entire block went dark. Charlie lay on the mattress, his hand on the glass, and cried himself to sleep.
**
“Wake up!”
Charlie woke to the voice again.
A few hours probably had passed since the fireworks. He’d fallen asleep with his hand on the glass, meeting Callie’s, their mattresses propped against the dividing barrier.
A light went on above him, about a tenth as dim as it was before, just enough for him to see, but far less blinding. Charlie glanced over and saw the shadows of Callie, still asleep on her mattress, her hand against the wall.
“You have a visitor,” the voice said. “Someone interested in what you did yesterday. Someone who would like to have a word with you. Remember the rules. One more stunt, and your bitch is dinner. Understand?”
“No, he’s fucking retarded,” Boricio snarled, suddenly in the room, wearing the same outfit as before, except now he had on a miner’s hat, with a light that wasn’t working.
“Yes,” Charlie said. “I’ve got it.”
The door at the end of the hall opened to a single set of footsteps owned by another yellow hazmat suit, without any clipboard or weapon.
The footsteps made their way down the row of cells.
“What the fuck does he want?” Boricio asked.
I dunno, Charlie thought, not wanting to speak out loud in case they were monitoring him.
“Well, this should be good and goddamned interesting,” Boricio said, plopping on the mattress and crossing his legs. “Looks like you’ve made yourself someone worth talking to Charlie Boy! Maybe you can ask for a raise!”
Boricio looked at Charlie’s dangling dick. “You mind tucking the turtle away, Charlie Brown? I didn’t come here to give you a conjugal visit. Though, I’d love to step on over and give ole’ Callie a bit o’ the bone and splatter, if you get my drift.”
I’d have to be an idiot not to get your drift. You’re as subtle as a forest fire.
“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna bang on Callie’s precious backdoor. Remember, I’m in your head. And well, let’s just say, that makes me part of you, and you know she ain’t gonna have any part of you in any part of her, so I’m sorta screwed, fuck you very much.” Boricio shook his head.
Charlie watched the light on top of Boricio’s hat turn back and forth and wondered why he’d imagined Boricio wearing a miner’s helmet — a broken one, at that.
The man in yellow reached Charlie’s cell, then pressed something on the panel outside his door.
The voice above Charlie crackled to life. “Remember,” it said, “be a good boy, or—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Charlie shouted as the man in yellow entered his cell.
The man looked Charlie up and down, then spoke, his voice now coming through the speakers above. He wasn’t the same man who’d been taunting him over the speakers, but his voice was oddly familiar.
“That was some show you put on out there,” the man said from inside his hazmat suit as he continued staring at Charlie like some kind of lab animal.
Something about the man’s accent was unsettling in its vague familiarity, as was his appearance, though Charlie couldn’t quite place where he might have seen the man before.
Boricio jumped up and down behind Charlie. “Holy shit, Charlie Brown! What the fuck is this?”
What?
“You don’t see it?” Boricio said, pointing frantically at the man’s mask. “Look closer, you dumb lanky pile of shit, squeeze those beady fucker eyes of yours together and tell me you don’t recognize who in the fuck-all you’re looking at!”
Charlie examined the man’s face. He was in his early to mid thirties and bald, with an eye patch over his left eye and a long ugly scar running in a deep ravine from the high above his patch to the low of his cheek below.
Something about him was damned familiar, like a word on the tip of Charlie’s tongue he simply couldn’t remember.
“Dude,” Boricio said stepping right beside the man in yellow, pointing manically back at the man and then himself. “Look, Charlie! It’s me! It’s me!”
Charlie’s jaw dropped.
It was beer-battered bullshit, no doubt, but Boricio was right.
TO BE CONTINUED…
YESTERDAY’S GONE
EPISODE 15
“Team Building Exercise”
* * * *
CHAPTER 1 — Teagan McLachlan
In the dream, the sun had kissed Teagan’s skin. But when she woke, it was darkness that met her. Darkness and the sound of whistling. Above her, a dark cloud engulfed the inside of the car.
But the dark cloud wasn’t a cloud; it was something else — pulsating with serpentine motion, shifting form, and hovering its attention toward her as if it were alive.
Her eyes widened in fear, and the cloud seized her terror, using it to multiply its mass into a swiftly spinning billow, melting through the air on its way toward Teagan’s trembling body, crackling with a cool current of live electricity that made the tiny hairs on her arm dance.
Teagan was paralyzed, unable to move.
Her father was asleep, slumped over the steering wheel, and her mother an echo beside him. The car slowly rolled forward, the headlights slicing through the inky silence of the highway, flashing on a guardrail quickly growing larger as the car rolled forward.
Teagan panicked. She wanted to scream, but had to move first, needed to reach across the front seat, but couldn’t. The cloud started spinning faster and whistling louder — an angry tornado tearing through the tiny interior of the car.
The whistling kept screaming, splitting the sanity inside her head. Teagan reached up to cover her ears and cried out as if that might mute it.
Light suddenly appeared — brighter than anything Teagan had ever seen.
The bright light was then enveloped by something blacker than the darkness outside, and in that instant her parents were gone. The car smashed into the guardrail with a grinding crunch, and then a thundering thud before coming to a jarring stop. The darkness above her had evaporated into wisps with her family.
Something seemed familiar, too familiar — flooding Teagan with a sense of Déjà vu she couldn’t shake.
Trembling and confused, Teagan leaned forward and looked at the clock on the radio: 2:15 a.m.
The odd, familiar current grew stronger inside her.
She’d been here before.
Teagan heard the sound of a baby crying. Her baby, Becca. She frantically searched every seat in the car, but her baby was nowhere. She swallowed hard, realizing the sound was bleeding into the car from outside, somewhere in the dark.
She looked out the window but couldn’t see her. Teagan was terrified of the darkness outside, thinking of the black cloud that had crackled to life and taken her parents away.
What if it’s out there — waiting?
Teagan couldn’t leave her child out there alone, though. Becca was only one month old and defenseless against the darkness.
Teagan forced herself into bravery, then threw the rear door open and launched herself into the night, moving with a fluid grace she could only find in her dreams.
Yes, this is a dream.
None of this is happening.
Becca’s cries dragged Teagan’s attention toward the trunk of the car. Her baby was in the trunk. Milk spotted the front of her shirt as she ran to open the trunk.
Where are the keys?!
She looked up and through the rear window of the car where she was drawn to the keys dangling from the steering wheel. But that wasn’t the only thing Teagan saw in the car — the dark cloud was back as well, churning fast, spinning in furious circles as its mass spread throughout the cabin.
The keys were held captive in the icy heart of the darkness. Teagan had no choice but to swallow her fear, then reach inside and
grab them.
Hurry. Do it!
Becca’s cries echoed louder inside the trunk as Teagan’s heart furiously pounded. She forced herself toward the car’s front door as her fingers trembled at the handle.
Open the door. Reach in. You’ll be in and out before it can do anything to you.
Teagan watched as the mass spun even faster, growing inexplicably darker. Something from the center of the vortex smacked hard against the window, leaving a red bloody smear before it was pulled back violently into the vortex.
Something else hit the window, a torn chunk of flesh which used to be wearing her father’s watch, but now wore only his fat and tarnished silver wedding band.
Every window exploded at once — an eruption of a million shards, spitting a swarm of glass and black from the car, where the cloud instantly gathered into an even larger mass above the car, spinning and growing with intensity.
Teagan screamed and ran from the car — away from her child, still crying in the trunk — slicing her heart into a hundred guilty ribbons.
How can you leave your child to that?
Teagan could leave her child because she was too terrified to go back, even though she hated herself further with every fresh step she took from the trunk. She stopped for a moment, turned and looked back at the growing darkness.
Go back. Save her!
What kind of mother leaves her child to die?
She’s safer in the trunk. I’ll go back to get her.
The darkness began to shake the car as its tendrils reached down and ripped the lid from the trunk and tossed it into its vortex where it spun with the darkness and then shot out into the woods off the side of the highway.
Teagan screamed as it reached in to claim Becca.
Teagan woke to the sound of her daughter sobbing.
Black Island, New York
April 2012
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE EVENT…
Even with Becca crying, she was relieved to be away from the dream, and safe in her bedroom. A soft blue light beside Becca’s crib illuminated her weeping infant. Teagan was at the crib in seconds.
“You need to be changed,” she said, lifting Becca to her lips, giving her a kiss, then setting her back in the crib. “I’ll be right back Baby B. Just one sec.”
Teagan fumbled in the dim light, and gathered the diapers, cream, and wipes. As she changed Becca, named after her older sister, Teagan couldn’t help but feel the stain of guilt left to linger after her dream’s decision. What should have passed moments after waking was soaking deeper into something inside her.
Teagan started to cry. “You okay,” Ed asked from bed.
“Yes,” Teagan said, nodding even though he probably couldn’t see her in the dark, wiping her eyes and feeling like a fool. She had been so hyper-emotional since delivering Becca in February, and hated feeling so raw all the time, always at the edge of every emotion. Having such limited control over her emotions made Teagan feel even younger than sleeping with a 44-year-old man did.
She finished wrapping Becca in warm clothes and swaddling her in a blanket like a baby burrito, then returned to bed and started to nurse. The frail infant’s lips sucking away, fingers curled and eyes closed, made Teagan feel even guiltier for leaving her baby in the trunk, regardless of whether it was a dream.
She tried to tell herself that she’d never do that in real life.
I would die to protect her.
“What’s wrong?” Ed said, wiping his eyes and sitting up beside her, then wrapping a long arm around her and drawing her and Becca closer.
“Just a nightmare,” Teagan said, laughing at how silly she felt. “It’s nothing, really.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Teagan suspected Ed didn’t really want to discuss her dream, though. While he was far more communicative than the Ed from her world — the one who had saved her life — this “other Ed” was still rough around the edges with talking about stuff like feelings, dreams, and other things that weren’t black-and-white and made of logic.
She turned to face Ed in the dim light of their bedroom, thinking how much safer she felt with him beside her. Their friendship had only recently blossomed into something more — almost in spite of them each denying the feelings they had both developed over the course of a few months. Teagan wasn’t sure if she could call the feelings inside her love; they weren’t as pure or true as what she felt for Becca — that feeling that she would do anything and kill anyone to protect her child. But still, the feelings were stronger than anything she’d ever felt before, even if they were born from sorrow and a bounty of mental baggage.
“Nah, it’s just a silly nightmare,” Teagan said, nudging herself closer to Ed.
“Well, you’re safe now,” he said, kissing her forehead. Ed leaned over and kissed Becca’s nearly bald head.
He’s so sweet to Becca.
He would never leave her in a trunk!
The new thought pushed Teagan into a fresh batch of tears, which then pulled further concern from Ed.
“You sure you’re okay?” His brows were now furrowed enough for Teagan to see in the dark.
She was about to answer when sirens outside started to wail, scratching the silence into an agitated scream, as the one screech quickly turned to chaos.
Ed’s phone rang and Becca started to scream.
“What’s that?!” Teagan shouted over the loud siren. She had never heard a siren on the island before.
Ed didn’t answer. He had the phone in his hand and his lips at the receiver, and his expression had already gone from concerned to something she’d never seen on his face before, or the other Ed’s for that matter. His eyes were dilated wide with a horrible fear. He hung up the phone and set it on the nightstand.
“What is it?”
Ed said, “They broke out.”
“Who broke out?”
He leaped from the bed, threw on his clothes, then turned to Teagan. “The infected.”
* * * *
CHAPTER 2 — Boricio Bishop
Black Island Research Facility
Black Island, New York
Other Earth
August 17
TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT…
Boricio wasn’t willing to wait another day.
He had waited too long already. Rose could already be a full month into recovery, and should have been a month into recovery. Instead, Boricio had allowed Will to warm his hands beneath the fat of his ass.
Boricio was sick of the month-old argument, and angry at the old man for standing so decisively in his way. For a guy with a third eye, Boricio was sometimes shocked at how much shit Will was blind to.
Will kept saying, “We’ll talk about it later,” but later was a word that couldn’t be measured, so fuck it with a meter stick.
Rose wasn’t getting any better. If anything, she was getting worse. Her days were often filled with pain and her memory wasn’t coming back. She was also having trouble with her short term memory. There were a few days during Boricio’s visits that a glimpse of the past would come forth, and she’d smile and remember a snippet of their life together. And those moments helped to bridge the distance between them, helped her feel comfortable with him and not treat him like a stranger. But the next day, the memory was gone, and it was if she’d never remembered anything. The coldness had returned.
Some days, he felt as if she were looking at him for the first time.
And each of those stranger’s glances was a knife in his heart.
He would take a hundred, hell, a million, such knives if she weren’t also in constant pain.
From the waist down, she felt nothing. And likely never would again. But the parts she could feel anything, she usually felt only pain. Boricio couldn’t stand to see her in such misery.
He had to go over his father’s head and see Dr. Williams, the lead scientist overseeing research on the vials.
Williams was instrumental in Luca’s success, and would be a fool t
o ignore the data and deny Rose the same fighting chance. He may have been many things — egotistical, obsessive, unable to relate to humans — as far as Boricio could tell, but he wasn’t a fool. Especially not when compared to Will, who was becoming more of a fence-sitting philosopher than a man driven into action by curiosity. Telling the difference between philosopher and fool was increasingly more difficult for Boricio.
Boricio did wonder for a small moment if maybe he was wrong, and he was perhaps overestimating Williams’ willingness to bend the rules. Then Boricio thought back to the wide smile slathered all over his face in the aftermath of Luca’s tests and felt certain that Williams simply needed the right question asked in precisely the right way to give them both the only answer they wanted.
Boricio reached the middle of the hall and the pair of access elevators and stepped inside, with someone coming in behind him. He pressed 7, then set his hand against the graphite-colored palm reader, fingers evenly splayed.
“Access: Denied. Insufficient Clearance Level,” the display read.
What the fuck?
Boricio tried again, pressing harder. The green lines on the display rose, then fell, then turned red.
“Access: Denied. Insufficient Clearance Level.”
Boricio started to breathe slowly, exactly as he’d been practicing to steady the rising anger, but a thick wad of air was suddenly trapped in his throat, and his clenched fist was shaking at his side, one bad second away from flying into the hard alloy of the elevator door.
“You okay, Mr. Bishop?”
Boricio slowly turned to face Richard Styley, the dweeby systems designer from Level Three who had followed Boricio into the elevator.
“Yeah, Richard, I’m doing great. Thanks.” Boricio smiled, the need to slam his fist into the door of the elevator making itself too comfortable to leave — a lot like Styley, who stood three feet from Boricio staring.