by Sean Platt
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 1 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 that 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 leapt from the bed, threw on his clothes, then turned to Teagan. “The infected.�
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Twenty-Three
Boricio Bishop
Black Island Research Facility
Black Island, New York
Other Earth
Aug. 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 where she could feel anything 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 to 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 3 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.
“Can I help you with something, Styley?”
It must have been something in the way he said it, because Styley took a dweeby step back from Boricio and started shaking his head furiously back and forth. “No, Mr. Bishop,” he said. “You just look upset, so I was seeing if there was something I could help you with. Like maybe you were having trouble with the elevator.”
No, I’m not having any trouble with the elevator. I’m having trouble with a know-it-all philosophizing dick tip, fuckyouverymuch.
“No,” Boricio shook his head, unclenching his fist and relaxing his fingers. “No trouble at all, Richard. I just forgot what I was here for, and I hate it when that happens.”
“I know how that feels.” Styley smiled, though Boricio thought the smile looked thinner than a summer sweater.
Boricio nodded, then pressed 5, and set his hand on the scanner. The green line went up and down, then dinged as the elevator began to move. Boricio ignored Styley as the man pressed the 6 and put his hand on the scanner.
The elevator doors dinged closed. Boricio quickly scowled, then scrubbed it from his face before the doors opened to Level 5 a few seconds later. He stepped from the elevator before the doors were even half open, ignoring Styley as he said a meek “Goodbye,” and marched down the hallway toward Will’s office, trying to keep his calm, despite an inferno of rage burning inside him, licking an inner certainty that Will had revoked his access to Level 7.
Boricio spent the entire hallway breathing in and out and in and out as he tried untangling the pretzeled thoughts and twisted circles threading through his head. Another 15 minutes of Boricio’s practiced breathing, or hell, even a long hour of Lamaze wouldn’t be enough. He stormed into Will’s office, barely able to keep accusation and anger from owning his voice.
“Wanna tell me why the fuck my security clearance has been downgraded?!” Boricio yelled. “I just tried to get to Level 7, like I have every day since you dragged my ass and entire life onto this island.”
Will calmly looked up from his desk, sighed, then held Boricio’s angry gaze for a half minute or so before turning his attention back to the thin stack of sheets scattered across his desk. He stared down for another second, then shook his head and pushed the papers into a pile toward the corner.
“Boricio,” he said, “I don’t want to fight, not about this or anything else.”
“If you didn’t want to fight, then you wouldn’t have done sh … stuff behind my back.” He watched his language, giving Will nothing to bitch about and only the facts to argue. Boricio swallowed and breathed, waiting for Will to respond.
“I understand how you’re feeling, and hear what you’re saying,” Will said, “And I’m sorry you’re angry. But I did what I had to do and stand by my decision. Unfortunately, you weren’t around when I made it. If you were standing beside me, I would have told you. I certainly have nothing to hide. Can you say the same?”
Boricio’s fingers curled back into their fists.
Will shook his head, sighed, and then stood up and walked around his desk to face Boricio.
“I’m not afraid of you, Boricio. I am your father. And I will do what is right, always. I’m sorry about Rose.” He cleared his throat. “Truly I am. But there’s nothing I can do. What’s happened has happened, and the best thing we can do now — the healthiest thing for us to do together — is to accept that reality and do what we can within the realms of proven medicine, not the vials. What I cannot allow to happen,” he bored his eyes into Boricio’s, “what I will not allow to happen, is for you to go over my head again. That isn’t good for Level 7, Son, and it’s definitely not good for our family.”
“I didn’t go over your head,” Boricio said. “Or behind your back. Unless you’ve suddenly been named as head of the Remedy Project and didn’t take me out for a steak to celebrate, then I beg to fucking differ.”
Will had walked around to Boricio’s side of the desk, but the words spilled from Boricio’s lips without a single breath taken, and nearly every word from the inside of a snarl made him take a surprising
ly large step back.
Boricio finished. “You’re a consultant to the Remedy Project, Will, a consultant just like me, not in charge. And what I thought had to be done with Luca didn’t require your particular brand of it ain’t gonna work, so I took it to Williams, who knew I was right, and helped to save your son from the death sentence you were all too willing to accept.”
“It was wrong,” Will said. “And you were wrong. Are wrong. The only reason you’re even allowed to step foot inside this facility is because I brought you in and put my name beside yours. You may be too old for me to be your legal guardian out there,” Will pointed past the wall of his office, “but in here, that’s exactly who I am, like it or not. I gave you full access, and you abused your position.”
“Sorry that your memory’s only working in bits and pieces, Pops, but the truth is that you brought me into Level 7 to bail you out, and we both know it.”
“I never needed you to bail me out, Boricio,” Will said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Well, you sure as shit needed me to help you ‘deal with all the assholes and politics of the job,’ or is that not the exact words you used when you asked me to come work here?”
Boricio took another step toward Will. “I’m the only one in here who gets you, and that’s why you need me. So, what are you gonna do if you downgrade me, Dad? How are you gonna get by?”
“I managed before, and I’ll manage again, but this is unacceptable. I will not be held hostage by my son, or made to feel as though my instincts are frail. You don’t know everything, Boricio. Some things you don’t know on purpose because you can’t. And there are times when you have to be okay with that. Despite your access, and our relationship, I am privy to classified information that I cannot legally share with you.”
For the first time, Will’s eyes held a hint of apology. “I’m sorry, Boricio, but that’s the way it is. This is one of those times where you just have to trust me. Honestly, after all these years I feel it’s the least I deserve.” He shook his head. “You have no idea how much acid you give me.” He pushed his hand against his stomach, as though the acid was leaking.