White Space Season 1

house, then everything went black.

    **

    Cassidy woke to an infomercial on the TV, and saw that the time on the clock beside her bed was blinking 12:00 in its soft blue LED display.
    What the hell was in that pill?
    Her head was pounding and her body ached. Usually the pills made her slightly nauseous at worst. Nothing like this. She vaguely remembered that she’d had a dream. A nightmare, but it was all a blur behind the headache.
    She was pretty sure this was the worst headache she’d ever had. She wasn’t sure if it was a reaction to the pills, or an accumulation of all the stress. As a child she used to get horrible migraines, pretty close to the severity of this headache. Maybe she was getting them again, she figured.
    Fuck.
    She found the pill bottle beneath her pillow, took another two pills, for pain, this time, not recreation, and swallowed some water.
    She laid her head back down on the pillow, watching as the clock’s blue digits blinked on and off, on and off, on and …
    When she woke again in the morning, Emma was gone.

    * * * *

TO BE CONTINUED…

::EPISODE 2:: PROLOGUE —
    Cassidy Hughes (AGE 10)

    Hamilton Island, Washington

20 years ago

    Cassidy loved the twilight, the last vestiges of freedom before darkness swallowed the world and she and her sister had to go home.
    The sky was that beautiful shade of blue that wasn’t quite blue, almost on its way to purple, giving them just enough light to play “chase” in the woods surrounding their neighborhood, even though their mom never wanted them in the woods so close to dark.
    “Ready or not, here I come,” Jonny Conway called from home base after counting to 40.
    Cassidy crouched behind a large tree about 20 yards away, probably closer than the other three kids hiding. While the others sprinted off as far as they could go in 40 seconds, Cassidy thought it better to hide closer, figuring Jonny wouldn’t think to look so close.
    She perked her ears above the howling wind and leaves scraping along the forest floor, a wind which only added to the spookiness of playing in the woods at night, straining to hear the sound of Jonny’s footsteps. Cassidy wanted to peek around the tree, but didn’t dare. Jonny was 11, the oldest of the group, and the biggest and fastest, so she was as good as caught if he spotted her.
    The silence stretched, and Cassidy became more convinced that Jonny was sneaking up on her. The anticipation made her feel like her bladder might burst at any second.
    Cassidy crossed her legs, wishing she hadn’t drank so much grape Kool-Aid with dinner.
    A twig snapped nearby, and a chill shot up Cassidy’s back as she looked back and prepared to make a run for home base. There was nobody behind her. Yet. But she had to get moving soon before the others made a run for home base.
    Chase was like hide-and-seek, but better. Whoever was “it” had to find and catch the hiders before they reached home base. If all the hiders made it back to home base before they were caught, the person had to be “it” again. However, if the seeker caught you, you were “it” next.
    Cassidy’s strategy was to stay close enough to home base to easily sneak back once Jonny went off searching for the others.
    Suddenly, she heard laughter from the north, along with running. A chase was on. Jonny was running after Tommy or Eric. Somewhere in the woods, her sister, Sarah, was also hiding, and likely eying home base. Sarah, despite being Cassidy’s identical twin, was faster, though Cassidy always played a smarter game.
    “Safe!” the boy shouted. Cassidy peeked to see it was Eric.
    Jonny turned his attention to the surrounding area to see if any of the other hiders had moved closer to home base during the chase. If he headed south, she was as good as busted. As Jonny moved closer, Cassidy was pretty sure she’d start peeing the minute she tried to run.
    Crap.
    She stepped out from her hiding spot. “I surrender” she said.
    Jonny ran up to her as if he thought she might run away at the last second, a strategy she had used to catch him off guard twice before, and nearly tackled her.
    “Sheesh!” she shouted. “I surrendered. You didn’t need to jump on me!”
    “OK,” Jonny said, laughing, “Cassidy is it!”
    “All right,” Cassidy said, “I need to take a time-out to pee.”
    Sarah and Tommy emerged from the woods now that it was safe to do so. Sarah looked up at the darkening sky. “We should get home, Cass, it’s getting