Yesterday's Gone: Season One

the signal and jumped from the car. John followed. Mary looked at Paola and told her to stay put, she’d be right back. Surprisingly, Paola didn’t argue, and Mary stepped out of the car and joined the rest of the gang looking down over the guardrail.
    As she drew closer, she noticed an overpowering sickly sweet smell that seemed somehow familiar, though she couldn’t quite place it. The sound of a river rushing beneath them was barely audible over the squawking of birds as they continued to circle and dive.  
    John turned toward her and leaned over, vomiting on the road.
    Jimmy and Desmond simply stared. Mary reached the guardrail, looked down below and immediately wished she’d stayed in the car.
    Corpses filled the river, in the hundreds, if not thousands, bobbing up and down, floating like logs as birds feasted on their rotting flesh.
    “Well, I think we know where all the people went,” Jimmy said, his face ashen.

    **

BRENT FOSTER

    Brent wasn’t sure how long he hid in the pitch black, waiting for a looming dread to fade from the apartment. Maybe 20 minutes. Probably two hours. Hard to tell in the dark and with nothing to count.
    He wasn’t sure what he was hiding from, either, but something in his lizard brain made him run from the downstairs apartment. Something told him if he stayed, he’d die. He hadn’t even worked up the courage to look out his windows.
    What did he see?
    Though he couldn’t see the man on the street’s face well enough to see his expression, his run told Brent all he needed to know. The man was fleeing from death.
    Maybe the city had suffered a terrorist attack, and the man saw the bad guys coming. Or, Brent suddenly thought, perhaps the man had something to do with what happened and was running from the police or Army or whoever the hell was now in control of the city.
    Brent had only recently moved to New York, so he was a tourist to 9/11, not a citizen. But he knew enough to know someone was surely out there evacuating people, searching for survivors, or both. He couldn’t expect someone to find him; he’d have to find them . And that meant leaving the building.
    He went back into the living room, glanced out the window and down to the street below. The city, or what he could see of it, was a morgue. He went to the fridge and grabbed another water, sat on his couch, and put his feet up on the coffee table, where a framed photo of his family faced him.
    They took the picture last Christmas, just in time for cards. Brent thought sending family photos for cards was smarmy, but Gina insisted. He wondered if it was something women did to compete with their friends to prove who really had a nicer-looking or happier family. All Brent saw in 90 percent of the photos were uncomfortable children and miserable spouses holding tight to a veneer of love.  
    Merry Christmas, indeed.
    He held the photo, eyes fixed on Ben’s joyous smile.
    Brent hadn’t wanted kids, not really. The world was far too fucked for that. Ben was an accident. Gina’s plumbing made him a one in a million shot at best. Same as Ben’s odds when Gina was rushed to the hospital bleeding at seven and a half months.
    Only then did Brent realize how much he’d come to love the thought of having a son , and let his cynicism face the light of hope. When the doctors came out to update him on the status of the emergency C-section and told him he had a son, he was nothing but tears.   And when he finally saw his son in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit , his heart melted. Ben was their miracle. And for one not inclined to believe in miracles, that was no small statement.
    Sitting there on the couch, Brent felt guiltier than ever about trading his family for work.  
    He’d always wanted to be a reporter. When he landed a gig in New York, his dream came true. Sure, it wasn’t The Times , just The Apple Tribune , but still, he was in the heart of it all, covering feature stories in the city of a million stories. But the newspaper business was dying: the Internet, evaporating advertising, and a cast and crew that couldn’t stop the bleeding. As the cuts came, he was always spared (so far), but it meant working that much harder to survive the next round.
    He rarely saw his family.
    It was a temporary sacrifice, he told himself, and a necessary one. He was working toward something, and getting there a word at a time. And he knew good writers, damned good writers, who were unemployed, hungry, and writing anything