Yesterday's Gone: Season One

entertained some loon with crazy , tin foil hat stories.
    “Well, we never really knew, to be honest,” Stan said, “At first, we thought we were supposed to warn people. We tried that, but nobody listens to you when you say the world’s gonna end. And we didn’t want to lose our jobs or get thrown in the loony bin. So we kept mum, just trying to be ready in whatever ways we could.”
    “Wait,” Brent said, looking around the room, and trying to see into the hall , which likely led to a single bedroom and bath. “You said there were four of you; where’s the fourth?”
    “We haven’t seen her yet,” Melora said. “She was supposed to come here last night to wait with us. But she never showed.”
    “So you all stayed here for the end of the world? What happened at 2:15 a.m.?” Brent asked. “Did you see people vanish? Was there some big light from a UFO? Was God here? What happened?”
    Melora smiled one of those smiles that someone gives you when they’re looking down on you. “You think we’re crazy, don’t you?”
    “I don’t know what to think,” Brent said, “I’m just looking for my family and would like to know what the hell happened.”
    “They’re gone,” Luis said from behind. “They’re all gone.”
    Brent was getting pissed, but kept his attention on Melora as he spoke. “They’re not gone. I’m going to find them.”
    “I’m afraid Luis is right,” Melora said. “Everyone is gone. Which is why I’m confused. You didn’t answer my question before. Have you not had the dreams, too?”
    “No,” Brent said, standing. “I didn’t have any crazy dreams. I told you what happened and now I’m going to go out to find my family. Thank you for your time and your . . . stories .”
    Brent pushed his way past Luis, who didn’t bother to stop him.
    “Wait,” Stan called out, his voice hyper. “There’s something you’ve gotta see.”
    Brent was going to ignore him, just head the hell out of there, get back out on the street and leave Crazy Town. But again, his reporter’s curiosity tugged at him. Even if these people didn’t know what the hell was happening, he wanted to understand what they thought was going down.  
    “What?” Brent asked, going to the kitchen where Stan and Melora were pulling something from a box. A small video recorder.
    Stan handed it to Brent.
    “Press play.”
    He did.
    The camera showed the time in the bottom right corner. 2:14 a.m. The scene was the room he was in now, except the chairs and couch were all moved aside, and the three 215ers were sitting on the floor talking.
    “Should be any minute now,” Stan said in the video.  
    Melora started to say something and then the power went out.  
    The camera switched to night vision green and showed all three fall to the ground, unconscious. There was some static. Brent watched the screen, waiting for them to move, but they didn’t. They were out cold. If he didn’t know better, he’d think they dropped dead right there.  
    “That’s it until an hour later, when we woke up,” Stan said. “Then we went out and drove around the city to confirm what we thought.”
    “ I drove around the city,” Luis corrected him.
    “Yes,” Stan agreed.  
    “Okay, so you recorded yourselves ‘passing out’ at the same time; what’s that supposed to prove?” Brent asked.
    Melora reached into the box and pulled out another recorder. “This is the one we put in an apartment two doors down. One of several we placed in other apartments, I might add. Without anyone’s knowledge, of course.”
    She handed it to Brent, and he pressed play.
    2:14 a.m.
    The scene was inside someone’s bedroom, a king-sized bed. The camera was already on night vision. Next to the bed, Brent saw a clock’s face that read 2:10. He could see the shapes of a man and woman in bed, the guy hogging the blankets, the woman curled against him. He could hear one of them snoring.
    The alarm clock went black.
    “That’s the power outage,” Melora said.
    Brent kept watching.  
    More static, this time accompanied by a five second burst of a high pitched whistle like a tea kettle if the tea kettle’s sound were filtered through a high velocity fan.
    And then something came into view of the camera and Brent jumped. The camera fell from his hands.
    “What the fuck was that?!”
    Stan, surprisingly agile, grabbed the camera before it hit the ground. He rewound it to where Brent had left off and handed it back.
    Something that