Yesterday's Gone: Season One

constant, just outside his bedroom window. He glanced at the curtain, but it was closed, mercifully.
     
    “They’re here,” she whispered.
     

    * * * *

 
    BRENT FOSTER
     

     
    October 15, 2011
     
    afternoon
     
    New York City
     

     
    Brent couldn’t stop watching the video.
     
    One minute the couple was in bed, sound asleep. The next, an impossible, smoky-looking liquid cloud appeared from nowhere, killed the video and filled the screen with static. And then the sleepers disappeared — vanished, vaporized, gone.
     
    Stan, as requested, showed him three other videos they’d recorded in their neighbors’ apartments. Each video showed the same song, different tune.  
     
    “What is it?” Brent asked.
     
    “We have no idea,” Melora said. “Though we suspect it’s extraterrestrial, and that the dreams we’ve shared the past few decades were some sort of alien broadcast meant for us.”
     
    Brent shook his head, trying to shake the thought of the black liquid cloud hovering above his wife and child, desperately wanting to ignore the lunacy. Yet, without a better explanation for where everyone except them had evaporated to at 2:15 a.m. the night before, he clearly had little choice but to play along.
     
    “Why us? Why didn’t they take us?” Brent asked. “Why would they take a...” he wanted to finish the sentence, but fell short at the word child , as though murdering the word would take the reality with it. He HAD to believe Gina and Ben were out there, somewhere.
     
    “There have to be others,” Brent said, glancing at the self-proclaimed 215 Society. “I mean, you all had the dreams, so yeah, you’re still here. But I didn’t . And I’m here, too. So there must be something else which kept me around. Something which may have kept others, too?”
     
    “You probably don’t remember your dreams,” Melora said, the professor’s tone starting to piss off Brent. “In fact, most people only remember a small percentage of their actual dreams. Isn’t it possible you had the dreams and don’t remember?”
     
    “Nah,” Luis said, “He’d have to remember at least one of them, right? Maybe there are others out there like he says. Makes sense.”
     
    Brent nodded as if endorsement built the road to reality.
     
    “Even if there are others,” Melora said, in her parochial voice, “it’s safe to assume his family isn’t among them, or else they would have been in his house this morning.”
     
    Brent stared at her. Her face was blank, clinically detached from her words. He was pretty good at guessing people’s histories, what made them the way they were. Melora, however, was beyond him. He felt like punching some color into the pasty white of her face.  
     
    Brent suddenly remembered seeing one of them on the street. “Wait a second. Was one of you out on the street earlier? Wearing a dark jacket and a hat?”
     
    “Yeah,” Luis said, “why?”
     
    “You saw something. I saw you looking north with your binoculars, then you ran. What was it; what did you see?”
     
    “You don’t want to know,” Luis said, taking a sudden interest in his boots.
     
    “We may as well tell him,” Melora said, “He’s going to find out sooner or later.”
     
    Luis shook his head, as if delivering this news was more painful to him than it would be to Brent. The sensitivity seemed a bit odd coming from such a musclebound tough guy.
     
    “Tell me,” Brent asked more than said.
     
    “You sure you wanna know? I mean, you might have a wife and child out there and when I tell you this, you’re gonna wanna go after them.”
     
    “Tell me.”
     
    “You’re right on one thing ... we’re not alone. There’s something else out there. These ... things. Not quite human, but not quite anything I’ve ever seen either. Maybe aliens, I dunno. I saw a few of them when I was driving around the city before the sun came up. They look like people, if you stretched them out and burned them black, then dumped them in some kinda gel. And they move all weird and shit. When I drove past, a few of them chased after me. And they were faster than any human I ever saw.”
     
    “And you saw one out on our street?” Brent asked, shaking his head, as if it would help him digest the impossible.
     
    “More than one,” Luis said, “A whole mess of ‘em. They looked like they were searching for something or someone. Maybe to come and get the ones that had been left behind.”
     
    Brent stared