Yesterday's Gone: Season One

him.
     
    “I’m going to open the door, okay?”
     
    She nodded her head yes and he opened the front door, rather than the back, then leaned inside the car. The first thing he noticed was the purse on the floor in the front passenger seat. Then he saw keys dangling from the ignition, not much of a surprise considering the car was still running.  
     
    “Are you okay?” he asked again.
     
    She shook her head no, wiping tears from her face. “They’re gone.”
     
    “Who’s gone?” he asked.
     
    “My parents. They d... disappeared.”
     
    “What do you mean, disappeared?”
     
    She waved her shaking hands at the front seat as if it should be evident, then explained, through a quickly rising tide of tears.  
     
    “We were driving home from vacation. But Dad didn’t want to stop at a hotel because he has to get back to work in the morning and we’d already left too late. So he decided to drive straight through. I was sleeping. Mom was too, in the front seat. Then I heard this loud whistling sound that woke me.”
     
    She lost her voice to a sudden torrent of tears.
     
    “It’s okay,” Ed said in his calmest voice. He would have put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but was too far from reach in the front seat. It was probably for the best; she might see the move as a threat and then she’d really lose her mind.
     
    She found her breath and finished her story. “I heard this whistling sound, and woke up. There was ... something else in the car.”
     
    Her green eyes were wide, wet, and tinged in red.
     
    “It was like a dark cloud or something, but it moved weird, like it was alive. Pulsating. It moved over me and I could feel it, cold and filled with some sort of electricity. It even zapped me a bit, but it didn’t hurt exactly ... Then I noticed my dad was asleep at the wheel. And the car wasn’t moving. The cloud thing moved faster and faster like we were inside a mini-tornado. The whistling grew so loud I had to cover my ears. And...”
     
    She cried again, then swallowed before continuing.
     
    “There was this flash of light and it was suddenly gone, just like that. My parents too.”
     
    She surrendered to her tears as Ed tried to make sense of what she had laid out. He wanted to ask the girl if she were certain she saw what she saw. Maybe she’d been dreaming. But she was obviously fragile and he knew from limited experience with his own daughter, as strong and independent as teenagers often appeared, they could easily and quickly regress to small children who needed reassurance that the monsters in their closets weren’t real at all.
     
    No, the real monsters are on the street. And they’re often confused for the good guys.
     
    As much as what she said seemed unbelievable, Ed had the honed instincts from years of training that told him when people were lying to him, or even themselves, with a shocking accuracy. It was part of what made him such a valuable asset to the agency. This girl wasn’t lying. To him or herself.
     
    Ed felt the unseen pieces of the night’s puzzle slowly shift into place. Something had happened to the people on the plane, to the people in the house he’d been in, to the people in the store, and the cars, and everywhere else.
     
    Something big went down.
     
    Something his experience hadn’t prepared him for.  
     
    It wasn’t a terrorist attack or natural disaster. It was probably something that fell off the edge of his understanding.
     
    “How long have they been gone?”
     
    The girl looked at the clock on the radio face. 5:12 a.m.
     
    “Three hours; it happened at 2:15 a.m. I remember looking at the clock because it kept flicking on and off while the cloud thing got faster. 2:15 over and over again.”
     
    That was about the time his plane went down, though he’d not had a watch to know exactly. He swallowed hard and asked the next question in his softest, most careful tone. “What do you wanna do?”
     
    She looked up at him as if it hadn’t occurred to her to do anything other than wait for her parents to return. She was shell-shocked, normal thoughts were canceled until further notice.
     
    “What do you mean?”
     
    “They’ve been gone almost three hours. You can’t just sit here on the side of the road. I almost ran right into your car.”
     
    “I ... can’t leave. What if they come back?”
     
    This wasn’t going to be easy and time was a foe. He’d have to level with her.
     
    “Three hours ago, I was