Yesterday's Gone: Season One

flying in an airplane. I fell asleep. When I woke up, the plane had crashed. Somehow, I was thrown into the nearby woods. But when I went back to search for other survivors, there weren’t any.”
     
    She looked at him. “None?”
     
    “None. And no bodies. Everyone on that plane, except for me, had vanished. At exactly 2:15.”
     
    Her eyes widened as something inside her started to click.
     
    “I drove through town and didn’t see anyone there either,” he continued, leaving out the part about breaking and entering.
     
    “So what are you saying? Everyone’s gone?”
     
    “I don’t know about everyone; I mean, we’re still here. But there’s a lot of people missing.”
     
    “Where did they go? Are they coming back?”
     
    Ed looked down at the purse on the floor, searching for the right words, but finding nothing. “I don’t know.”
     
    The girl swallowed, wiping tears from her face. She seemed to be a bit less broken than she had a few minutes before. But he saw the familiar glimmer in her eyes — her brain was making the necessary adjustments to move on, even if it wasn’t letting her know just yet.  
     
    Ed marveled at the brain’s ability to sever emotions when necessary, to do what needed done despite emotional connections. He’d seen children become cold-blooded killers, soldiers mercifully end the lives of their fallen comrades, and agents turn on one another without hesitation. The Switch, as he called it, was in most people, though most would never discover it unless led there by circumstance. And it was almost never a good circumstance which showed you how to flick The Switch. It certainly wasn’t in his case.
     
    Sometimes it was necessary to find The Switch in order to move forward. Those that couldn’t or wouldn’t flip it often paid a high price for their hesitance.
     
    “My name is Ed,” he offered, leaning closer and extending his hand.
     
    “Teagan,” she said, shaking his hand with a frail grip.
     
    “Okay, Teagan. What do you want to do? Where’s your home?”
     
    “Cape Hope, North Carolina.”
     
    “Do you want to go there?”
     
    “Do you think my parents might be there?”
     
    “Honestly? No. I don’t know where people went, but I definitely don’t think they went home.”
     
    She stared out the window, then her hands went to her stomach, soothing her unborn child.
     
    “How far along are you?”
     
    She pulled her hands away, as if embarrassed by her condition.
     
    “Five months,” she said, then paused as if she were going to say something else, before deciding not to.
     
    “Do you know if it’s a boy or girl?”
     
    “I hope so,” she said, her face straight for a moment until he got the joke. Then she smiled.  
     
    She found The Switch.
     
    Now she could move forward.
     
    “I don’t know; I want it to be a surprise,” she said, staring into the dark. “Do you think there are still doctors left?”
     
    “I don’t know,” Ed said. “But I’m sure we’ll find someone who can help.”
     
    He thought to tell her that he could, in a pinch, deliver a baby. But decided not to. She was still three or four months away and there was no telling what would happen between now and then. They were stuck in a rather horrible present, and to count on anything beyond the moment was wishful thinking. For now, he would look after her. But he couldn’t allow himself to get attached. If shit hit the fan, he’d have hard choices to make and he needed to know he could find and flip his Switch without missing a beat.  
     

     
    **
     

     
    They decided to drive to Cape Hope, even though it was sure to be a pointless trip. Ed hoped to find someone she knew that she could stay with, and then he could go on his way.
     
    She left a note in the car for her parents telling them where she was and that she was with “a guy named Ed” who was helping her. Ed hoped for her parents’ sake they didn’t come back to the car to find the note. He was sure that if roles were reversed, he’d be scared shitless to find his pregnant daughter running off with some “guy named Ed.” She took her mom’s purse and their suitcases from the trunk, so nobody would steal them, and loaded them into “his” SUV.
     

     
    **
     

     
    About 20 miles south, he decided they would need some sleep before the next day’s travel. They stopped at a store and grabbed some clothes for him, along with a trio of portable lanterns and several packs of