Yesterday's Gone: Season One

furrowed in the rear-view mirror, “didn’t you have the bat, Charlie? How the hell did the channel change to Callie here poundin’ the fuck outta that thing, while you were in the corner pissing yourself like a little bitch?”
     
    Bob looked into the rearview, smiling his asshole bully smile. No, he hadn’t changed. He was still a major fucking bag of dicks.
     
    “I dropped the bat when I went to take a swing,” Charlie admitted sheepishly.
     
    “DROPPED the bat? Jesus, kid, now I can see why you were always last picked in gym.”
     
    Fucker.
     
    Callie turned back to Charlie, a kind look in her eyes.  
     
    “No, he saved me. If he hadn’t come after that thing, it would’ve killed me.”
     
    Bob didn’t say anything, just looked in the rearview, eyes locking onto Charlie’s before returning to the road. Bob glanced up once more to meet Charlie’s eyes, then accelerated, pushing the car faster, and louder.
     
    As they drove into the unknown, Charlie felt the old familiar feeling. The world had changed; its rules had not. The bullies still ruled while the weak cowered.
     
    He glanced at Callie, who was closing her eyes and leaning back in her seat, and wished he wasn’t so goddamned weak.
     

     
    ****

 
    EDWARD KEENAN
     

     

     
    They didn’t get back to sleep after the nightmare, so they hit the road instead. The clock on the SUV’s radio read 1:10 p.m., but the sky outside was darker than it should have been. The clouds were thick and low; thunderheads rolled in the distance illuminated occasionally by pockets of lightning.
     
    The highway stayed empty, save for the occasional abandoned car. Ed was surprised more cars weren’t clogging the roads. At some point, he figured, they’d run into an area that was more heavily trafficked at 2:15 a.m. when the drivers all went poof, and they’d be forced to find an alternate route. But for now, at least, the highway was working.
     
    They didn’t talk much about the nightmare. The few times Ed asked about the helicopters and the men, Teagan brushed it off as a crazy dream that seemed silly in the rational light of day. And while the dream might have been, and probably was, perfectly innocent rather than some ominous sign of things to come, Ed couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to it than Teagan was saying. But he didn’t want to upset the girl anymore than she already was.
     
    Though he couldn’t remember his own dreams at the hotel, he did remember an odd feeling when he woke, as if something else were in the room with them. Something that was probing his mind as he slept. Something he would have missed entirely if he’d not been snapped to battle by Teagan’s scream. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, or whether or not it was something his mind had manufactured to help him stitch together the scattered clues found across a day packed full of mostly unknown.
     
    Along with the human mind’s ability to flip The Switch, it also worked constantly to find connections between disparate data. To make sense of the world and find connections. To learn through sleep and refine the animal mind. Nothing more, nothing less. It was the ultimate puzzle solver. Sometimes, though, the process, if closely monitored, led to more confusion than clarity.
     
    It was in that confusion that many people attributed special meaning to ordinary things. Ed didn’t believe dreams were magical, psychic gifts, divine province of the Gods, or anything other than the brain’s hardwired response to stimuli. People who needed magic to explain science were simply not appreciative of the everyday magic of reality.
     
    Still, even with his firm belief that psychic dreams were bullshit, he couldn’t dismiss the possibility that someone could foresee things through some scientific means we had yet to comprehend. He’d once read a book by some scientist about quantum physics. Though the book was supposed to have been written for the layman, most of it was beyond Ed. The one thing he got from it, or at least he thought this was the scientist’s point, was there is no past, present, or future, and all times co-exist in the same moment. In which case, perhaps some people were more tuned to such things — and saw these moments without realizing it, but our brains aren’t wired to make sense of such things, as we’re used to linear time, so our brains found other ways to make sense of the data — dreams.
     
    Whatever the case, Ed figured