Yesterday's Gone: Season One

her face, though he was pretty sure she thought he was laughing at her expense.
    “The less I say, the better. Trust me. When the world returns to normal, people will be looking for me. They find out I was with you, they’ll haul you in, ask you more questions than a week’s worth of SAT’s, and make your life a living hell. The less you can honestly answer, and trust me when I say they can tell when you’re lying, the better off you are.”
    Teagan stared at him for an uncomfortably long time as if she were still trying to figure out exactly what he was. She needed him to fit neatly into some preconceived notion of good or bad because that’s the way light spilled against the prism of her sheltered adolescent worldview. Few layers of gray existed in her world of blacks and whites.
    “So, how did it feel the first time you killed someone?”
    Ed moved his eyes from the road, let up slightly on the gas, then looked to his right. To his relief, her expression wasn’t that of a vulture searching the carcass for morbid details; it was the sparrow-like curiosity of an innocent child.  
    “What do you think it’s like?”
    “I can’t even imagine it; it has to be awful.”
    “Yeah, it is that. It’s also scary.”
    “You’re scared?” she said, surprised. “But you shot those guys like you were picking up a carton of eggs and a gallon of milk.”
    “It’s scariest the first time. But it’s never not scary . You’re always looking at two choices — run or act. With each choice comes a consequence. What happens if you run? Will those people continue to threaten you or those you’re protecting? If so, then you really don’t have a choice, do you? You must deal with it in the moment, unless you’re outnumbered or have too many variables to deal with. And when you kill, you must always be prepared for the fallout. And you have less than a millisecond to make the right choice.”
    “Did you feel guilty about killing those men at the gas station? I mean, they might not even have meant us any harm. Maybe they were just like us; they had guns to protect themselves from the bad guys.”
    “Maybe,” Ed said, “But I can’t think about that. I can’t cry into the rearview. If I ponder all the what-ifs, that leads to guilt and my instincts get dull. It makes it that much harder to act decisively the next time. Soon, I’m dead. Or worse, someone I’m protecting is dead.”  
    “So how do you deal with those things?” she asked, slowly drifting from curiosity to full-blown psychological exam. “How do you just … forget?”
    “I disconnect from the situation. Remove all emotional residual, lingering doubts, and every ounce of guilt. I seal them all in a drum, fuse the lid, then drop it into the deepest ocean of my soul.”
    Ed could feel her staring.
    “I don’t believe you,” she said, “I don’t think you can just disconnect your humanity like that.”
    “You’d be surprised what you can do, have to do , when it’s do or die.”
    “I’d rather die than lose my humanity,” she said. It was her turn to stare out the window. Rain began to fall on the windows and roof of the SUV.
    Ed flipped on the wipers. “That’s a rather noble idea, really it is. But I guarantee you one thing — once your baby is born, you will go anywhere and do anything to protect it, and believe me, you have no idea what that means.”
    A sign ahead announced: Cape Hope: 50 Miles.
    Ed hoped to find someone. He needed to lose the pregnant appendage. The sooner he was flying solo, the sooner he could quit the crap and get on with a solution to whatever happened last night.
    “I know why you’re not in a rush to get to your daughter,” Teagan said, circling back to the original subject. “You’re afraid of what you’ll find, aren’t you? You don’t know what you’d do if she were gone?”
    Ed kept driving.

    * * * *

MARY OLSON

    Mary and Desmond crossed the parking lot, passed the attendant’s booth at the far edge of the hotel, then stepped onto a narrow strip of State Street on their way to find Paola. Jimmy and John agreed to stay at the hotel, Jimmy downstairs with an eye peeled for Paola, while John swept the upper floors one more time for anything that might help them understand what happened to Mary’s daughter, or the world.
    The group agreed to meet back in the lobby of the Drury in one hour, whether they found anything or not. “You look like you actually know where you’re going,” Desmond