Yesterday's Gone: Season Three (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER)

closed his eyes and luxuriated in the delight of her touch.
    “I had the weirdest dream,” she said, causing him to open his eyes and look at her.
    “ You had a weird dream? So did I. What was yours about?”
    “I woke up and the whole world was gone.”
    “I had the same dream,” he said. “That is so weird.” He sat up in bed. “I was looking for you, and …”
    Another vision from his dream flashed in his memory — a black creature with soaking wet flesh; bright light beaming beneath its skin and rows of rotting teeth plaguing its misshapen mouth.
    Ryan closed his eyes trying to shake the vision from his mind before it took over.
    Oh God, I’m dreaming now. No. No. I don’t want to wake up.
    Stop thinking about the monsters.
    I’m here, in bed with Mary. We’re in Warson Woods, where everything is perfect.
    He opened his eyes, and Mary smiled, “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing,” he shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about dreams. I want to—” he didn’t finish his sentence. Instead, he leaned toward her, cupped her soft face in his hands, and took in her scent.
    No, this isn’t a dream. You don’t dream the scent of your wife.
    He kissed her neck and she sighed, filling his ear with her warm breath.
    He felt his cock stiffen beneath the covers.
    “God, I love you,” he said, leaning closer and running his open hand under the covers, over her stomach and up to her breasts, cupping the bottom of her left breast and slowly closing his fingers over her nipple which hardened at his touch.
    “I love you too,” she said, reaching over and under the sheets to pull him closer.
    Their moment was shattered by a scream.
    He opened his eyes, startled, as she crawled frantically backward in the bed, trying to get away from him as fast as she could, her eyes wide in horror.
    “What?!” was all she could gasp, staring down at him.
    What’s wrong?
    He looked down, figuring maybe she’d seen a giant bug beneath the covers, but then he saw the source of her horror — not a bug, but his lower half, a mutated, twisted, monstrosity, with wet luminescent black skin, twisted limbs, and something gnarled and malformed where his cock should have been.
    “What are you?!” she screamed.
    Ryan woke up sobbing, his heart torn by cruel reality yet again.

    **

    Ryan had been awake for an hour or so when he felt something horribly wrong.
    He had sensed something weird the day before, but wasn’t sure what it was. The scientists had administered a serum, supposedly with cells from the kid, Charlie, who had somehow managed to resist the same mutation, even with infection.
    It seemed like a shot in the dark — the sort of fringe science Ryan didn’t understand or particularly have much faith in. But he had nothing to lose. He was all alone, in constant pain, and had been turned into some kind of half-human/half-alien monster. All Ryan had when they found him was the promise that death might end his misery.
    Now, perhaps they’d given him a new gift — hope for a normal life. A cure.
    Ryan felt nothing following the injections, though he’d been waiting eagerly to feel something — anything — different. He longed for some measurable change, for better or worse. Something to let him know for certain that things were shifting inside him.
    But Ryan felt nothing, at least not until last night, when the first flush of odd started slowly flooding through his system. It was nothing he could explain, but it was definitely new, and he felt certain it had something to do with the injections.
    Either way, Ryan hoped it was a good sign.
    That ended this morning, an hour after waking when he suddenly found himself seeing through someone else’s eyes and feeling their thoughts.
    It was Charlie.
    He was standing in his cell watching an old, fat, naked man in the cell next to him. Something about the old man terrified Charlie. Ryan knew because he felt Charlie’s fear no differently than if he’d felt it himself.
    He saw the dark thing that had once been inside the old man — the Darkness Ryan sensed spreading through the world. It was a part of the creatures that had infected him. He could feel its echoes in his blood. This Darkness was different, though, perhaps even its leader.
    The Darkness flowed from the old man, into a guard, and then into Charlie.
    Oh God.
    Charlie’s mind was then a prisoner of the Darkness, walking through the cell, carrying the guard It had momentarily possessed to the elevator. It