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

pressed the guard’s hand to the touch pad, then set Itself free.
    The Darkness murdered the first guard it met, ripping the head clean from his body. A second guard charged the Darkness, but It opened Charlie’s mouth and spewed out a part of itself into the air, then onto the Guardsman’s face and down his throat, until It started to spread inside that man too.
    Ryan felt a horrible cracking inside his mind, a mental fissure from too many perspectives. He cradled his head in his hands, then dropped to his knees, screaming through the pain of his three sudden perspectives: A terrified Charlie witnessing the horror before him, the Darkness inside Charlie, and the stewing Darkness inside the Guardsman.
    The Darkness continued to seep through the halls, in search of an exit. It wanted to follow Callie and Boricio so It could find someone — a child It wanted to kill.
    As It met resistance, Its compromised Guardsman trailed beside It , shooting anyone trying to stop them. The Darkness and the Guardsman quickly made their way into the civilian sector, where they infected or murdered everyone in sight.
    “Oh God,” Ryan cried, helplessly watching from the horror in his mind.
    He pounded on his cell, screaming for someone to free him so he could help.
    “Open the cell! Let me out!”
    No one answered.
    Ryan fell to the floor, screaming and helpless.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 5 — Boricio Wolfe Part 1

    Dunn, Georgia
    March 31, 2012
    FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE EVENT…

    Boricio leapt from his bed and threw a wad of covers onto the floor, then bolted to his window, tore a handful of curtains to the side, and peered out and into the empty yard below.
    Boricio was certain he’d see something outside, sitting there like danger waiting to hatch. But the yard was empty, unlike Boricio’s overburdened mind.
    He’d had another beer-battered bullshit of a dream; fucked up beyond all reason, this one with him marching over every end of the impossible. He’d spent his last few hours sleeping, lost in a never-ending eternity of demons in hell, and Monopoly games with Rip Van Creepy, except Van Creepy was a little kid again. And the dreams were weirder for how real they seemed, as if he weren’t just dreaming — he was seeing something yet to come.
    He went into the bathroom, took a shit, then threw on his shoes and returned to the window, shook off the haze of deja vu and stared outside at all the empty he wasn’t expecting to see.
    Boricio wondered why he couldn’t shake the weird feeling. Maybe it was a scent in the air that most of his mind was too stupid to understand but some other part of him picked up on and was filtering forward and telling him, “Hey, pay attention, fucker!”
    As he’d been telling Paola while trying to show the girl how to shoot straight, some shit you knew faster than you thought. That sorta crazy shit happened in nature all the time. It was people that ignored it. Boricio read about how some botanists at some college infected a group of tobacco plants with a virus. Within days, another group of plants near the infected ones sensed the danger, and produced a chemical in their leaves to protect themselves.
    That was crazy shit. And this shit was like that shit, though Boricio didn’t quite know how, or what he was sniffing. Because he didn’t understand the scent in the air, he didn’t know what to do. He took a final look outside before turning from the window.
    It was probably just the unease of sleeping without anyone in the house able to stand guard. Boricio hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since back when he was bunking with Charlie and the rest of the boys. If he couldn’t relax enough to get some decent shut eye, it meant he was either always awake, or haunted by nightmares.
    He was majorly on edge, still a bit drunk from his late night shooting the shit with Mary, and just a little fucking exhausted. Ever since he’d healed Luca and aged a decade, he’d yet to feel the same kind of energy he had just a month ago.
    But at least he wasn’t hungover. Boricio didn’t get hangovers. No matter how much he drank, Boricio couldn’t remember a single time where he had felt fucked up the following day. Level of consumption made no matter. Boricio could drink himself anywhere from tipsy to totally fuckered, then wake up the next morning with a fanny cleaver fat enough to fuck the remainder of the day.
    Frequency of drink didn’t mean dick either. Whether Boricio got himself drunk three