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

of hearing her final screams screeching every time he closed his eyes, and sick of thinking about the goddamned vials.
    He was awake for several minutes before realizing he was still slightly drunk. He’d never had a hangover before, at least nothing beyond a mild headache. He’d never thrown up, at least not from too much alcohol, though the bottle of Jack he’d spilled on himself while falling to sleep the night before made him want to wake with a Technicolor yawn.
    Boricio glanced over at the empty bottle, and felt almost happy for the draught. One more reason to shift gears and get the fuck out of town. He was drinking too damn much, even though the too much felt like it was barely enough while he was doing it. Becoming a drunk was too easy, and Boricio had known too many men who were too stupid to live any other way. That was the problem with alcohol: You drank to forget and drank to celebrate. And if you didn’t have anything to mourn or memorialize, well hell, you could just drink while waiting.
    Boricio wished that so much of his last few months weren’t swirled in such a blur. He was having a difficult time separating truth from horror, and the past he was trying to flee. He wasn’t sure where the true lines lay between nightmare and reality. Time had turned soupy, and while the calendar clearly said October 13, Boricio could hardly believe so much time had passed since his last time behind the wheel of the Mini-Cooper.
    When Boricio fled Black Island, he was searching for the time and space to find himself anywhere else and away from everyone’s reach — he longed to find a place beyond the flow of time.
    But Boricio had found nothing like that at all. He found The Prophet instead.
    It was odd, how much Boricio felt drawn to The New Unity Church, even though he knew religion was bullshit. Even smart theology left you with two choices: Either man was one of God’s fuck-ups, or He was one of theirs. Boricio found the second one far easier to believe.
    Before walking through the front door of New Unity, Boricio would have claimed, gun to head, that God was definitely not good. Religion was a crutch for the weak, giving you nothing you couldn’t get for free, costing plenty you shouldn’t have ever had to spend, and ultimately, worth exactly the same squirt of piss it was worth before your ass ever kissed the flat of the pew.
    Yet mankind was largely religious, which in Boricio’s estimation made people slightly dumber than most animals, since most animals were smart enough to kill for food and protect their young, without being dumb enough to murder another just because their two theories end-to-end failed to make a straight line. It was bullshit, but the truth: Two religions in a valley meant war. Add another dozen and you had enlightenment.
    When the old man first started talking about October 15 and the Judgment Day right behind it, Boricio thought he was crazier than a sewer rat. But that was before he said something that momentarily bleached the marrow from Boricio’s bones.
    The old man had been giving one of his two daily sermons a few nights earlier, about 90 minutes or so before Boricio started emptying his bottle of Jack. He said, “There is no power, short of the gentle hands of the Good Lord Himself, that can pry the secrets from the depths of the human heart.”
    After he said the word “heart,” the old man kept going on and on and on like he always did, except this time Boricio seemed to know before every word before it left the old man’s mouth. When the old man started talking about standing at the empty well, even describing it down to the pile of bricks beside it, Boricio could see the same well, same as he’d seen in his dreams. Then, when he started talking about the end of it all and the beginning of everything else, Boricio could see it like he did in his dreams, staring down from space at the world, where everything was turning to black like pixels fading from a dying screen.
    In that sermon, the old man somehow changed from a smarmy evangelist to something Boricio didn’t quite understand, but he was just curious enough to stick around and figure out. The longer Boricio spent around the old man, the more it seemed as though he’d known him, or at least had been dreaming of him, forever. Boricio couldn’t tell if that was true, or just part of a larger illusion.
    The old man certainly took himself seriously, and carried himself with dignity, but everyone on TV, from