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

of itself as any name, let alone The Prophet, so he shrugged. “I dunno.”
    He asked, “How many are dead?”
    “A lot. Dead, or infected,” Lisa said. “And the weirdest thing, most of the infected people are mutating immediately — like you, but without your control. It’s happening so fast — I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    “Why are you in here?” he asked.
    “I need your help. I know what you’re capable of,” she said. “We’ve gotta save Billy.”
    “Who’s Billy?”
    “This kid I found on our last trip out. He was alone, scared shitless. I told him I’d protect him. He’s three levels down, and the thing is making its way toward him right now.” She looked in what was left of Ryan’s eyes. “Do you need a gun?”
    He looked back, then held up his right hand, deformed and ending in a blackened claw, “Can’t use one. And don’t need one. But I’m glad to see you trust me enough to give me one.” He tried to smile but his face hurt too much.
    “Don’t make me regret it,” she said.

    **

    They stepped from the elevator and into a long hallway on a residential level. The alarm continued to buzz, with bright red lights spaced every 40 feet or so blinking along the ceiling.
    The halls were splattered with blood, black liquid, and too many corpses to count. “Jesus Christ,” Lisa said, staring at the carnage in horror.
    Ryan’s elevated senses picked up on a two heartbeats nearby, at the end of the hallway, in one of the rooms to the left. “I can sense two people here, though one heartbeat is way faster than the other,” he said to Lisa, pointing toward the far end of the hall. “But I don’t think they’re mutants or the aliens. I sense them differently.”
    “Is one of them Billy?”
    “I dunno,” he shook his head, slowly making his way down the hall.
    Before they reached the door, Ryan sensed someone behind it. He turned to Lisa. “Maybe you should go in first, so I don’t scare whoever’s inside?”
    “Good idea,” she said, then stepped through the doorway, which slid open at her approach.
    The door slid closed behind her, leaving Ryan alone in the hall, standing beneath a blinking red light, listening to the on and off alarm which was growing increasingly annoying.
    Lisa was taking forever inside the room. Ryan wondered if something had happened. Perhaps the person was hiding, or maybe they’d left the room. He considered going inside, but was still worried about scaring whoever was in there, or worse, having them mistake him for a monster and opening fire when he stepped through the door.
    After a while, Lisa came out of the room with a 20-something dark-haired woman, looking 10 months pregnant judging by the way her belly pushed tight against her black dress. Her eyes were two confused saucers.
    “She doesn’t speak English,” Lisa said.
    “So what are we doing now?”
    “We’re gonna get her out of here,” Lisa said. “To somewhere safe.”
    “I think she’s safer here,” Ryan said. “I can feel them, too many, out there, roaming the halls on the other floors.”
    “Yeah, but if we leave her here, she’s defenseless. Once they get to this level she’s done.”
    Ryan looked at the woman, and sensed the two heartbeats, hers, along with the child inside her, both beats thrumming like drums in his head.
    He wondered if the Darkness, the aliens, or the other mutants could sense people as well, or maybe even better than him. If so, it was only a matter of time before humanity was picked like every cherry from a tree, or transformed into Darkness.
    “Come,” Lisa said, waving them back toward a connecting hallway. “Can you sense anyone else? Can you sense Charlie?”
    Ryan stopped and closed his eyes, searching for Charlie’s signal, like trying to tune his mind to a distant radio station.
    In his head, he could hear hundreds of echoes from dozens of different sounds — clicking, shrieking, and even random grabs of thought in garbled clicks and beeps. Whatever the sounds were, they likely made sense when passed between the aliens and mutants, but Ryan couldn’t untangle the noise, despite his condition.
    Most of him was grateful.
    He could also see some of the same images the creatures saw as they scoured hallways searching for humans to either murder or draw into their collective Darkness. Each time a fresh body was absorbed, Ryan felt a small surge in power. He wondered if the other monsters felt it too, then swallowed with a