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

are the others?
    He heard the shotgun and felt an intensity of pain, no different from if he himself had been shot. Ryan could see through the dying mutant’s eyes — it was still standing, swaying over where it had just knocked Lisa to the ground.
    Ryan saw through the other mutant’s vision as well, as it attacked the pregnant woman.
    The mutant knocked her to the floor, ripped the dress from her body, then opened its maw, sinking its teeth into her full stomach.
    Ryan wanted to rush to the door, but was overwhelmed by a sudden flood of disgust as the creature tore the woman open, then pulled the fetus from inside her and started to feast.
    He fell back against the wall, then turned and vomited. He looked up as he heard a second shotgun blast, killing the mutant attacking Lisa.
    Ryan rushed through the doors, blinded by pain and disgust, but at the same time, relishing the surge of power coming from the mutant feasting on the dying woman’s baby.
    He launched himself into the air, and landed on top of the remaining mutant as the half-eaten bloody baby fell to the ground in a sickening wet thud. The pregnant woman screamed, one hand on her open guts, the second reaching for her dead baby, both eyes wide in horror.
    Ryan unleashed his rage, screaming as he sliced the mutant’s throat to an open vent, then plunged his claw into the mutant’s burning eyes, gouging them one at a time.
    Ryan collapsed to the ground, shaking, crying, and screaming all at once as he stared at the pregnant woman, dead and cradling what was left of her baby in her frozen hands, eyes open to the heavens as if to beg for an answer to “Why?”
    Lisa stared at the woman, eyes tearing, unable to move.
    Ryan, now on his knees and shaking, stared up at Lisa, “I’m so sorry,” he said. “They got past me.”
    She stared back, and Ryan felt the rage bleeding from her. Maybe it wasn’t meant for him, but Ryan couldn’t tell the difference. She marched toward him, gritted her teeth, then raised her shotgun to his head.
    Her hands started shaking as Ryan met her eyes and begged her.
    “Please, kill me. Kill me now.”

    * * * *

CHAPTER 8 — Boricio Bishop Part 2

    Kingsland, Alabama
    October 15, 2011
    THE DAY OF THE EVENT…

    Boricio was chained to a wall, in reality and in dream.
    The last few minutes, which felt like hours of Boricio’s fear-battered dream, was spent chained to a dungeon wall as a long line of grotesque demons whipped his body, lashing his back as they screamed through his life’s atrocities line by line, starting with the earliest — stabbing Cricket Branson with a Bic pen when he was four — and ending with his last few month’s worth of personal terrible before finding the end and starting over again.
    The violation the demons kept wanting Boricio to repeat over and over and over again was the one where he murdered Rose from behind the wheel of her Mini-Cooper, before leading his own father to finish her forever.
    The shackles followed him into the waking world. He was in an underground room with shackles on the walls to either side of him. On the wall to his right was a stairway, all of it lit by a low bulb hanging from a chain in the center of the room.
    The whole thing seemed like something out of some old pervert’s makeshift sex dungeon.
    Where the fuck did The Prophet go?
    What did he do with the vial?
    He screamed, his bellow fueled by rage and filled with fury. It was also fueled by self-loathing for having been duped by a so-called “man of God.”
    As if on cue, The Prophet descended down the stairs less than a minute later. He removed his hat, set it on a wooden table in the middle of the room, then turned to Boricio.
    “I’m so sorry,” he said, shaking his head like he was mourning tragedy instead of making it with his own two hands.
    Boricio wanted to murder the old man, and probably would have if his wrists weren’t keeping him prisoner. He imagined his free hands digging all eight digits and a set of thumbs into the pasty white of the fat fucker’s turkey neck.
    Boricio yanked against his chains, growling.
    “Truly I am,” The Prophet continued. “I didn’t want it to be this way, Boricio. And so I prayed to The Good Lord that it wouldn’t be. But,” he shook his head, “His way is the only way.”
    The old man sighed, taking a moment before he continued. “I had truly hoped for the two of us, you and me together as The Good Lord intended to usher in the Rapture. Yet, because