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

God!” Brent said, looking out at the parking lot.
    Ed stood, went to where Brent was standing, then stared out at the sea of creatures. The lot was packed with more aliens than Ed had seen during his entire time patrolling New York.
    He saw hundreds. Maybe a thousand.
    All of them waiting for something.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 6 — Boricio Wolfe Part 2

    Mary’s little lamb took 10 minutes to start batting her eyes. She was probably getting the man-kid’s kibble n’ bits to do a little batting too. Weird how Boricio didn’t see the aging happen, it just was, like when you look down and see the blood but wonder when in the fuck you were cut. He looked over at Luca, poor fucker looked older than he did, maybe over 40 and not even half as handsome.
    Boricio wondered if maybe he should just get the flying fuck all out of Dodge while the gettin’ was good. It wasn’t like he’d never been the only one howling at the moon before. Maybe he’d find out where those fuckers Charlie and Adam got off to.
    Mary’s little lamb may have been able to bat her eyes in 10 minutes, but she took a year and a goddamn half to open her mouth, and when she did, it was to give the man-kid a bullshit “thank you.”
    Luca pet the side of her cheek and said, “I need you to help me.”
    Her response wasn’t much more than a whisper. “What do you need?”
    Luca smiled, fucker looked like he was half crying, then said, “I want to save your mom.”
    A tear fell from the lamb’s cheek and she said, “Thank you, Luca,” her voice about cracked in half, like she was choking on a chicken bone before she managed to squeak another. “Thanks so much.”
    “But,” Luca got ready to thicken the plot. Boricio smiled. “I can’t save Desmond.”
    The girl’s eyes went glassy. “I just can’t.” Luca shook his head. “I love Rebecca. I have to save her.”
    “Why can’t you save them both?”
    “I’ll be too old. I can only save three people. You, your mom, and Rebecca.”
    He looked down.
    Paola said, “Oh,” as though she just realized how old Luca really looked, even older than he did before the monsters stopped her breathing. Shouldn’t have been too hard to see, since Luca’s hair had a bunch of salt where there’d only been pepper before.
    “Mary’s going to be mad at me,” he said, eyes getting watery as a bucket. “And I need you to help me make her not mad.”
    Boricio was getting bored of the live action Disney Channel movie scene. Mary’s little lamb finally said, “Okay.”
    After a pause, Little Lamb added, “Are you sure? About Desmond?”
    Boricio said, “And circle gets the fucking square!”
    The man-kid didn’t even look, like Boricio wasn’t talking at all.
    Boricio paced in a circle, waiting for their scene to finish while wondering what sort of shit Luca had actually “fixed” inside him. Shit seemed broken, like the wrong feelings were assigned to the wrong shit. Like he knew what he wanted to fucking order but the goddamn waitress kept screwing the pooch with the wrong dishes in each of her hands. You could kill a waitress for not getting shit right, but what were you supposed to do when the shit that was wrong was coming from inside you?
    Boricio still felt a driving need to follow his favorite set of Darwinian directives — fuck and kill — but the passion almost seemed gone. He still thought tearing the head from a fucker’s neck, then using it to knock down enough pins to celebrate a strike would be funny, but for the first time since Tom taught him how to make everything black, he felt bad for having the feeling. Maybe not bad, exactly. But almost like he felt bad for not feeling bad. That meant shit was broken , not fixed.
    Fuck!
    Boricio wasn’t the sitcom dad on some laugh factory fuck all. He needed his instincts, had to know he could do what needed to be done without some mystic shit slapping the pause button and making him hesitate.
    Luca and his little lamb were trading mumbles until Paola finally stopped sobbing long enough to say, “Okay, Luca. I understand.”

    Boricio walked up to Luca, put a hand on his arm, pulled him to his feet, then led him out of the basement, into the courtyard to a car that had died, along with the driver’s hope, a hundred or so feet from the front gate.
    Boricio turned him to the window and his reflection against the dying orange flames behind them. “See yourself?”
    Luca nodded.
    “You probably look older than your old man, am I