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

it looked like a forest of Tim Burton’s nightmares, with crooked trees and giant worms pushing their mottled bodies through rows of bloody soil.
    Between the two rows of fat, crooked trunks with long and gnarled roots, and thousand-fingered branches braided above Boricio’s head, Luca lay sprawled across the forest floor, crying.
    Luca was no longer old.
    He was young, so young he seemed almost tiny.
    As Boricio ran through the forest toward Luca, branches clawed at him from both sides, trying to pull him back into the black.
    “Luca!” Boricio screamed, trying to get the boy’s attention.
    Luca didn’t answer, he only made his crumpled figure smaller, huddled and crying and sobbing in a pile, begging for help.
    The darkness from the forest was creeping into Boricio’s lungs like a thousand pounds of smoke. Boricio ran faster and harder, pumping his legs until he finally reached Luca, where he dropped to his knees and pulled the boy into his arms.
    “You gotta wake up, Kid. It’s time.”
    Luca shook his head, still sobbing. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t fight when the Terrible Scary is everywhere.”
    “The Terrible Scary?”
    “Yes, The Terrible Scary,” Luca nodded. “The Black Pieces. The end of everything.” He looked up at Boricio, then fell back on his palms and scooted back, gasping. “The other one of you!”
    “No,” Boricio shook his head. “That’s not me.”
    Boricio could feel the horror on the other side of reality, ready to end everything as his friends stood frozen.
    He stood, then held his outstretched hand to Luca. “You can’t be scared of the Terrible Scary.” He shook his head. “Not now or ever again.”
    Luca lay on the ground, cowering and unconvinced, as worms began to erupt from the soil, inching their slick segmented plump bodies toward him, trying to drive him away.
    Boricio snarled another order at Luca but the boy still laid there.
    So Boricio roared:
    “The Terrible Scary is nothing!” he yelled as the black started whistling around them. Boricio could feel the Darkness growing in power, shaking the trees around him in the world in Luca’s head, and dimming the light in the real world his body still stood in.
    The Darkness would soon swallow them both if Luca wouldn’t stand and fight. “Do you remember when you went inside my head back when you were being held in that dungeon? How I huffed and puffed and tried to blow your house down? But you stood up to me. You found the part of me that was broken, and you … fixed me, Luca. You fixed ME, a monster! Don’t be afraid of this. It’s nothing, unless you let it be.”
    Luca nodded, and said, “I’m scared.”
    “The Terrible Scary tries to hold you down, bury you inside your deepest fears, because it can smell your power, Luca. It burns with black, and that makes It terrified of your light. If you let It win, you will never see your family again. Your daddy, your mommy, your sister, you’ll never see them again. Ever. Stay scared, Luca, and you ruin the world. Stand now to save us all.”
    Boricio held his hand out to Luca, hoping the boy would take it.
    He did, then the world around them went white.
    The gnarled trees on either side of the Terrible Scary straightened as the road paved itself with a row of freshly laid brick, neatly trimmed with rich green grass. The sky went from oil to azure and the clouds from coal to milk.
    Once the Terrible Scary was entirely gone, they found themselves back in Other Luca’s room, now flooded with a light so white it was as though no other color existed.
    Luca blinked his eyes, though Boricio could barely see him.
    Boricio screamed, “You know what to do?” and was sure Luca nodded, even though he couldn’t see.
    Boricio stepped into the brilliance as Luca’s fingers curled around the vial. The man-kid flickered; a skeleton, then a child, then, for the thinnest slice of a second, nothing but light.
    The Darkness swallowed Boricio Bishop, as Luca was born from the Light.
    The room began to shake, wind howling through the shattered window, as the light dimmed from blinding to bright. In a voice that no longer belonged to Luca, but to eternity itself, Luca thundered:
    “Go! Run!”
    What was left of Team Boricio bolted out of the bedroom, but the Darkness reached out with a knotted spear of sable, goring Will through the back, then bursting through his chest as he was inches from the door. Will’s body was yanked back into the room, then into the