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

moved his eyes across the walls of glass, trying to see through to the dark on the other side. He saw nothing but Charlie, Charlie and more Charlie. It was The Charlie Show everywhere he looked, without even a hint of his co-star, Boricio.
    So, what? I just think and you can hear me?
    “Yup,” Boricio said, still talking with his mouth, though Charlie figured they couldn’t hear him if he was only an imaginary version of Boricio.
    Where am I?
    “A place called Black Mountain,” Boricio said.
    How do you know what this place is called if you’re not real?
    “You must’ve heard it, but don’t remember. I’m just telling you what you already know.”
    So what good are you?
    “Fuck you, Charlie Chum Water. I’m here to keep your ass from crackling in the heat of the fire. You ain’t even gonna get by, let alone outta’ here without me. And you can believe the fuck outta’ that.”
    I can get by just fine on my own. I don’t need you.
    “Yeah? How’s that whole going-it-alone thing working so far? Let’s take a minute to tally all that’s happened since we last saw one another, mkay? You got eaten by some giant fucking tornado, then spit into a snowstorm. You lost Callie. You almost froze to death until Adam saved your ass. Then you both got caught. Adam lost his fucking head, and you let a boy get shot to death. Now you’re infected and trapped in a cell. So yeah, America voted, and we’re gonna have to be sending you home.”
    Shut up!
    Charlie closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at Boricio.
    Boricio whistled, then said, “I’m still here,” singing like he was Tweety Bird.
    Go away. I don’t need you.
    “Okay,” Boricio said.

    Charlie looked around the room to see where Boricio had gone, as if he were real and confined to the same laws of physics as Charlie. But the figment was nowhere. Charlie felt alone again, wishing he’d not banished his only companion, even if that companion was only a man inside his mind.
    Sudden movement from behind the window grabbed at Charlie’s attention. He sat straighter, perking as he heard a crash, like something dropping just outside the window. A light flickered in the distance, then brightened into life, washing a second cell in white. And then another, and another, and another, until a row of cells identical to Charlie’s were all screaming with light. Every cell held a prisoner — some lying on a mattress and others standing, while many were curled into balls in the corners.
    He saw two rows of 10 cells, lining either side of a long hallway. Charlie counted twelve others, with no more than one prisoner in any of the cells. At the far end of the hallway separating two rows was a thin beam of light bleeding through the bottom of a door.
    The door whooshed open, like in Star Trek , then two men wheeled a gurney down the hallway toward him. Both men were wearing yellow hazmat suits with enclosed masks and air tanks concealed beneath the yellow suits on their backs.
    A second chill ran through Charlie as he stared, open mouthed and waiting, hungry to see which of the prisoners the two men would wheel out. But the men had come for a deposit, not a withdrawal, so said the long lump beneath the white sheet.
    One of the men leaned toward the cell door across from Charlie, then tapped a black glass pad in the chrome frame of the door, probably entering a code on the panel to open the door.
    The men wheeled the gurney inside the room, then hoisted the body from the gurney and onto the bare mattress, where a pillow lay waiting. The men blocked Charlie’s view of the new prisoner.
    Charlie was already wearing a chill, but it seeped into his every pore with the realization of what he was seeing. Lying naked on the mattress, either unconscious or maybe even dead, was Charlie’s best friend and unrequited love, Callie.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 3 — Brent Foster Part 1

    Somewhere in Georgia
    March 28, 2012
    FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE EVENT…

    “The Prophet?” Brent said, his weirdo alarm buzzing like crazy as the old man’s station wagon quickly closed the distance between the grocery store and Black Mountain.
    “Yes, sir,” the old man said. “I ran a little church round here for years; The New Unity Church parishioners were a humble bunch, and all of them blessed with visions of the Lord’s Wrath on the 15th of last October, before He gathered so many of his loved ones to Heaven and cast others into Hell.”
    Brent tried to bury what he feared was an