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

thudded into a brick wall.
    Brent was easing tensions when The Prophet slowed the car to a crawl, and stared into the darkness ahead.
    “What’s going on?” Rojas asked.
    Brent looked up to see why they had stopped, his jaw nearly dropping at the shadows barely illuminated by the wagon’s high beams.
    The highway was blocked with tall dark towers of stacked cars, trucks, and debris, soaring 10 stories and higher, vaguely visible in the moonlight.
    “Holy shit!” Lisa said, leaning forward and shaking her head. Then, “What in the hell? This wasn’t here the other day.”
    The Prophet stared for an eternity, as if he were trying to wrap his head around who or what might have made the impossible possible. Something in his expression seemed to indicate that he didn’t think it was divine work.
    “I saw the same thing in New York,” Brent said. “Except with bodies.”
    “Bodies?” Rojas asked.
    “Yes, thousands, maybe tens of thousands, all stacked in Times Square.”
    “I wonder if those were the sinners or the saints,” Lisa said, glaring at The Prophet.
    “Where do we go now?” The Prophet asked, still preoccupied with the stacks of cars, still visibly shaken, maybe all the way to his core.
    “Turn the car around,” Lisa said. “We’ll get off at the last exit and find another way.”
    The Prophet put the car in reverse just as the engine died. The car began to roll backward and he slammed his foot down on the brake pedal, jerking the car to a halt.
    “What the hell?” Lisa said, leaning over. “Out of gas?!”
    The Prophet leaned forward and stared at the gas gauge, seemingly as surprised by the red as he was by the stacks in the road. “Sorry. It’s been a while since I’ve had to drive myself anywhere.”
    “Great!” Lisa said, opening the door and stepping from the car. Everyone followed, Brent growing more certain that Ed would make a break for it soon. Rojas was tasked with keeping an eye on him, but the Black Mountain Guardsman was distracted, if not outright spooked, with everything else happening. Brent watched Ed for any brewing signs for action. If he were going to make a move, it seemed like the right time.
    But Ed was quiet, perhaps biding his time.
    “Shit,” Lisa said, looking down from the overpass railing to the road below, or the crumbles that were left of it. Though dark, they could see enough detail to know that the landscape below was littered with jagged crags of debris as far as the eye could see, as if an earthquake had split the road into thousands of chunks of asphalt and earth.
    “I think there’s aliens down there,” Billy said, his first words since they’d left the shopping center.
    Brent didn’t see any signs of life, however.
    “We have two options,” Lisa said. “We can go down there and try not to break our asses. Or we go through this pile and hope that the towers don’t fall on us. Anyone have an opinion?”
    Brent was surprised she was asking anyone for input, but the question seemed mostly directed at Ed. Perhaps Ed had earned a bit more respect back at the grocery store than she was verbally willing to acknowledge. Brent stared at the road ahead of them. His eyes had adjusted a bit to the darkness, so he could see that the towers of cars sprawled for a few hundred yards or so, with just enough room to walk, or maybe drive a motorcycle through. It reminded him of the vehicle piles they’d found as he and Luis were trying to make their way to Times Square, except those cars were only jammed side-by-side, not on top of one another too.
    What the hell could have done this? Not the aliens?
    They can’t even climb; surely they’re not stacking cars like toys.
    Ed’s eyes narrowed as he looked down from the overpass and then back toward Lisa. “I don’t like the looks of anything down there.” He shook his head, then turned to the stacks. “I say we head straight through the maze and hope there’s a working vehicle on the other side of this maze.”
    Lisa stared at him as if trying to read what else he may have been thinking. Maybe she was wondering if he were looking for an exit too. Hell, maybe she didn’t even have it in her anymore to care. Perhaps with everything else going on, a prisoner was the last thing she had the time, or the ability, to look after. Brent thought about Mr. Ebers, his eleventh grade shop teacher who would often turn the other cheek, pretending not to notice as several of his students fled his classroom when