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

his back was turned. Mr. Ebers didn’t seem to have the energy to care anymore, figuring his life was easier if he just let the people who didn’t want to be there, leave. Lisa’s life would be far easier if she didn’t have to deal with Ed.
    But perhaps Ed had proven himself so valuable an ally against the aliens that Lisa couldn’t stand to lose him, and therefore wasn’t about to look the other way — for even a moment.
    “Alright,” Rojas said, gesturing with his rifle. “Let’s move forward.”
    As they headed into the maze, The Prophet stood beside the stalled station wagon, unmoving.
    “You coming?” Lisa asked.
    “I don’t know,” he said after a long moment spent slowly shaking his head.
    “We’ll be fine,” Lisa said. “Bring your air horn.”
    Something flashed inside the Prophet’s eyes, and for a moment, Brent could have sworn the man’s face went blurry for a split second. Brent blinked and rubbed his eyes. The Prophet was looking at him. “You okay?” he asked as he reached into the car and grabbed the air horn.
    “Yeah,” Brent said, not wanting to meet the man’s eyes.
    They headed into the maze together, with the old man walking in the middle, and Brent feeling more uneasy than he had since their excursion into the city.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 4 — (Other) Will Bishop

    Other Earth
    Paddock Island, New York
    Saturday July 9, 2011
    night
    THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT…

    Will waited in a chair next to Luca’s bed waiting for his son to return from the bathroom down the hall.
    Will had decided to test Luca at home from now on. Will tried his best to mask his emotions — both the excitement of discovery and the fear of the unknown — never wanting the boy to be afraid, or get too deep inside a mind where getting lost was too easy to do.
    At least they weren’t in the lab. Level Seven put Luca on edge, a feeling that Will could understand given the sheer number of people who were following Luca’s progress. Luca was the first human subject of an alien technology that their best scientists barely understood. Yes, the boy had healed completely, but he’d come out of his coma enhanced, a possibility easily predicted from the animal testing. But Luca’s abilities had grown beyond simple enhancement of latent human abilities.
    Luca was already doing things Will, whose proximity and early exposure to the vials had changed him, had never done, but now he was doing stuff Will didn’t even think was possible.
    Luca told Will that he had been going to another world, like theirs but different. A world where his mom and dad and sister were all still sleeping in their own beds and living the life fate had stolen from Luca.
    Of course, that was a scenario any child in Luca’s position would want to create. So while Will believed Luca was seeing what he said he saw, he had a rather large question about whether Luca was the architect of that world.
    Teleporting to another dimension — if that was in fact was what Luca had done — was beyond the scope of anything they were prepared for. Will was torn between his commitment to science — he couldn’t allow future testing on others without divulging this information — and protecting his son. Once Black Island Research found out about Luca’s new side effect, he would go from child to lab rat. And even though Will was valuable to Black Island Research, particularly in dealing with the vials he’d discovered so many decades ago, not even he could protect Luca from that fate once the truth was out.
    Could Luca really be visiting a parallel world?
    If true, the possibilities were enough to cripple his mind. Not counting a parallel world, two possibilities existed: Either Luca was imagining the other world entirely, or he was somehow traveling back in time.
    Will didn’t want to consider time travel. That rabbit hole was just too goddamn deep, worse than string theory and the infinite worlds that went with it.
    Believing Luca was manufacturing it all was easier for Will, especially since Luca’s mind was able to bleed color onto empty canvas. More than he, or anyone at the island, had ever seen. But things that had happened over the last several weeks made Will wonder if the impossible could be true.
    He was slowly starting to believe that it probably was.
    It started with the subtle but obvious changes in Luca. Level Seven was pulling too much from him, drawing on too much of his power. Luca’s mind seemed stressed, yet when he