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

phone.
    What in the hell?
    The sound was especially startling since Will couldn’t even remember the last time he’d heard it. When someone called Will, they called his cell. He usually thought about his landline once a month, each time he was stupid enough to sign another check to the phone company.
    The phone rang three times before he managed to grab the phone from his nightstand.
    “Hello?”
    “Good morning, Sir. Is this William Bishop?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you the father of a Mr. Boricio Bishop?”
    The lump in Will’s throat was as big as a golf ball. “Yes.”
    “Were sorry to inform you, sir, but there’s been an accident.”

    * * * *

CHAPTER 5 — Boricio Bishop Part 2

    Other Earth
    Paddock Island, New York
    Sunday July 10, 2011
    night

    Boricio woke up feeling like he was trudging through the desert, knee deep in sand, pulling a fat bag of hammers by the thin of his neck.
    It took him a moment to realize where he was — a hospital in the city.
    How did I get here?
    His throat was raw and his head was pounding. His earlobes felt like they were on fire. Even his teeth hurt. The coppery taste of blood coated his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Below the neck Boricio was nothing but numb. Whatever was working to kill his pain from the shoulders down, wasn’t working on the top floor, though.
    Boricio scooted himself up on the bed, then wiggled his toes just to make sure they could still dance. Sure as a sack of sugar they did, so Boricio wasn’t paralyzed. Just temporarily frozen from the pain.
    He blinked again, then swallowed, wincing through the pain.
    Boricio ran his fingers across his bandaged head as he looked around the hospital room, his eyes starting at the far right and the partition with all the silence behind it, then slowly grazing to the left, stopping at Will, sitting in a chair beside him with his arms crossed, waiting for Boricio to see him.
    “Hey,” Will said with a smile. “Good to see you blinking.”
    Boricio tried, but couldn’t smile back. Finding two pieces of what happened so he could put them together was hard enough. His memory was a blur. The naked recall, along with the ache and the pain, made the idea of a smile almost absurd.
    Boricio forced a question from his raw throat. “What happened?”
    “You were in a crash this morning. Do you remember the accident?”
    Boricio narrowed his eyes, then rocked his head slowly back and forth, and ever so slightly left to right. He went completely still, looked down, then finally shook his head.
    “What’s the last thing you remember?”
    Boricio tried to think back, but the only memory he could come up with had him back at Black Island, saying goodbye to Will, then stopping by the house to give Luca a high-five and tell him he’d see him after the weekend.
    Boricio was trying to blink himself into the next memory when he realized he was only blinking from his right eye, and that his left was showing nothing but black. Boricio felt suddenly trapped in a vacuum of horror, gasping for breath as his fingers ran over the bandage covering much of the left side of his face, including his left eye.
    Will was at his bedside a second before Boricio started to scream. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
    “What happened to my face?”
    “You were in a car accident,” Will put his hand on Boricio’s shoulder.
    Boricio felt a flicker of rage toward Will, seeing his face twitch the way it did as he hesitated to deliver the news to Boricio as if he were a child. He wanted to snap at Will to just fucking tell him what was going on, because Boricio was imagining the worst case scenario lurking beneath the bandages.
    Boricio breathed himself into calm, then said, “How bad is it?”
    “You lost your left eye in the accident.” Will paused, rubbing his hand on Boricio’s shoulder, then said, “And your face and back of your head were badly lacerated, requiring lots of stitches, including one from your forehead to your left cheek which is gonna be pretty scary looking for some time. It’s too soon to say, but I believe the scarring can be minimized with cosmetic surgery, but not right away. Fortunately, your other injuries were minor.”
    Boricio tried to swallow again, this time managing to push the lump all the way to the bottom of his chest. He wondered if he would ever be able to grow hair around the gash again. He couldn’t care less. Boricio would be perfectly fine being bald as a baby. But Rose loved