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

met her. Darkness and the sound of whistling. Above her, a dark cloud engulfed the inside of the car.
    But the dark cloud wasn’t a cloud; it was something else — pulsating with serpentine motion, shifting form, and hovering its attention toward her as if it were alive.
    Her eyes widened in fear, and the cloud seized her terror, using it to multiply its mass into a swiftly spinning billow, melting through the air on its way toward Teagan’s trembling body, crackling with a cool current of live electricity that made the tiny hairs on her arm dance.
    Teagan was paralyzed, unable to move.
    Her father was asleep, slumped over the steering wheel, and her mother an echo beside him. The car slowly rolled forward, the headlights slicing through the inky silence of the highway, flashing on a guardrail quickly growing larger as the car rolled forward.
    Teagan panicked. She wanted to scream, but had to move first, needed to reach across the front seat, but couldn’t. The cloud started spinning faster and whistling louder — an angry tornado tearing through the tiny interior of the car.
    The whistling kept screaming, splitting the sanity inside her head. Teagan reached up to cover her ears and cried out as if that might mute it.
    Light suddenly appeared — brighter than anything Teagan had ever seen.
    The bright light was then enveloped by something blacker than the darkness outside, and in that instant her parents were gone. The car smashed into the guardrail with a grinding crunch, and then a thundering thud before coming to a jarring stop. The darkness above her had evaporated into wisps with her family.
    Something seemed familiar, too familiar — flooding Teagan with a sense of Deja vu she couldn’t shake.
    Trembling and confused, Teagan leaned forward and looked at the clock on the radio: 2:15 a.m.
    The odd, familiar current grew stronger inside her.
    She’d been here before.
    Teagan heard the sound of a baby crying. Her baby, Becca. She frantically searched every seat in the car, but her baby was nowhere. She swallowed hard, realizing the sound was bleeding into the car from outside, somewhere in the dark.
    She looked out the window but couldn’t see her. Teagan was terrified of the darkness outside, thinking of the black cloud that had crackled to life and taken her parents away.
    What if it’s out there — waiting?
    Teagan couldn’t leave her child out there alone, though. Becca was only one month old and defenseless against the darkness.
    Teagan forced herself into bravery, then threw the rear door open and launched herself into the night, moving with a fluid grace she could only find in her dreams.
    Yes, this is a dream.
    None of this is happening.
    Becca’s cries dragged Teagan’s attention toward the trunk of the car. Her baby was in the trunk. Milk spotted the front of her shirt as she ran to open the trunk.
    Where are the keys?!
    She looked up and through the rear window of the car where she was drawn to the keys dangling from the steering wheel. But that wasn’t the only thing Teagan saw in the car — the dark cloud was back as well, churning fast, spinning in furious circles as its mass spread throughout the cabin.
    The keys were held captive in the icy heart of the darkness. Teagan had no choice but to swallow her fear, then reach inside and grab them.
    Hurry. Do it!
    Becca’s cries echoed louder inside the trunk as Teagan’s heart furiously pounded. She forced herself toward the car’s front door as her fingers trembled at the handle.
    Open the door. Reach in. You’ll be in and out before it can do anything to you.
    Teagan watched as the mass spun even faster, growing inexplicably darker. Something from the center of the vortex smacked hard against the window, leaving a red bloody smear before it was pulled back violently into the vortex.
    Something else hit the window, a torn chunk of flesh which used to be wearing her father’s watch, but now wore only his fat and tarnished silver wedding band.
    Every window exploded at once — an eruption of a million shards, spitting a swarm of glass and black from the car, where the cloud instantly gathered into an even larger mass above the car, spinning and growing with intensity.
    Teagan screamed and ran from the car — away from her child, still crying in the trunk — slicing her heart into a hundred guilty ribbons.
    How can you leave your child to that?
    Teagan could leave her child because she was too terrified to go back, even though she