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

wide with a horrible fear. He hung up the phone and set it on the nightstand.
    “What is it?”
    Ed said, “They broke out.”
    “ Who broke out?”
    He leaped from the bed, threw on his clothes, then turned to Teagan. “The infected.”

    * * * *

CHAPTER 2 — Boricio Bishop

    Black Island Research Facility
    Black Island, New York
    Other Earth
    August 17
    TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT…

    Boricio wasn’t willing to wait another day.
    He had waited too long already. Rose could already be a full month into recovery, and should have been a month into recovery. Instead, Boricio had allowed Will to warm his hands beneath the fat of his ass.
    Boricio was sick of the month-old argument, and angry at the old man for standing so decisively in his way. For a guy with a third eye, Boricio was sometimes shocked at how much shit Will was blind to.
    Will kept saying, “We’ll talk about it later,” but later was a word that couldn’t be measured, so fuck it with a meter stick.
    Rose wasn’t getting any better. If anything, she was getting worse. Her days were often filled with pain and her memory wasn’t coming back. She was also having trouble with her short term memory. There were a few days during Boricio’s visits that a glimpse of the past would come forth, and she’d smile and remember a snippet of their life together. And those moments helped to bridge the distance between them, helped her feel comfortable with him and not treat him like a stranger. But the next day, the memory was gone, and it was if she’d never remembered anything. The coldness had returned.
    Some days, he felt as if she were looking at him for the first time.
    And each of those stranger’s glances was a knife in his heart.
    He would take a hundred, hell, a million, such knives if she weren’t also in constant pain.
    From the waist down, she felt nothing. And likely never would again. But the parts she could feel anything, she usually felt only pain. Boricio couldn’t stand to see her in such misery.
    He had to go over his father’s head and see Dr. Williams, the lead scientist overseeing research on the vials.
    Williams was instrumental in Luca’s success, and would be a fool to ignore the data and deny Rose the same fighting chance. He may have been many things — egotistical, obsessive, unable to relate to humans — as far as Boricio could tell, but he wasn’t a fool. Especially not when compared to Will, who was becoming more of a fence-sitting philosopher than a man driven into action by curiosity. Telling the difference between philosopher and fool was increasingly more difficult for Boricio.
    Boricio did wonder for a small moment if maybe he was wrong, and he was perhaps overestimating Williams’ willingness to bend the rules. Then Boricio thought back to the wide smile slathered all over his face in the aftermath of Luca’s tests and felt certain that Williams simply needed the right question asked in precisely the right way to give them both the only answer they wanted.
    Boricio reached the middle of the hall and the pair of access elevators and stepped inside, with someone coming in behind him. He pressed 7, then set his hand against the graphite-colored palm reader, fingers evenly splayed.
    “Access: Denied. Insufficient Clearance Level,” the display read.
    What the fuck?
    Boricio tried again, pressing harder. The green lines on the display rose, then fell, then turned red.
    “Access: Denied. Insufficient Clearance Level.”
    Boricio started to breathe slowly, exactly as he’d been practicing to steady the rising anger, but a thick wad of air was suddenly trapped in his throat, and his clenched fist was shaking at his side, one bad second away from flying into the hard alloy of the elevator door.
    “You okay, Mr. Bishop?”
    Boricio slowly turned to face Richard Styley, the dweeby systems designer from Level Three who had followed Boricio into the elevator.
    “Yeah, Richard, I’m doing great. Thanks.” Boricio smiled, the need to slam his fist into the door of the elevator making itself too comfortable to leave — a lot like Styley, who stood three feet from Boricio staring.
    “Can I help you with something, Styley?”
    It must have been something in the way he said it, because Styley took a dweeby step back from Boricio and started shaking his head furiously back and forth. “No, Mr. Bishop,” he said. “You just look upset, so I was seeing if there was something I could help you with. Like maybe you