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

that he was lying in something cold and sticky.
    “Mom … Dad …?” Luca swallowed.
    “Mom … Dad …?” His right hand found his mom’s stomach, then inched up and along her side, over her shoulders and up to her neck, until Luca was screaming at the jagged meat zigzagging across the sawed-off flesh.
    Luca leapt from the bed, landed hard onto the floor, then rose from the wood and raced toward the wall. He flipped on the light then turned back toward the bed, screaming louder as he saw the part of his dad he’d kicked into the corner, and the part of his mom whose face was frozen, staring at him from the floor between the wall and the bed.
    The lights flickered, then went daylight bright.
    He was in the middle of a big city. Not Las Orillas. It had to be New York since Luca was looking at the same buildings from his vacation two summers before. Except now he was alone, in the middle of a city, surrounded by towering mountains of bent yellow steel, all of them flowing from the top with fountains of blood.

    **

    Luca’s throat was too old and caked with age for him to scream, so he woke with the terrible howl caught inside his cracking gullet.
    Luca blinked his eyes and trembled beneath the sheets.
    Despite the horror of his dream, a part of Luca enjoyed its reality. Even if it was a nightmare, it wasn’t real. So the bad stuff couldn’t really happen, but he still got to feel like he was eight, instead of the old man he’d become. It was a miracle his grandpa had been able to laugh as much as he had before he died, since he had to feel about as old as Luca’s body felt now. Even when Luca wanted to laugh, just thinking about it was almost more pain than Luca could stand.
    He took a full minute to climb from bed, then another getting to the bathroom. Luca constantly had to pee, even though it seemed like he never ever had to poop. And even when he could poop, it took forever and sometimes hurt.
    Luca leapt from the toilet seat, startled, as a crack of thunder roared from a pistol outside, followed almost instantly by another. Then silence.
    Luca was already dressed from the day before, since he hated changing into pajamas and Mary said he didn’t have to. He slipped on his shoes, then went outside, pushed open the fence to the backyard, and then joined to watch the target practice.
    Though you couldn’t tell who pulled the trigger from the sound of the bullet, Luca felt positive Paola’s shot was what he’d heard from the bathroom, so he wasn’t the least bit surprised to see her holding the gun and taking fresh aim at a row of bottles on the fence.
    Paola pulled the trigger. The bullet blasted from her gun, and whistled into the forest.
    Boricio said, “Try again, and stop thinking.”
    Paola took a few seconds, steadied her arm and closed her eye, then squeezed the trigger and missed again.
    Boricio walked up to Paola, held out his palm, curled his fingers around the butt the second it was set inside it, then raised the pistol and blasted two shots from its barrel like he was finishing a sentence.
    Twin bottles exploded in unison; glass shattered like the roar of applause.
    Boricio handed the gun back to Paola.
    “Look Hannah Montana,” he said. “Thinking is A+ when you’re sucking face for a grade, but it’ll get you a big fat F in Staying Alive. If a thought takes you longer than two seconds when you’re slipping around the sweaty insides of a what in the hell am I gonna do sorta moment, then you’ve gotta know good judgment at the speed of a blink. Now, ol’ Boricio may say a lot of things that make you wonder whether he’s the messiah of mathematical truth, since it’s such a high percentage of what I say, but there ain’t nothing I’ve said to you yet, and nothing I’m ever gonna say that’s truer than that. You’ve gotta trust your gut — everything else is just a lie you’ve learned to believe.”
    Paola nodded.
    Boricio nodded back. “Look where you’re shooting, then pull the trigger. If you have to aim, then learn to do it faster.”
    He took a step back behind Paola, then turned and winked at Luca. Luca smiled back, though he wasn’t really feeling it.
    Paola drew a deep breath, aimed the gun — but only for a second — then squeezed the trigger twice, missing both times.
    She lowered her arm, yelled at the top of her lungs for what felt like maybe a full minute, though that might’ve only been because Luca had to pee, then raised it and pulled the trigger