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

cell.
    So when she woke in the morning to find the lights on and two guards wheeling someone in on a gurney, she got excited that he was finally coming back. But the guards stopped two cells away, opened the door, then deposited an old, heavyset nude man onto the mattress.
    The old man lay motionless, likely sedated as she had been. They closed the door to his cell, then left the hallway.
    A while later, the same guards came back with breakfast — Cheerios in a bowl, two bottles of water, and fruit. Before the guards left her, Callie asked, “Where’s Charlie?”
    But the guards said nothing.
    Callie considered yelling, but decided to keep her mouth shut, at least for now. Charlie had gone willingly, or so it seemed. That meant she would have to be patient. She ate the Cheerios with her fingers. At least it was Honey Nut Cheerios, and not plain. She was surprised that even without milk, the Cheerios tasted pretty good.
    After a while, the old man began to move on his mattress. He sat, immediately meeting Callie’s eyes. Something about his gaze sent a chill down her spine. It was almost as if he’d never been sleeping at all. He simply woke, sat up, then turned his eyes on Callie with a creepy stare that settled somewhere between Willy Wonka and Hannibal Lecter.
    He smiled, and Callie looked away.
    A bit later, a guard in a yellow hazmat suit appeared, looking at the old man. Callie recognized him immediately as the one who Charlie had been speaking with earlier as she pretended to sleep. He looked a bit like Boricio, but bald and with an eye patch. He looked a lot like him, in fact, though she couldn’t be certain without a closer look or hearing him. If it was Boricio, she wondered why was he going through the ruse of holding them?
    Most of all, what did Charlie know that she didn’t? Why was he out of his cell? Where had they taken him? And why hadn’t they taken her?
    The man who looked like Boricio started to yell at the old man, though Callie couldn’t hear him. But she could still see him, waving his arms and pointing his fingers almost accusingly, it seemed to her.
    Callie wondered why.
    After five minutes or so, the man who looked like Boricio turned from the cell and left. The old man smiled, staring after Boricio as he went down the hall.
    Well, that’s just weird.
    Then the old man turned his attention to Callie, staring directly at her.
    Even weirder.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 7 — Mary Olson

    Dunn, Georgia
    Boricio’s Compound
    March 2012
    FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE EVENT…

    The cool spring night did nothing to chill the warm feeling Mary felt as she tossed the empty “bottle of piss” from the wooden picnic table into the large metal bucket across the yard, where it crashed loudly against the metal, then rained glass into a pile.
    Bottles of Piss was what Boricio had called the alcohol-free near beers that she kicked back back like they were the real thing. She’d never much liked alcohol-free beer, but she was pregnant, and Boricio had managed to get the generator to run a refrigerator on the back porch, making the drink ice cold, which did a lot to make up for the fact that it wasn’t getting her buzzed.
    “Shhhh….you’re gonna wake them!” Boricio said, mimicking Mary’s earlier warnings she’d been using since Luca and Paola went to bed about two hours before. At least that was the warning that Mary was using before she started throwing bottles herself a half hour ago.
    Mary laughed, feeling goofy enough to wonder if Boricio hadn’t switched labels on the beer bottles.
    “You didn’t give me real beer, did you?” she asked.
    “I might be an asshole, but I’m not gonna give a pregnant chick beer,” Boricio said. “I don’t wanna see you giving birth to some short-bus kid.”
    Mary laughed again, despite the awfulness of his comment.
    Mary was on her fourth bottle of piss, or perhaps it might have been her fifth. She was usually good at keeping track, but throwing her empties into the bucket had begun to confuse her. Or maybe it was sitting on the bench beside her new friend Boricio the Killer that had done it.
    Mary didn’t believe she could ever get used to living in close proximity to Boricio, and nearly everything about him still horrified her. But after several days in his company, and what seemed like a hundred-thousand hours or so of his endless mouth, Mary had a vague, but fascinated, understanding of what it was that made him tick.
    Boricio was a genuine killer; that