Yesterdays Gone: SEASON TWO (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER) (Yesterday's Gone)

entire city, then threw it down in a stack of debris as though it were cleaning a house and sweeping dust into a corner. Weird shit. Ed found himself wondering if the weird storms were an extension of the aliens in some way. He hoped not. If the storms were an alien creation, God help the humans who tried to survive them.
    Brent had been quiet a while. Ed looked over to see that he’d fallen asleep, his head on the passenger window.  
    Would he have gone through with his crazy plan if I hadn’t intervened? Would he have been able to infect someone as he intended? And, God, what would the consequences have been?
    Ed supposed it didn’t matter. The people in charge wouldn’t have let Brent leave with two infected people, no matter whom he had as a hostage. Ed had played out extraction scenarios in his head a hundred times, imagining how he’d rescue his daughter. It wasn’t feasible; a facility like Black Island had too many failsafes to allow someone to slip in and out without harm. And while Ed might be able to defeat the security, and even reach to his daughter, he doubted he could escape in a manner that wouldn't put her at mortal risk.  
    And risking Jade wasn’t an option. She’d already suffered enough from the curse of being his daughter.
    The way he figured it, they had no reason to harm her; there was nothing to gain in pissing him off by hurting her, especially when they allowed so many civilians to live on the island unmolested. Plus, their stated goal of trying to rebuild society seemed genuine enough, at least on the face of it. But that meant they would have to do everything that needed to be done to protect that goal, no matter who was in their way. So Ed would play ball. He’d worked for worse people, after all.  
    His parallel, the other Keenan, said his daughter would remain safe. Ed trusted him with that much. Keenan 2 had lived a slightly different life, a daughterless one, and Ed figured that though she were not his flesh and blood, that there may be some sort of connection which would keep her safe for a little while, anyway. Ed knew that Keenan 2 wasn’t the puppet master. Second in command, maybe. But not in charge. Someone else was pulling the strings behind the scenes, isolated from everyone and everything, using Keenan 2 as an intermediary. As Ed continued driving through a world growing whiter, he wondered if he’d ever find out who was really the man behind the curtain at Black Island.
    Is there a seventh person?

    **

    They reached the east coast of Georgia by nightfall. They arrived by way of Interstate-95, though there were several times when they had to find a detour around some obstruction, one of the many new travel norms of their brave new world.
    Ed decided to locate a hotel to stay at for the night. They’d need a solid night’s rest before searching for Boricio in the morning. He had a feeling they’d need every watt of energy their bodies could produce, especially if they came across anyone from Black Mountain. He found a newer-looking Holiday Inn off the highway, which looked nice and alien-free. The hotel was a free-standing building at the end of a shopping plaza that included a few restaurants, a Home Depot, a department store, a small grocery store chain he’d never heard of, and four different banks. He chuckled at the profligate abundance of banks in this world as well as his own.  
    He cut the lights as he pulled into the hotel’s parking lot, which was 60 percent full from the guests who involuntarily checked out on October 15, then waited 10 minutes to scout the scene for any aliens. None showed.
    They grabbed their gear and headed inside. On instinct, he began securing the perimeter, once inside. He locked the lobby’s glass double doors . He checked the side doors and confirmed they couldn't be opened from the outside without a key card (which wouldn’t work anyway without electricity), then headed up seven flights of stairs, banging their rifles and shouting the entire time, to attract anything that might be inside the hotel to come out now, rather than later when they weren’t prepared.
    All the noise was for not; the hotel was a ghost town.  
    They found a room with two Queen beds and a small kitchen suite. Ed drew the drapes and lit a few of the small battery operated lanterns he’d brought, placing them along the floor in the bathroomto cast just enough light into the main room that they could see without broadcasting their location