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

through his hands and shins. His limp mouth hung agape, tongue savagely removed. Dried blood has pooled in the stubble upon his chin. He smelled of death. A crude mark had been etched into the flesh of his chest. Ed stepped closer to make it out. It was a number, 9.  
    “Little ones to Him belong;
    They are weak but He is strong.”

    And then the singing stopped.

    * * * *

LUCA HARDING: PART 1

    Kingsland, Alabama
    The Sanctuary
    March 24
    11:07 a.m.

    Everything had been weird since yesterday.
    Mary, Will, and Desmond weren’t talking with the others too much. They seemed angry at Rebecca’s mom and The Prophet.  
    Luca wanted to be angry at the people for punishing Rebecca, cutting all her hair off and making her cry. And he was angry, at first. But then he began to pick up on all the feelings of the people like radio signals and realized that things weren’t as simple as he’d first thought.  
    When he focused in these frequencies, he learned that some of the people were mad at Rebecca and Carl, but most were afraid for them. That meant they were acting out of fear, not anger. And while Rebecca’s mom, Sarah, seemed angriest of all, she wasn’t really. She was actually the most afraid, convinced her daughter was going to hell and thus doing what she believed was right. Luca’s radar was intercepting more than just sensory feelings, though. He was sometimes catching snippets of actual dialogue.   At first, he thought he was overhearing bits of conversations. But no one was ever talking.   That could only mean one of two things:
    I’m hearing their inner-thoughts, or maybe the voices that normally speak to me are now communicating via other people’s voices in some attempt to trick me.
    After morning class, Luca and Scott headed to the church for their construction shifts. They weren’t old or skilled enough to be trusted with the hard work, so they spent most of their time prepping work areas and cleaning up for the men who were building the church. Most of the time, they sat back, watching, and talked to one another. Scott was nice and told funny jokes, though not as funny as Jimmy’s had been.  
    Scott was like a PG-13 version of Jimmy, which was okay, and he might have seemed funnier if Luca were still eight. But his own thoughts felt more grownup than they used to. Things he once thought were funny he now found silly, even babyish. But his thoughts still didn’t feel as grown up as his outside had become, though he really wasn’t certain what being an adult felt like. Luca felt trapped between child and adult, ping ponging between the two. As weird as it was to him, he was sure it was weirder for those around him. Paola and Scott were still talking to him like he was a little kid, when they talked to him at all.  
    Scott was telling one of his corny jokes, something about a llama walking into a bar. Even though he wanted to listen, Luca kept sensing his attention pulled toward the Box of Shame.
    The box was wooden and shaped like an outhouse Luca once saw outside the Miller’s house back home a year ago. When he asked his dad what is was, he followed the answer by wondering out loud why construction workers would ever want to poop outside. “Because sometimes you just have to go,” his father exclaimed. Luca started telling his mom that if Anna didn’t get out of the bathroom soon, he was gonna use the Miller’s outhouse across the street. Fortunately, it had never come to that, which was a good thing since his dad said that outhouses smelled like the worst parts of the zoo.  
    The Box of Shame looked just like an outhouse, except there was a huge wooden bar across the door that kept it barred from opening. There were two small holes at the top of the front and one larger hole at the bottom where Luca had seen Rebecca’s mom slide some water in and take a bowl from. Luca assumed the bowl was where the girl was forced to use the bathroom, which made the Box of Shame more like an outhouse than by just its appearance.
    “You want to join us later?” Scott asked, “We’re going on a store run, me and a couple of the guys. I bet if I ask, they’d let you go, even though you’re still technically a kid.”
    “ You? ” Luca said, not meaning to sound so surprised, but also slightly annoyed that Scott felt it necessary to again point out that Luca wasn’t yet a man, despite his appearances.
    “Yeah, why not me?” Scott said.
    “Well, isn’t it dangerous?”  
    “I can handle