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

helpless to do anything but watch as drool spilled from his gaping mouth and pooled onto the ground below.
    He passed in and out of consciousness, drifting through an endless series of meandering thoughts, but always returning to the question: who dragged him to safety? Someone had to have pulled him from the church. The Prophet had felt something, like someone was with him, but didn’t see anyone and couldn't remember a thing.  
    He thought of the famous poem, Footsteps .
    Perhaps it was Him.

    **

    The Prophet woke to the morning light. His body was stiff, his face numb. He brought his hands to his face; it felt mottled and burned on the left side. However, and thankfully, it did not hurt to touch.
    He looked around. Where is Gladys? Where’s my family?
    The Prophet was alone, sitting in the ashes of the church. He looked around. The rest of his compound was untouched. Only the church lay in cinders, struck and burned from the face of the planet, reduced to little more than a memory frosting the air over its charred foundation.
    The Prophet stumbled to his feet and approached the blackened remains of the church he’d known all his life. It was as though a giant, or the Devil himself, had picked up the roof and tore off the walls, leaving nothing but the remains of the floor, pews, and several piles of smoldering remains he couldn’t make out at first.
    Then it hit him.
    There were bodies.
    The entire congregation had been reduced to cinders. He found the smallest of piles and thought of Ellie Mae, smiling at him.  
    The Prophet fell to the ground weeping.
    “What have I done?”

    * * * *

1 - BRENT FOSTER: PART 1

    Black Island, New York
    Black Island Research Facility — Level 6
    March 22, 2011
    morning

    The woman and child behind the glass are not my family.
    That was the thought Brent kept beating into his brain as he glared into the   cavernous observation chamber behind God knows how much bullet-proof, bomb-proof, and everything else-proof glass, here beneath the earth at the end of the world.
    The glass was one-way, thank God . Brent couldn’t imagine having to look into his family’s new sets of alien eyes, or having them see him on the free side of the chamber. The cell reminded him of an enclosed room he’d once seen at a zoo where penguins were kept, except this cell had no pretense of a natural habitat. It was sterile, industrial, and lacked anything that could ever be accused of being a creature comfort. No cots and no toilets. Nothing but gray concrete-looking walls, a row of drains in the floor, and ominous looking vents and holes in the ceiling. On the far side of the chamber was an oversized square door, which exited into another room Brent hadn’t been cleared to enter.
    This was Brent’s first time this deep under the massive facility beneath Black Island. Civilian access was limited to the first level. The farther down, the higher clearance level needed to access it. The whole place reminded Brent of the interior of spaceships he’d seen on shows — industrial in color and style, sliding doors with retina and hand security panels, and the constant hum of electronics beneath the continuous rush of cold, sterile-smelling air into the facility. The room he was in was small, one of several that looked into the viewing chamber where his family was being held, though he could not see into those rooms through the one-way mirrored glass. He wondered how many other men were in identical chambers watching their wives and sons, and what those people had planned for them.
    Gina and Ben paced back and forth like animals, slightly hunched, arms swinging loosely, heads tilted as if trying to constantly hear something just out of earshot. Both bodies were stripped of clothing, a final indignity, layered atop the alien infection that had already bleached them of much of their humanity. While their skin wasn’t as dark as the alien skin, or as wet — and it didn’t have what seemed like lights beneath the surface — it had definitely already altered from human form. Their skin was smooth, yet scarred in places, and slightly waxen. It was as if whatever infected them was slowly shedding the outer skin and replacing it with something else, not fully alien, but not fully human. Perhaps it was working with what biology allowed in its best approximation of the alien skin.  
    If he had any remaining rays of hope that his family could be saved, they were dimmed to a flicker five minutes earlier