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

crossroads. He had nearly a full tank of gas and would just drive until he figured out where he was or found sunlight, when it would be easier to find his way back.  
    Daylight apparently wasn’t too far off since Boricio crashed into it head first about an hour later, alongside an uncomfortably loud wave of deja vu that ended in a row of houses that reminded him an awful lot of the ritzy-titsy homes up in Gulfport, Mississippi.
    Boricio pulled the Z8 into a perfectly bricked horseshoe drive, and smiled. His smile grew bigger when he stepped inside the unlocked house.  
    The two-story house was posh, with eight-bedrooms, six-bathrooms, and three boat slips, two occupied. Same as most of the other rich houses Boricio had seen, this one was flush with alcohol, clothes, guns, jewelry, lots of pills, pounds of weed, loads of money, and shelves lined with food.  
    The living room was massive, with a pile of rich bitchy furniture pushed to one side. Eight bedrolls sat in a circle, each with a large bank of pillows, several bottles of water, and a medium-sized red bucket. The buckets had what looked and smelled like vomit. The air was thick, sour and weirdly familiar.  
    Two buckets lay on their side with scabs of black vomit crusting the lacquered hardwood floor. A red and white bedroll was in the center with wooden instruments, spirit sticks burned to a nub, and a large two-liter jug of sludge, filled to the top, with an empty shot glass sitting beside it on the floor. Boricio picked up the two-liter jug and shot glass, then went upstairs, found the master bedroom and fell into the plush oversized bed. He filled the glass to the top, put it to his lips, then spilled the entire psychedelic mess down his throat.
    For a few moments, he felt nothing. Then something moved in his guts.
    Seconds later, vomit spewed from his mouth and Boricio fell over, face down on the Egyptian cotton. He smiled. He felt lighter, stronger, better. He turned over, looking up where the ceiling had been. It was replaced by colors: swirling, spinning, dancing across his mind. But the colors weren’t alone. They came loaded with memories, unpleasant ones, which started as whispers but were growing louder by the second, mixing into a chaotic mix of sound and visuals that threatened to swallow him whole.
    He snarled, had to fight as thoughts piled on top of him, too many to sort, voices, images, and a million colors — fuck, the colors — as his body swayed back and forth in the waves, all the while his stomach lurching with each movement. The waves, the noise, and the colored memories rose in pitch, carrying him ever higher, impossibly high, as if into the sky above, though he could see nothing but the colors and memories. He continued to rise and felt the rising fear of the inevitable drop that would come.
    A childhood fear whispered into his mind: fall in your sleep, and hit the ground, you’ll die in both worlds, and never be found.
    And then he fell.
    But the fall wasn’t long. It was instant. And instead of crashing to the ground, he simply stopped moving.
    He woke face up in a dark, cold, slippery pit that was wet with the putrid scent of death. The only light came from above, but seemed so dim and far away as if to be thousands of feet from where he lay. He sat up and noticed a crow next to him, pulling at something in the ground.  
    A worm?
    Then Boricio saw it wasn’t worm, but rather the flesh from a corpse. One of thousands of tangled naked bodies that lined every square inch of the pit around him, piled as high as he could see.
    Jesus Christ.
    Not one to stick around in hell-holes, Boricio grabbed a handful of corpse and started to climb towards the light. He climbed and climbed until sweat started to stew in his pores and coat his body. His muscles bulged and he felt inches from exhaustion, but after an hour, he was getting closer to the dim light above which he could now make out as stars. As he drew closer, Boricio felt a gust of cool air and could see the grass swaying at the edges of the pit just yards away.  
    He continued to climb but lost his grip when three heads emerged from the grass. Then he heard a horrible scream from the sky above just as the corpses beneath him came to life, clawing, tearing, biting.
    This shit is about as real as a pair of Beverly Hills tits, but fuck me in my starfish and hit me with a slap of hot yogurt if it don’t feel exactly like the here-and-now.  
    The fingers kept clawing at