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

floor, dumbstruck. How the fuck did he find the journal? SHIT! But he didn’t shoot me? Why the hell not? And why didn’t he haul me away to be condemned to some unfathomable misery at the hands of Sullivan?
    “Um...OK,” Brent stammered, his voice betraying his every weakness. He slowly extended his left arm and took Keenan’s left hand in his own. Keenan clamped down and yanked up with the force of an ox, slingshotting Brent into a full and upright position. After Brent checked to make sure his fingers were still intact, he followed Keenan to the table, ignoring the spilled beer, broken glass, and his freshly soaked pants.
    Brent sat. Keenan stood, gun still on Brent. “What the hell are you thinking?”
    “What?” Brent said, offering a ridiculous ruse.
    “Don’t dick around. I want to know what you’re gonna do. Now. Or I go to the brass with this and you’ll be reunited with your family quicker than you think.”
    Brent had never considered that as an option for how Black Island Research might get rid of him. Hell, they could probably use more infected “subjects.”  
    “I don’t know what I was thinking,” Brent confessed. “I was trying to figure out a way to get my family out of there. I wasn’t planning to infect anyone. Well, not seriously, anyway. I was just writing down different ways I might be able to get to my family and get them out of here.”
    Keenan sat down and placed the gun on the table between them. Close enough to dare Brent to make a play, but far enough to ensure Keenan would have it in his hands and trained on Brent in seconds.  
    “Get them out of here?” Keenan said, shaking his head, as if it was the damnedest thing he’d ever heard. “And then what? Where you gonna go? Who can help you? And what the hell are you gonna do, keep your family in a cage somewhere? How long you gonna do that before you shoot them and then yourself in the head?”
    “I don’t know,” Brent said sheepishly, staring at the floor, embarrassed and ashamed, like a scolded child who’d not thought out the very obvious consequences of a very stupid plan. “What am I supposed to do, though? Give up? They’re my family. You fight for your family. You never give up. It’s what you’re supposed to do. Right?”
    Keenan stared at him for a long time as silence grew a thick skin between them.
    “I need to tell you something that can’t leave this room, which is bugged, by the way.”
    “Bugged?” Brent said, surprised.
    “Yeah,” Keenan said, holding up a black box with a red light. “But right now, they’re not hearing shit.” Keenan leaned forward. “What I’m about to tell you must stay between us. OK?”
    This is either going to be incredibly good or impossibly bad.
    “OK.”
    “That’s not your family down there.”
    “What?” Brent asked, more skeptical than surprised, wondering if Keenan was about to rattle off the whole, ‘they used to be your family and now they’re aliens’ routine, though something told him he wasn’t.
    “Let me ask you a question, Brent. What happened on October 15?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Just answer the question. What happened on October 15?”
    “Everyone disappeared,” Brent said as nonchalantly as if commenting on grass growing. “Well, everyone but us.”
    “No,” Keenan said. “They didn’t vanish . . . We did.”

    TO BE CONTINUED . . .
    NEXT TUESDAY (JAN. 24, 2012)

    * * * *

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YESTERDAY’S GONE
    EPISODE 9
    (THIRD EPISODE OF SEASON TWO)

    “SNOWFALL”

    Copyright © 2012 by Sean Platt & David Wright. All rights reserved  
    Cover copyright © 2012 by David W. Wright
    Edited by Matt Gartland at Winning Edits .
    http://winningedits.com/

    This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental. The authors have taken great liberties with locales including the creation of fictional towns.  
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