Yesterday's Gone: Season Three (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER) (11 page)

Whatever they did, it made Luca feel better than ever before. Stronger. Smarter. Well, not smarter, but his thoughts seemed more together and he could remember lots more stuff easily. Things that hadn’t made sense to Luca before finally had their colors right. Things and people. Suddenly, and with ease, he could see the patterns in the world around him, and all the many things no one else could.
 

Since the surgery, people seemed incapable of hiding their thoughts from Luca. Even when he didn’t want to hear them. His dad was able to do the same thing, had been able to for a long time, but not quite like Luca was able to, his dad had said.

Now, Luca was learning to do other stuff. Stuff Luca didn’t understand. That’s what the tests and the room were for, and what all the people behind the mirror were waiting to see.
 

Mr. Sullivan finished with the card part of the test and smiled. Luca could see the man’s colors start to change as his heartbeat gathered speed.
 

This was the part of the test he really wanted to see, the part everyone behind the mirror cared about.
 

Everyone already knew Luca could guess the spaceship and the carton of milk and the two girls skipping rope. Now they wanted to see the new stuff.

Mr. Sullivan moved the stack of cards to the right, then traded them for a small metal box which he set in the palm of his hand. Mr. Sullivan looked up at Luca as he lifted the lid of the box, smiled, and drew a small silver ball from the inside.
 

Mr. Sullivan held the ball in the palm of his hand, then closed the lid of the box, moved it to the corner of the table just beside the cards, and turned his full attention to Luca. “Do you know what to do with this?” he asked.
 

Luca looked at Mr. Sullivan, then down at the ball. He said, “You want me to see if I can move it by using my mind.”

Dr. Sullivan smiled. “That’s right, Luca,” he said. “Do you think you can do that?”
 

Luca smiled because he knew he could. He’d already figured that out on his own a week ago.

He narrowed his eyes in concentration, staring at the ball for several seconds before it lifted into the air and hovered three inches above Mr. Sullivan’s open palm.

Mr. Sullivan beamed. Luca couldn’t feel his dad behind the mirror at the moment, but he knew he must be proud of him, just like Mr. Sullivan.
 

“Can you lift it higher?”

Luca smiled because he knew he could.
 

He narrowed his eyes in concentration again.
 
Two seconds later, the ball was floating nearly a foot above Mr. Sullivan’s palm.
 

The man smiled wider, still holding his palm steady beneath the hovering ball. “Is that all?”
 

Luca shook his head, smiling so wide his face nearly split into a laugh. He narrowed his eyes further, focusing. The ball stopped floating, then suddenly shot across the room in a zig zag, across the room and back, up and down from ceiling to floor, then across the room in several wide circles before returning to its soft and silent spin above the man’s palm.

Luca then let the ball drop into Mr. Sullivan’s hand.

Mr. Sullivan kept his face straight, but Luca could see his colors and he was very, very happy. Probably like his dad was on the other side of the mirror, even though Luca still couldn’t feel him.
 

Luca laughed and clapped. His giddy “YAY!” screaming on repeat was enough to push the serious Mr. Sullivan into a bottomless laugh.
 

“That’s enough for now, Luca,” he finally said, catching his breath. “Thank you.”

“Did I pass?” Luca said.
 

Mr. Sullivan smiled again, then said, “Your dad will tell you how you did.”

Mr. Sullivan left Luca’s room and closed the door behind him. Ten minutes later, Luca’s dad came in.

“We’re going home?” Luca said, grinning.

His dad nodded, but looked upset. Luca couldn’t read him, and felt suddenly confused.

“Is everything okay?” Luca asked.
 

His smile was thin. Luca’s dad said, “Let’s go home and get you something to eat. We’ll talk then, okay Captain?”

Luca said okay, even though his dad only called him Captain when he was trying to get him to do something he didn’t want to do, or had to tell him something Luca didn’t want to hear.
 

**

They quietly walked to their house on the island. Luca spent most of the walk hoping Boricio would be there when they got home, though Luca knew he probably wouldn't be. The walk took ten minutes. One minute after that and Luca knew Boricio wasn’t home. Luca went to the bathroom, then washed his hands and went into the kitchen, where he sat on his side of the bar and watched his dad chop tomatoes and garlic.
 

Luca sat in silence until the sizzle of garlic in olive oil filled the kitchen and made his tummy growl loud enough for his dad to hear. His dad turned to him, almost laughing. “Hungry?” he said, smiling.

Luca nodded. He wished Boricio was home, but was happy to see his dad almost laugh.
 

“Dad,” Luca said. “Why are you mad at me?”

His father was facing the stove, back to Luca. He flicked off the burner, then turned to his son. He walked to the bar and put his hands around Luca’s waist, then lifted him from the barstool, set his bare feet on the hardwood floor, and dropped to one knee to look him in the eye.
 

Both of his dad’s eyes were welling with tears when he said, “I’m not mad, son. I’m scared.”

“Why?”
 

“I don’t know exactly,” he shook his head, his colors agreeing that the words from his mouth were true. “I just want to make sure you’re okay. You did great today, and I don’t want you to think for a second that I’m not proud of you, because I am.” His dad took a moment to think, then said, “Sometimes people are so awesome that everyone in the world wants to share them. You might be that awesome. And if that’s true, I’m not ready to share you.”
 

The colors weren’t all the way true, but they were mostly there. Luca figured his dad was trying to explain one of those grownup things where he could only use most of the color. Luca tried to see beyond the words his dad was saying, and see the ones he was thinking. However, his dad was good at keeping Luca out of his head when he wanted to.

His dad pulled him into a giant hug, the kind Luca liked best, then said, “How are you, Luca? That’s the most important thing to me. How are you feeling right now?”

Luca thought about it, then told the truth. “I’ve never felt better in my life.”
 

Will broke into a laugh, some of it funny and some of it sad, but almost all of it white like relief.
 

**

nighttime...

Luca thrashed in his bed, trying to wake up, prisoner of the Terrible Scary like he sometimes was in his sleep.

Luca could see the scary man, the Man in the Middle, the man who used to be there before Mom and Dad and Anna died in the car accident. He had disappeared for a bit, not long enough to make Luca forget, but enough to let him believe he might not come back.

The Man in the Middle was after Luca, laughing and cursing and growling like a dog, saying all the bad words he liked to say, the words that made Luca’s stomach sick, pulling him by his hair and dragging Luca kicking and screaming into the depths of the Terrible Scary.
 

Luca screamed, trying to wake up, wanting to force himself back into the bright light and true colors of his bedroom.
 

The scream died in his throat as he opened his eyes.
 

Luca wanted Boricio. Boricio, even more than his dad, would be able to help him feel safe from the Man in the Middle. Would teach him how to kick the Man in the Middle out of his dreams.

When Luca opened his eyes, he realized he wasn’t in bed, but standing on carpet in his bedroom, lit by the blue nightlight on his dresser.

But he didn’t have any carpet in his bedroom, only hardwood floor. And the dresser wasn’t his dresser. At least not anymore. It was his old dresser — the one he had in California, before the accident that killed his family.

He also didn’t have any Ninjago Legos even though he had been wanting them forever. The Lego table that wasn’t his had them in piles. Luca walked to the table, dropped to both knees and started picking up the Ninjagos one by one, examining each before setting each back down, trying to figure out whether his memories of putting them together were actually his.

No, they weren’t.
 

Except they sort of were.
 

Like everything in the room. This was his old room, and he was somehow standing in it.

This must be another weird dream.

Luca stood from the table and looked around the rest of the bedroom, his heart freezing in his chest at the sight of the lumped covers on the bed, rising and falling under the breath of the sleeping child.
 

Luca crept toward the sleeping boy, then peeled the blanket from his face, knowing what he’d see before he did — himself.

No. This is unpossible. It has to be a dream.

Luca wanted to shake the other Luca awake and start asking him questions, but then he spotted something on the nightstand next to the bed. A blue wood framed photo which had the words “Family” written in white cartoonish letters.

He picked up the picture, tears welling inside him.
 

Luca was in the picture, looking the same age as he did in this year’s school picture, but Mom and Dad and Anna were standing behind him, instead of being dead. Luca started to cry, remembering the accident.
 

Mom told him to buckle his safety belt but he didn’t want to. He kept taking it on and off and on and off. It was off when the car swerved off the road and rolled over and over. Luca was thrown from the car, through the front window, screaming. He might have been out for a minute, maybe more. But when he went back for his mom and dad and Anna, the whole car got swallowed by fire.
 

Luca looked at his sister, smiling in the photo. It had been forever since he remembered her smiling. And suddenly he missed Anna the most. He left the sleeping Luca alone, then went into Anna’s bedroom, crying because she was actually there.
 

Luca crept to her bedside, then reached out to touch her hair. Her eyes shot open and a surprised half-smile appeared on her face.

“Luca?”
 

Before he could answer, Luca was gone.
 

A second later Luca found himself standing in the middle of his dad’s bedroom. His dad had been reading his iPad, the soft blue light illuminating his face in the otherwise dark room.
 

The iPad fell from his dad’s hands as his father leapt from the bed. “Oh my God, Luca!” he yelled. “How in the world did you do that?”

That’s when Luca realized it hadn’t been a dream. He’d gone to another world.

TO BE CONTINUED…

YESTERDAY’S GONE

EPISODE 14

“We Are Accidents Waiting To Happen”

* * * *

Author’s Note:

Hi, fellow Goner.

When we started
Yesterday’s Gone
last summer, we knew that we’d have some ‘splainin’ to do when we finally pulled the curtain back to show you what happened right before The Event of October 15.

Sean and I (Dave) have spent many hundreds of hours hammering out this storyline, and believe this season will be one of the most powerful stories we’ve written together. The challenge of presenting a complex narrative is to tell it without insulting the reader with constant reminders of what they know, while making it so people who have gone weeks or months between episodes can easily recall the story to that point.

It’s a fine line to balance.

Given the nature of this story, and the multiple timelines and alternate Earth characters, we wanted to take a moment, offer a recap, and address some of our most frequently asked reader questions regarding timelines and alternate characters and worlds.
 

There are
NO SPOILERS
below, provided you’ve read up to
Episode 13
(the book before this one).

Yesterday’s Gone
began with the premise that nearly everyone on Earth vanished on October 15, except for the main characters you first met in this story. As was revealed (to some of the characters) in Season Two, it wasn’t Earth’s population that vanished —
it was them.

During the mysterious “Event” of October 15, 2011, they were somehow brought to an alternate Earth, which we refer to as “Other Earth,” where all of this story has taken place to date (unless we label a place “our Earth”).

Along with the Other Earth, there are Other versions of a few of the characters, including (but not necessarily limited to) Ed, Boricio, Luca, and Will. These characters have similar, though slightly different lives.