Yesterday's Gone (Season 5): Episodes 25-30 (48 page)

“No. We have another base.”

“Where the hell are we?” Keenan asked.

“Montana,” she said. “Camp’s a few miles away.”

“How many of you are there?” Marina asked.

“Twenty-five,” she said, “down from fifty-one.”

“You tell us your story; we’ll tell you ours,” Brent said, following Lisa and the other Guardsmen to the chopper.

* * * *

EPILOGUE

Three years later …

Ed Keenan bumped along in the van’s passenger seat as they raced down the ghost town’s street, pursuing one of the thieving bandits on motorcycle who’d stupidly tried robbing their truck.

“You got a shot on ‘em yet?” Harry asked as he attempted to keep pace with the bastard.

“Not yet,” Ed said, attempting to aim with the AR-15.

The motorcycle was weaving back and forth, and the van was jostling hard on the broken roads, rendering every shot impossible.

They had to catch this bastard to find out where the raiding party was holed up before they struck again. By Ed’s estimation, there were ten, maybe twenty of the bandits nearby. If there were more, they would’ve already attempted a more direct attack and tried to take over their compound rather than coming after their trucks when they went out to find supplies. They’d already lost five drivers in the last six months, and Ed wanted to end it before winter threw the compound into lockdown again.

The cyclist turned down an alley between two large warehouses, speeding up, and taking the turn too fast.

The bike and driver went down, sliding along the road.

“He’s ours now!” Harry turned into the alley and slammed on the brakes.

Ed prepared to hop out of the van, gun in hand, and chase the guy on foot — assuming he wasn’t too injured, or dead, from the crash.

But Ed stopped with his hand on the door handle as he looked straight out the window at the thing that shouldn’t be.

Hovering in the middle of the road was a violet square of light about ten feet by ten. The bike lay on the ground in front of the light, but the cyclist was nowhere to be seen.

“What the fuck is that?” Harry asked.

Ed didn’t like the looks of it.

He stepped out of the van and raised his rifle, carefully approaching the light. 

He saw something move from within it. A dark shape coming closer.

Ed took aim, readying himself to open fire on whatever the hell emerged from the light.

Harry was out of the still-running van, also aiming his shotgun at the temporal disturbance.

Suddenly, the cyclist’s body came flying from the light, landing ten feet in front of Ed.

Harry took two shots at the cyclist, but missed both times. 

The man’s face and arms was scraped to hell from his wreck, but he was still alive, barely.

“You really shouldn’t go leaving your garbage all over the place,” a man’s voice said from inside the light.

The voice was familiar.

Another dark shape drew closer, and then the man stepped through the portal.

“Boricio?” Ed said, dumbfounded.

“The one and only, at no man’s service but happy to see you,” Boricio said with a shit-eating grin. He had two pistols hanging from holsters at his side and a sword’s hilt sticking up from behind his black leather jacket: a cowboy ninja on meth.

“How?” Ed asked. “Where the hell have you been?” 

Another figure stepped through the portal — a man who looked around forty, with dark curly hair and a thick beard. Something about his eyes looked familiar.

Ed realized he was looking at an older version of the kid, Luca.

“Luca?”

“Hi,” the man said, soft spoken.

“You know these people?” Harry asked, his gun still on them.

“Yeah,” Ed said. “They’re OK. You question this scumbag while I catch up.”

Ed walked over and shook their hands. “Where have you two been?”

Luca said, “Preparing.”

“For what?” Ed asked.

“It would be easier to show you,” Luca said, nodding toward the portal.

“How do I know I can trust you?” Ed asked. “How do I know you’re not infected?”

“You’d already be deader than dead, Double-O Dipshit,” Boricio quipped. “Come on, we ain’t gonna cornhole yer pucker.”

Ed followed them into the light.

As he stepped through, he felt his body vibrating, and a loud hum filled his ears. For a long moment, Ed felt like he was stuck in time or space, everything a blur around him. And then he was out, on the other side, in what looked to be a long, dark studio apartment with brick walls. Black curtains were drawn tight over the far wall. The portal hummed and glowed behind him.

“Where are we? Are we … back on Earth?”

“Yes,” a woman’s voice said from his right.

Ed turned to see Mary, her hair cut short, dark circles under her eyes. A black tank top revealed ripped biceps, as if she’d spent the past three years pumping iron in a prison yard.

“Mary,” he said, offering his hand to shake, “how are you?”

She shook his hand firmly, “Welcome home, Keenan.” 

He noticed the tattoo on Mary’s left bicep: Paola’s name in a heart. Beneath that, another heart with no name.

“We’ve gotta go back and get Brent and the others,” Ed said. “They’ll be glad to know you’re alive.”

“In time,” Boricio said. “First we need to see how you’re gonna take this.”

“Take what?” Ed asked.

Nobody answered. Mary, Boricio, and Luca exchanged glances as if they were trying to decide whether to share their secret with Ed.

There were two other people Ed didn’t recognize, a young blonde in her twenties, sitting at a table working on some sort of large black circular contraption. Perhaps a camera. Beside her was a thin black guy who looked around forty, working on a large gun that look like nothing Ed had ever seen.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“We’re getting ready,” Mary said.

“Ready for what?”

She walked toward the curtains at the far end of the apartment and pulled them aside.

Brightness flooded the room. Ed drew closer to the windows and gasped at the city’s skyline, filled with large hovering black spaceships cutting through a thick smog.

“What the hell is this?”

“They took over. They turned this world into something you ain’t gonna believe. Enslaved a lot of us, killed even more.”

Ed felt sick to his stomach, scanning the skyline before he looked down to the streets below at the perverse abominations walking the streets — a cross between infected and aliens.

Boricio asked, “So, Keenan, you ready?”

“Ready for what?” 

“To join Team Boricio and take this big, blue marble back?”

Keenan thought of Jade. He’d lost the only thing that meant a damn to him. He had nothing to lose, and three years of imprisoned rage to unleash.

He met Mary’s eyes, a partner in loss. 

“Hell yeah, I’m ready.”

TO BE CONCLUDED IN SEASON SIX

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Phew
, the season is over!

While
Season Three
remains the most difficult season we’ve written to date, this was the season that intimidated us the most as we were preparing to write it. I’m using this author’s note to give you our mindset and concerns both going into the season and as we wrote it.

Obviously, if you haven’t read
Season Five
, you should stop reading as there ARE spoilers ahead. That’s why we put it AFTER the season! You didn’t just jump to the Author’s Note first, did you?! 

Don’t worry, I used to do that, too.

From very early on in the first season of
Yesterday’s Gone
, we knew the war between the Light and Darkness would come home, and it would be an all out alien invasion. No, scratch that — an alien
occupation
.

And we knew bits and pieces of the things that would lead us to the sixth season and the ending we have in mind. But a lot of the in-between stuff wasn’t clear. We needed to pave the road to
the ending we want to tell.

Given that
YG
is our flagship series with the greatest number of fans, there’s also that pressure to deliver a story that makes you glad this went six seasons rather than wrapping in three. And we want you to finish wishing we wrote ten more! (Not that we have any plans for that.)

This seasons tasks:

Tell an awesome big story

Bridge the gap between Seasons Four and Six

Continue to develop and surprise you with Collective Inkwell’s brand of deep, complex characters.

Because while
Yesterday’s Gone
is a big action-packed spectacle, we always put our characters at the front of everything we do. And this season we needed to really put our favorite characters in some uncomfortable spots — especially Mary and Boricio.

On the subject of Mary, I noticed a few comments from people who thought that our female characters weren’t very strong in
Yesterday’s Gone
— something to the effect of the female characters suffering a lot of torment, and relying on men to save them.

This wasn’t a frequent comment, but even a few mentions will get us to look at what we’ve written and see if maybe there’s something we overlooked. It’s hard to see your own stuff objectively, particularly so close to publication.

So do I think our women are too weak?

No, I don’t.

Why?

Because we don’t subscribe to the current fad of creating super women (or men) who can do anything and kick all kinds of ass with a machine gun even if prior to the story they’d never handled a weapon. 

I think there
should
be strong female role models in fiction, and that women in books shouldn’t be relegated to cliched “women in distress” roles or used
solely as
romantic interests, or props for men. However, I think that when you go too far in the other direction, you wind up being patronizing, and creating a wholly unrealistic character that nobody identifies with!

 And here’s the thing — everyone suffers in our books. Men, women, children —
everyone.

 If you’re a lead character in a Collective Inkwell book, you’re going to have a rough time. Your hopes will be dashed, your fears will be realized, and … you might just get killed off.

Happy endings are a guarantee for no one.

I happen to think Mary is a very strong character, particularly given the shit she’s been through. But she’s not military trained, a secret agent, or a serial killer. She’s a mother pushed to the extremes in pursuit of protecting her child. But she still worries whether she’s doing the right thing. She still second guesses herself. Because she is NOT a super hero. She is human — like all our characters.

There’s a scene we wrote for Season Four where Mary and Boricio were attacked by the infected in the motel parking lot. Boricio told Mary to stay back while he took on the enemies. 

Now, I can see how that might make Mary look like she’s letting the man take over, but you have to consider two things. One: Boricio told her to stay put. Boricio is pretty damned convincing when he tells you to do something. Second, even if Mary can kick ass (and she’s had weapons training), she still has to consider one thing: if she dies, her daughter is on her own. In other words, just because she can do something doesn’t mean it’s an easy decision to put herself at risk. Sometimes running or hiding is the wisest move.

While that might be seen as Mary being weak, many of our other characters (except maybe Ed Keenan) would’ve done the same thing in that position.

Hell, one of our weakest characters in the book is Brent Foster. If he were a female character, I imagine we’d catch all sorts of hell for all the fretting he does in the series. Hell, we
have
gotten flack for Brent being too whiney. But here’s the thing — he’s not unlike many men I know. Guys who aren’t fighters. Who aren’t skilled killers. Guys with more book smarts than street smarts, who tend to overanalyze themselves into analysis paralysis. 

Like I said, we write human characters — warts and all. 

But most of our characters
aren’t
warriors. They’re regular people put into difficult positions, fighting for their lives.

Boricio was another character we thought a lot about this season. Last season, a minority of readers felt that he’d been neutered a bit. “Boricio finds love and is hanging out with Mary and Paola? What a pussy!”

But I don’t think I’d want to read a series where the main characters were the exact same in
Season Five
as they were in
Season One
. We don’t want Boricio to be a one note character. We love the complexity of him having to reconcile his killer side with the now “fixed” part of himself.

He’s not a good guy by any means. But he’s also not the psychopath from the first season. 

This season, we were tempted to push Boricio back in the other direction. But then, as the story unfolded, we said no, fuck that noise. We’re going to break him down even more.

Last season he faced his past in the form of a father of a young woman he’d killed. This season he faced his greatest weakness — the death of a love he’d finally allowed to flourish inside him. 

Losing Rose (again) has done something to Boricio which turns him into the force he’ll be in the final season. It was a necessary journey, and one we enjoyed writing as much as Mary’s. 

Lastly, this season saw us exploring Luca more. He’s still a kid, but a bit wiser for all he’s been through.

He’s also not the Luca we first started with (that boy had become The Light at the end of Season Three.) This Luca is even more complex, riddled with guilt, and struggling with the power growing inside him and The Darkness’ plans for domination — something Luca doesn’t think he can stop.

We originally planned to make Luca the embodiment of The Darkness. We were going to take our most innocent character, Luca, and turn him into the big bad guy while making our baddest character, Boricio, into the main good guy.