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  October’s Gone

  A Yesterday’s Gone Story

  Sean Platt

  David W. Wright

  Copyright © 2020 by Sterling & Stone

  All rights reserved.

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  Contents

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  1. October 15, 2011, 2:16 AM …

  2. Seven Years Ago

  3. October 15, 2011 …

  4. Four years ago …

  5. October 15, 2011 …

  6. Two years ago …

  7. October 16, 2011 …

  8. Four months ago …

  9. October 16, 2011 …

  10. Three months ago …

  11. October 17, 2011 …

  12. Two months ago …

  13. October 17, 2011 …

  14. One week ago …

  15. October 18, 2011 …

  16. Twelve Years Ago …

  17. October 18, 2011 …

  18. October 31, 2011 …

  What happens next…

  A Note from the Authors

  About the Authors

  To YOU, the reader.

  Thank you for taking a chance on us.

  Thank you for your support.

  Thank you for the emails.

  Thank you for the reviews.

  Thank you for reading and joining us on this road.

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  One

  October 15, 2011, 2:16 AM …

  Liz opened her eyes to the oddest thought.

  An ugly image, profane really, and now it would be stuck there all day. She wouldn’t be able to get it out of her head unless she lost another little war to the pills.

  Despite her intentions in agreeing to use this vacation at the cabin in the woods to finally make her escape, Liz didn’t want her husband dead.

  But she must have left the door open to her emotions again, because yet another nightmare had found its way inside her. They had been more and more frequent for the last four months. Darker and darker, taking her deeper and deeper.

  This one left Liz with the unsettling yet unrelentingly graphic picture of Anderson’s head on a pike. She pickled in her guilt for several minutes before rolling over to lay a reassuring hand on her husband’s body.

  But his side of the bed was, though still warm, empty.

  She tossed the covers aside and sent her feet to the floor.

  “Anderson!” A harsh whisper cutting through the darkness.

  Liz needed a light. What time was it?

  She peeked into the bathroom. Turned on a light, then flinched back at the brightness and flipped it back off.

  “Anderson?” Liz called into the hallway, still keeping her voice low, not wanting to wake Junior, somehow certain that even if she screamed, she wouldn’t hear anything back. “Honey?” She hadn’t called him that in years and hadn’t meant it even then. “Are you here?”

  She opened the door to their only child’s room. “Junior … are you in here?”

  Anderson was standing inside, hunched over something. He was six-four on his driver’s license, but still at least six-two in real life. A man that size made an awful lot of shadows, and it didn’t matter how charming his smile might be if that grin turned invisible in the dark.

  Liz had already been feeling unsettled and hesitant. Now she was paralyzed.

  “Stay back,” Anderson said in a monotone, without turning around.

  “What is it?” Liz asked; it was almost a hiccup.

  “Stay back,” he repeated.

  Was he protecting her, or himself?

  She stepped into the room anyway.

  Saw what Anderson was staring down at.

  And screamed from the bottom of her stomach to the top of her lungs.

  Junior was dead, covered in clotted blood, like chocolate over nougat, maggots infesting his rotting body and writhing out of what used to be his caramel-colored eyes.

  Anderson turned around and looked at Liz.

  His smile was no longer invisible. “Your turn.”

  Liz screamed—

  —and woke up in bed for a second time, this time for real.

  “Anderson?” She searched his side of the bed.

  Of course, it was cold.

  Liz pulled the covers aside and went to Junior’s door.

  She opened it up and looked inside. But same as in the nightmare, her son was gone.

  Liz had yet to check the time, but it was still pitch black outside, and barring an emergency, there were exactly zero reasons why Anderson and Junior should be gone from the cabin right now.

  She flipped on the kitchen light and saw the note. Her blood boiled before she even picked it up. She looked down at the message, wanting to crumple it in her palm.

  Took E.T. out for some midnight fishing on the lake.

  Little bitch needs to learn a thing or two about how to be a man.

  And I don’t want to hear a word of shit from you about this when I get back.

  A.C.

  Instead of balling it up like she wanted to, Liz neatly folded the paper, then went over to her purse — still sitting by the coffeemaker where she had left it next to her charging phone after unloading their sundries that afternoon — and slipped the potential future evidence inside.

  Of course, Anderson took their son out fishing in the middle of the night, and of course, Liz wasn’t allowed to have an opinion. She knew exactly how this would go down, same as it always did. Anderson would come home in one of his worst moods, cursing their kid and decrying everything from Junior’s personality to his present disposition. Not that he ever did, or would ever do, anything to help with either one. Junior would probably come home in tears, or so terrified of the consequences that he wouldn’t so much as consider shedding one.

  He took their son fishing because she’d put her foot down and said he couldn’t go hunting on Monday. She never put her foot down, so she should’ve known that Anderson would find some other victory in the cold war that had become their marriage.

  She should probably check the time. It was somewhere between starting the coffee and crawling back into bed.

  Liz went to the window, parted the curtain, and looked outside. Almost fell on her ass when she saw all those lights in the sky.

  She’d never seen anything like it. As a little girl, she had been fascinated by the northern lights, especially since the idea of ever actually seeing them herself felt about as likely as spotting a wild unicorn. Liz did her sixth-grade science project on the aurora borealis and had checked out six books from the library (the maximum allowed) just so she could look at the pictures. Feeling sorry for her when she finally had to return them, Mom had bought her a gorgeous hardcover at B. Dalton, then begged Liz to keep it from her father. That was easy, since she hated talking to him or being around him, or even thinking about him at all. Mom could still protect her then. She didn’t die until Liz was in the seventh grade when she was just old enough for things to go from bad to unspeakable.

/>   The lights outside reminded her a lot of the aurora borealis, except it was even stranger and — hard as it was to believe — even more beautiful.

  The lavender haze contained pools of milky amethyst and deeper, darker violet spirals. She didn’t even realize that her heart was beating harder until she heard it. She was working hard to absorb the majesty of an alien view and quell the steadily rising anxiety insisting that something was off.

  What time was it? She really needed to check.

  But there was something she needed to take care of first.

  Her heart felt like it might bruise her chest, and her mind was already looping. She hated to take the pills at any time of day and resented it hard at whatever in the morning, but she didn’t have a choice. She knew what would happen if she stopped taking the pills when she needed them.

  Liz returned to her purse, loathing herself like she always did before doing what had to be done. She dug around without looking until her hand emerged with a small plastic bottle. She cradled it like a cable tethering her to a mountainside.

  She stared at the label. Hating the words, hating the crutch, hating the biology and the situation, and the reality of a world that had her leaning on pills to battle an all-consuming panic that might otherwise swallow her whole.

  She would feel awful enough about the dependency without Anderson, always making her feel even worse. And though she couldn’t prove it, she was pretty sure that he sometimes — if not often — went into her purse or the medicine cabinet and counted her remaining pills.

  The doctor said she could take one or two, or even three, if things turned especially bad.

  Just one, she told herself, palming the pill. To take the edge off.

  She poured herself a glass of water, swallowed the pill, then unplugged her phone from the charger and blinked at the screen as it brightened.

  Liz looked at the time: 2:41 AM.

  Then a text from her best friend, Colette: See you Monday morning. Right?

  Maybe she should have taken two.

  Liz started the coffee, then stared down at the message while waiting for it to brew.

  The dripping had finished before she finally sent her reply: Definitely!

  Except, Liz couldn’t return Colette’s message, because hers wouldn’t send.

  Her phone only had a single bar at half-mast, but that didn’t seem to be the problem. There wasn’t a No Service message; it was more like the phone was ignoring her. The text sat in its little box, and no matter how many times Liz pressed Send, that’s where it stayed.

  Stupid thing probably needed a reboot.

  Liz restarted the phone, hoping to revive it. She poured herself a cup of coffee despite the ridiculous hour, then realized there was no way she could drink even a drop of the stuff without emptying her bladder first.

  She flushed and then stood and, without thinking, accidentally did the very thing she had been trying so hard to avoid. But there she was, looking at herself in the mirror. Staring at yet another savage reality, this one in shades of purple, darker than the sky outside and without a hint of the lights’ earlier majesty. The bruise had faded, yet was still a ghastly shade of indigo and rotting grape. It was almost brutal the way the blemish haunted the otherwise creamy skin beneath her right eye.

  She needed to stop staring. Looking at the thing made it too easy to hate him. And the last thing—

  CRASH!

  Liz landed on her ass, screaming as she fell.

  Then she laughed on the floor, calming herself enough to stand and hopefully stop feeling like such an unadulterated idiot.

  That wasn’t just the loudest thunder Liz had ever heard; she didn’t know the sky was capable of cranking the volume up to eleven like that. The lightning had to be right outside the cabin. She didn’t hear rain, but it had to be seconds away — torrents falling from a plum-colored sky.

  Back to the window, but this time she ran. Parted the curtains almost violently and stared outside. Saw a few seconds of nothing followed by something large and dark flashing by the window, about fifty feet from the cabin.

  She nearly fell back on her ass again.

  Something felt so very, very off. About everything.

  It wasn’t just that Anderson and Andy were both gone, or that the sky was an unearthly color of lilac and swirling light. The air itself felt different. Liz didn’t have a word for what was pumping inside her and had no idea if there even was one, but the atmosphere felt emptier somehow.

  She wished Junior was here because she needed to know he was safe. But she also wished Anderson was here, and couldn’t stand the feeling of needing him. Not now, of all times.

  So the sky was weird, and the thunder was terrifying, and neither her husband nor son were in the cabin. Still, she wasn’t in danger and didn’t need a man to protect her from scary sounds and wild animals outside. The scurrying shouldn’t worry her — it wasn’t like wolves or bears knew how to turn a doorknob.

  It wasn’t needing someone that bothered her; it was needing a pile of shit like Anderson. He would get off knowing how scared she felt right now, proving that Little Liz needed Big Daddy Deputy Anderson to protect her.

  Again, she gasped at the window.

  Liz had seen plenty of lightning storms, but these bolts were outlined in a blinding white, their hearts the color of eggplant as they crackled across a wisteria sky. It was simultaneously the most beautiful and terrifying sight of her life.

  The power died, and she whimpered.

  “You’re being a dumbass, Liz. Knock it off.”

  Being by the window wasn’t good for her. Too many shades of purple and uncertainty. Too many unnatural yet perfectly ordinary noises. Too many shadows she imagined moving in the darkness. The rain fell hard and fast, same as any other storm, but it sounded like an incessant whisper of souls trapped between planes of existence.

  None of those thoughts made any sense, but it was barely three in the morning, and her meds had yet to kick in. She sure as hell shouldn’t be standing by the window waiting for the boys to come home. Not if she wanted to stay sane.

  She turned and took a few tentative steps toward the kitchen.

  Stopped cold when she heard something screeching.

  Stood there frozen for several disconcerted moments. She pictured what the living room had looked like with the lights still on, determined that her path was clear enough, then darted toward the kitchen without another thought.

  Straight to the corner where her phone was still on the counter next to the coffee pot.

  She turned on the flashlight app and used her new light to find the sharpest knife.

  Then (against her better judgment but what the hell else was she going to do?), Liz went back to the window, clutching her weapon and staring outside into the darkness.

  It only took seconds for Liz to see something unsettling. Another blur by the window.

  Minutes passed. Then it came closer to the window.

  Closer.

  Liz didn’t move.

  Probably couldn’t.

  The rain was still whispering, and she could still hear the screeching, and none of that made any sense. The woods were full of wolves and bears. That’s all it was.

  The shape came closer, now a few feet from the window.

  Just like she’d thought: it had to be a bear.

  Scary, not terrifying.

  But then another strike of lightning illuminated the bear in mulberry.

  Its face was … wrong. Repulsive.

  Her gag reflex triggered, as she quickly turned away, bile coating her throat as it climbed.

  She swallowed it down and tried to make sense of what she couldn’t be seeing.

  She had to be seeing things.

  She turned back to the window.

  Another flash of lightning and an even better look. The bear had no eyes, and its mouth was crooked, higher up than it should have been, and its lips were almost … human-looking.

  Darkness replaced the sigh
t of the creature as the lightning vanished.

  Liz was both horrified and desperate for another look.

  But by the time her eyes adjusted to the darkness again, the bear monster was already gone.

  Just as she exhaled, there came a pounding on the door. What had to be fists. Junior and Anderson, finally home.

  She opened the door half-panicked, hoping that Anderson was back with his gun, and knowing she had to get Junior inside before the monster came back.

  Her son was standing on the porch, soaking wet and panting hard, his eyes worried, or perhaps even panicked.

  “What is it?” Liz asked.

  “Dad.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “Is he here?”

  “No.”

  She swallowed the rising knot in her throat. “I thought he was with you.”

  The panic appeared to leave his eyes.

  Then the twelve-year-old spoke in a monotone. “The monsters must have gotten him.”

  Two

  Seven Years Ago

  “You promised,” Junior said.

  “I didn’t promise, I—”

  “You said that I never had to do anything that I didn’t want to do!”

  His arms had been crossed hard for a while now. It looked like Liz might need help to untangle them. But she didn’t want to ask Anderson. His “help” lately had been anything but.

  “I never said that.” Liz shook her head while giving him her sweetest smile. “Do you remember? I said that no one can ever make you do something you didn’t want to do. But that wasn’t all, and you know it. What else did I say, Junior?”

  He shook his head, refusing to answer.