Yesterdays Gone: SEASON TWO (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER) (Yesterday's Gone) (71 page)

DAVID:
I know what will happen to a few key characters. I’m waiting for the others to show me their endings. There IS an end-point to this series, though. But there’s also a lot more to happen between now and then!

MATT: Is serialized fiction turning out the way you had hoped and dreamed it would? How about for your readers; is the reader response what you were hoping it would be?

SEAN:
It’s been exactly as I hoped, and I CANNOT wait to get started on Season Three. June 19 seems so close, yet so far away! Reader response blows me away, and I can’t wait to kick the story harder in the balls for the third season. The reader response makes me want to impress them more. Least we can do to say thank you for all the support.

DAVID:
Sean was always more optimistic than I was. I was afraid people might not want to wait for the story to be continued. I knew
I
loved the format, and
hoped
that others would, but I couldn’t be certain until we put the story out there and found out.

And response is turning out even better than I’d hoped! Even more impressive, is the number of people who are rooting for us to succeed! These are people who are connecting with us through this story. They’re buying our books, telling their friends, writing to us, and leaving reviews. In doing so, our readers have made our writing dreams a reality. We’re humbled and thankful for how readers have responded.
 

Thank you!

MATT: If you could start over from the very beginning of
Yesterday's Gone
, including the
pilot
, what would you do differently?

SEAN:
I would remove some of Luca’s infantile language. That’s one of the only things some readers have questioned, and understandably so. I’ve seen a few comments about how the author must not know any 8 year olds and that Luca must be slow. My son is Luca’s age, and my daughter is two years older. My son, Ethan, is extremely bright. But he turns small when he’s sad or scared. And if his world went away, he would be terrified enough to see the world in terms of “terrible scary.” Knowing what I know now, I would spend more time developing the thought that he was feeling infantile, not slow.
 

DAVID:
Like I said earlier, we didn’t really give much thought to opening sequences before this season. This is even more evident in Episode One, which quite frankly, opens up pretty damned slow for a post-apocalyptic book.

While we’ve drawn a large audience, I can’t help but think that the slow open is not representative of the overall series, and we likely lost some readers in the opening pages. I’d love to go back and just change the beginning of Episode One a bit, just to bring the action in earlier, set up the stakes right away.
 

In fact, I might just do it in the next few weeks. I won’t change anything which affects the timeline or history, just the opening sequence. If I do it, I’ll leave a note in the Author’s Notes to indicate what I did, in case anyone is re-reading it and thinking they lost their mind, “This isn’t how it originally opened!”

Other than that, I love how the series is playing out. I can’t wait to take what we’ve learned with
Yesterday’s Gone
and bring it to Young Adult paranormal genre with
ForNevermore
next week!
 

* * * * *

FORNEVERMORE

THE NEXT SERIAL THRILLER FROM SEAN PLATT & DAVID W. WRIGHT

From the writers of the groundbreaking post-apocalyptic serial Yesterday’s Gone, comes a dark new fantasy horror serial, ForNevermore.

All 17 year old Noella Snow ever wanted was a normal life.
 

But normal died with her mother, minutes after she was born. Then again when her father was murdered before her eyes on her seventh birthday. Now she spends her days in quiet misery, an outcast at school, harboring a secret crush on her best friend, Sam.

Noella’s only happiness lies in her dreams, in a world where her father still lives and Dante, a mysterious stranger with a deadly touch, guards over her.

Now those dreams have turned to nightmares as Noella begins hearing voices, witnessing murders she can’t possibly know of, and seeing the monsters from her sleep merging into her waking life.
 

Noella doesn’t want to return to King’s Point, the psychiatric hospital where she was forced to go after an “episode” two years earlier.
 

She tells herself she’s better.
 

But then one night Noella sees the impossible... Dante, watching her from afar, as he has for centuries – nearly as long as he's loved her.

Is Noella losing her mind? Or is she linked to a hidden world, destined to be normal ForNevermore?

ForNevermore is a bold new paranormal serial, with awesome cliffhanger endings that will make you feel like you’re watching your favorite TV show right on your Kindle.
 

* * * *

Check out the first two exciting chapters of this new paranormal serial.

CHAPTER ONE

Aurora Falls, New York

Friday, October 26

9:50 p.m.

On the short list of things worse than what had already happened to Noella Snow today, being murdered was definitely one of them.

It was her 17th birthday, and was officially her worst birthday in 10 years. Considering what happened on her 7th birthday, that was saying a lot.

She was working the counter at Keefer’s Koffee, Aurora Falls’ pathetic excuse for an echo of Starbucks, and wondering why she’d even agreed to cover Tammy’s shift. She looked at the clock for the hundredth time. Ten minutes until closing. It seemed as if the clock was conspiring to keep her from the bed she couldn’t wait to fall into, where she could pull the covers over herself, and try to forget this day ever happened.
 

Noella was wrapping unsold brownies in thin sheets of ice blue cellophane so they’d be “fresh” for the morning rush, while ignoring the urge to shove one, or five, in her mouth. Sure, it would dull the day’s pain . . . for a few minutes. But once she swallowed, the dull ache would return, stronger, accompanied by her old friend guilt.
 

Treat yourself, it’s your birthday, girl.

It
was
her birthday, and she had grown into a slim young woman, but neither changed a childhood of name-calling, with barbs such as
Thunder Thighs, Chunky Monkey,
and
Patti Fatty,
crushing trust and reducing her confidence to crumbs.

Noella slid the tray of brownies into the cooler with a decisive shove, just as the front door dinged and split the silence of the nearly empty coffee shop. She looked up, and felt a cold snake of terror slither across her shoulders, then down her spine.
 

Noella wasn’t sure how she knew, whether it was the voices she’d taken pills to silence, or a hunch, but she knew for certain that death had entered Keefer’s.

The weird thing was that guy didn’t
look
dangerous.
 

He was young and handsome, even in soft wash jeans and a moody-looking leather jacket. His blue New York Mets hat and thick mop of brown hair made him look like any one of the hundreds of guys who came into the coffee shop. But there was something in his eyes that bled into Noella’s, something that said:

He is here to kill me.

Most nights there were at least four or five people scattered among the 10 booths peppering the front arc of Keefer’s. They usually lingered around, hooked to the Wi-Fi, and taking a million years to leave, keeping Noella from closing and getting on with what little life she had. Tonight, of course, the place was tumbleweeds. She hadn’t had a customer in 15 minutes, punctuating both the loneliness of her birthday, and her new vulnerability.
 

Tony, the shift manager, was out back taking the evening’s trash to the dumpster, though Noella knew he was really just sucking down yet another cigarette. Tony smoked more minutes than he worked, making him a generally useless co-worker.
 

Useless or not, I could really use him right now.

“Welcome to Keefer’s,” she said, trying not to sound nervous. “What can I get you?”

Mets Hat said nothing as he drifted toward the counter, his eyes studying the menu on the wall above and behind her as if he were trying to figure out a menu written in Swahili.
 

But his eyes weren’t
really
reading the menu. They were reading Noella.
 

That wasn’t uncommon. Though Noella considered herself plain, that didn’t stop any number of creepy guys from coming in, undressing her with their eyes, and worse. Sometimes they’d comment on the faint heart-shaped birthmark on her left cheek, as if they were the first in the world to notice it, and wanted a medal for coming up with some lame come-on line involving hearts.
 

Perverts were everywhere, and Noella had more or less learned to ignore the bore of their gazes. But this guy wasn’t a pervert. Or at least
just
a pervert. This guy was terror on two legs.

Noella’s mind flashed to the recent reports which lit the maudlin smiles of every local TV news anchor for the past several months — 12 murdered or missing girls in the last half year. Unsolved crimes with no suspects or clue what the killer looked like. Another chill shot through her core and something whispered in her mind.

He looks like this guy right here.

Noella scanned the counter looking for anything she could use as a weapon. Her eyes settled on the closed drawer where she’d set the knives they used to slice bagels and sandwiches.

Hurry up, Tony!

Noella was aware of the murders, as it was impossible to live in the town and not be. This was upstate New York, not exactly a hotbed of crime, let alone serial murders, so corpses left in the streets tended to attract attention. Hardly a day went by in the shop where someone wasn’t talking about their connection, no matter how tangential, to one of the victims. But the murders weren’t anything Noella gave particular attention to, or worried about. Until now.
 

Mets Hat stood silently in front of her, hands in his jacket and anxiety all over his face. The longer he stood there, staring, the more convinced she became that she was staring at the serial killer everyone was looking for.

Where in the hell are you, Tony? It doesn’t take that long to smoke a cigarette!

Noella wanted to flee, turn and run as fast as she could, out the back door without so much as a glance behind. But she felt foolish. Her logical side – the side the pills made stronger – whispered:
He’s just weird, not a murderer at all. Also, serial killers aren’t usually cute, are they?

If Noella ran from the store, she may as well draw another bull’s-eye on her head. She didn’t need to give the kids at her school yet
another
reason to make fun of her. And certainly word would get back to them if she ran out of the shop like a crazy person. So she stayed put, praying to whoever might listen that Tony would return and calm the crumbling walls of resolve around her. She glanced back through the door behind her, and into the storage room where the exit door was propped open.
 

No sign of Tony, yet.

Come on, man. You smoking the whole pack?

Noella’s leg began to shake. She had to pee.
 

“Find anything you like?” she asked.

The man’s eyes looked past her, toward the back room. The side of her brain that the pills couldn’t calm began its chatter again.

This is it. He’s got a gun in his pocket.
 

Mets Hat turned his head in an odd way, as if he’d heard the voices in her head. Their eyes met again, and the hair on her arms went angry and standing. Noella glanced at the closed drawer with the knives, then down at the panic button on the floor, maybe four feet away,
 
trying to decide which she should run to first. The knife would help her immediately, if she were able to defend herself. But the button could bring the police, and their guns,
eventually.

He stared at her as though he could read the conversation in her mind and feel the weight of her decision. His eyes went narrow, and Noella felt a sudden tear inside her mind. A violation. She wondered if he was really inside her head, or if it was only the side of her mind that never went quiet or stopped playing tricks.
 

His eyes lit up in a manic glee, which eerily echoed that in the eyes of the man who killed her father 10 years ago tonight. You don’t forget those details, no matter how hard you try.

This is it.

He pulled the gun from his pocket before Noella could reach the panic button.

She screamed as her foot stomped down on the button, anyway.

“Shut up and give me all the money in your register!” he yelled, pulling a thin canvas bag from inside his jacket, and throwing it into her arms.