Beyond the Past Read Free Page A

for a closer look.” The command came from the team leader, Sergeant Garrett ‘Honey’ Bloom, through Lucas’s headset. He stood and moved with Brody in unison as they approached the warehouse.
    He could feel the tension rolling off Brody, and tried to ignore it as he could barely contain his own stress. Brody was right—something felt off. He glanced around the area again trying to identify it, but saw nothing that set off his internal alarm.
    The air shifted, followed by sudden silence. He reached out to grab Brody’s arm, but the building exploded, the bright light blinding him. Through his earpiece, Garrett yelled, “Abort! Abort!”
    He fell to the shaking ground and tried to crawl away. Still completely blind, he hoped he was moving in the right direction, and not toward whatever remained of the building.
    A hand landed on his shoulder, dragging him a few feet. Another explosion reverberated throughout the area, and whoever had him let go. Lucas tried to get to his knees, but a noxious odor overtook him, the smell of chemicals and rotten eggs causing such unbearable pain in his head, he momentarily prayed for death.
    As he gagged from the scent, he rolled into a fetal position on the wet ground, wondering if these were his last moments on Earth.
    The searing pain in his head debilitated him; the odor made it hard to breath.
    He tried to inhale, desperate for fresh air, and then he passed out.
    He woke with a start, unsure of his whereabouts. When he got his bearings, he rubbed his eyes, waiting for the hangover to set in and the memories to fade.
    3 . . .2 . . .1 . . . and there it lay. The pounding in his head made him promise he would never drink again—a vow he knew he wouldn’t keep—and his stomach rolled.
    Besides his blow-by-blow recount of the explosion that had changed him, he dreamt vivid images of death and destruction, which invaded his thoughts whether awake or asleep, and they always proved the same—someone being murdered.
    He never recognized the victim, but at his core, he knew what he saw must be real, but it took place somewhere in the future.
    The first time he’d realized his visions were real had been when he woke one night from a nightmare where a man was shot dead in front of a liquor store in downtown Portland, Oregon. Three days later as he’d read about the man being gunned down, he’d barely been able to hide his stress from Gabby.
    The fact that he’d witnessed this man’s death before it happened scared the hell out of him.
    He knew he’d come back a different man from Guatemala, after the accident there. The way he’d been discharged and how they’d moved Gabby and him to Portland let him know something must be up. But not until he began to see the visions did he expect he’d been fundamentally changed on a cellular level. After the first time he’d been able to verify the truth of the vision, he’d begun scouring the news online looking for more verification, and he’d found it.
    The visions had been snippets of a person’s life; specifically, their death. They never lasted for more than a few seconds, but those seconds stretched on and on, making it seem like hours had passed, as if he watched a slow-motion movie, every detail of the death available. He saw the exact whereabouts, the details of the person’s face, and what they were doing seconds before death struck.
    For a while after he realized what he was seeing would actually happen on some distant date, he’d tried to keep track of them, jotting down what he’d seen in a notebook. He scoured the Internet for hours trying to place a name with the face, time, and type of death he saw in his visions. What he would do with this information, he had no idea, but it became imperative that he match up the people in those mental images with names. He actually hoped that one day, maybe he’d figure out a way to find the person he saw in his flashes, and somehow be able to contact them.
    But really, what would he