Whittaker

  -------------------

  By Alonso Pedrido

  Acknowledgments

  In Memory Of Natividad And Hermino Pedrido

  My Heart goes far away when I think of you. But the pain always remains.

  Prologue: Sarah

  What does it feel like to live forever?

  Sarah had thought about it for longer than she should have. Not in the romantic sense of vampires or the grandeur of gods, but in the bleak, black shape of eternity. The kind of forever where you drift weightless in a void—fully conscious, fully feeling—trapped between memories and nothingness. A place where no sound escaped, no scream carried, no prayer ever echoed back. Just you. Alone.

  Was that where she would go? Was that where Mac was?

  That hellish eternity—it clawed at her mind like something remembered from a dream. She couldn’t say why she thought of Hell. Why the word came so easily. But she forced it away. Shoved it down.

  Whittaker.

  That’s where Mac had gone. That’s where she needed to be. But even now, standing in the middle of a dead street on a bitter winter night, snow biting at her skin, her hands shaking around the cold glow of a phone—Sarah felt lost.

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  His name hovered on the screen. His photo. His old Facebook profile.

  How had it come to this? Staring at his page in the middle of the street while a storm twisted the sky around her.

  Maybe this was punishment. Maybe she deserved it.

  The guilt was a weight she knew well: the failure, the distance, the silence. She’d left them. All of them. Drifted away from the people who once mattered. And now—now she was crawling back, desperate for help. Trying to follow a thread that had long since frayed from the rest.

  She knew the group had fallen apart. Even without seeing them again, she could feel it. Whatever bond they once held was long gone. But she didn’t care.

  This was her redemption. And Mac’s.

  The call log on her phone was a wall of unanswered dials. Every message left on “Read.”

  No replies. No signs of life.

  Except for one.

  Whittaker.

  That single word, sent weeks ago. It haunted her more than silence.

  She remembered the decline—the unraveling that played out in full view of the world. His rants. His screaming. His violent outbursts at shadows no one else could see. She remembered when he checked himself into the facility. Voluntarily.

  The look he gave her as the doors shut behind him—wide-eyed, pleading, already distant—that moment had never left her.

  And now? He wasn’t talking. The local PD’s number was disconnected. No word had come from the town in months.

  The roads were closed. The storm didn’t stop.

  And that song…

  That damned song that screamed in her ears. A melody no one else heard. A tune that didn’t belong in this world.

  Sarah would go to Whittaker.

  But she wouldn’t go alone.