Available Darkness Season 1

torso as the victim melted to cinders in an embarrassment of seconds.
    “Jesus Christ,” Caleb stood from his chair and leaned forward toward the bank of monitors, “where the fuck did they get that?!”
    “Some kid with his cell phone,” Garcia shook his head. “Punk ass caught the whole thing and put it on Youtube.”
    “And none of us have it?”
    “No sir. Well, not the original.”
    Caleb wanted to punch something; a slab of concrete would’ve been nice. Given the opportunity, he could have squashed the video. Now it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle. With every asshole and their brother armed with cell phones cameras and the proliferation of so-called citizen journalists, it was becoming increasingly harder to control information. There was nothing he could do now except have his people question the video’s authenticity and hope nobody else was walking around with a different angle.
    “Tell them no comment until we get the original video. Then… get me the goddamned video!” Caleb barked as he slammed his fists down on the table and the laptops jumped two inches before falling back into place.
    Garcia left and Caleb sank back in his seat and let out a long sigh.
    Outside, the world was splitting at the seams. Somebody had better find a way to keep it all together, because Caleb sure as hell wasn’t feeling up to the job. He needed a nap. Pills and sleep, in that order.
    He absentmindedly twisted his wedding ring, pondering the second appearance of his killer in less than 24 hours.
    Though the video suggested the supernatural, Caleb had been on the job too long and had seen too much. His team specialized in the unknown and had worked hundreds of cases that seemed to offer no reasonable explanation at the outset. ’Alien’ abductions, monsters, fucking Sasquatches, you name it, Caleb had worked it. Every time the agency had been able to articulate a reasonable explanation, though. And on the rare occasions when his team couldn’t find a logical answer, the cases were kicked upstairs to a more specialized unit who always made sense of the senseless.
    He wasn’t too proud to hope for a monster. A demon would make his quest for justice almost romantic, rather than the up-at-dawn, never-ending, soul-swallowing quixotic siege it now felt like.
    He watched the monitors as the stations hit the top of the hour and started replaying the scene on repeat. His left leg wouldn’t stop bouncing.
    The phone vibrated inside his pocket, making Caleb imagine for just a moment he was having a heart attack. He breathed a near silent fuck as he looked at the phone’s screen to see who was calling — it was Special Agent in Charge Bob Cromwell, his direct superior.
    “Why is this goddamned video on my every channel?” Cromwell asked, almost as if it were a question.
    Caleb brought him up to speed. The case was ice this morning, and had only grown frostier. Not only did they now have a missing child and a murderer, but a cop killing, and a second kidnapping to deal with as well. Caleb could barely imagine how the case could possibly get any more fucked up, so he swallowed hard and closed his eyes, preferring not to tempt fate.
    “We need to talk,” Cromwell said. “How soon can you be here?”
    Caleb sighed and came out the other end with a quick calculation, “About four hours.”
    “Meet me at my house. I have something to show you.”
    Caleb stared at the phone for a full minute after the call. What was so important that SAC Cromwell wanted him there in the middle of the night during the largest news story to hit the west coast in five years?
    Well, at least he was homeward bound. Soon enough he would be sharing city limits with his bottle of pills.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 2 — John

    John was driving north along the highway following nothing but a shadow-flocked trail of instinct, hoping to find his way back to Abigail. His quest to find a van he’d barely gotten a look at through other people’s memories, a van she might not even still be in, seemed only slightly more likely than him finding a police escort to help him with the search.
    As he punished the car to drive faster, a rising bile in his gut told him to flip the car in the opposite direction — he was going the wrong way and piling miles between himself and Abigail.
    And the farther he got from her, the less likely he’d ever find and save her.
    No, keep going the way you’re going. Ignore the doubt and fear — it’s trying to