Available Darkness Season 1

show characters on it.
    Stuffed animals lay in a row along a blue pillow.
    Stagnant air reeking of waste steeped in a bowl in the corner of the room.
    “Jesus,” someone said behind Caleb.
    Where is the girl?
    “We’ve got a possible missing child,” Caleb spoke into his radio, “maybe kidnapped by our murder suspect. We’re sending a photo. Add this to the BOLO’s.”
    He instructed his agents to find out how many other girls were on the discs to see if they could verify if the dark-haired girl was indeed the room’s most recent prisoner.
    Caleb glanced back at the monster on the computer screen and prayed the girl wasn’t now in the hands of something even worse.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 2 — The Amnesiac

    Last night…

    The man woke amidst the darkness, breath barely budging from a shallow prison of angry lungs. He gasped for air, nearly hyperventilating in the confined space. He tried to lift his leaden head, could barely move an inch. Walls surrounded him on all sides. His arms, he realized with a sick dread, were fixed against his sides as though bound.
    His mind scrambled to make sense of his surroundings. A horribly long minute later, his fingertips confirmed he was captive in a box. The smell of earth around him said he wasn’t just in a box. He was in a coffin.
    I’m not dead , his mind started to scream.
    His mouth would only make sounds that refused to render into words.
    Panic set deep and his whispering breath climbed toward a pant, echoing against the narrow walls of his tomb in perfect time with his pounding heart.
    What happened?
    Why am I buried?
    His voice whimpered its way through the suffocation. He heard his own cries of “no,no,no” as he tried to shake life into his limbs. The voice was part his, part child; mostly frightened animal.
    His body bristled from a billion needles, impeding thought and dulling motion. Finally, with a strength he didn’t know he had, behind a panic that could be borne only by waking in one’s grave, he shoved his forearms madly against the wood above. He heard a snap, then another, as the lid of his prison shifted ever so slightly.
    It was the greatest sound he’d ever heard. And freedom suddenly seemed possible — if he wanted it badly enough.
    He clawed, scraped, and pushed at the darkness above him with blunt, awkward blows, blotting the bulkhead with blood he could not see but could smell. He desperately fought his way upwards, using first his arms and then his knees, finally his head; anything to give him leverage. His arms shot forward, no longer meeting resistance. The lid lifted and fell to the earth beside him with a thick, muffled thud.
    The moon mocked his confusion, like a Cheshire smile in the sky.
    He collapsed into the cold dirt, sucking crisp air into his stale lungs in bottomless mouthfuls, then exhaling breath in hot gusts of steam which evaporated into the frigid air of midnight.
    His body tensed from the nearby sound of movement and he pulled himself upright to peer into the darkness.
    He was in the midst of thick woods. Tree branches pierced the gloaming like ink stained daggers, barely illuminated by the pale silver moon. Shivering, he looked down at his bloodied bare arms and chest. All he wore were torn jeans, soaked in blood.
    He would have screamed for help, but something — he wasn’t quite sure what — stopped him cold.
    Beside him, a shovel bulged from a mound of dirt; an invitation for his gravedigger to come back and finish the job.
    His head throbbed, his thoughts were mush, and he couldn’t remember anything, much less how he wound up buried.
    Jesus Christ , I was drugged, kidnapped, and Lord knows what else.
    Another sound. Movement . A branch breaking.
    He realized with a horrible certainty ― whoever dropped him in the dirt wasn’t gone, or finished.
    He glanced again at the shovel and swallowed. He forced his body into an awkward sprint, legs wobbly as he stumbled blindly into the night.
    Just run.
    He raced from his tomb, stumbling forward into the black forest as fast as his weakened legs would go. Sharp pain lacerated his sprint, branches clawed his flesh, jagged rocks and warped roots turned the pads of his feet into a mess of gory ribbon. He was certain he would fall at any second, but his instincts pushed him forward despite the pain.
    He was prey, and expected his predator any second. Perhaps a scream, or a gunshot to split the silence and stop him in his tracks. He ran, every step of blind terror