Available Darkness Season 1

shoving him deeper into the horrible dark. His thoughts ran even faster.
    Who was after him? What had they done to him? And the puzzler to top them all ― who was he?
    The man remembered nothing of his past. Not his occupation, not his location, nor even his name. Stumbling through amnesia, he pressed against his pants pockets, searching for a wallet, perhaps some identification. There was no wallet. Instead, he found a balled up piece of paper, damp with sweat. He could see lights ahead, dots where the trees began to thin. He looked for a place with enough light to stop and unfold the paper. As he got closer, his eyes adjusted to the squares and rectangles making up a row of two-story homes, backs facing the woods.
    He moved closer and stepped from the woods and into one of the few back yards without a privacy fence. He chanced upon a clothesline dipped low with damp garments. He snagged a shirt from the line just as a series of lights flicked on along the roof. The shirt slipped from his fingers and he scurried away, slipping in cold, wet grass as he raced off with a final fearful glance back.
    Sudden agony pounded between his eyes and sent the amnesiac to his knees. He wanted to crawl to someone’s stoop, pound on a door and plead for help, but part of him warned him not to.
    Help can only hurt you .
    Someone is searching. Someone wants you dead, and until you remember who, stay invisible.
    He swam through a thousand needles of blurred, incomprehensible bits of memory, searching for anything that made sense. Vague flashes of people he couldn’t recognize, but nothing which brought clarity.
    Maybe his memories were clouded by the pain racking his body, he thought. If he could find a spot to rest, everything else would fall into place. Though he had woken just moments before, his body was about to shut down on him if he didn’t immediately find somewhere to rest.
    Part of him wondered if he had died. And perhaps his body’s reluctance to move, meant it wanted to return to its former state.
    He didn’t want to lie down if it meant dying, though he couldn’t go on in this state.
    He saw a shed behind one of the other homes without a fence. The shed sat far in the back yard, bathed in the shadows of several trees. He glanced up at the windows, black squares against slate. Either nobody was home, or the occupants were sleeping ― he hoped.
    He slid inside the shed and pinched his eyes at the dim light: Lawn equipment, an old bicycle, and several large plastic storage containers. Easily enough room to lie down. He grabbed a pair of hedge clippers from a rack just in case his pursuer found him.
    He was about to shut the door when he remembered the paper in his fist. He set the hedge clippers down and looked at the crumbled paper.
    As he unfolded the paper, he noticed that his hands were trembling. He tried to calm his breath with little success, and moved closer to the open shed door seeking what little light from the moon that he could find. The handwritten words proved easier to read than the amnesiac would have thought.

    “312 Hanover Street
    Trust Nobody. Especially the law.
    Avoid the sunlight! Don’t touch anybody!”

    What the hell?
    He sat still for a moment trying to pull sense from the words when he thought to find his reflection in one of the windows of the house. Maybe if he saw himself, he thought, it would trigger a memory or two.
    His body refused to cooperate, though.
    He fell in the spot where he stood.

    **

    A woman’s scream shattered his sleep.
    A shrill rattle, infused with terror, woke him with a start and swamped his mind’s eye with a horrifying reel of a woman in distress. At first, he thought the scream was at the sight of him in the shed, and he reached out, searching for the hedge clippers, prepared to defend himself.
    But he was alone.
    The scream was coming from the house where the windows were no longer dark.
    “Get out!” the woman screamed.
    He cautiously moved towards the shed’s open door. It was still dark outside, but the night seemed somehow more alive than he remembered.
    Did I sleep an entire day ?
    He could clearly see inside the large window at the rear of the house. The blinds were open to feature the source of the scream, a thin woman wearing a tee shirt nearly as black as the hair that spilled just past her shoulders. She thrust a finger into the face of a bald man the size of a linebacker. He was terrifying from the back; the amnesiac could only imagine the