Available Darkness Season 1

with an impossible sort of certainty. If both brothers were real and both some sort of otherworldly feeders, then …

    What in the hell does that make me?

    Caleb leaned back in his bed and pondered the question.
    His cell phone vibrated, humming on the nightstand next to his bed.
    Caleb picked it up and looked at the screen to see who was calling in the middle of the night. His boss, Bob.
    “Hello?” Caleb said, feigning grogginess so Bob would think he was still asleep rather than launching an investigation into some half-cocked tapestry of deceptions based on a dream, more likely inspired by his drugs than actual memories.
    “What are you looking for, Caleb?” Bob asked.
    Caleb’s heart started pounding faster. They’re monitoring me? Why?
    He swallowed, “What do you mean, Bob?”
    “Don’t make me drag it out of you. Why are you accessing department databases and dredging up ancient history? What is it you’re trying to find?”
    Caleb, normally quick with a lie, was frozen.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 9 — Larry and John

    Larry

    John and Larry both reached out in blind attempts to stop the slaughter.
    Abigail’s fingers were ten tiny pythons around Lydia’s paling skin. Both bodies shivered and shook, Lydia tangled in death’s inescapable clutches while Abigail feasted on her fleeting life.
    The two men were dead in their tracks, impotent witnesses to the destruction playing out before them. The child, so sweet just hours before, had been transformed, by them, into a killing machine.
    John was frozen, staring in horror, seemingly wondering what he’d sentenced Abigail to.
    Larry fell back, crying out, “Stop her!” but unable to save his former lover.
    He wanted to scream, but his mouth filled with vomit instead, which spewed in a fountain, burning bile through his esophagus and onto the cold cement floor of the warehouse. Suddenly, something in Larry snapped. He raised his pistol, aimed directly at the back of Abigail’s head, and marched forward.
    John glanced up just in time, reached out, and for the second time that night, delivered a blast of energy from his palm, sending Larry to a crumpled heap on the cement. The gun skidded backward across the floor and John descended on Larry in less than a breath. Unlike last time, John wasn’t weakened by the blast he had sent. However, the blast also didn’t do as much damage to Larry, who was on all fours, scrambling away from John and towards the gun.
    “Stop!” John barked.
    Larry turned and glared upward, anger coursing through him.
    John stared down, silent. Unflinching. His message was clear:
    “Do NOT fuck with Abigail.”
    Larry looked past John and toward Abigail, who hunched over Lydia’s ashen body. The electricity had nearly finished its course through her body and Abigail was rocking slowly, murmuring something Larry could not make out.
    Something in Larry shifted.
    While he was devastated that Lydia, one of the only women he was ever close to having loved — though he’d never uttered the words or even admitted the fact to himself until this very moment — was dead, he was also curious.
    Abigail being turned was the first such transformation he’d ever witnessed. Though he’d known of a few instances where people had become feeders, they were rare, the stuff of whispered legend. But John had actually done it — had not just brought the girl back from the brink of death, but had turned her into a feeder.
    A million questions raced through his mind, so much he wanted to know — needed to know. But he’d have to bury them for now.

    * * * *

    John

    John watched Larry’s face transform, his flesh fading from raspberry to blush, and finally to its normal doughy hue. He could sense Larry’s pulse slowing like a man letting up on the gas of a high speed performance car. John glanced over to the gun, which lay a good 10 feet behind Larry.
    “We have a problem here?” John asked.
    Larry shook his head. His eyes passed John, darting to something behind him. John did a 180 and found Abigail standing, facing them.
    John braced for what was to come, for her to break down and cry or scream out in anger at what they’d done to her. He was filled with confusion as he considered what he would say to comfort her, how he would explain what happened, and how he’d deal with the anger or fear she felt after killing Lydia. And then he considered something he’d not even thought of — Lydia’s memories which might be swirling through