Available Darkness Season 1

up and out of his body, spiraling into the heavens above.
    He floated above the earth and surveyed the neat rows of houses and trees below. The night was teeming with life. He closed his eyes, feeling the vitality of a hundred thousand living things below as surely as he felt the cool breeze whip past the body of his floating ghost.
    What? was all he could think.
    He closed his eyes.
    When he opened them, he was back in his body, staring down at the mosaic of two withered corpses.
    What the hell am I?

    **

    He stared down at the burned bodies in disbelief. Then at his own flesh. He no longer bore any of the scratches, scrapes, or cuts that lacerated his body just minutes earlier. He felt the pulse of new life beating in the blood beneath his skin.
    He wondered again what the hell happened? More importantly, how? He could not get his brain to embrace the arctic truth lying in ash before him.
    In a vain desire to resolve his numbing questions and the enigma of his identity, he slipped into a downstairs bathroom and finally came face to face with his disquieting reflection.
    The face that stared back was young, with only two tiny wrinkles yet to flirt with the corners of his full mouth. His dark hair and indigo eyes were no more recognizable than a stranger off the street. He leaned in close, examining his features as though they were behind glass in a museum. The image blurred like a breaking wave, causing him to lean closer, to get a closer look, as if distance was the issue, and not his eyes playing tricks on him.
    Then the hair on his neck rose to the sound of water running from a faucet he hadn’t turned on.
    What the?
    Suddenly, the mirror image was gone, replaced by a mug he’d seen just minutes earlier — the angry face of the bald man.
    He fell back against the wall, before realizing his reflection hadn’t changed. He wasn’t looking through his own eyes; he was peering through the eyes of the dead man, images caught in a previously lived moment when the man had been shaving his head.
    The image shimmered again, and the false reflection was gone, replaced with the wide-eyed stare coming from the hollow eyes of the amnesiac.
    Without warning, the entire bathroom disappeared, and the amnesiac found himself staring into the approaching fist of the bald man. A split second shattered in the impact, and the amnesiac felt like the dull echo of a faraway sound. The bald man landed another blow and the amnesiac felt it, like a phantom pain in an absent limb. He screamed in a voice that was not his own, but that of the woman who had suffered the beating he was now experiencing.
    Reality returned, with the bathroom mirror, and he fell to the ground, shaking with vertigo.
    The roller coaster then kicked into motion again, and he felt his body thrusting forward into a deep descent.
    A million memories rushed through his skull in a chaotic burst of flashing images and unholy cacophony — voices yelling, children crying, sirens, and maybe every sound the bald man and the woman had ever heard. It was too much; the man’s head felt as if it were splitting, the alien thoughts about to spill from the seams and swallow him whole. He reached up as if squeezing tightly would be enough to keep his skull intact and would quell the thoughts.
    More images swam through his mind in a dizzying current that nearly drowned him with the sick realization that he was somehow infected with the memories of the people he’d killed.
    The sounds grew louder ― snippets of conversation, sounds of music, stolen thoughts, growing louder and faster; cold and sharp like the blades of a million little daggers, each digging into some deep part of his brain like a worm burrowing to the center of an apple. Should the worms reach the core, the man knew with certainty, it would plunge him deep into a madness from which he would never ascend.
    Whatever traces were left of his life before this were drowning in chaos as he struggled to find some tether back to reality.
    The whirling world flickered in and out of existence, one second displaying the reality before him and the next, the unnerving world behind the eyes of the dead.
    He couldn’t fight anymore.
    He let go and slipped into the darkness.

    **

    The amnesiac woke to the sound of pounding.
    His eyes shot open as he leaped to his feet in a single fluid movement. With fists clenched tightly at his sides and thick waves of electric currents arcing around them, he stood ready for whatever was