Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved cliffhangers. My fascination began with a TV show called Cliffhangers, which ran for less than a season in the 70′s. The show featured three stories every week, one about a vampire, a mystery, and an Indiana Jones sorta adventure. Every segment left the hero hanging and questions lingering with a…

“to be continued…”

I hated having to wait a WHOOOOOOLE week. Yet, as each new episode drew closer, I grew more excited and eager to see what would happen next. And when it comes to serialized stories, it’s always about WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Years later, I loved and hated other shows in a similar way — LOST, X-Files, Carnivale, The Wire, Deadwood, The Walking Dead, Battlestar Gallactica, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and too many more to name without coming off like a guy who never gets off the couch.

Though these shows span different genres, they have a few things in common.

They all have great stories, they all have storylines which stretch across seasons, and they all have flawed but memorable characters. And, of course, they always leave you wondering what happens next?

SERIALIZED BOOKS

While serialization has been around for ages, it wasn’t until Stephen King did it with The Green Mile in the 90′s, that I discovered it.

King managed to do what the best TV shows did – he kept me hanging from book to book, always wanting more.

It was the most awesome reading experience I ever had!

While I’d always dreamed of creating a serialized TV show, King showed me that I could do the same thing with books.

However, that seemed like a faraway dream as you have to be a pretty big name in order for a publisher to take a chance on a serial.

When I met Sean Platt, we decided to try serializing a story I’d been sitting on forever, Available Darkness. While it was a great experiment, our workload was too much at the time to give it its due. And though we had a nice response, most people asked the same question – when will it be available in book form?

Most people, I find, don’t enjoy reading on a website. Neither do I.

And to be honest, though we were serializing Available Darkness, it wasn’t a true serial. It was a book we were putting out in serialized format. A strong distinction, in my opinion.

You can serialize any book, I suppose. But I prefer a book which was meant to be serialized, designed from the outset as such, so it can be enjoyed as both a part and part of a whole. You know, like TV shows.

While we both wanted to do a serialized series, self-publishing print editions seemed too costly to deliver cheaply to readers. And delivering a cheap, but awesome read, is what we wanted to do, even if we weren’t yet sure how.

AND THEN KINDLE HAPPENED…

While Apple revolutionized the music industry, Amazon changed the way books will be sold. Forever.

Readers began adapting to the idea of eBooks, and were buying eBooks in record numbers, outpacing the sales of print books at Amazon.

Authors like John Locke, J.A. Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and a ton of names that will someday be household, found success on their own terms with eBooks. They didn’t have to go through publisher gateways to find readers. They didn’t have to worry about a publisher thinking their work was good enough to publish. They only had to worry whether readers would read their stuff.

And the readers have spoken with their wallets and purses.

Indie authors are celebrating the wall coming down because it gives them a much better chance of getting their books into the hands of readers. But there’s another advantage to this new age of eBooks. Publishers (including indie authors) can now experiment with different and more creative ways to deliver stories.

Two years ago, there weren’t too many publishers that would serialize a book if it wasn’t written by Stephen King or someone with a proven track record. It’s too risky an investment. But with eBooks, the risk is greatly minimized.

Sean and I saw our window to doing what we’ve wanted to do since we started writing together… create a serialized book series.

AND YESTERDAY’S GONE WAS BORN

Serialization is hardly a new idea, it’s been around for hundreds of years. But serialized eBooks is something I surprisingly don’t see too many writers doing.

We considered how some of our existing book ideas could work in the format, but decided against that. We didn’t just want to serialize an existing book, or even a book we are in the process of writing. If we were going to do it, we’d do it right.

Our series would be designed from the outset as a serialized book, paced just like TV episodes, with rising tension and killer cliffhanger endings.

We came up with the concept of Yesterday’s Gone, and then we each came up with our own characters independent of one another and said, “Okay, see what you can do with this premise and let’s see where it goes.”

Then we traded our chapters and began to flesh out the first “episode,” storylines, and then the full “season,” developing Yesterday’s Gone as writers would develop a running TV series. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had writing!

We released the first episode in August, and followed up with Episode 2 in September. Reaction has been great. Readers have emailed us to tell us they love the concept and the books, and also that they hate us for making them wait to find out what happens next.

But, just like me, they admit, they love having something to look forward to in the next episode.

I love email like that!

TWEAKING THE EXPERIMENT

While we originally planned to release new episodes every month, Sean convinced me that a month is too long. Voracious readers can get through our 100 page books in a day or two. Making them wait a full month is just too long.

For one, there’s many storylines to follow. Expecting readers to remember everything a month later is a bit much. And given that I, the co-author, can’t remember every little thing that happens from episode to episode a month after I wrote it, I can’t expect readers to.

So we decided to shake things up a bit — release all six episodes of Season One all at once – right now, along with the full season in one convenient and low-priced download.

Season One came out last week and we couldn’t be more excited to share the news with you.

We’ll be releasing Season Two in January, with episodes released on a weekly schedule, which seems a better fit for the serialized model. While there will still be a few months between seasons, I think the story flows a lot better in weekly installments.

If you like post-apocalyptic stories like The Stand, shows like LOST, or serialized fiction in general, I’d love for you to check out Yesterday’s Gone. You can buy Episode One right now for .99 and see if you like it, or just dive in and buy the full Season One for just $4.99.

We’re also posting the first episode online at SerializedFiction.com starting here, where we’re also posting some behind-the-scenes marketing stuff, our trailers, Yesterday’s Gone-related news, and more in-depth discussion about the story and our experiment.

You can click on the video to watch a larger, HD version at Youtube.

Hope lay in bed, mentally tracing her fingers over John’s angular jaw, across his chin, and then over his soft lips as his breath rose, fell, and whispered between them.

The soft blue light of predawn made her feel ridiculous for her mini-breakdown hours earlier.

The painting, which she’d started without any thoughts of what it was or where it would eventually go, had taken a dark turn in recent weeks. It was a non-commissioned piece and not something she planned to show at her friend Sergei’s gallery. She initially thought the new direction was some unrealized artistic desire bubbling up and pushing her to explore her boundaries.

However, as the painting progressed, she began to sense another power at work. Night after night, she was continuously pulled from her sleep, unable to rest until she returned to the canvas, adding bits and pieces of images, compelled to lay them across the canvas as though she were obsessively divining the will of the Gods.

She’d never felt so out of control and without direction, save for the first painting she’d ever professionally shown, Dusk Wanderlust. The one which drew John into Sergei’s art gallery when it first opened in the historic district of St. Augustine nearly two years ago. Just as that painting seemed to draw her and John together as one, this painting seemed more ominous, though she wasn’t quite sure why, as though it would rip them back to two.

The angel didn’t originally start out looking like John. He originally appeared a rather generic, golden-haired heavenly being. Prior to that morning, there was also another person in the painting—the broken body of a red haired woman, her body draped in black. A dark tattoo of a shooting star stained the pale flesh along the nape of her neck.
Hope wasn’t sure how she knew, but she was positive the angel had just killed the woman.

Then, last night, she was roused from her sleep with a sudden, burning desire to return to the canvas and scrub it with changes. Without realizing where her mind was moving her hands, she’d endowed the angel with her lover’s face.

Two hours later, sweat matting the hair on her forehead, she dropped her brush and lost the first of her tears. Shaking, she knelt down and picked it back up, then quickly began to paint over the dead woman’s body in violent strokes of indigo and violet.

Horror was bubbling to the surface of their lives. Hope could feel it burning beneath her skin and in every pore of her body. Well, at least, in the inky shadows of the night.

In the bright light of morning, under the down covers of a warm, soft bed, that fear seemed as out of place as a grandfather clock in the corner of a nightclub. John had talked her down from the ledge last night, helping her examine why she was so upset. She didn’t tell him about the woman in the painting because some part of her felt it had something to do with infidelity and she didn’t want to appear insecure. If there was one thing Hope knew about John without any doubt whatsoever, it was that he was a faithful man.

During his examination of the painting, John told her, with a satisfied smile, that she’d never been so happy for such a long period of time. That realization, in the face of the looming two year milestone of their dating, was bringing some nested fear to the surface and manifesting itself in the form of this unsettling painting.

“The fear will go away,” he’d said, squeezing her shoulder blades beneath his large, strong hands. He turned her around, then pulled her into his embrace, absorbing her tears as they soaked the thick cotton of his nightshirt. “You deserve to be happy.”

While other men in her life had analyzed her only to determine that there was something wrong with her and that it was her fault she was miserable because she must be afraid of happiness, or some such psychobabble, John didn’t search for what was wrong.

He simply told her what was right—them and their love.

And he was right. She deserved to be happy. She just needed to get past the fears.

Even though they’d been together for two years—her longest relationship by at least 14 months—they had never settled into the mundane routine which seemed to poison the wells of so many other relationships around her. She sometimes wondered why this man seemed so different than all the others?

She was far too cynical to believe in things like fate or soul mates. But the inner romantic in her, the one who existed at her core despite all the bad experiences life had seen fit to throw her way, secretly believed that John was the closest thing to a soul mate she would ever know.

They were different in many ways, but their differences seemed to work in harmony. While she was anxious, frenetic and prone to emotional flights and dives, he was calm, laid back and perhaps the most evenly tempered person she’d ever known. However, they also had many things in common, including a love for reading, art, and equally at home discussing philosophy or why there would never be a show on TV better than the X-Files.

John was also the first person who ever took such a deep curiosity in knowing everything about her—from what she was like as a child (a clumsy, scrawny introvert), to the consistency of her dreams (incredibly rare), to her deepest fears (being unable to conceive a child), to what inspired each and every one of her paintings. At times, John appeared like a scholar with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the subject of her, no matter how uninteresting she sometimes felt.

Perhaps the biggest reason their love was so intense, even after all this time, was that to her, John was still something of a mystery.

He worked as a cook at an upscale Italian restaurant just a short walk from Sergei’s gallery, and didn’t talk much about his life before moving to Florida, which he said was rather ordinary. With any other man, she would suspect such reticence to be indicative of an unseemly past filled with debauchery and selfish deeds.

John was different, though.

He grew up in more than 20 foster homes after his parents died, drifting from state to state, never really establishing roots in any of them. He spent his time working and reading and sometimes composing music on piano, though he never played for another soul. He had no friends, family or meaningful relationships. John was, in some ways, a blank slate, a guy who seemed to have been waiting for some spark to bring him to life. Hope was that spark, he confessed during one of their few discussions of his past.

Despite his claims to the ordinary, there were times, such as this, when she lay next to him in bed watching him sleep, that she felt there was far more to John than she might ever know. There was a deeper John somewhere inside, a John who had yet to look her in the eye. She suspected that perhaps he had suffered some great hurt which made him the way he was, so remote and distant to everyone other than her.

She moved a bit closer to him in bed, wanting to touch him, but not wake him.

John’s eyes opened and his left eyebrow arched.

“Are you watching me sleep?” he asked, a smile breaking through the surface of his tired face. It wasn’t the first time she’d been busted.

She slid towards him under the sheets, her hand sliding under his shirt and finding his warm chest as her leg wrapped around his groin. She felt his cock stiffen immediately. She smiled.

“Well, good morning,” she said as she climbed on top of him and reached down to slide him into her.

“Wow,” John said, still smiling, “it is a good morning.”

Suddenly, the sound of their doorbell shattered the intimacy of the moment.

“What the hell?” Hope said, climbing off of John and cycling through the possible selections in her mind—who could possibly be showing up on her doorstep at this hour?

John threw on some jeans and then flew downstairs.

He peered through the front door’s peep hole and glanced back at Hope, who stood at the foot of the stairs with the phone in her hand—just in case she needed to call the cops.

She didn’t need to, though. They were standing at her doorstep.

“It’s the cops,” John whispered, a confused look on his face.

He flicked on the porch light and opened the door. Hope, suddenly by his side, wrapped both her arms around his right one.

“Hi, I’m Detective Avery,” said the tall, hawk-nosed, dark-haired cop with raccoon circles under his eyes. “This is Detective Johnson,” he said, gesturing toward his partner, a thin black man with salt and pepper hair and a receding hair line.

“We’re wondering if either of you have seen this woman?”

Avery held out a photo. Hope’s throat closed and her stomach nearly fell through the floorboards. Staring back at her was a glossy image of a red haired woman, a shooting star tattoo leaving a trail of ink across the nape of her neck.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Be sure to check out the Author’s Notes in the comments section following each chapter. Also, please tweet this post and help spread the word about Available Darkness and nurture online fiction.

John and Larry both reached out in a blind attempt 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.

John and Larry 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. His heart shattered as he stood in the shadow of the sentence he had condemned Abigail to endure. Yes, he had saved her life, but at what cost?

Larry fell back. 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. Rage, anger, hate, he wasn’t sure, but it stormed toward the surface and splashed ice water on his inaction. He raised his pistol, aimed directly at the back of Abigail’s head, and marched forward.

John glanced up just in time. He instinctively 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 that had slid across the floor.

“Stop!” John barked.

Larry turned and glared upward, his face flushed with anger.

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 her body was rocking slowly as she murmured something Larry could not make out.

Something in Larry shifted.

Yes, he was still horrified and saddened 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. Yet there were other emotions churning the sick stew in his guts and brain, a blended broth of awe and curiosity. This 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.

A thousand questions throbbed through his mind. He’d been obsessed with the arcane knowledge of Other World ever since he’d first seen one of the aliens, more than two decades prior.

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 heart rate slowing, could even hear the man’s heartbeat, he noted with interest. He 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. His mind scrambled over the possibilities. What he would say to comfort her, to explain what had happened, or at least to say he was sorry. However, she wasn’t crying. She wore a marble slab of emotion.

After a long stretch of silence, her vacant expression changed slightly.

“What happened?” she asked, in barely a whisper.

______________________________

“What are you looking for?” Bob said, repeating the question that had rendered Jack speechless.

While Jack would normally flare up at anyone (no matter how high their ranking) who had the temerity to ask him such a thing, or dared to spy on him, he needed to tread carefully. Something big was happening, and for the first time in his professional career, he was at a disadvantage because he had no idea what was in play.

Jack figured honesty was the best policy since he had no idea how much they knew. “I’m remembering things, Bob. Things that don’t make a whole lot of sense.”

The other side of the line was silent.

Shit, I said too much.

Then, after a long silence, Bob responded. “Let it go, Jack.”

Jack wanted to do anything but let it go. He wanted to jump through the phone and demand for Bob to tell him everything. Right now!

“Listen, Jack, I get that you have more questions than answers right now and that it’s frustrating. However, I need your head in the game. We have a killer to catch. The man who, I might remind you just in case you’ve forgotten killed your wife.”

“I haven’t forgotten a thing,” Jack said, pissed that Bob would play that card. He was also somewhat pleased. If Bob was getting desperate enough to try such a cheap tactic, it meant one thing, Jack was closing in on something that they, whoever they were, didn’t want him to know.

“We’ll help you make sense of things, soon, Jack, I promise. But right now, I need to know you’re not going to be sidetracked. I need to know you’re not going to botch this up.”

Jack measured Bob’s words. If he responded too quickly, Bob wouldn’t buy the change of heart. Moreover, he’d likely lock down Jack’s ability to get any information at all, if he’d not already done so. Jack pulled a sigh from the depths of his belly and unscrewed the bottle of whiskey he kept on his nightstand. He took a deep swig and sighed a second time, half enjoying the show he was putting on for Bob.

“I’m just so tired,” Jack said, broadcasting utter exhaustion, “I just want to close this case and put an end to the nightmare.”

“I know,” Bob said, his voice soothing.

“You know, I haven’t cried since the funeral,” Jack said, in a moment of spontaneous honesty, surprising himself with his confession.

Bob was now the quiet one.

Jack continued, “My head hasn’t been right in a while, Bob. I’m not eating or sleeping. It’s no wonder I’m having such fucked up dreams. I just want to catch this guy, Bob, nail him to the fucking wall so my wife can finally rest in peace.”

“Do you need some time off?”

“No, Bob. Just let me get this monster and then we can deal with whatever else we need to deal with.”

“If you ever need anything, Jack, anything at all,” Bob said, “just ask.”

“Thank you,” Jack said, taking another sip, “Right now, I’m just gonna get some sleep so I can hit this tomorrow with fresh eyes.”

They hung up. Jack turned out his light and stared at the computer, wondering how else they might be monitoring him. He glanced at his window, the curtains closed, as they always were. He then rolled off the bed, dropped softly to the carpet, crawled toward the wall, and slowly pulled the bottom corner of the curtain aside just enough to steal a glimpse. There, about half a block down, he saw a van nearly swallowed by darkness.

“Well, hello there,” Jack whispered to his watcher.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Be sure to check out the Author’s Notes in the comments section following each chapter. Also, please tweet this post and help spread the word about Available Darkness and nurture online fiction.

Jack kneaded his temples and stared at the screen. On a safari for clues to his foggy past, he’d accessed a database in the bureau computer, wound his way through a series of gateways, and finally located his full file. While he’d pieced together many puzzles via public and classified records during his years with the agency—lives collected neatly in folders filled with facts, photos and crime scene reports—it was another thing altogether, attempting to quilt the fragments of his own scattered existence.

Facts stared back at Baldwin; things remembered and forgotten, both seeming as ancient as he was feeling. He saw nothing which indicated that his parents, William and Elizabeth Winslow, died in a violent crime. Their deaths were listed as a car accident, just as he recalled. Driving home one rainy night, their car lost control on a slick road and wrapped around a light post.

Death on impact. Survived by one son, Jack. No mention of another.

Shortly following the accident, Jack was adopted by Ed and Myriam Baldwin. Ed was an agent with the FBI, leaving a career’s worth of footsteps for Jack to eventually follow. According to the gospel which Jack had never thought to question, Ed and Myriam were a freshly married couple, unable to conceive. Ed had been on his way home from work when he arrived at the scene of the accident, Jack’s parents hugging the lamppost, twisted inside a couple tons of metal. After a long talk with Myriam, they decided to adopt Jack. They got their child and saved the world from one more orphan.

Jack sighed and put his elbows on the desk. He’d already searched for records of his birth parents, but turned up nothing. Not too surprising. If they died in a car accident, they shouldn’t have been in the database unless they had been flagged for some reason, or were victims of a crime the bureau was investigating.

Another few seconds in front of the screen and the corners of Jack’s mouth suddenly twitched. He leaned forward and let his fingers dance across the keyboard. He typed John Winslow in the search box, and then ENTER.

Four names, three of them with no relation to him; the fourth, a huge question mark.

When Jack clicked on the fourth name, he received a message window. ACCESS DENIED, the red letters said. PROPER CLEARANCE REQUIRED, the green ones agreed. Below the lines, a message showed his IP address and mentioned that his search and failure to meet clearance had been noted. Great.

What the hell is going on? Why would John Winslow, possibly his brother, be a secret FBI file?

Jack continued to stare at the monitor, the corners of his mouth curled in frustration. He had no memories of a brother, yet something in the name tickled the deep recesses of his brain.

Could he have completely forgotten having a brother? He’d known of people forgetting things and blocking things out after traumatic events. Hell, he could understand wanting to forget your parents’ murders and burning the reels of the mind movie. But this, if it were true, went well beyond forgetting. There was a paper trail noting his parents’ death in a car accident, implicating lie as truth. That meant conspiracy.

But why?

Why cover up a murder? Why cover up the existence of a brother? Could the government really have rinsed his memories, not only of murder but of a younger brother as well?

A week ago he would’ve thought it was impossible or at least downright lunacy. But it had been a long week, even without the dream. The dream! Jack shuddered at the involuntary image of his father’s burned heap of a body; a sack of ashy flesh no different from those which had littered the last few of his days; no different than his wife, Julia’s.

Something brought Jack to life, out of his drugged fog, like an animal perking to a strange and sudden scent.

The monster in his dream had claimed to be his brother, Jacob.

Two brothers, one nightmare.

Jack entered the name Jacob Winslow.

ACCESS DENIED, PROPER CLEARANCE REQUIRED

Jack thought of the killer he was tracking. The killer, who finally had a name, thanks to Bob’s information—John Sullivan. He entered the name and held his breath.

ACCESS DENIED, PROPER CLEARANCE REQUIRED

What the hell?

Jack’s mind was crackling, connections slowly clicking into place. Something inside him shuddered. What if the killer, John, was also his brother? It didn’t make sense, of course. According to Bob, the killer wasn’t from this planet. The killer also seemed younger, though Bob said he was in fact, much older.

The boy in the dream was distinctly younger than Jack.

Yet when Jack thought of the damage Jacob had done to his father’s body, and the damage this John Sullivan was doing to others right now, the connections, as crazy as they seemed, almost arranged themselves 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?

Jack leaned back in his chair and pondered the question. His cell phone rang. His boss, Bob.

“Hello?” Jack said, feigning grogginess so Bob would think he was still asleep rather than launching an investigation into some half-cocked tapestry of deception, based on a dream, more likely inspired by his drugs than actual memories.

“What are you looking for, Jack?” Bob said.

Jack’s heart started pounding. They’re monitoring me? Why? He swallowed, “What do you mean, Bob?”

“Don’t make me drag it out of you, Jack. Why are you accessing department databases and dredging up ancient history? What is it you’re trying to find?”

Jack, normally quick with a lie, was frozen.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Be sure to check out the Author’s Notes in the comments section following each chapter. Also, please tweet this post and help spread the word about Available Darkness and nurture online fiction.

Larry swung the black van into the chop shop. The unassuming warehouse sat in the middle of a dozen others, nearly invisible, in a broken row in a rundown neighborhood just two miles south of their next port of call.

Lydia was waiting outside, alone as he’d requested. Most hours, she’d have a crew of at least six to help ensure her safety, but their amorous past was a solid promise of safety. She raised the bay door and Larry pulled inside, parking beside the white Ford Econoline she’d readied for him. The van was modified inside, with a spacious cargo area sealed off from the front to prevent any light from seeping inside. Larry would transfer John and Abigail, and then be on his way. Lydia would take care of the black van and all its tracking systems.

Larry hopped from the van. Lydia pulled the bay door down and turned to him, her infectious smile lighting the room, “Hey, stranger.”

He laughed. “Not by choice. You still seeing Tony?”

“Hell no, he’s back with his little bitch Jessi.” Lydia sidled towards Larry, then leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek. “You asking for any particular reason?”

Larry grinned. It had been a while since he’d been laid. Even longer since he’d been with a kinky little minx like Lydia. He felt the usual stir, and then ignored the wish that was turning to a want which time wouldn’t allow. Lydia’s eyes danced; hands in her pocket, head sideways, a lock of chestnut curls teasing the nape of her neck. Larry swallowed.

“No reason, just wanted to make sure the hairs on my neck weren’t rising because of an asshole behind me.”

Lydia laughed. “Nope, just you and me … and whoever you have in the van.”

“Thanks for this,” Larry said, reaching into his pocket for an envelope of cash which found her fingers in a whisper, with the fluidity of a man used to greasing palms and paying for those items or services which were unavailable on the open market.

“Nothing but a thing,” Lydia said, peering over Larry’s shoulder at the black van. “So, what are we about to unwrap?”

“I need to get these people to safety,” Larry said as he led her to the side door. He slid it open. Inside, an especially large looking John with a still sleeping Abigail like a rag doll in the nook of his body.

“Oh shit!” Lydia’s eyes widened. She took an involuntary step back from the van.

“So you get the news in this city too, huh?” Larry made a weak attempt at humor. It didn’t work.

“Dude, what the hell are you into? I’m not into helping a kidnapping, no way.” Lydia took another step back, this one on purpose.

Larry had seconds to calm her. Lydia’s blood was always hot and it didn’t take much to roll it to a boil. She may have run a chop shop with a regular clientele of thugs, thieves, and organized crime, many which had blood on their hands, but kidnapping, or any crime involving a child, was something she wasn’t willing to take part in.

He spoke calmly.

“Come on, you know me better than that. Don‘t believe any of that shit you saw on TV. There are some people after her, bad people. We’re protecting her.”

John crawled from the van and nodded to Lydia.

“What about him?” she said, “I saw what he did on TV. What the hell is he?”

“You trust me?” Larry asked, his voice climbing an octave like a guy in a fight with his girlfriend.

Lydia looked past John and at Abigail, who was starting to stir. “You okay, sweetie?”

Abigail looked up at Lydia. The child’s eyes were cloudy and distant. Larry could only imagine the accusations barreling through Lydia’s mind. They drugged this girl!

Larry had always been able to count on Lydia in a pinch, but they hadn’t spoken in more than half a year, since the “Tony situation” came out of nowhere and took over everything. Who knew where her loyalties lay now?

Larry eyed her up and down, while her attention was on the child. He was certain she was packing heat; something small like a snub nosed Ruger, probably in the small of her back. Lydia might not have run with the lowest of the low, but she was, like Larry, always prepared for any eventuality. He didn’t want to get into a gunfight, so he’d have to act quickly to disarm her the moment before she reached for her piece.

“Where are we?” Abigail asked, her syllables slurring through the slosh of a thick tongue and vacant expression.

Something looked off about the girl, Larry thought. Same doll, different batteries.

“You okay, honey?” Lydia asked, edging towards her.

John leaned over, blocking access to Abigail, and growled. “Don’t touch her!”

Lydia drew back, and before Larry could make a move, she had a gun in hand, a Ruger, indeed, Larry noted, and aimed it at John. Oh fuck, Larry thought, this is gonna get ugly.

“What the hell is going on here?” Lydia asked, gun trained on John, but eyes on Larry; wide, wild, and dilating in a fear that was full yet unflinching.

“Put the gun away,” Larry said, his voice a glassy calm, “You saw what this guy did to those people, right? He may not be human, BUT, he’s not the bad guy here. And this girl here, Abigail, isn’t human either. These government fucks are after them both. They want to capture them, experiment on them and God knows what else. All that shit on TV is a giant spin by the media machine, Lydia. You have to believe me.”

Something in Lydia’s eyes softened and Larry could see she was starting to buy what he was selling. He might have even believed they would get out of the entire mess unscathed if Abigail hadn’t started to scream at that moment, her body convulsing in a wicked rhythm of spasms, eyes rolling into the top of her head. A low predatory snarl started to spill from her throat.

“What the fuck?” Lydia said, gun back on John.

John’s face turned gray as he turned to Larry, “What’s happening?”

Abigail echoed the question in broken gasps, her fingernails digging into John’s arm. “Wh… what’s hap…pening to me?”

Abigail’s back arched upward, her body a circus freak of twisted contortions as anguished cries erupted from her lungs.

Tears poured down Lydia’s face, “What’s happening?”

She put the gun back behind her back and moved towards Abigail, reaching out to help somehow. Neither Larry nor John were able to stop her before Abigail’s flailing hand seized Lydia’s forearm and locked.

And the feeding began.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Be sure to check out the Author’s Notes in the comments section following each chapter. Also, please tweet this post and help spread the word about Available Darkness and nurture online fiction.

Swallow enough pills and sleep eventually finds you. For Jack, it came quickly. His breathing relaxed and he found himself deep in his dreams, though he wasn’t in the bedroom of his youth. He was somewhere else.

Jack stood on a deck overlooking a pristine white shore, familiar, though only through the hazy fog of fragmented memory. He was more relaxed than he’d remembered feeling in a while. Chasing criminals has a way of owning you even when off duty. Prior to their mutual “I do’s,” Julia used to continually complain, both with words and dancing eyes, about his inability to unplug from work and just be happy.

Julia!

He remembered the shoreline; the pristine white sands of Aruba, where he and Julia spent three amazing weeks on their honeymoon. Which was, oddly enough, probably the last time he’d felt at peace. Julia had made him promise to take three weeks off from work, a luxury he’d never experienced, even though he’d probably built up a half year’s worth of vacation time. He didn’t want to. He had too much work and knew it would pile up without his constant attention.

“The world will still turn and the job will get done without you,” Julia had said.

And she was right. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he found his shoulders relaxing long enough to let him enjoy life. An epiphany, Jack returned home with renewed purpose. Life was his to create. Family first, a husband’s duty.

That vow lasted almost until the end of his first week back until Jack found himself buried alive with a case that kept him hostage to the office from early light to mocking moon. One case turned to two, then weeks to months and months to years until just like that, he found that he’d slowly surrendered his limbs to the shackles of fate without even realizing it.

Waves lapped. Jack took a sip of wine. Behind him, he heard a muffled voice from the other side of the double French doors of their honeymoon villa. Though he was deep into dream and memory, a part of him was also aware of the waking life in which his wife was long since dead. His eager heart sped in his chest.

It had been so long since she had visited his dreams. Even though he’d wake up sad, these brief moments were better than nothing. He opened the door and…

…was again a child, back in the middle of that awful night which had been blotted from his memory ever since, stepping gingerly into the darkened hallway. Downstairs, his father was still screaming at his mother. The shadow man was just ahead of him, at the landing of the stairs. He turned back and in that dissonant voice, warned Jack to wait.

And Jack did.

Moments later, he heard his father cry out, “What the fuck?”

The end of fuck was severed by a ripping sound followed by a wet thud and a splash which sent chills down Jack’s spine.

He’s dead.

While a part of him should have been happy that the man who tormented he and his mother would no longer do so, the reality of murder did not bring the relief he’d sought. Panicked tears welled inside and warm piss trickled down Jack’s leg.

His mother screamed. At first Jack assigned the sound to the horror of seeing her husband murdered. Yet the scream held an elevated fear which went far beyond the terror of a frightened witness, sharp as it was with the acid panic of self preservation.

“Hello, mother,” the man in shadows said in a voice of boots crunching atop vomit soaked gravel.

Then, the sound of ripping flesh and gurgling, followed by silence.

Jack waited, fear circling the drain of his throat.

She’s dead, you killed her!

The adult part of Jack was frozen as well. He remembered nothing of this night from his youth, these memories were not the ones of how he knew his parents to have died, yet he knew it wasn’t a dream. This was a truth he’d been hiding from, or … which had removed from his mind. Entombed memories were no less real for their burial. He urged his dream self to take a step forward, to unravel the rest of the mystery.

“Mommy!” young Jack screamed, bolting down the stairs and into the living room.

He saw the still smoldering corpse of his father, flesh still bubbling as his headless body twitched. Wherever his father’s head was, it wasn’t anywhere next to his body.

The next two things he noticed in unison.

The shadow man, now looking slightly more human in form, stood in the center of the living room with his arms outstretched, while his mother, throat slashed and blood soaking through the thin gauze of her night shirt, danced. Her arms were raised, her lifeless head rolling back and forth barely there and maybe only by a thread. Her feet hovered inches above the ground. The shadow man moved his arms wildly like a crazed marionette as Jack’s mother danced some perverse jig. The shadow man continued to vent a smog of chilling laughter during the macabre recital.

Jack screamed. The shadow man turned to him, surprised, and allowed his mother to collapse in an inanimate heap.

“Forgive me, a son should have one final dance with his mother, yes?” The trailing S, a serpent’s hiss.

Jack was confused. He longed to run at the monster, pound him, tear him apart, anything. But fear bolted his ankles to the floor.

“You don’t remember me, do you Jackie?” the monster said, drifting closer.

Jack wanted to turn and run. The adult Jack also wanted to turn away, tears streaming down his sleeping cheeks. Neither Jack could do anything but watch the mind movie that had no pause.

Finally, the child spoke.

“Why did you kill her?”

“Because!” the monster yelled, his voice sounding more boyish and human than before, “she left me. You all left me behind.”

“She’s not your mother!” Jack cried out.

“Ah, what have they done to you, brother? You really don’t remember me, do you? It’s me … Jacob.”

And just like that, the shape of the shadow man dissipated like spider webs in a tornado, and standing before Jack was a boy, not much older than he, wearing a black shirt and pants, coated in the fresh blood of Jack’s parents.

Jack was torn between confusion, anger and a sudden, incredible sadness. None of this was making any sense and his head felt as if it were going to split and spill its contents.

“She made you forget,” Jacob said, “but I,” and he pointed at his head and spread his lips in a lunatic’s smile, “I NEVER forget!”

The monster boy stepped forward and Jack took a step back, shaking.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you two. You‘re my brothers.”

Brothers? Two? Who else is he talking about? Adult Jack was puzzled, though his mind was too entrenched in the dream to work out the logic at play.

The monster headed to the front door, opened it, and disappeared into the night.

This was all too much for young Jack, what was he supposed to do now? His head hurt and more than anything, he wanted to march behind his mother right into the arms of death. Adult Jack was feeling the same feelings as he was experiencing this, in some way, for the first time. Part of him wanted to die right there in his dream. To spare him of not only this, but of living alone in this cold world without Julia.

But he couldn’t.

A tiny voice called from upstairs, “Is he gone?”

Jack glanced up at the four year old peering back between the banisters. A boy so young should not see such things.

Adult Jack was dumbstruck. I have a brother?

“Go back in your room, Johnny!” Jack shouted, tears twisting his voice into a gasp.

Confusion, shock and pain were twined like hair in a braid, but he couldn’t allow himself to shut down. Though he were just a child himself, he had to protect John. Family first, a brother’s duty.

__________

Jack snapped awake.

“John?”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Be sure to check out the Author’s Notes in the comments section following each chapter. Also, please tweet this post and help spread the word about Available Darkness and nurture online fiction.

It’s coming.

He closed his eyes, tried to focus on Abigail, to connect with her. He could feel her there, could even how close she was, but there was something—some sort of darkness surrounding her—preventing him access to her mind.

He heard Brock shouting.

Abigail!

And then the gunshots.

John leapt to a squatting position, waiting for something, his body prickling for action. But he was caged and helpless.

He felt Abigail starting to fade. She was wounded in the gunfire. He knew it as certainly as he knew the sun would soon be rising. He screamed and began to use his body as a battering ram, slamming himself against the side door as if he could somehow shake the locks loose.

“Abigail!” he screamed.

He thought he heard something, her voice? He stopped moving and tilted his head, hungry to hear something rise above the gunshots. Everything went silent as time seemed to pause in wait for whatever was next. Either his side door would open and Larry would appear or the van would start moving, on their way to his would-be kidnappers, and away from Abigail, who needed him now more than ever.

The silence was like a slow and steady suffocation. He started to rock again, shaking the van wildly and screaming. “Let me out!”

The side door slid open as John flinched, preparing for the worst. Thankfully, it was Larry whose dark shape filled the open door and not Brock‘s. Larry didn’t have to say a word, John could see the truth in his eyes and on the asphalt, just yards away. Abigail, in a pool of blood, eyes open and staring at him in a dead gaze.

John’s heart crumbled as he exploded from the van and sprinted towards Abigail. He collapsed to her side and reached to feel for a pulse even as her eyes held their dead focus on the van. He caught himself, unsure what damage his touch could do to her in this state. He called to her; but no response.

“Don’t touch her!” Larry screamed, his heavy footsteps thundering across the asphalt towards them.

Larry reached down and touched the child’s neck. His eyes widened.

“Holy shit!” he cried out, “she’s still alive.”

“Call an ambulance, we’ve got to help her!” John said through a cracked voice.

Larry looked grave, his hand still on Abigail’s neck.

“There’s no time, John. She’s dying.”

John’s mind raced as he shook his head, repeating, “No, no, no, no. There’s got to be something we can do!”

Something flickered from deep within the recesses of John’s forgotten memories; a glimmer of something almost recognizable, a faint echo of a lost transmission from a long dead satellite. Larry mumbled something about needing to get out of there before the cops came. John closed his eyes, trying to block Larry’s voice out.

“Wait!” he said, pointing at Larry.

John dove deeper into the murkiness of his subconscious like a blind man trying to find his keys along the ocean floor. Only, John couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the keys, let alone recall what they unlocked.

“John,” Larry said, “she’s dying.”

“I fucking know that,” John barked, spinning towards Larry, anger flashing, and then…

…something came to him and John had an idea.

“I can turn her?” John asked Larry, “I can bring her back as a vampire, can’t I?”

Larry nodded, “You know how?”

“I think so, I am remembering… something.”

“If you do this,” Larry warned, “you’re sentencing her to a life of hell.”

“A life of hell is all she’s ever known,” John said, “but it sure as hell beats not living.”

John looked down at the helpless child. His angel. Her open, glassy eyes cut straight into his heart. Though Larry said she was alive, John was pretty certain she couldn’t see him. Something resembling instinct whispered, just let me take over. He wasn’t sure if the voice was to be trusted or if it was wishful thinking that someone or something would answer his silent pleas for guidance.

Do it, now.

John knelt down, leaned in close, closed his eyes and handed his intuition the reigns. As he drew closer to her neck, he could feel her pulse, faint and barely there, against his fevered lips. Something pulled him, commanded him, compelled him. He opened his mouth. Pain splintered through his entire jaw as John’s teeth seemed to grind, twist and churn beneath his gums as his canines grew longer and sharper, piercing the edges of his tongue. Blood flooded his mouth with the taste of metal.

Bite her.

Rationality and doubt pleaded with him to stop. This is insane, you’re going to finish her off right here! John closed his eyes tighter, ignoring the voice, and put his mouth on Abigail’s neck. His instincts screamed to just bite, but fear held him in check, wondering how hard to bite, what if he bit in the wrong place?

Do it!

Instinct took over and flipped a switch. John bit down without further thought or hesitation. Blood flooded his mouth, warm and bitter. He drank, swallowed, and felt Abigail’s life blood sluice down his throat in two reluctant gulps. John then breathed into her wound. Only it wasn’t a breath from his lungs, but something else entirely; his essence delivered as her elixir. A current, different and less intense than the kind which he stole from the lives of so many, flowed—this time from him, to her.

Abigail’s body began to convulse. John pulled back, afraid his touch had started a fire which would quickly consume her. Her fingers splayed, as her legs shot out completely stiff. Her back arched up in an almost unnatural arc. Her jaws opened wide, her eyes even wider as she fought for ragged breath, her chest rising and falling rapidly.

John took another step back, his heart on the precipice of either fear that these were her final spastic death throes, or joy that he’d managed to save her. And then…

her body then fell limp as if whatever puppeteer holding the strings had just cut them all at once.

John dropped to his knees, his breath and heart both on pause. Her hair hung in tangles over her pale face—he couldn’t tell if she were alive or dead. A silent moan escaped her open mouth as she lifted her head, hair falling from her waxen face and eyes blinking open. Though barely there, Abigail smiled and spoke in a voice so frail, the gathering wind nearly tore it asunder.

“My angel.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Be sure to check out our new feature, Author’s Notes in the comments section following each chapter. Also, please tweet this post and help spread the word about Available Darkness and nurture online fiction.

“You need to come with me,” the man said to John.

“No fucking way.” Larry lifted his rifle, aimed it at the man’s head and said, “Let her go.”

“If you shoot me,” the gunman said, “my finger will twitch, this gun will go off and she will die. It’s all very simple, really. Or … we can end this peacefully, John comes with me, you take the girl and this never happened.”

The man was Brock, John recalled from a sliver of memory he’d stolen from one of the squad. A real badass. He wasn’t bluffing – he would shoot Abigail without flinching if he thought all was lost. He had no compunctions about killing – anybody. Brock worked for the same man he saw in his vision. The one who took Abigail and then let her go.

Jacob.

“Put the gun down,” John told Larry.

Larry didn’t budge. “No way you’re going with him, John. Trust me, it won’t end well for you.”

Brock looked down at Abigail, smiled a sickly sweet smile, “Tell them Abigail, do you want to die today?”

She looked up at John, eyes now flooding in tears, and whimpered, “No.”

John, heartbroken, turned to Larry, stepping between Larry and Brock and placing himself directly in Larry’s line of fire. John looked his old friend in the eyes, they were wild and a bit scared, but also angry. Sweat drenched his brow and hairline. A single drop dangled from his ear.

“Let me go with him,” John said, “you take Abigail and watch over her till I come back.”

“I can’t let you do that,” Larry shook his head, looking past John and at the gunman, “the minute you go, they get what they want. And I can’t let that happen. YOU can’t let that happen. This is more important than one person’s life.”

John couldn’t believe what Larry was saying. How could he be so cold? Whatever the gunmen wanted, it wasn’t worth a child’s life, especially not Abigail’s! Pondering her death for even a second twisted something deep inside John’s heart.

“Larry,” John said, trying to influence whatever compassion might be resting in the man’s core. “She’s just a kid.”

Larry blinked the sweat from his eyes, doing his best not to look away from the gunman and Abigail.

“You don’t get it John, you would choose the same thing. You chose burial to protect this, to keep it from them.”

John wished he could remember something from his past life, anything. It was hell on earth wondering what was so important; serious enough to trade for the life of a child. He couldn’t imagine anything important enough, except … Hope.

“Is it … Hope?” he asked, mentioning his love’s name to Larry for the first time.

Larry’s eyes widened in recognition then froze on John for a moment as though trying to taste the right answer.

It was Hope, John decided. Dark despair dug its talons deeper into John’s brain. Something horrible was about to happen. He could feel it racing towards him like a runaway train, and he, fate’s passenger, with no control.

“Doesn’t matter, Abigail needs me. Needs us. Now.” John said. He turned to Brock, “What do you want me to do?”

“Get in the back of the van,” Brock said, pointing to one of the identical black-windowed black vans behind him, “there’s a special cell to ensure you won’t … well, you know,” he said nodding his head in reference to the dead bodies between them. “Once you’re inside, and I’m in the driver’s seat, I will let the girl go and bring you home. You will be perfectly safe. If we wanted you dead, we would’ve struck during daylight.” Brock glanced up at the sky. “The sun is going to rise any minute, we need to get on with it.”

“How do I know you’ll let her go?” John asked.

“If we wanted the girl dead, she would never have left our custody,” Brock sighed, losing patience with the exchange. “Shall we?”

John glanced back at Larry, who almost imperceptibly nodded his head yes, with great reservation.

John tried to signal to Larry not to worry. He would find a way out of this, he was certain, despite the overwhelming sense of dread pumping through his veins. Right now, this was their only card. Despite his powers, even if he could duplicate the energy blast he had managed to hurl at Larry earlier, he doubted he could do it any more quickly than Larry firing a round at Brock. Either way, Abigail would end up taking a bullet.

John began to walk towards the van. He glanced down at Abigail, who was sucking back a small sea of tears and snot. He winked, as if to say everything would be okay. The lie made her smile, for a moment anyway. Seeing the glint in her beautiful eyes, made him smile.

He prayed this would not be the last time he’d ever see her. In the past 48 hours she was the only person for which he felt anything remotely close to love. Without memories of his own life, she was his everything. Without her, he was adrift with reality’s compass broken and more alone than God.

__________________

Abigail watched as John approached the van. She knew she should be brave and do something, but what could she do? The soldier already warned her that if she tried to do anything stupid, a team of 12 more men, snipers, he called them, would, on his command, kill everyone in sight. She didn’t know if he was lying or not, but she didn’t want to take any chances.

“He can die, you know,” the soldier told her as they walked towards the motel a few minutes earlier, “if they shoot him in the head enough times, he won’t come back to life.”

So she remained silent. What little fight she had stayed dormant. And as John walked towards the van, she wondered if she’d made the right decision. Wondered if there was anything she could do to make a difference. In a few moments, they would have him. God only knew what they wanted, but she couldn’t see it ending well for John. These men looked like government soldiers who might experiment on him or … worse. The gun tightened against her head, as if the soldier could tell what she was thinking and meant to dissuade her.
____________________

Larry watched as John walked towards the van. The fact that he trusted these men, was further indication of how much of his memory remained blank. Larry could think of at least five different things the old John would have done to neutralize the situation. But Larry wasn’t about what could have been, he was about being prepared and making things happen.

And he still had one ace up his sleeve he was eager to lay down.

Prior to getting out of the van, Larry retrieved a watch he’d made and strapped it to his left hand. While it looked and functioned like any other digital watch, it was also a trigger to detonate a nearby series of explosives. The gunman briefly lifted his hand from Abigail’s shoulder to retrieve something from his pants. A remote which opened the side of one of the black van’s side doors. He instructed John to climb inside.

Larry saw something stirring in Abigail, like she had her own ace she was itching to play. Shit, he had one shot at this and couldn’t afford to have another variable in motion. He narrowed his glare at her, and when she looked into his eyes, he shook his head no.

John climbed into the van and looked back at Larry, a vow of I’ll figure something out written on his face. The odds of that happening were much dimmer once they had him, though. John had no idea about the power of the forces he was dealing with. The door slid mechanically shut and the lock clicked into place.

“Okay,” the gunman said, “we’re walking back to the van. Once I’m inside, I’ll let her go. The inside of the van is lined with ultraviolet lights. If you try anything, I will end John’s life in an instant.”

Shit. Larry figured the soldier had something up his sleeve, but had no idea what. His window to act was about to slam shut.

_____________________

Abigail followed the soldier’s instructions carefully, walking backwards slowly, his hand—the one with the remote—on her shoulder and gun now at her back. As she attempted to keep her balance, her mind raced, searching for anything she could do. She watched Larry’s face in search of another subtle glance or shake of the head to indicate direction, but his face was a stone mask.

The soldier instructed her to turn with him as they drew closer to the van, navigated around it and towards the driver’s side door, which had been left open. Abigail’s nerves were frayed, waiting for whatever was about to unfold. Dread, fear and hope were waging war inside her body, her head growing dizzy and her stomach swimming in a stew of sick.

Suddenly, Abigail stumbled backward, her foot getting caught up with the soldier’s. Rather than breaking her fall, the soldier stepped back, as she spun her arms, trying to find some balance before hitting the ground hard. The soldier aimed his gun down at her, his eyes narrow slits.

The chance she’d been waiting for, a moment to help her beloved angel, happened amid an instant outburst of tangled noise and rolling waves of sudden heat.

The motel room door behind them exploded open in a fiery blast. A second door, further back, detonated in a blazing echo. The soldier, stumbled forward then spun around, diverted briefly by the eruptions. Abigail took her chance, scrambled to her feet and ran towards Larry as gunshots rang from behind.

“Goddammit!” the soldier yelled.

Larry was also taking his chance and fired repeatedly at the soldier. Almost instantly Abigail realized the error of placing herself in the crossfire. Breathless, and heart pounding, she didn’t know what else to do but run as fast as she could to Larry as bullets whizzed past her, slamming into the pavement and spitting up chunks of asphalt.

And then one found her.

Pain splintered her chest as she was thrust backwards to the ground.

Oh God, no.

The pain was intense, like wet fire spreading through her chest. She writhed on the ground, attempting to get up before giving up. It was all she could do to turn and look back towards the van, praying that John remained safe from harm. After that, she could not move, laying stomach down on the ground, head frozen in place, eyes on the van.

The pain was soon gone. As if she’d reached whatever limits of anguish a person were allowed before something in their minds finally flipped the shut-off switch. Abigail’s eyes caught glimpse of the spreading pool of blood coming from her like ink in the darkness of pre-dawn. She wondered how so much blood could spill from a single body.

Shots continued to ring out, then stopped altogether. Abigail watched as the soldier fell to the ground. She tried to turn to see Larry, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. Darkness crept in at the edges of her vision, and it was all she could do to keep her focus on the only thing she could see—the van. It shook wildly, a mostly muffled scream from John. Did the soldier make good on his threat?

Something else entered her field of vision. Larry, crouching down, looking at her. His eyes harbored deep sorrow—as though he was looking at a dead girl breathing.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, reaching out to touch her cheek, though she felt nothing.

He leapt up and raced towards the van, his footsteps like echoes from somewhere far away as sound dissolved along with her other senses. Darkness, like a gauze, distorted almost everything in her vision as her life bled out onto the ground of the motel. She watched as Larry ran first to the fallen soldier and then to the van’s door.

Open the door. Please…

All she wanted was to see her angel a final time before she died. She fought to hold tight to the world, to keep her focus.

As Larry opened the van door, Abigail lost the battle and succumbed to the darkness.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Be sure to check out our new feature, Author’s Notes in the comments section following each chapter. Also, please tweet this post and help spread the word about Available Darkness and nurture online fiction.

She watched as John attacked a soldier, sinking his teeth into his throat and then leaving the man a burned heap. Abigail sat paralyzed, horrified and fascinated all at once. Though she’d seen the aftermath of John’s feeding, this was the first time she’d actually seen … it.

Pain crawled up her throat as her eyes fought back tears. For the first time, Abigail was not only afraid for John, but seeing his unbridled glee for the feast, some part of her was afraid of him.

The gun in her hand suddenly felt powerless against the narrow-eyed juggernaut of fate.

_______________

Brock was now 40 yards behind the girl in the car. He lowered the night vision goggles on his mask, confirming she was indeed alone, her attention bolted on the old motel. Brock bit his lower lip, flipped up the goggles and crept slowly towards the car.

____________________

John stood over the two corpses, invigorated and oddly … euphoric. His hungry eyes wandered the parking lot for a second before his ears pricked to the sound of a few gunmen approaching from behind. He lifted his hands in the air and slowly turned around, a predatory smile spreading on his face. John threw his head back and quietly dared them as if he, not them with their assault rifles and deadeye aim, held all the cards.

“I’ll give you the same chance as the others,” he leaned forward and whispered, “run.”

One of the men barked into an unseen radio, “Alpha Seven to Alpha One, do you copy?”

The radio’s silence washed the man’s face in sudden worry. There was a small fissure in the cool of his voice when he repeated the call.

“He’s dead,” John said without emotion, though he had no idea if Alpha One was indeed one of the men he’d taken, one was named Sergei and the other Christian. Bits of their memories now intermingled with his own, a too-confusing brew that had yet to settle. “I killed him. And you’re next unless you run.”

Two of the men that flanked Alpha Seven stepped forward, one yelled, “Hands behind your head, drop down to the ground!”

Though part of John was still very afraid, there was something in him, a bloodlust, which thrust him forward without regard for his life. The gunmen’s bodies were so warm and appetizing. Their fear excited John, making their desire to take their lives even more intoxicating. Hunger, twisting like a dark parasite, coiled then expanded somewhere inside his guts. Wisps of blue and magenta aura surrounded the men, beckoning John to draw from their wells. His fingers tingled in anticipation.

John stepped forward, staring down Alpha Seven, almost daring the man to take a shot. The man refused to break his stare even as John stood just inches from him.

A shot rang out, and one of the two flankers was hit in the back of the neck and fell to the ground screaming. The remaining gunmen spun around, each facing a different direction, weapons aimed into the fading darkness, searching for the shooter. They both flicked down goggles on their masks but not in time. Two more shots rang out and the top half of Alpha Seven’s head disappeared in a splash of blood which missed John by a drop. The other man was hit in the leg and fell to the ground, still clutching his gun, and looking for the gunman.

Suddenly Larry appeared, climbing over the top of his van, which was turned on its side. He jumped down, rifle slung over his shoulder, hair as wild as the look in his eyes. Apparently John wasn’t the only one invigorated by death dealing.

“Hot damn, that was some shooting,” Larry said as he quickly ran forward, paused with a slight grin, then finished the two wounded gunmen with a pair of head shots.

John dropped quickly to the ground, laying hands on one of the men’s corpses to capture the last bit of life as it fled his body. The stream was different, weaker and not as satisfying as the others. It was also full of pain. John flinched as he felt the first gunshot which hit the man in the leg. He tried to pull away, but couldn’t break the connection as he continued to feed on the last of the man’s life, his memories and his pain. As the corpse burned, John continued to twitch, pain splintering his entire body.

He relived the man’s final moments, seeing through the dead man’s eyes. He saw Larry barreling towards him, gun drawn, aimed and…

An explosion went off in John’s mind as he jumped back from the corpse, broke the connection, pain twisting through his body as something else, far darker and lonelier wrapped itself around his mind. He felt himself falling into a void, his body finding velocity as it crashed towards an unknown doom.

Suddenly, a tether snapped him back to reality. Larry’s hand on his shoulder, his voice in his ear, “Hey buddy, you okay?”

John nodded. He was not okay. An overwhelming sense of doom had taken root in his head, pressing on him from outside and within. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something horrible was going to happen.

“Abigail?” Larry said, looking up and past John.

“Where’s Abigail?” John asked, still groggy.

“Here,” a voice said from behind.

John turned to see one last gunman standing about 10 yards away, one hand gripping her shoulder tightly, the other holding a pistol dug into Abigail’s temple.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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John had been rolling through the lonely mountain roads for nearly an hour, embroiled in an aimless search for Abigail’s signal, like fading reception from a dying cell phone.

He was in a rural stretch of nearly nothing; an uneven sampling of homes strewn along the dark and dusty dirt roads. It seemed to John like the sort of place where the people all knew one another, were likely to have guns for protection, and didn’t take kindly to strangers.

The few people he’d seen outside had quietly hurled suspicion as his car drifted by well below the speed limit, with John’s eyes in fastidious search of any little hint that might help him on his quest. A little suspicion was inevitable, but he hoped to keep it dim enough that he wouldn’t prompt a call to the police. Though his body had completely mended itself from the earlier gunshot, John wasn’t sure he would be so lucky if shot several times and shuddered to wonder what would happen if he was hit in the face.

An old woman, being pulled by a dog that was slightly too large for her delicate looking arms, fixed her stare on the hood of John’s car as he drifted into a slow approach. Her hand sank into the pocket of her long brown coat just as he passed, and John kept his eyes on her in the rearview as she retrieved a cell phone and brought it to her ear.

John softly tapped the brakes, then slowly reversed the car until he was even with her. He rolled down the window and gave a slight nod of his head, doing his best to look as though the chill outside meant nothing to his naked torso.

“Howdy, ma’am,” he said, the syllables elasticized in his best approximation of country congeniality. “Any chance you seen a German Shepherd run by these parts? You’d know her by a spot of white she wears on her backside.” John released a slight chuckle. “Course old Lucy likely wouldn’t have been going slow enough for you to have seen the spot.”

The lines on the woman’s face relaxed. She almost smiled. Still holding the cell phone she said, “No I haven’t, did you lose your dog?”

“Yeah,” the lie fell effortlessly from his mouth, “A-gin. my daughter was walking her and BAM! Lucy just took off after a rabbit in the woods like she always does. We’ve been looking for round about half an hour now already.”

“No, I’m sorry,” the woman shook her head, eyes involuntarily drifting to the depths of the surrounding woods.

“Have you seen a dark haired girl and a bald guy? The bald dude’s my dad. He and my daughter got foot patrol. I was lucky enough to get the wheels.” John shot the woman a friendly smile and tapped on the side of the driver’s door.

“No, I haven’t seen anybody,” she said, “but I haven’t been out too long. I hope you didn’t lose them, too.”

John laughed, “Nah, if I know them, they’re probably already back home watching the game and feeding the dog my share of the pizza.”

They exchanged a laugh and then a wave before John put the car into drive and went on to roam the streets, waiting for something. Anything.

After five minutes, the anything emerged to light his vision and he was tuned in to Abigail again. His pulse quickened in excitement.

The road in front of him was suddenly replaced by a inky darkness, darker than black beneath the bleach of the moon. Abigail stared at the bright white satellite, then at her surroundings.

She was in the woods… somewhere nearby?

John shuddered as she looked around, afraid that he (and she) would see the bald man lurking in the nearby shadows, but there was nothing but an endless oath of forest.

Now, Abigail was looking at her arms. Her wrists were red from being bound, but she wasn’t bleeding. He could clearly see she was laying on the ground.

Get up, he thought.

______

Abigail’s head was woozy as she opened her eyes and saw the moon piercing branches above.

Where am I?

The last thing she remembered was being dragged into a van. Before that… the policeman’s head being blown to grisly little bits. She looked down to see if his blood was still on her. It was.

She wondered how she’d gotten here and if her angel had helped bring her. She started to look around. No sign of him. A cold chill ran through her body and she pulled her legs to her chest.

And then she heard his voice.

“Get up.”

She spun around frantically in search of her angel.

___________

John watched through Abigail’s eyes as she looked around frantically.

What was she looking for? What was scaring her?

And then he heard her voice.

“John?”

____________

Abigail suddenly realized it was John’s voice slipping through the membrane of her mind.

“Woah,” she said as a small laugh escaped into the darkness.

“Can you hear me?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I think I’m close…. Can you see this?”

She looked around, but could see nothing.

“No, all I see are trees.”

“No, in your mind. Do you see anything?”

She wasn’t following. “No,” she answered.

“Never mind… look around look for a landmark, anything… I think I’m nearby. If you see it, I will see it too.”

Suddenly Abigail understood. She was hearing John’s thoughts, but he was somehow able to both hear her and see through her eyes. She rose unsteadily to her feet and stumbled forward through the darkness. Branches, rocks and grass sliced thin slivers of red into the widened flesh of her feet.

“Do you see anything?”

“No, not yet. Oh, wait,” Abigail said as a swathe of moonlight illuminated a narrow winding path to where the trees were starting to thin, “I think I see something.”

Abigail ascended a slope and the trees thinned. Above her, a water tower, its red light blinking every other second.

“Did you see that?” Abigail asked.

Silence.

“John?”

Nothing.

Fear slithered up her spine as she glanced around, suddenly feeling exposed in the middle of the big black open. And alone, so utterly, completely alone.

She wondered if she had imagined the conversation between her and John. Her head started to throb.

________

The connection was severed before John was able to witness whatever it was she had wanted him to see.

“Abigail!” he cried in frustration and fear. What if something had happened to her? What if the man from his past had re-appeared?

____________

Abigail’s eyes grew blurry with tears as she looked around for a place to go, a place where she might find solace. Part of her was simply willing to lay down and die. She’d been through more than enough already.

What is the point in living if it only heaped more and more misery onto each passing day?

And then she heard her name.

At first she thought it was only in her mind, but then realized it didn’t feel like a whisper between her ears. It was less direct and far more distant, coming from the woods she’d just escaped.

“John?!” she shouted.

_________________

John’s heart leapt in his chest. She was close. The steady hand of fate, or something, had led him to her. It was impossible, but every bit as real as the sweat beading across his forehead.

“I’m here, on the hill!” Abigail screamed.

“Stay there, I’m coming! Just keep yelling!” John shouted as he burst into a run, hurdling knotted branches and rocks like a forest native. His instincts had sharpened since his last jaunt in the woods.

Abigail screamed again, this time yelling “hello!” just loud enough to burn her throat. John smiled, even as the tears came streaming down his face. He raced up the hill and saw the moonlit clearing ahead. And then, still small on his horizon, he saw her, standing beneath the satellite’s spotlight, something too beautiful for imagination to conjure.

__________

Abigail saw a flash of motion in the woods below, her angel had arrived. She cried out his name and broke into a sprint towards him.

___________

Ten yards away, and all John wanted to do was embrace Abigail and never let her go. Hold her, protect her with all he had left.

Five yards away and suddenly, and only after they were locked into imminent collision, did they both seem to realize the danger the embrace harbored for Abigail.

Four eyes widened as Abigail tried to swerve left and instead slipped and fell forward, launching herself toward John.

John leapt up, narrowly missing her touch and launched into the sky nearly 20 feet before crashing back to the ground and rolling to a stop.

He quickly shot up and looked back at Abigail, who was lying on the ground, hair spilled across her tender face.

He ran to her, afraid she’d smashed her head on a rock, or worse… what if they had touched? As John approached, he saw that Abigail’s head was moving up and down as she was making some sort of strange noise…. And then he realized that noise was laughter.

She was okay.

She turned and looked up at him, the moon illuminating her face in such a way that it tugged at some phantom memory or emotion he could only call love.

“You’re here,” she said, smiling.

____________

In a room absent anything other than a single door and a small red bulb gently swaying from the ceiling, Jacob sat on the floor lotus style. He had left the girl in the woods and was waiting for his prey to take the bait.

Though his eyes were open, he saw nothing of the room around him. Instead, he was looking through the eyes of Abigail.

A smile crept across his face as John stepped into the girl’s view.

“Hello, brother.”
TO BE CONTINUED…

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