Free Loving Jessie by Dallas Schulze Page A

Jessie was asking him to take pictures of a freaking rose garden, not a mass grave.
    God, had he thought that a week spent nailing down shingles and hanging lath had worked a miracle cure? All it took was Jessie asking him to pick up his cameras to show him how far away that cure was.
    But she was sitting there, looking at him, waiting for an answer, and he couldn’t tell her the truth. That he hadn’t touched his cameras in months. That he didn’t know if he would ever touch them again.
    Forcing his mouth to curve in what he hoped was a natural smile, he gave her the only answer he could.
    “Let me think about it.”
    The beginning of the dream was always the same. He was standing in the middle of the road. It was an old road, built centuries ago, intended for carts and wagons and foot traffic. Never wide, it was made narrower still by the piles of rubble that spilled in from either side. He knew that, a few weeks ago, that rubble had been homes. There had once been life here. Children had grown up here, married, had children of their own, grown old and died here. But there was nothing left of that now, only the jagged remnants of walls, and empty black holes where windows and doors had been.
    The clear winter sunlight lit the destruction with brutal clarity, and, in the dream, just as it had been in reality, he was analyzing the play of shadows and light, choosing the best angles to catch the full drama of the scene before him.
    He could feel the weight of the camera in his hands, so familiar that it was more an extension of himself than a tool. The Nikon wasn’t his newest camera, or the fanciest, but it was the one he reached for first. It fit his handperfectly, responded to his touch like magic. In the dream, he could feel the faint roughness of the case beneath his fingers, and he wondered if he should change lenses. Maybe a wide angle would best capture the full impact of the devastation.
    He reached for the leather case slung over his shoulder, his movement slow and unhurried. It wasn’t until he heard the voices that he realized he’d been standing amid utter silence. The shrill, frightened voice of the woman tore the silence like a blade slashing through raw silk. And then there were others. Hard, male voices, rough and angry. He couldn’t understand what they were saying. Funny that, even in the dream, that remained true. But he recognized violence. Smelled hatred.
    Turning slowly, so slowly, he saw them drag her into the street. Four soldiers. And her. A woman. No, a girl. Hardly out of her teens, if that. Impossible to tell what she looked like. Her face twisted with fear.
    The bleak gray and tan winter landscape was suddenly drenched with color. Eye-searing crimson and jet black. Their uniforms were vivid green, the sky a slash of cerulean overhead. Color seared his eyes, making him flinch back, dazzled.
    And this was where the dream varied. Sometimes he stood watching, as if glued in place. Watching through the lens of his camera as the soldiers dragged the girl into the center of the street, only his finger moving, triggering the shutter as they shoved her to her knees and put the gun to her head.
    Other times he dropped the camera, the clatter as it hit the ground loud enough to drown out her screams. When he looked down, he could see it in pieces in the dirty street, the back open and film trailing out in a long, black tongue. And then he was moving forward, mouth openas he shouted. Except there was no sound. His throat ached with the force of his shouts, but there was never any sound at all.
    Matt shot up in bed, the sound of a gunshot echoing in his head. His heart was pounding in his chest, his breath coming in deep gasps that hovered on the edge of becoming sobs. A thin film of sweat covered his body, his skin chill in the warm night air.
    He hadn’t made a sound. He knew that. When the nightmares had first started, he would awaken with the sound of his own scream echoing in his ears. It had