But finally the crowds closed in and had cut him off so he couldn't get through, only then did he realize he had seen these people before. Not in this realm, but in what most people think of as reality. But too him that was the real land of nightmares and to make matters worse it was a nightmare he couldn't wake up from.
But fortunately this tormented soul could wake from this particular dream and he did so with a shout to find himself back in his run down little apartment and his drab life.
Seeing the time was still well before dawn, John knew that after his dreams tonight he would never be able to get to back to sleep so he did the only thing he could do and that was to roll out of bed and face another new day. Shuffling through the living room in route to the kitchen to get his coffee started he passed the small collection of treasured items that he kept with him; through necessity he'd gotten in the habit of moving a lot and as a consequence of that liked to travel light.
The small drab apartment had come furnished which suited him. It even had a TV, not the he watched it much; the radio was more his speed. One of the few exceptions to the lack of technology you would find around the apartment was the laptop computer set up on the rickety kitchen table. That, along with his cell phone and digital cameras, were about the only things in the apartment you could even generously consider as up to date. . He had those only because he had too. He worked as an freelance photographer so he would get calls about crime scenes, accidents, all sorts of things and he'd go there to shoot some pictures and then email them to whoever it was that hired him for the shoot. He worked with a lot of online publications; he really wouldn't call them news sites but they paid well when he got the shots and that's all that counted.
He was also known for being able to find a lot of opportunities himself, especially in the case of murders or any other violent crime or accident. His nominal bosses just thought he had a nose for that sort of thing. If they only knew the truth he sometimes wondered, what would they really think then? But seeing the camera gear reminded him that he still hadn't checked to see if he'd gotten paid for last nights work. It had been a car accident, a fairly grisly one too; not that the site of the blood and broken bodies bothered him anymore but he did know the old saying about if it bleeds it leads. . So after getting confirmation that they liked the shots and would pay him his usual fee, he lit up a cigarette and went to get his breakfast ready. .
At last pulling into the parking lot of the station Holly did manage to slip into the building without Roger seeing her and even made it into the editing room to find Tami looking over the footage from last night just like she said she'd be. At least one of them had been on the ball, Holly thought ruefully. It wasn't til about an hour later that Roger poked his head into the room to find the two women had already finished up the noon edit. Seeing that it looked like a slow news day he told them not unexpectedly to have another edit ready for the 5pm show just in case and then left.
Later the two of them were just finishing up a fluff piece about dog groomers when word came in on the police scanner of a hit and run of a woman not too far away. The two news women knew a good thing when they heard it and got to the scene as fast as they could (without breaking too many traffic laws) so they'd have some good shots before the whole area was swarming with people. Unfortunately by the time they arrived and set up, the cops had the area closed off so they couldn't get too many close ups but, well, you just had to take what you could get in this business.
Holly decided and, not for the first time, to get some shots of the crowd too, more on a whim than anything else. After all who knows, maybe they could see some of the dead women's friends crying or something; Holly knew those shots were good from experience.. Unfortunately, while there were a few people around that looked upset, most of them were just rubbernecking to see what they could. . Holly spotted a few people that even had cameras of there own. Of these most of them she dismissed as just civilians but a couple could have been professionals. It wasn't just the more sophisticated camera gear they carried or the easy way they carried it but rather they had the look of having seen a lot of these types of things before themselves. Pushing those thoughts out of her mind as unimportant, Holly knew the two of them had to get the raw footage back to the station ASAP so they packed up as fast as they could and headed out.
John though had gotten some good shots of the hit and run. In fact he'd gotten here first. He'd hung around longer than he usually did especially on jobs that he hadn't been sent out on. He really wasn't sure why he stayed this time; it just seemed like the thing to do. . That's when he saw her. She was a member of one of the TV crews that wasn't really all that interesting to him; he'd seen plenty of them over the years. . So many in fact he hardly even noticed them anymore. But there was something about her that got his attention and on a whim he brought his camera to his eye and shot a few frames of the petite women with the reddish hair and of the other slightly taller brown haired woman that was with her. The two of them shared such a passing resemblance that John wondered for a moment if they were related somehow. .
Deciding that he'd seen everything that he was going to see here, John sent out some electronic inquirers to a few web sites to see if anyone was interested in the shots he'd gotten. . After that John did what he always did when he had time to kill, which was most of the time: havea few smokes and cruise the city watching the people. He especially liked to head to places where there were lots of people since they were what he was after.
Sooner or later he always found what he was looking for and not surprisingly he did tonight as well. . Stopping by a food court that he knew was open all night, John was just starting in on his burger and chili fries when he sensed the person he'd been looking for had entered the room with him. Now there were lots of people around so as he munched on his food, John paid closer attention to those around him and it didn't take long for him to zero in on the women in question. Sizing her up John figured she was 30 to 35 year old black woman; she seemed attractive enough with long black hair and big brown eyes. It was too bad really that she was going to die, he thought to himself, but shit happens.
Holly and Tami had both thought at various times that maybe they should just move into the station since they both seem to spend so much time here and tonight was no exception. They had barely gotten the footage for the hit and run done when the call came in of a women being found raped and murdered down town. . So once again they were grabbing their gear and climbing back into there well worn van and off they went. Not for the first time, Holly considered that it was shaping up to be a rough year for violent crime in the city.
The crime scene looked pretty straight forward to both women. Even if it was a bit grisly from what the police were willing to tell them, the victim, an African American woman, was jumped and dragged into the ally where at least one but possibility multiple men raped and beat her to death. If it hadn't been for a semi-homeless man looking for tin cans, who knows how long she could have lain there, Holly wondered. If she had it would have given vermin-like rats a chance at the body and that really would have made this a lot worse. Early on in her career she'd seen something like that and the image still haunted her. But shaking herself out of those gloomy thoughts, Holly got to work.
So after getting the shots they needed the duo headed back to the station to get it edited and ready for the morning news. Being the more tech oriented of the two women, Tami spent some of her limited free time checking out a few online publications. It was while doing this she found to her surprise that one site already had shots of the same murder scene that she and Holly had just gotten back from. In fact whoever had taken the pictures had somehow gotten some real up close and personal ones. Looking closer Tami realized that whoever it was had even gotten there before the police had closed off the area, since she couldn't see any yellow police tape or even any cops in the pictures. She did find herself wondering out of professional curiosity just how whoever it was had pulled that off. But glancing back to her own footage running on the monitors, she wondered if maybe they had gotten a shot of the mystery photographer here somewhere. .
Without considering the chain of events she was setting in motion Tami mentioned what she'd found to Holly then got back to work. Later though, Holly's thoughts though kept going back to what Tami had said and the more she thought about it the more her little reporter's antenna started to twitch, could there be a story here? These so called online magazines wereconsidered more or less bottom feeders by the more mainline news agencies and no one really paid all that much attention to them. But could she maybe track this one person down and use whoever it was as a window into how these groups work? She mused that idea over to herself.
