In Dreams

By Annie Reed

A near-future tale of love, loss, and redemption.

Nature videographer Jerome and his lover Andy, an environmental activist, dedicated their lives to rescuing the planet from the disasterous policies of generations past. Just when their efforts began to make a difference, Andy lost his life at sea.

Or did he?

A mysterious man has entered Jerome’s lonely, solitary life. A man who wears Andy’s face but has none of his memories. A man who’s haunted by an unknown presence that cloaks itself in the fog and watches.
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“One of the best writers I’ve come across in years. Annie excels at whatever genre of fiction she chooses to write.” —Kristine Kathryn Rusch, award-winning editor and writer of The Retrieval Artist: The Anniversary Day Saga

“You can’t go wrong with Annie Reed. Her deftly-crafted tales—with characters as memorable as the stories themselves—far surpass most of what’s out there. She deserves a wide audience.” –Michael J. Totten, author of Resurrection

"I've been a fan of Annie Reed's short stories for a long time." –Marcelle Dube, author of THE SHOELESS KID

"The appearance of a new Annie Reed story is a treat. Try one and you'll be hooked." –Dave Hendrickson, author of CRACKING THE ICE

"A friend recommended the works of Annie Reed. I was not disappointed." –Carol Davis Luce, author of NIGHT GAME

For more information about Annie, go to www.annie-reed.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thunder Valley Press
• Release date: Dec 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301220502

Annie Reed

Award-winning author and editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch calls Annie Reed “one of the best writers I’ve come across in years.”Annie’s won recognition for her stellar writing across multiple genres. Her story “The Color of Guilt” originally published in Fiction River: Hidden in Crime, was selected as one of The Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016. Her story “One Sun, No Waiting” was one of the first science fiction stories honored with a literary fellowship award by the Nevada Arts Foundation, and her novel PRETTY LITTLE HORSES was among the finalists in the Best First Private Eye Novel sponsored by St. Martin’s Press and the Private Eye Writers of America.A frequent contributor to the Fiction River anthologies and Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, Annie’s recent work includes the superhero origin novel FASTER, the near-future science fiction short novel IN DREAMS, and UNBROKEN FAMILIAR, a gritty urban fantasy mystery short novel. Annie’s also one of the founding members of the innovative Uncollected Anthology, a quarterly series of themed urban fantasy stories written by some of the best writers working today.Annie’s mystery novels include the Abby Maxon private investigator novels PRETTY LITTLE HORSES and PAPER BULLETS, the Jill Jordan mystery A DEATH IN CUMBERLAND, and the suspense novel SHADOW LIFE, written under the name Kris Sparks, as well as numerous other projects she can’t wait to get to. For more information about Annie, including news about upcoming bundles and publications, go to www.annie-reed.com.

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In Dreams

Copyright © 2017 by Annie Reed

Published by Thunder Valley Press

Cover and Layout copyright © 2017 Thunder Valley Press

Cover art copyright © rolffimages/Depositphotos.com

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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1

2047

Jerome ran

Every morning. Rain or sun or damp coastal fog, he ran.

He’d been a runner for as long as he could remember, and probably before that according to what his mom told him.

Tried to run every chance you got, she said. Don’t know why you were in such a hurry to get away from me.

That wasn’t it.

Something about feel of the breeze in his face and the beat of his feet on the dirt driveway between his parents’ old house in the woods and the two-lane county road where he caught the bus on school days—he loved it like his friends loved their music vids or sports or talking about girls.

Running got him places faster than walking, but it also gave him time to really look at the world around him. He got to watch birds raise their babies in the nests they built in the tall oak trees that lined the driveway, and then watch the baby birds when they finally left their nests.

Early morning runs, when the sun was just cresting the hills to the east, let him see things his younger brother, George, missed. George always had his nose buried in some vid on his tablet. He never cared that Jerome saw fawns, all spindly legs and big ears, hiding in the brush at the base of the trees while their mothers, ever watchful, glanced up from a morning meal of tender grasses to watch Jerome as he ran by.

Once he’d even seen a brown bear rooting around a fallen tree.

Andy had asked him once how a kid who always ran when he could have walked learned how to sit still long enough to wait for the perfect moment to take a picture.

I think it was all those morning runs, Jerome said. Whether I’m moving fast or slow, I just like being outside. Watching things. Taking it all in.

You are a disgusting morning person. Andy had given him an impish grin before kissing him on the nose. The only time I want to see the sun coming up is if I haven’t gone to bed yet.

Andy had been a true night owl. Jerome was an unabashed morning person. Andy loved tea. Jerome would happily trade all the tea in the world for a nice strong espresso blend. Andy had been a button-downed business person whose idea of casual was a navy sportscoat over a dress shirt with no tie. Jerome sometimes went for days without wearing shoes.

Yet somehow they still managed to make a life together.

A good life. A happy life. A life worth all the thousand little compromises that people in love made every day to make a life together work.

And it had all ended without warning nearly five years ago.

These days Jerome ran because it was the only time he forgot he was alone.

He ran until his legs ached, until his breath rasped in deep gulps that made his lungs burn, his feet go numb, and slicked the inside of his shoes with blood from cracked calluses and broken blisters. And then he kept running.

He ran when the pavement beneath his feet was slippery and cold or when it was meltingly hot. When each stride jarred his hips or sent jolts of pain up his spine.

The house where he lived now had the same kind of long dirt driveway as the house where he’d grown up. The dirt driveway connected his house to a two-lane county road that wound its way from I-5 to the Pacific Coast highway, twisting and turning back on itself like a snake sidewinding across the low coastal mountain range.

Not that these mountains were anything like the mountains where Jerome had grown up, or even the mountains where he’d lived with Andy for four blissful years before Jerome’s world had gone cold and gray and empty. Those mountains had been granite behemoths whose craggy peaks reached for the stars. It had taken months after Jerome had moved to Oregon before he stopped calling these low mountains foothills.

He varied his morning runs only by the direction he turned when he reached the end of his driveway. If he turned to the left on the two-lane county road, he ran inland toward the town of May Creek, little more than a collection of houses clustered together around a refueling station on one of the many bends in the road. If he turned to the right, he ran deeper into the heavy forest that blanketed the coastal mountain range. The road to the right took on just enough of an incline that he felt the burn in his muscles sooner, and the return trip home was faster than the trip out.

Jerome rarely ran toward the coast. He ran to get away from his house—to get away from himself—and he was in no hurry to return to it.

Today, though, something made him turn to the right. Maybe it was the allure of early morning sunlight through the remnants of the foggy marine layer from the coast, or the warm glow of morning light that turned the tops of the tall pines a yellowy, delicate green. Maybe it was the inexplicable itch in the middle of his back between his shoulder blades that drew him toward the windy road that ran through the thickest part of the forest.

He didn’t know. He just went with the feeling. He’d been living his days like that for four years now.

The early morning air still held a chill, but the spring birds were flitting through the trees, and he saw more than one ground squirrel scurrying along the side of the road. Lambs trotted next to their mothers in a pasture half-hidden behind a thick stand of cedars, spruce, and aspen trees, the grass in their pasture a brilliant spring green.

It was the first of May. Jerome had crossed one more day off the calendar that morning, a long line of Xs marching irrevocably toward an anniversary he wanted to forget and couldn’t help but obsessively remember.

The day Andy had died.

He rounded a sharp bend in the road, feet slapping the pavement, breath puffing out from the climb up the steady incline toward the coast. The itch between his shoulder blades had grown stronger, joined by tension in his neck at the base of his skull that had nothing to do with running.

He felt like he was being watched.

No other runners were on the road. A few dogs had barked at him from behind chain-link fences, but he knew the dogs and the dogs, in spite of their barking, knew him. Only a few cars had passed him, and they’d given him a wide berth. He’d waved to one bicycle rider—a guy named Gus who rode his bike every day, rain or shine, to his job at the Chevron refueling station in May Creek—and Gus, old-style earbud wires trailing down from his ears to the retro phone in his pocket, had given him a friendly wave back.

Jerome tried to shake the feeling off. The upcoming anniversary was playing tricks on his mind, that was all. He concentrated on his breathing, on watching the receding fog, and playing around in his mind with composing what might be a halfway decent shot of the trees, the fog, and the golden morning sunshine. These days he took most shots with his pocket tablet instead of a dedicated vid camera, and he deleted most of those when he got back to his house, but the mental exercise kept his mind sharp.

Or so he told himself.

He was so intent on the play of sunlight and shadow in the treetops that when he rounded