Chapter 5
The dreams started at the site of the crash again. It was a small plane, every passenger dead. The faces were foggy this time. No one was in focus. He pulled his camera up to his eye and snapped a picture. When he pulled it down, he was in his apartment. There was no question that it was his: full of books, computer parts (computers?), records, a typewriter. That last was very important. He took a few steps toward it, and the apartment dissolved into a cliff. When he turned around, the two men he'd seen on the bank were there, bending over some crates. The grey-haired man pulled a gun and pointed it at him. He took a step backward, putting up his hand in a fruitless attempt to stop the bullet. Then, the world shifted suddenly, and he was falling. Falling into nothingness, into blackness...
He opened his eyes and saw only darkness and felt only cold. He uncurled himself with a muffled groan. His body certainly wasn't appreciating this treatment. He couldn't say that he disagreed either. He sat up and looked longingly toward the river. What was that disease you could get from drinking contaminated water? Giardia or something? He rationalized to himself that being sick was better than dying of thirst, and yet, he stared at the water and tried not to think about what animals had been doing in it upstream.
He shuddered and decided that he wasn't all that thirsty, struggled to his feet and limped to the river. Every step was pure agony at this point. He hadn't taken off his shoes, but he really didn't want to know if his feet were any more than simply sore. His pants, on the other hand, were continually rubbing the wounds on his legs. The bag on his back felt like a ton of bricks. He looked at his body again and decided that a lot of this must be due to whatever had happened to him. He was no muscle man by any means, but he looked... sort of fit. He wondered what his face looked like. He couldn't form an image of himself. That wasn't really important right now, but he found that he couldn't tear his mind away from the fact that he knew absolutely nothing of any import. The unplumbed depths had given up a few tidbits of information: the name Gibbs, an apartment, something about a plane crash, the fact that he was in the mountains. All of this, however, did not add up to anything substantial. It told him nothing about who he could trust. All he knew right now was that, after the dream he'd had, if he saw those two men again, he'd run from them.