Wendy was taking pictures of a midnight beach party.
It wasn't much of a party, actually--five people she knew (all of them younger than she was), and one guy none of them knew, who had been walking along the beach and joined them. A fire burned inside a ring of charred stones, and a few feet from it, propped on a driftwood log, was a thirty inch color TV that Tony had brought, power cable snaking down to a big battery pack on the sand. On the screen, without sound, was an old Japanese monster movie about a giant mutant turtle that flew and breathed fire.
Wendy kept back from the fire, fiddling with her camera while the others drank beer and talked. The only one who seemed to be watching the TV was the guy they didn't know. Hicks, he had said his name was; he had been carrying two six-packs and so had been immediately invited to the party.
Fog threatened to roll in from the sea, and the wind kicked up. Wendy zipped up her jacket, resumed adjusting her camera. She was using fast black-and-white film, no flash, making what she knew would be good guesses with the time exposures. She sat on the sand, set the camera on her knee for support, and took a picture of all six people, the fire, and the TV, the flickering image of the screen at a severe angle. Then she got up and backed farther away, looked up at the moon slicing through the incoming fog, and wondered if she could get it into a picture along with everything else.
"This movie SUCKS!" It was Hicks, and he sounded so angry everyone else stopped talking; the beach became suddenly quiet, the only sound the rolling hiss of the waves on the sloping sand.
"It's only a movie," Avra said. She laughed.
But Hicks sat there shaking his head. "I've had it," he said, and he pulled a gun from inside his jacket.
The gun was big, obviously real, and Wendy's chest tightened, catching her breath. Christ, she hated guns, even just looking at them. They scared the hell out of her, especially since most people really had no idea how to handle them.
Hicks raised the gun, holding it with both hands, and aimed it at the television set.
Tony scrambled to his feet, spilling beer onto the edges of the fire with a sizzling hiss. "Hey!" Tony said. "Hey, come on, man, don't fuck around! I paid a hundred and fifty bucks for that TV!"
Hicks turned to Tony without moving the gun. "A hundred and fifty? Must have been stolen, then. That's a good TV."
)
For Wendy Burke, photographer of the darker side of life, the senseless murder of a friend leads to the discovery of something far more malevolent and frightening: the future.
