AUTUMN IN THE DARK MEADOWS
Translated from Spanish, “Las Vegas” means “The Meadows”
Painter’s Cove was quiet. Its waters were warm, though the sun was hours gone. It was late, and I was tired. I should have stayed home and gone to bed early, like most nights since I arrived at the Hoover Settlement. But after another day of wind and dust, the idea of night swimming in the cove’s waters was too strong to resist.
I kicked one leg, slowly propelling myself through the water. The temperature of the water cooled as the pool deepened beneath me. A breeze like a towel fresh from the dryer grazed my skin. I heard it comb through the waist-high grasses lining the shore, where I left the majority of my clothes.
The cove was one of my favorite places in this new life after escaping Los Angeles. It was always deserted this time of night and only a fifteen-minute walk along the steep bank on the Arizona side of the Hoover Dam. The entrance was buried in mounds of aromatic creosote, mallow and marigold bushes, keeping it delightfully secluded.
I twisted onto my back and shivered, the warm night breeze suddenly feeling cool on my wet skin. The wind gusted heavily, creating spindles of dust along the water’s edge, and a familiar feeling of uneasiness crept over me.
I wasn’t alone. He was here.
I closed my eyes to recapture the calm feelings, but they slipped through my fingers like seaweed, and panic grew inside me. I felt the night around me, pressing me down into the black water. I had to leave before it happened again. I opened my eyes, and my heart sank.
A dark figure stood on the shore, the tall grass bowing around him in the strong breeze. He was as still as a pillar of stone. The only evidence of life was his bright blue eyes glowing like a hot spring, watching me.
I began to propel myself backward, careful not to turn my back to him.
“Never turn yer back to the ocean,
Fòmhair
,” Mamó, my Irish grandmother, said inside a memory. Her wool coat was the same color as the heaving Irish Sea before us. “If ye do, a great, gray wave will come an’ steal ye away, never to be heard from agin. He will take ye down into the darkness where ye canna scream.”
My back bumped against the high wall of red rock at the deepest end of the pool and, not taking my eyes from him, I reached back, finding grooves in the rock to cling to.
I blinked, and the shore was empty. The wind moaned softly through the cove, rippling the surface of the water. He was still here; I felt his cold, ancient eyes on me.
A pebble dropped into the water, rings yawning around it. I tilted my head up. The moon hung small and dull behind a figure standing at the top of the rock wall above me. Only a moment passed before he leaped off the edge.
I sprang into motion, pushing off the rock and swimming for shore, but my arms didn’t seem to work in time with my kicking legs. I knew I wouldn’t reach land. I never did.
He hit the water like a missile behind me, and I focused on putting as much distance between us as I could.
Something warm closed around my ankle, and I kicked out. I tried to scream, but water filled my mouth as he yanked me under the surface. The moon grew dimmer the deeper he took me, until it finally disappeared and we were alone.
We reached the bottom of the cove, where my feet slid in the slick mud as I tried to gain traction to push away from him. I struggled against his hands clamped on my wrists, but my arms tired quickly, and I knew I needed air to keep fighting.
The small vial he wore around his neck drifted around him in the darkness, tiny air bubbles escaping from the empty glass tube as water slowly filled it. Why was he doing this? Didn’t he understand I was drowning? I tried to plead at him with my eyes.
He pulled me into his arms and held me against his chest. It was just like all the other times, and it felt both comforting and horrifying, because I knew what was coming next.
Small pinpoints of light burst in tiny explosions around me. I wanted a breath of air like nothing I’d ever wanted before, but his arms remained locked around me. I knew I would soon try to take a breath, and water would pour into my lungs. I knew I would choke and cough, and it wouldn’t help. I was afraid of that feeling. And the dimness that followed.
With the dismal amount of strength I had left, I shook myself to get his attention, and he pulled away slightly to look at me. The desperate betrayal on my face was mirrored in his own, as if he was offended I didn’t want to be drowned. It was because he was as foreign as one could be on Earth. Because he wasn’t from Earth. He didn’t understand this would kill me.
He pulled me back to him, stroking my hair as if to calm me. Tears sprang to my eyes and melted into the water around me. I didn’t want to die. But people died every day. What hope I had for heaven’s existence faded away, and I realized I would simply disappear.
My weak legs kicked involuntarily, but my heels only found soft mud. My face crumpled, and my lips cracked open with a sob, and murky water gushed into my mouth. I gasped and felt the burn of heavy water filling my lungs. I coughed, only drawing in more water, and the burning spread through my chest and nose.
It was his fault. He was guilty. But there was nothing I could do about it. I was dying.
“I’ll always be here, Autumn,” I heard him whisper, but his lips didn’t move.
I should have listened to Mamó, I thought, as the water grew darker around me. I shouldn’t have turned my back to something so dangerous. This would never have happened.
And then there was nothing. No white light, no pretty meadow, no pearly gates. Just empty space. And heat.
The heat pressed on every inch of me and made my skin crawl.
Gravity shifted, and I fell. My eyelids popped open a split second before I crashed into something terribly solid. I lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, my sweaty legs entwined in the damp sheets still attached to the bed I’d fallen out of.
I didn't move for a full minute, comforted by the air swishing in and out of my lungs and the orange light of the morning sun streaming in the window. Just a dream, just a dream, just a dream, I thought to myself in time with my breathing.
Having the same dream every night since we last spoke wasn’t helping matters between Grey and me. Things were complicated enough without pieces of the dream surfacing in my mind when I saw him in the distance or ran into him on the street. It was enough to give me a panic attack in full daylight. I usually fled from him to be alone.
The dream was too real to ignore. It was as if Grey actually dragged me to the bottom of Painter’s Cove to slowly drown me every night, and it was our secret.
Because my life had changed so drastically in the past year and a half, I had to play catch-up after waking. Key facts clicked together like puzzle pieces as my mind broke through the web of sleep. I wasn’t in Los Angeles anymore. I was three hundred miles away at the Hoover Settlement. Karl and his Reconstruction Front had claimed what was left of Los Angeles after the Crimson Fever snuffed out the lives of nearly the entire world’s population. The Front’s cruelty forced the creation of a resistance group, who hid in the dark subway tunnels underneath Hollywood. It was with this group that I escaped Los Angeles. That was ten weeks ago.
And it had been nine weeks since that evening with Grey on the Hoover Dam. Nine weeks since he told me he suspected the Crimson Fever was brought here by someone in his group, The University. They were a technologically advanced group of historians and scholars from the distant planet of Andros. Though they appeared human, and their chemical makeup was identical to ours, there was one significant difference – they could live forever by taking doses of a vitamin they engineered called the Elemental Vitamin, or E-Vitamin for short. The vitamin was made from a crystal The University had engineered. Grey kept a small piece of the crystal in a vial around his neck, and once a month would break off a small bit to mix with citrus juice to make the vitamin, giving him a faint lemon scent.
I threw an arm over my eyes to block out the morning sun and sighed heavily. It would sound so ridiculous if I didn’t know it was all true.
Grey and I hadn’t spoken since that night on the dam. Not that he hadn’t tried. I spotted him around town, felt his eyes watch me intently, always patiently waiting.
Until that night nine weeks ago, I’d believed he was fundamentally like me, despite his alien origins. But when he admitted one of his people contaminated Earth with the virus that wiped out everyone I loved, I suddenly saw him as dangerous and, literally, alien.
The enormity of who he and his people were, where they were from and what they allowed to happen here, to us, consumed me. It was so real, I could almost swallow it. I breathed in its heaviness, and the muscles in my legs tightened again, ready to kick against the bottom of the cove.
I forced myself to stand. Then to make my bed. I crossed the small room to the dresser, turning on a lamp as I passed. As the artificial light diluted the sun’s morning rays, I said my daily thanks to the founders of Hoover for having the foresight to settle near Hoover Dam. Maintaining the hydroelectric dam kept the power flowing to most of the Southwest, and I was truly grateful for this luxury.
I pulled open a drawer, and something I faintly recognized tumbled from the dresser top, landing on the meager pile of clothes inside. It was a picture frame. I picked it up. My fingertips tingled. A five-year-old me in a fluffy yellow dress held an Easter basket and smiled at the camera. My dad kneeled in the grass next to me, hugging me tight against his chest.
What was it doing here? Because of our unexpected escape from Los Angeles, I hadn’t brought anything to Hoover, aside from the picture of me and my parents at the Santa Monica Pier. I glanced up to where it should be; leaning against a stack of books, but the creased photograph was hidden by picture frames covering every inch of the dresser’s surface.
My mouth fell open as I looked at each one. My dad kissing my mother in the kitchen of their first house. The three of us at the beach. At home, lined up on the couch, each with our own personal bowl of popcorn. My best friend before The Plague, Sarah, and I dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf for Halloween. Among the pictures sat a small jewelry box that Mamó gave me. My hand raised to my throat, instinctively seeking the familiar curve of the Celtic knot charm I always wore on a necklace. It had been Mamó’s as well.
My eyes filled with fresh tears as I drank in the memories. I touched the delicately carved wood on the jewelry box lid. These should still be safe at The Water Tower in Los Angeles, my old home. How had they come to be here?
And then it became painfully obvious. He had been here.
My hand fell away from my mother’s face, and panic bloomed in my chest. Grey had been here while I slept. Only he could have gotten to LA and back so quickly. His people had the unique ability to go wherever they needed by merely envisioning their destination. They called it astral projection and used it to go all over the universe. What made him think it was okay for him to come here uninvited? And to go into my home at The Water Tower? I didn’t want him in either place.
I buried the pictures underneath the clothes in my dresser. No one could see these. They would ask where they came from, and I wouldn’t have an answer.
It was three hundred miles to Los Angeles, and it took at least a couple weeks to get there by horseback, as fuel had disappeared in these parts after the Boulder City riots in the days after The Plague.
Not only was it a long trip to Los Angeles, but it was dangerous as well. It didn’t stop scores of people from making the trip, though the traffic only flowed one way – north to Hoover. No one went south.
Over the past ten weeks, small groups arrived sporadically from Los Angeles asking for “Autumn and Grey.” Just before escaping the city, I broadcasted a message from The Front’s radio station to tell the residents left in Los Angeles not to trust The Front and to come to Hoover. The people who heard and managed to flee were grateful for the information that saved them from resorting to joining The Front. They were also concerned about what happened to us after our transmission was interrupted by a gunshot. The people of Hoover were always happy to regale them with the story of our traumatic arrival.
They also enjoyed pointing us out in public, their “celebrity” residents, and whispering the “fun fact” about who my mother had been. Fun for them, awkward for me. When I couldn’t avoid talking to them, it was the same conversation every time, “You’re welcome for telling you about Hoover and The Front. Yes, the famous actress, Adara O’Neal, was my mother. No, I don’t know where Grey is right now.” At this point, the conversation grew strained on my part, and the excited newcomer usually left me alone. I didn’t blame them for asking. And I didn’t really mind talking to them. It was the constant reminder that my mother was dead, and Grey was no longer in my life, that was bothersome.
I paused in burying the small jewelry box, and curiosity made me open it. My cell phone and charger sat on top of notes Sarah and I passed between classes. Beneath those, I found a few rings and trinkets I’d liked a lifetime ago. I pressed the power button on the cell phone. Nothing happened. My appetite for memories had been whetted by the pictures Grey brought me, and I wondered if I could still access the pictures on my phone.
I plugged the phone in, and the red charge light illuminated. I looked wistfully at it as if it were a time capsule. I’d have to wait until tonight to look through it. I strung the cord behind the dresser and hid the phone behind one of the dresser’s legs, just in case. I didn’t want to have to think of a lie to tell Connie about how I got the phone when I didn’t have it when we left Los Angeles.
I stuffed my head through my t-shirt and stepped into jean overalls, noting that the grass stains on the knees were barely visible after a rigorous afternoon spent at Ash’s Laundromat. I never minded spending a few hours there among the washers and dryers collected from the small neighborhoods surrounding the new buildings that made up the settlement of Hoover. Ashley, the girl who ran the laundry, was a mechanic at heart and kept the machines running so the town didn’t have to resort to washboards at the shore of Lake Mead. I congratulated myself on my burgeoning domestic frontier town skills, caught my red hair into a long ponytail and pulled a Dodger’s baseball hat low over my eyes.