Autumn in the Dark Meadows (The Autumn Series) (7 page)

He stared at me for several seconds and then said, “How do you know this?”

“My cell phone was inside the jewelry box you brought me this morning.  After I charged it, there was a text message from her.”

I waited for some kind of reaction from him at this amazing news, but his face remained pensive.  “Sarah was the one who went to UCLA Med Center to look for her mom, right?”

I nodded.  “And I quit hearing from her the same day.  I thought she’d gotten sick, too, but she didn’t!  She’s still alive!  And she’s in LA!  I need you to help me get to her.”

Grey didn’t respond.

“Please, help me.  She’s my best friend.”  I felt my anger rising.  Why wasn’t he saying anything?

He looked down at me.  “Autumn... aside from myself and Lydia, no one left UCLA Medical Center alive.  I know, because I was there.”

I stared up at him.  Of course.  I remembered him saying he helped at a hospital in the days following the outbreak of The Crimson Fever.  So he was at the same hospital as Sarah and her parents.  Maybe she left before Grey was forced to give up and leave the hospital?

I shook my head.  “She made it out.  I got a text message from her.”

“Do you know when she sent the message?”

“It’s dated right after we arrived in Hoover.  She mentioned hearing our radio broadcast.”

“And you said she’s been taken by The Front?”

“Yes, which is exactly why we need to rescue her.”  I was starting to feel impatient.

“But you don’t know her exact location?”

I shook my head, frustrated he wasn’t reacting the way I’d hoped.  “No, but we can start at the warehouse store The Front was using and go from there.”

“Los Angeles is a massive city, more than four hundred square miles, and if she sent the text two months ago, she could be anywhere now.”

“We have to start somewhere.”

“Maybe I can go alone – ”

“No!” I interrupted.  “You’re not going without me –”

“And I’m not taking you down there into another dangerous situation!” Grey snapped, anger flashing across his face.  I stepped back, suddenly uneasy.

“Forget it,” I said curtly.  “I shouldn’t have asked.”  I turned and began to walk away, but Grey grabbed my arm and pulled me back.  I stumbled and crashed against him.  My breath caught in my throat like water as he looked down at me with cool, blue eyes.

His grip softened, and he said, “You can’t ignore me for months and then expect me to –”

“I don’t expect
anything
from you anymore,” I hissed.  I yanked my arm from his grasp and walked away, relieved to have my back to him and space between us.

My face burned, and my mind was in a million pieces.  As soon as I began concentrating on one worry, another pulled my focus away.  It was an unwinnable tug of war.  Connie and Rissi, Sarah, Las Vegas, Los Angeles.

If I’d been asked nine and a half weeks ago, I would have sworn on my life Grey would do anything for me, and I could blindly trust him for anything.  That wasn’t the case now.

I rejoined Ben but didn’t say anything.  I stood with my arms crossed over my chest.  I felt Ben looking down at me, but I hoped my body language told him not to ask me any questions.  I was in no mood to make up a story about what Grey and I were arguing about.

“Westland for Kyle,” I heard a voice say behind us.  It was Mayor Westland, pacing around our group with a walkie-talkie.

“Go for Kyle,” the walkie crackled in response.

“Have you gotten Vegas on the emergency channel yet?”

“No response yet from Vegas on any channel, Mayor,” Kyle responded.

I turned to Ben, who stared into the darkness toward Las Vegas.  We had already lost so much.  My stomach clenched, and I thought I might be sick.  I pressed a fist to my mouth and forced myself to take a deep breath.  Rissi was fine.  Connie was fine.  We weren’t going to lose any more.  Those days were over.

“All right everyone!  Let’s move out!” Shad yelled from atop Thunder.

I climbed up on Snicket and joined the tide of horses heading into the wind and the darkness.  Away from the light and shelter of the med center, our group suddenly felt very small.

Our group pressed west on what was left of Highway 93, toward the pass leading to Las Vegas.  Sand covered the road in loose drifts so deep the horses’ hooves sank into them.  The metal highway signs were bent low by the strong wind, and above us, billboards that once screamed ads for the casinos were now stripped of their promises of penny slots and large jackpots.  The raw boards underneath were exposed, like showgirls without their makeup.  Some signs had been blown over completely and lay half-buried under mounds of sand, like sleeping animals.

Cars dotted the highway, their paint scoured off and dead tumbleweeds caught underneath them.  Their windows were fogged with death, and despite my effort not to look, my eyes were drawn to the blurred images of the still forms inside.  I tried to concentrate on the dark road ahead of us instead.

The sand stung our faces, making visibility poor and forward progress painfully slow.  I pulled my bandana as wide as it would go across my face and tried to keep the bill of my hat down, but my eyes were still exposed.  They began to ache and water.

We were descending into the valley when the wind let up slightly.  I pulled the bandana from around my neck, shook out the sand driven into its folds, and tried to find a clean part to dab my tender eyes with.  I heard a muffled cry behind us, and then JR hollered for us to stop.

I twisted around in my saddle.  In the dim glow of light from the nearby wagon, I saw Sam’s horse, struggling in the deep sand, its saddle empty.  Sam was on the ground, moaning and clutching her ankle.  Grey and Ben leaped from their horses and moved Sam away as Josh grabbed the horse’s loose reins.  I yelled ahead to Shad and pulled Snicket around to head back to the wagon.  I slid down from Snicket in time to see Grey gently pulling Sam’s shoe off.

“Is she okay?” Ben asked.

Grey tenderly pressed on different parts of Sam’s ankle and said, “It’s not broken, just twisted.”

She winced as he continued to examine her ankle.  He frowned and said, “She needs to go back.”

“I’m fine!  I can still ride!”  Sam insisted.  She tried to stand, but instantly crumpled to the ground.  “I just need a second.  Let me try again.”

Grey shook his head.  “You won’t be able to use the stirrup if you can’t put any pressure on your ankle, and you can’t ride with just one stirrup.”

“Yes, you can.  I’ve seen Autumn do it,” Sam insisted.  All heads swiveled toward me.  Grey raised his eyebrows.  I was saved from having to describe the sidesaddle technique I’d adopted for the dance when Ben spoke up.

“She can ride with me.”

I spun, shocked.  “We can’t spare anyone to send back with her,” he said.  “We have to keep moving.”  He looked at Sam.  “That okay with you?  You can ride with someone else, if you’re not comfortable...” Ben’s voice trailed off, but Sam eagerly nodded.  He leaned forward, took her hand and pulled her up.

Half an hour later, the winds and stinging sand returned full force.  The horses and riders struggled forward on roads completely engulfed by moving sand and nearly impossible to follow.  Shad had a compass and knew roughly which direction to head, so everyone followed him.

The horses’ hooves kept sinking into sand dunes, and while they’d become somewhat used to the sandstorms over the past several months in Hoover, this was different.  Out here in the middle of nowhere, the wind actually seemed like it was trying to push us back home.  It screamed and pelted us with shards of sand, like needles against our skin.  The horses pranced sideways when the wind shrieked particularly loud, and thrashed and whinnied in terror when they sank into a loose patch of sand.  How long could we go on like this?

I didn’t know how much further it was to Las Vegas, and though visibility was practically nothing, I braved a face full of sand to glance up every few minutes, watching for the beam of light shooting from the top of the Egyptian.  The settlement in Vegas turned the light on at night to let travelers know life was there.  I hoped I’d see it soon.  I hoped it would mean they were all alive.

A shout from behind made me turn around.  We were stopping again.  Shad rode back to the group.  He looked angry, and though I couldn’t hear his words through the wind, it looked like he didn’t agree we should be stopping again so soon.  His voice got louder when he saw JR pull a tarp from the wagon bed and begin setting up a windscreen.

I dismounted and watched as the signs of a temporary camp grew around us.  JR had the windscreen up, and Josh and Kathy passed around food.  Shad stared northwest to where the lights of Las Vegas would normally be lighting the sky, but the clouds of dust obscured any sign of an approaching city.

I was eager to press on, too, but I had to admit I could use a break.

“How long are we staying here?” I asked Ben.

“An hour or so, to give the horses a rest,” he answered.

I glanced over at Shad, who was still staring into the distance.

“Do you think he’s okay?”  I asked, looking back at Ben.  “I’ve never seen Shad act like this before.”

“He’ll be okay.  He’s just freaked out.  I am, too.”  Ben shook his head and looked at the ground.  “This morning, before Rissi left for the field trip, she showed me the new outfit you helped her find.  I was shocked at how much she’s grown in the last year.  Then she left for school.  If I had known that might have been the last time –”

“You’ll see her again, Ben,” I interrupted forcefully.  “Don’t think like that.”

He nodded.

“What was it like, riding with her?” I asked, watching Kathy help settle Sam onto the ground behind the windscreen.  She was pathetically thin and small.  She looked weak.

“Not as bad as you’d think.  We didn’t talk much, but she seemed nice.”

“Nice?” I stared at him.

“We were the new people once, too, remember?”

“Why are you defending her?”  I rubbed my dry eyes, growing irritated with this conversation.

“Don’t be so hard on her,” Ben said, pushing his glasses up so he could rub his own eyes.  “She’s trying to be tough.  She keeps refusing any help.”

“Sounds like she’s trying to impress someone,” I said dryly.

“Sounds like someone I know,” he said, pointedly.

I glared at him.

Ben took a long gulp of water from his canteen.  He passed it to me, and said, “Look, I really could care less about who comes with us at this point.  I just want to get there.”

I drank from Ben’s canteen and handed it back, feeling guilty for arguing and angry I couldn’t let it go.

I walked away without saying anything and tied Snicket to a scraggly mesquite tree in the protection of the windscreen, then retreated from the group into the darkness.  I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, and the wind was dying down a little.  I found myself leaning against the side of the supply wagon, staring out into the darkness toward what I guessed was the direction of Los Angeles.

I suddenly missed home more than anything.  I felt small out here in the middle of nowhere.  Adrift, cut loose... lost.  A year ago, I had been struck immobile by these desperate feelings, but now they were like familiar faces.  I saw my old self before The Plague and remembered I was a fairly social person.  I always enjoyed meeting new people and joining clubs and going to dances.  Now, I was practically a recluse.

No wonder I felt lost.  I didn’t even recognize myself anymore.  What would my parents think of me now?  What would Sarah think when I got back to LA to rescue her?  Would she even still want to be friends when she realized how much I’d changed?

I ducked around the side of the wagon so I was hidden from the group and dug the cell phone from my pocket.

“Message Sent,” glowed on the bright screen.  I sucked in a breath.  Somewhere between here and Hoover, there had been a signal strong enough to send my two pending text messages to Sarah.  And if she still had her phone with her and was close to a working tower, she would get it.  I wondered if she could be reading my messages right now.

I heard footsteps behind me, and I hid my phone just as a terrific crash sounded from the back of the wagon.  I jumped, whirling around.

It was Grey, lowering the tailgate.  He glanced at me, then threw back the tarp covering the supplies.

“You startled me,” I said, turning slightly away from him so I could slip my phone back in my pocket.

“My apologies,” Grey said curtly and began digging through the supplies.  He looked more irate than I’d ever seen him.

“What’s wrong?”  I asked.

He barely glanced up as he opened another box and said flatly, “We’re talking again?”  He flung the tarp back further and began shoving boxes around.

“When did I say we weren’t?”

“You made it pretty clear how you felt back at the med center.”

“I didn’t mean I was never going to speak to you again.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Grey said pointedly.

I stepped back, unsure what to say next.  Grey had never spoken to me like this.  Granted, we hadn’t known each other for that long, but even in high-stress situations, he’d always been calm.

“I just, I just thought you looked upset,” I stammered.

He dropped the bag he was searching through and stared at me again.  “Yes.  Yes, I think I am.”

I studied him for a moment. His normally calm expression was now pinched and panicked.  He flipped the lid off another box with enough force to send it sailing over the side of the wagon and into the dirt.

Good sense and the constant company of my recurring dream told me to leave him alone, but I was curious what could have happened to upset him so much.

“Okay then.  You’re upset.  Why?”

He unearthed a large box of Band-Aids, sighed heavily and looked around the wagon bed almost desperately.  “I can’t find any aspirin.  I know I packed it in one of these boxes.  I also can’t find a lot of the other stuff.  Medical supplies we’ll definitely need in Vegas.”

He shuffled around another box and muttered, “Who packed this wagon?  It’s a mess.”

My face burned.  “I did,” I said curtly and stepped up onto the tire and leaned in to look.  “Lydia and I didn’t miss any boxes,” I insisted, emphasizing her name so he wouldn’t completely blame me.  “It’s got to be in here.” I lifted the lid of the nearest box.

“I already looked in that one,” he snapped.

“Well, Spock, why don’t you just beam yourself back to the Starship Enterprise and pick some up?” I threw back at him before I could bite my tongue.

He stared at me, expressionless, for a moment, then said, “I can’t risk going to get more.  If someone here realized I was gone, or if I ran into someone back at Hoover, I wouldn’t be able to explain.”  His voice was short.

“Fine.  Bad idea,” I muttered.

“I know I packed aspirin.  These people depend on me, and they’re going to think I forgot.  I
know
I put it in here!”  He raked his fingers through his short hair in frustration.

Still stinging from his comments, I didn’t open my mouth again.

“It’s almost as if...” his voice trailed off while he counted the boxes.  “As if someone purposely took those boxes.”

“We put all the boxes in the wagon.  Maybe you just forgot to pack the aspirin in the boxes,” I said, supremely irritated he kept blaming me when I’d done him a favor by packing the wagon for him after he’d stood me up.

“I don’t forget things,” he snapped, eyes flashing.

“Yeah? You’re also not supposed to get pissed off.  It’s not ‘constructive’,” I snapped back.

“Certainly was easier to get stuff done,” Grey muttered.

“What’s
up
with you?  All those years repressing your emotions and you’ve just now sprung a leak?  Must be quite a shock to find out you’re a jerk.”

He glared at me, his blue eyes turning to electric ice, chilling me all the way down to my stomach.

“I guess that’s what
you’d
expect.  Oh wait,” he paused, staring down at me, his voice dangerously soft, “You don’t expect anything from me anymore.”

My knees felt weak, and I hardened my face to avoid crying in front of him.  I let go of the wagon and dropped to the ground.

There was only silence from the wagon, then Grey cursed under his breath and dropped the container of Band-Aids back into the box at his feet.  It broke open, and the wind sprayed the paper-wrapped bandages around the wagon bed like confetti.  He stared at it for a moment, then jumped to the ground and strode away from me into the darkness.

I stared after him, frozen with shock.  What had just happened? 
How
had that happened?  When I first met him, Grey had appeared strange, because he was always so calm when others were angry or upset.  At first, I thought he was just disconnected because of The Plague, like a lot of people were, but then I learned it was the practice of eradicating emotions that he learned from The University.  The University, his “observing only” space community believed that by squashing out certain emotions, they could be a more productive society.  Grey managed to live this way for more than three hundred years, only allowing himself the simplest of pleasures to satisfy the human need inside of him: enjoying a horseback ride, watching a sunset.  And then he met me.  He abandoned the idea of the Emotional Eradication Act when he desperately kissed me in the basement of Hollywood High School.  That had been only a handful of months ago.  I remembered my words when he tried to explain everything to me, “Are you saying I broke you?”

Had I really broken him?  Was he breaking even more now?  I had never seen him angry.  Never heard of others seeing him angry.  It was frightening to see him snap.  Like he was suddenly a different person.

I steadied myself against the wagon.  Every part of me sagged with fatigue.  Even my red hair, blown loose by the relentless wind, hung lifeless around my shoulders, stiff with dust and sand.  I was so tired.  My knees weakened, and I slid down to the ground, eyes stinging with sudden moisture.  I let my head drop to rest on my knees.

It wasn’t long before a body settled next to me and a heavy arm draped across my shoulders.  I didn’t look up.  I knew it was Shad.  His voice was low, and he said, “You look about how I feel.”