Autumn in the Dark Meadows (The Autumn Series) (16 page)

“Close your eyes,” he whispered. I did, and then a gust of air kissed my skin and brushed through my hair. When I opened my eyes, we were on the side of a barren hill overlooking the water main, the great white Hoover Dam in the distance.

The moon shone brightly down on us, and I saw we were alone.  We stood on one of the mountains overlooking the reservoir of the dam.  Beyond its inky blackness was the East Watchtower.  Grey pointed to a guard visible in the moonlight.

“The guards should have their backs to us, watching for outside threats,” he said.

“With everything that’s happened here, they may be looking for internal threats, too.  We should assume they’re keeping a watch on the entire town just to be safe,” I reminded him, scrutinizing the watchtower.  “You think the guard up there might be part of The Front?”

“Don’t know.  Best we’re not seen, either way.”  He squinted in the direction of the dam. “This might be a little more complicated than I originally thought.”

“Where’s the water main?” I asked.

“It’s on our side of the reservoir, directly across from the East Watchtower.”

I looked in that direction.  The moon was bright enough to illuminate the large pipe that snaked through the mountains from Hoover and disappeared over the bank into the reservoir below.

“I see it.  How are we going to get to it without the guards in the towers seeing us first?  It looks pretty open.  Where can we hide?”  I surveyed the area around the pipe, not seeing any substantial cover for either of us.

“I can project us to the dark side of the pipe where it casts a shadow.  It’s small, but if we duck down, it should give us a little cover.”

He reached toward me and pulled my black sweater tighter around me, zipping it up and pulling the hood down over my head.

“Tuck your hair in, too.  The red sparks in the moonlight.”  He started to help me, but then seemed to change his mind.  I quickly stuffed my hair inside the hood around my neck as he continued, “Just in case they do see us, they won’t know who we are.”

Grey pulled a knit hat down over his head, covering his blonde hair.  I stifled a laugh.

“What?”

“Are we going to rob a bank while we’re here?”

“No one would suspect us,” he shrugged.

I eyed him.  “Except you aren’t fooling anyone with that sweater.  I doubt anyone would recognize you without it.  It’s kind of your signature, if you didn’t know.”

“Is it?”  He looked at me curiously, then said, “Well, anyone from a distance won’t recognize it, and if someone comes near us, I’ll make sure to take it off.  Ready?”

I nodded.  He took a step toward me and hesitantly slid his arms around me again.  I stepped into his embrace and took a breath, closing my eyes and feeling the warmth of his chest radiating against my skin.  Suddenly, the sound of moving water was more pronounced.  I opened my eyes and saw he put us exactly where we’d been looking earlier, but before I could look around, he pulled us down so we were both kneeling in the dark shadow next to the large pipe. The ground was wet with mud that immediately soaked through the knees of my jeans.

“I’m going to have to climb down the pipe to see where they’re working,” he said.  “Keep an eye out.  If you see anyone, give me the word, and I’ll project to you and get us out of here.”

“Okay,” I said.  Being in the dark, huddled together on the ground this way, reminded me of how we first met a year ago.  I’d been running from The Front in a dark alley, and he’d grabbed me and hid with me in a nook until we were safe.  The familiar sensation brought a wave of old emotions back.  Maybe I shouldn’t have come with him tonight, I thought.  I couldn’t allow the return of these emotions if he was thinking of going back to The University’s ship.

He slipped out of the navy sweater he always wore and handed it to me.

“Do you mind holding this for me while I climb down there?”

I nodded, trying to pull my eyes away from his muscular arms.  It was easy to forget how perfectly made he was when he covered himself up, but now with his sweater removed and the soft glow of the moonlight beating down on him, he was stunning.

As I stuffed the sweater down the front of my sweatshirt, I noticed the faint outline of the necklace holding the small vial underneath his t-shirt.  It contained the E-Vitamin, his little fountain of youth.

“Do you want me to hold that, too?”

He paused, hesitating.  I realized suddenly he most likely never took it off, and probably never, in his three hundred years, entrusted it to another soul.  I shook my head, blushing.  “Sorry, you probably feel better keeping it on —” I began.

“Would you mind?” he asked, pulling the chain from around his neck and holding it up to put around my own.  I leaned forward, and he slipped it around my neck.  The enormity of his trust gave me a sick feeling of guilt in my stomach.  I hadn’t acted so favorably the last time he trusted me with something at almost this very location.   I opened my mouth, suddenly needing to apologize for walking away from him that night on the dam when he told me he believed The University brought The Crimson Fever to Earth.

Grey picked up the glass vial dangling on its chain and slipped it beneath my shirt.  It fell against the bare skin of my chest, the glass and metal still warm from his body heat.  My need to speak disappeared.

He raised his forefinger and lightly touched my lips, as if to shush me.

I was frozen by his touch.  Frozen and melting at the same time.  I didn’t ever want his finger to leave my lips, but it did, all too soon.  He looked at me, and I knew he understood what I couldn’t yet say.   I thought I saw a smile lifting the corners of his mouth, but before I could be sure, he turned and disappeared around the side of the pipe.

I stayed as much in the shadows as I could while I watched Grey carefully scale down the water main.  It arched downward and into the water more than one hundred feet below.

My eyes fell over the mass of tools left abandoned in the dirt clearing around the pipe, no doubt from the repair effort.  Then I heard Grey’s light movements echoing through the pipe.  The vibrations seemed amplified in the still night, and I was certain someone would hear us if they came close enough.

I scanned the surrounding area, watching for any movement in the dark hills and along the top of the dam, white in the moonlight.  I surveyed the dirt around me.  It was pockmarked with footprints, no doubt from the Hoover team assigned to seal the leak, but then something else caught my eye.  The moonlight glinted on a small piece of plastic.  I reached for it.  It was part of a small digital clock, broken in half and burned.  The edges were clearly melted and the face was cracked.

The vibrations of Grey’s downward movement stopped.  I pocketed the object and crept over to the edge to look down at him.  He hugged the large pipe in a bear grip as he inspected it.  Then I heard a sound from behind me.  Footsteps.

A figure strode into view on the dam.  The clop of boots on cement turned into the crunch of gravel.  He was heading straight for us.

I edged around the pipe, careful to stay in the shadows, until I could see down to Grey.  He wasn’t looking at me.  I tapped lightly on the side of the pipe to get his attention.  The gravel crunching footsteps were getting closer.  I made myself as small as possible in the shadow of the pipe and held my breath.  The footsteps stopped on the opposite side of the pipe, and I heard the heavy clunk of tools.

Ever so slowly, I peeked around the pipe again and saw Randy, Hoover’s airplane mechanic, dropping tools into a canvas bag he wore across his chest and tossing other ones back to the ground.

I slid back into my hiding place and turned to look over the edge to motion to Grey, but collided with something solid.  I gasped in shock before realizing it was Grey.  His hand clapped hard across my mouth, and his other arm shot around my waist, dragging me against him.  Randy’s curious face appeared out of the darkness above us for a fraction of a second before everything dissolved around us.  A yellow light exploded in my eyes, lighting what looked like a raging sandstorm around us.  Impossibly small particles blew in all directions, and sound ceased to exist.  The silence was deafening, and I was blindly being pulled backward through it, twisting and falling.

The flying particles morphed suddenly and became still and solid.  I was no longer falling.

“Autumn?  Are you okay?” Grey’s calm voice whispered.  I felt his hands on my face, pulling me back from oblivion.  I tried to open my eyes, but my vision shrank to fuzzy black tunnels.  My head spun.

“Take a deep breath,” he instructed.

I sucked air into my lungs and allowed my eyes to close again.  “What
was
that?” I gasped.

“We projected back to the Egyptian.  I’m sorry I didn’t give you any warning.  It can be quite startling to project with your eyes open.”

“That’s an understatement.  I feel like I just jumped out of an airplane into a tornado.  Let me just sit down for a second.”  I felt shaky and weak.

“You’re already lying down,” he said.

I struggled to open my eyes.  My vision returned, and my head calmed.  We were in Vonna’s secret spa suite, and I was lying on the floor in the middle of the room.  I sat up slowly.  No wonder Grey always told me to close my eyes when he projected with me.  I didn’t even want to try to understand what I’d seen with my eyes open.

The situation we just escaped from returned to me suddenly, and I turned to Grey.  “He saw us.  Randy saw us.”

“No, he
heard
us.  We were covered in shadow.  He didn’t see us.”

“How can you be certain?  He was so close.”

“I can’t be.  But even if he did see us, I doubt he’d believe his own eyes.”

My hands shook, and I steadied them on my knees.

“Come here,” he said, helping me to my feet.  He led me to the bed nearby.  It was still unmade from the last time I slept in it after our junk food feast with Vonna.  The memory of that night glistened in my mind like a half-forgotten dream.  I sat down on the edge of the bed, and Grey settled next to me.

“Better?” he asked, and I nodded.

“Did you have enough time to look at the water main?”  I asked.  He frowned, and before he said it, I knew it wasn’t good.

“The pipe was intentionally burst.  I’m fairly certain of it.  They’ve put a temporary patch on it, but the hole was too large and perfect to be a normal crack from wear and tear, and there weren’t any stress points near the hole.”

“I found something, while you were down there.”  I pulled out the plastic timer face.  “It confused me at first, being so small and out of place, but then I thought, if it were a timer on some kind of explosive device, it might have ended up like this.”

Grey took the tiny timer face and touched the melted edges.  “I think you might be right.”

“So The Front is in Hoover,” I said, exhaling a deep breath with the thought.

“I have no doubt Karl has his spiders among us now.  The only question is, how large is the web he’s spun?  The water main must have been at least a two-man job, if not more.”  Grey sighed deeply.

“We have to tell someone.”

“Who would we tell?  The only evidence we have, we can’t explain how we got.  And how do we know who to trust if we could tell someone?”

I heaved a big sigh and let my head loll back in exasperation.  There was nothing to be done, at least not yet.

We decided to wait to leave the room until daybreak in a couple hours.  I stretched out in the bed, and Grey went into the other room to lie down on the purple couch.

Despite my body aching to sleep, I lay in bed thinking about The Front being in Hoover, wondering how long they’d been there.  Could all the little troubles we’d had be attributed to them, or just the most recent ones?  There was no telling how many were among us, or how long they’d hidden in plain sight.  I always knew Karl was clever, manipulating so much of the remaining population in Los Angeles proved that, but what he was doing in Hoover was a stroke of devious brilliance.

I sighed, threw off the heavy down comforter, and walked to the window by the hot tub.  I noticed a couple pillows in the bottom where Shad camped out a few nights ago.  A green glow from outside drew my gaze through the dark window.  It was coming from the Palmetto down the street.  Teams of masked people came and went from the main entrance, pushing wheelbarrows draped with tarp.  Interior cleanup must be going through the night to ensure there were no remains left from The Crimson Fever before we moved our camp into the structure.  I wondered how many bodies would be in a hotel that size.  And what the cleanup crews did with them.  The thought made me shudder.

A lot of work was yet to be done before the move was complete.  For one thing, while the main entrance of the Palmetto was clear enough to pass through, the base of the building was nearly as buried as the Egyptian was, and a huge portion of the casino still needed to be dug out.  I imagined after I finished any remaining nursing duties, I would be joining the rest of the Vegas community to help with that task.

I sighed again and leaned my head against the window.  I was tired of sand.  I was tired of wind.  I was tired of the constant threat of Karl.

Once Grey took me to Los Angeles to rescue Sarah, we could come back and deal with them, I thought.  Hoover dealt with The Front once before, and we would help them do it again now.  I knew we couldn’t ask for our previous life after The Plague decimated Earth, but I wanted some kind of normalcy.  No more life-threatening situations, no more mysteries to solve, bad people to fight, children to protect, weather to battle.  I wanted to settle into life at Hoover, go to dances with Grey, cultivate my garden at home and be with Sarah.

The tugging in my heart whenever I thought of Sarah trapped with Karl started to physically hurt.  I had to get to her soon.  The waiting and uncertainty was killing me.

I wrapped my arms tightly around myself, and suddenly realized I still had Grey’s sweater stuffed down the front of my sweatshirt.  I caught the zipper between two fingers and pulled it down, letting the bundled-up sweater fall out.  I wondered if he intentionally let me keep his things before going to bed.  He never seemed to forget about loose ends.

Though I knew he was asleep on the couch in the other room, I glanced up to make sure I was alone, then pressed his sweater to my face.  It was warm from my body, but it still smelled like him.  Slightly musky and slightly citrus.  It was such a unique smell, I thought I’d be able to pick him out of a thousand people with my eyes closed.  My fingers ran over the stitching Connie did to patch the hole made when Karl shot Grey at the radio station a couple months ago.