by Melissa Roen
CHAPTER 22
DREAMLAND
The next seventy-two hours, I slept around the clock. Each time I felt myself swimming back from the sweet depths to consciousness, I’d grab the bottle on my nightstand, take a couple more sleeping pills, wash them down with a slug of whiskey, and retreat once more to dreamland. This world hurt too much to inhabit; I didn’t want to see that the sun still shone, smell the fragrant sea breeze on the winds. I just wanted to stay swaddled in a cocoon of substance-induced amnesia in the shadow land beyond.
The fourth day, I awoke and watched the dawn breaking on the shore. The mist was dove-gray shading into watercolor streaks of oyster-shell pink and a melancholy sigh of blue. The day was newborn and fragile, like the first steps I took outside. I emerged into the land of the living, and no matter how much I ached inside, I was famished and thirsty, and I needed to pee. The flesh of my body wouldn’t be denied. As much as I could wish otherwise, I would survive.
After trying to induce a coma for the last seventy-two hours and coming up short, my body now demanded movement and fresh air. Even though I felt like the recently-awakened dead, I decided to drag my ass up the hill to the Astrarama. Buddy’s company and the solitude on the heights were all I craved.
Before I left, I turned on my computer and scrolled through my inbox. Though I knew it wouldn’t be likely, I searched for word from Julian and ignored the other missives. I’d deal with them when I felt stronger. Then, I saw Leah’s email. It had been a couple of weeks since I’d had any news.
Hey, lil’ Sis,
Just wanted to let you know how we’re getting on. We’re thinking about leaving the beach house next month, and move to the compound by the Washington border. Looking on the bright side, it will make it easier for you to join up with us, if you can get to Vancouver. So far, the border is still open between Washington and British Columbia. Have you had any luck yet finding a flight? We’ll all breathe easier once you’re back safe, so get the lead out, girl. Hurry up!
The monsoons have been even more intense lately. In fact, it seems like we’re in the midst of a biblical storm that is going to last more than forty days. Every day, I look out at an endless expanse of moving liquid, the breakers rolling in and the rainwater gushing down; I can hardly tell where one starts and the other ends. I half-expect to see schools of fishes swimming past in the sky. There’s so much moisture in the air, if this keeps up we’ll have to grow gills. We haven’t seen the sun in a month. We’re living in water world.
The wildfires have burnt out along the coastal plains in central Cali. So that means there is a corridor open along the coast for the freak show from the south to travel north. The news out of there is so damn bleak! They’re at each other’s throats, and its all blood and mayhem. There’s a rumor the government is finally going to set up a perimeter—pretty much cut the state in half—to try and quarantine the madness, so we aren’t in any real danger here yet, but Jack and I feel uneasy just the same.
We were right to get out of Vegas when we did, and we’ve decided to trust our premonitions once again. Our instinct tells us it’s time to get out of Coos Bay; danger is coming up the road. Strange days coming soon, I can feel it in my bones.
Her words sent a chill through me when I thought of how lucky they were to have escaped Las Vegas.
I can remember many hot summer nights cruising the Strip with Leah in her convertible. The desert winds in Las Vegas carried the scent of adventure, something sinisterly delicious you could almost taste. It wrapped around you like curling tendrils of smoke after a long, slow pull on an opium pipe.
On the Strip it’s all dazzle, illusions shimmering on every side.
But on the other side of town, away from the resorts and casinos, squats another Vegas. It’s a city of trailer parks, porn shops, meth labs and tattoo parlors in run-down strip malls; of seedy strip clubs where the girls who can’t cut it anymore at the upscale lap dance emporiums still bump and grind.
Whole neighborhoods of foreclosed homes, abandoned construction sites and unfinished housing tracts that are slowly being buried in the desert sands.
The underbelly of the beast, where dreams die.
Leah had been right to leave before it was too late, because once the last vestiges of social order disappeared, Vegas was a fat, juicy plum—too ripe and tasty not to devour. Those who’d been on the outside too long would have their day.
They’d overrun the casinos, invade the palaces dedicated to vice and pleasure, looting and burning. Gangs would stake out territories, set up headquarters, and fight turf wars over new kingdoms. In the long, last dark night, the drums would beat, bacchanal would reign, and beggars would be kings until the last wick guttered and went out.
I continued reading her email.
Speaking of strange times, I had an email from Janice, a gal I used to work with in Vegas. It seems there have been stories about disappearances popping up all over southern Nevada. Of course, stories about weird lights and UFO’s around Groom Lake have been circulating for years: alien abductions, anal probing, and human experimentation, implanted microchips, monitoring and mind control.
But now, we’re hearing reports of mass disappearances affecting entire communities. The whole population vanishes for a week, and not everybody returns. The ones that do sometimes wake up in their own beds; other times, they come to wandering in the desert miles from town. And no one has a clue about where they’ve been all this time. It’s collective amnesia! Even weirder…inexplicable lights are reported in the sky around the time residents do their disappearing act.
Following the disappearances, teams of private contractors show up, escorted by the military, everyone decked out in hazmat suits and masks. They quarantine the survivors, collect evidence and conduct their own tests. From what we hear, there’s no biological or physical explanation. But they- the “authorities”—say they are worried about a contagion. A radiation leak doesn’t make people disappear! Hence, what’s up with the hazmat suits?
I’ve been trying to corroborate these rumors online. Theories about wormholes and alternate realities abound. My favorite crazy story is the government out of Dreamland is using the inhabitants of these godforsaken towns as guinea pigs in some weird-science, time traveling experiment.
According to Janice, no one realized the disappearances were happening in Las Vegas, or on such a large scale, until one morning everyone woke up to columns of tanks and white-hazmat-suited troops from Nellis Air Force Base, rolling down the Strip. The military effectively quarantined the whole city. Still, everyone is panicking. Inside the quarantine, it’s pure anarchy! Riots and looting are breaking out all over town. Some are saying half the population vanished, but even assuming those numbers are wildly exaggerated, tens of thousands seem to have disappeared…
Ordinarily, I’d dismiss what Janice told me about the vanishings and the white-suited government personnel who show up in their wake and what I read online, as wacko internet rumors and yet another Vegas urban legend, except something similarly spooky happened to us here.
There’s a pool hall and bar here in Coos Bay, where Charlotte likes to go for a drink and to rack them up, when she goes into town for supplies. She’s always been a bright lights and fast city sort of gal, and I can’t really blame her; it gets kind of lonely for a single female with just us and the dogs for company. So she’s gotten popular and intimately acquainted with the local male population of Coos Bay. Sometimes she stays overnight in town, or even for a few days, if she’s got a new lover. As you can well imagine, Chaz doesn’t always let us know when she’s not coming back home for the night. God love her, but she’s such a slut!
By the way, Mama and Charlotte really hit it off. They sit for hours telling war stories about their conquests. Honestly, the things Mama got up to when she was a showgirl. I never realized our dear mother had such a racy past! Chaz has even taken her twice to Mick’s Tavern. The owner, Steve, is the go-to-guy for Redwood Forest weed. So I’m told.
So when Charlotte went into Coos Bay for a supply run, about ten days ago, we didn’t really think anything of it when she didn’t come home. Except, when we got up the next morning, Mama was gone. She ate dinner with us the night before, and I saw her reading in her bed at nine o’clock.
We looked for her everywhere in the house and along the beach. Then, even though it’s more than fifteen miles to Coos Bay and hard to imagine Mama finding her way there, we tried to reach Charlotte, but with no luck. In the panic, it slipped our minds Kobe was missing, too. Jack and I went into town to Mick’s Tavern to find Chaz; Sloan and Matt set out to see if they could pick up Mama and Kobe’s trail in the redwoods
Steve said he hadn’t seen Mama with Chaz. She’d left with a trucker named Sal, who does the run between Coos Bay and the Canadian border twice a month. Sal’s a regular on the nights he’s in town, but Steve didn’t know where he lived. Chaz’s car was still in the saloon’s parking lot.
As you can imagine, I was out of my mind. Visions of gore and slasher movies flashed through my head. I know it sounds crazy, but I imagined Mama, Chaz and Kobe tied up and tortured by some axe-wielding, truck-driving maniac in a backwoods shack. We went to the Sheriff to see about getting a search team to comb the beaches and woods nearby.
Charlotte came rolling in the next day; she’d been shacked up with Sal in a town further north up the coast and hadn’t seen Mama the night she went into town. By then, we had an all-points bulletin county-wide. For the next forty-eight hours, volunteers helped us search the beaches and woods. It wasn’t looking good, and I feared in my heart it could only end badly.
Maya Jade, you won’t believe me, but I swear it’s God’s truth. On the fourth night after she’d gone missing, I couldn’t sleep, so I went into Mama’s room at about three o’clock, and there she was, with Kobe curled up and sound asleep on her bed. I woke her up yelling, I was so relieved and furious. I wanted to shake her and hug her at the same time.
And the freakiest thing is, like those people in Nevada that Janice wrote me about, she had no idea where she’d been. There were no cuts and bruises. She hadn’t been harmed. She was wearing the same nightgown, and it wasn’t soiled and torn as it would have been had she been tramping through the woods in a downpour for days. She actually looked well-rested, though her hair was mussed from sleeping. Her eyes were clear, and her face was smooth.
When I demanded she tell me what had happened—where she’d been—she just looked at me serenely, almost as though she was comforting a child afraid of the bogey-man. What she said was perfectly normal, but the way she looked—an eerie light glowing in her eyes—raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
“Don’t worry, my sweet Leah, everything is going to be fine.” She sat up and wrapped her arms around me. By then, I was sobbing tears of sheer relief that she hadn’t been harmed.
She stroked my hair and crooned in the same soft voice she used to comfort us when we were little girls, “Shhh… It’s okay now, my darling. Everything’s going to be alright. You don’t need to worry or cry. They sent me back. They said it wasn’t my time.”
I don’t know who “they” are. When I asked, she got confused and couldn’t tell me anything more.
I can’t stop thinking about what Janice said about government scientists and troops in hazmat suits showing up on the heels of other disappearances. What happened to Mama is too similar, right down to reappearing days later in her own bed. I keep asking myself, “Can the same thing be happening here in Coos Bay?”
Too many people know about Mama’s vanishing. It seems half the coast was out here, beating the woods. And there’s a lot of innuendo and speculation about us, ever since she turned up without a scratch after having gone missing for days.
We’re telling everyone that Mama was found wandering and returned by kind strangers, but the Sheriff’s asking questions we can’t answer. I don’t know if there have been other mysterious vanishings, since we really try and keep to ourselves. There are always convoys of people passing through, heading for sanctuary up in British Columbia. Down south, civilization has collapsed and been set on fire, but it’s still pretty quiet up here. I feel as if we are living in the land time forgot.
Still, I can’t wrap my head around what’s happening, and I can’t shake this feeling of apprehension. I don’t want to think about government-funded weird science, or alien beings from beyond the stars…
Like I said before, these are strange times, with even stranger days ahead, and you know when I get this feeling, even if I can’t explain it, I’m usually right. But one thing I’m sure of is that I’m not going to let anyone quarantine Mama and study her like she was some kind of lab rat.
I may be jumping at shadows, Baby. But you know me, and my motto is, “Stay ahead of the game.” So we’re preparing for the worst-case scenario, albeit a little earlier than anticipated. The old smugglers’ tunnel that comes out in the redwoods two miles inland is our escape hatch. We’ve got a Wrangler and an off-road truck than can’t be traced to us, hidden nearby. Every two days, one of us checks to see they’ve remained untouched. They’re loaded up with gas and any supplies we’ll need to make the trek to the compound up north. We’ve got extra weapons cached in the tunnels. If anyone comes calling we don’t want to see, we’ll be in the tunnel before they can break down the front gate.
Noah came down from Washington this week, and it sure came in handy that he was a munitions expert in the Army for all those years. He and Jack have rigged a booby trap for the entrance to the tunnel. Once we are through, that little surprise should slow down any pursuers. They won’t be able to follow us below, and they won’t know our direction above. That head start should give us enough time to reach the vehicles and lose them in the rainforest.
There are plenty of old logging roads the pot growers use to access their rainforest plantations. If you don’t know these woods, it’s easy to get lost. The tree canopy will shield us from any drones or ’copters. We should be able to put a hundred miles behind us before they know which way we’ve gone.
If the military comes snooping around, or we get awoken by black helicopters over the beach, we’re gonna vanish. For all anybody’ll know, we’re among the “Disappeared.” They can sit on their asses for a week to see if we turn back up!
I’ll be sending you updates as long as I can. If we have to bolt, I won’t be able to give you a heads-up. But I’ll find a way to get word to you as soon as it’s safe.
Remember, sweetie, to stay nimble; don’t let yourself be boxed in. When you stay ahead of the game… no one can catch you.
Leah
P.S… I know we are going to see each other again.
P.S.S… I’m never wrong.
I reread the letter, admiring the way Leah’s mind worked. Devious. Circles within circles. Always calculating the odds and staying a couple steps ahead. Leah had nerves of steel and metaphorically speaking, a huge set of balls. Slippery as an eel, she wouldn’t be easy to catch.
I thought about Leah’s mysterious reports. Were individuals and communities disappearing in this part of the world, too? I’d been so wrapped up in my own delirium and dilemma. Sometimes, I felt like I was drifting back and forth from dreamland to reality. And the membrane separating the two worlds was getting thinner all the time.
Strange times were coming. “Be nimble.” I liked the sound of that advice.
I moved up to the Astrarama the next day and spent the next couple of nights ferrying supplies between my villa and the dome, after midnight in Arnaud’s Land Rover. I waited until the streets were deserted, so no one could observe my preparations or tail me back to the Astrarama.
There was still no word from Julian. I had to accept it was really over. The split between us was too great, and there was no way to find our way back to each other across a militarized zone and a civil war.
My options had narrowed. It was going to be either Abu Dhabi or a globe-spanning flight and the dangerous trek alone through
British Columbia to Leah’s compound in the wilds of northern Oregon.
I needed to get in touch with Giovanni, but I’d avoided contacting anyone since that day at the lake camp. I needed these days on the heights, alone with my thoughts, Buddy, and the stars to grieve for my failed dreams.
The vicious storm that struck Lac Saint Cassiens spawned other tornadoes that day. One touched down on the runway at Nice, mowing down twenty airplanes parked on the tarmac before hanging a left and exploding straight through the middle of the Terminal 1 building. The airport was slowly digging out from under the devastation but was barely operating at fifty-percent capacity. Military aviation had priority out of Terminal 2. I didn’t know if there were many commercial flights still departing out of Nice Cote d’Azur Airport, but I did know it would take heaving on a lot of strings to get me on one.
Abdul’s return from Abu Dhabi had been delayed by damage at the airport. Although following him out to the Gulf States didn’t seem like the best move, I hoped he might be able to help me with the first part of my journey to Leah. Rome’s Leonardo di Vinci Airport was mostly operational, and Emirates Airlines flew out of there to Dubai. Hopefully, there were still flights connecting out of the Dubai hub to Vancouver. It might be the longest way to get to my destination, but it was looking more and more like going by way of the Arabian Gulf was my best bet.
Indeed, the only escape route left was south, towards the heel of Italy and eastward from there. An ocean-going vessel could, under optimal conditions, and allowing for refueling, make the sea voyage from Monaco to Rome in a few days, a week at the most. Giovanni might be able to help me find passage on a boat heading that way.
One month, maybe three, but it was getting closer to the time to finally run.