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Shannon pressed a button on a black plastic device on his shoulder.
“Yeah. I’m okay. It was just a wolf. Don’t come into the castle
unless I call for backup; there could be others. I’m going to check
it out.”

“Roger that. We’ll stay clear. Check in every ten minutes so we
know you’re safe.”

“Will do.”

I wrapped the blood-drenched blankets around myself more tightly,
struggled to my feet, and got as far back from him as I could. His
body still blocked the only easily reachable exit in the room. The
fire exits were even farther away, and I didn’t think I had much of
a chance of getting to them—definitely not while I felt like I was
dropping into shock. And he had a gun he’d already shown he was
comfortable using on living flesh.

“W-why didn’t you tell them I was here?”

“I need to assess the situation first,” he said, as if this were
some kind of normal response. He eased closer to me, slowly, as if
approaching a wounded animal in the forest. “Are you okay?” he
asked.

Not the question I’d expected, particularly after our brief
standoff. But then, I was a stranger who’d pointed a gun at
him—just like Trevor had.

“Of course I’m not okay!” I shouted. “You killed my husband!
You fucking savage. The world is gone, and now he’s gone.”

Immediately, I regretted this outburst. It was so hard to remember I
had to appease this person, or I was dead whether he directly killed
me or not.

I started to pace. I’d just settled into the new normal. I’d just
started to feel like maybe my life wasn’t going to be a
never-ending nightmare of bare survival. And this man had to come
along and murder my husband.

I was sure Trevor wouldn’t have shot him. It was just to scare him
and make him go away and leave us alone. Obviously, a stranger coming
in on his naked wife was a threat he had to address. He had to make
sure the man didn’t get any ideas in his head. If the other guy had
a weapon—which clearly he did—Trevor had to draw first. He had to
try to gain the upper hand to protect me.

“What do you mean the world is gone?” Shannon asked. His voice
had dropped low and gentle as if he were speaking to a feral cat
instead of a person.

I stopped pacing. “What do you mean what do I mean? Weren’t you
there, too? Aren’t you a survivor?”

“A survivor of what? I’m an urban explorer. My friends and I like
to check out abandoned theme parks. That man I shot... he was all
over the news for months, and so was your picture. Missing doctor.
Missing patient. No leads. No family came forward to claim you. It
was assumed he kidnapped you. I wouldn’t have had to shoot him if
he hadn’t been about to shoot me. I saw it in his eyes. He wanted
me dead, no doubt to keep whatever
this
is, going.” He waved
a hand around the room on the word
this
.

“W-what? I-I don’t understand. What about the solar flares?”

“What solar flares?”

It was like we were speaking two different languages with no
translation available between us.

“What do you remember?” he asked finally.

“N-nothing. I had an accident. I-I don’t know who I am.” I felt
so stupid saying that out loud, like it was a failure of my
intelligence or the educational system instead of a legitimate
medical issue that wasn’t my fault.

My head throbbed as I tried to put together what I’d thought was
true against what now seemed to be actually true. Shannon’s clothes
weren’t worn or old like someone who’d survived something awful
and was wearing the same two or three outfits for months or years.
They were new and nice. There was a bit of mud on his boots, but he’d
said he was an urban explorer. This was something he did
for fun
.
If he wasn’t aware of solar flares, they hadn’t happened, and the
world was still out there.

Oh, God. The world was still out there. All this time I’d been here
with some psycho who’d taken me from the hospital... trying to cope
with the new normal, and it wasn’t normal at all. Possibly just a
few miles away, life as everyone had known it had been humming along
without a hitch. Just-in-time delivery... still there. Electricity,
running water... it was all... still there.

“I-is my name even Elodie?”

Shannon eased still closer to me. “I don’t remember. The news
stopped running the pictures and story a few months ago. There were
some big school shootings, and the news cycle moved on. There were no
new leads on your story, I guess, so they never picked it back up.”

A sinking dread started to form a knot in the pit of my stomach. “He
wasn’t my husband.” Of course he wasn’t my husband. Trevor had
lied. About everything.

Shannon shook his head. “The news didn’t make it sound that way.”

“But there were pictures of us together in his wallet.” We must
have at least had one date. “He told me the world had ended. And...
I believed him.”

“Waking up here, no doubt you would. A lot of people don’t even
think about places like this existing,” Shannon said gently.

I started to think back to the way I’d felt about Trevor when I’d
first awakened—the giant
fuck no
that had filled my brain at
his presence, the big screaming flashing lights that told me this guy
was bad news.

I turned away and vomited my dinner on the floor. Then I turned back
to Shannon, embarrassed and ashamed by everything... that I’d been
sleeping with my captor that I hadn’t even known was my captor,
that I was naked and wrapped in a sheet covered in said captor’s
blood, that I’d just thrown up in front of this stranger whose face
held the most horrible pity I could imagine.

“Let’s get you cleaned up and go outside. My team has a bunch of
supplies, and then—”

“N-no.” My lip started to tremble, and I couldn’t make it stop.
“I can’t. I can’t stand for them to see me and look at me the
way you’re looking at me.”

“Well we have to report this, get you to the police, get you some
help.”

I could barely cope with the enormity of the truth as it was. Moments
ago, I’d thought I might have to seduce the man who killed my
husband in order to keep eating and living in a post-apocalyptic
wasteland of a world I wasn’t fully sure I wanted to stay in. No
part of that was true. And now, suddenly, the idea of facing the
police and the media and the world... it was a new horror that was
only just now dawning on top of everything else, and I couldn’t
confront it.

“NO! No police. No.” I couldn’t imagine the media swarming all
over me and then everybody in the country having the look on their
face that Shannon had on his. Even if I couldn’t see it, I’d know
it was happening. Millions of people saying
that poor girl
like
a useless prayer.

“But what about your family and friends?”

“You said nobody came forward. They put my picture everywhere, and
nobody knows or cares about me enough to have said anything yet.”

“But there might still be someone out there. You must have some
family out there. Friends. Co-workers. Someone important in your
life...”

“NO!” I was screaming now, loud enough that I was afraid his team
might somehow hear me and come running in anyway. I softened my tone,
hoping they hadn’t heard my outburst and said, “Please, please, I
can’t do this again. I can’t have someone come in and tell me
stories about my life I don’t remember that I just have to trust
and believe are true. I never want to hear another story about my own
life that I can’t confirm with my own memories. He made me
believe...”

“I know.”

I shook my head. “You
don’t
know. I believed I loved him.
I
slept
with him, willingly.” As mortifying as it was to
say, it wasn’t as if this man couldn’t figure that out with what
he’d been about to walk in on. It was somehow important to me that
he know Trevor hadn’t thrown me down and had his way with me, that
at least I’d wanted, or thought I’d wanted, to be with him.

“I’m sorry,” Shannon said.

“I thought we were surviving together in a collapsed world. He took
good care of me. I felt
safe
with him. B-but then you show
up, and you rip that reality away, and now I’m not a survivor
anymore building a life with somebody who loves me. I’m a victim.
And he died with me
crying
over losing him. He’s won. I
can’t ever take that victory away from him. I can’t trust anybody
else to tell me the truth about me. Please just go. Forget you found
me. I’ll figure something out when the sun comes up. P-please.”

By this point, he’d managed to inch his way to within reaching
distance of me. “Elodie, the park is dangerous and hard to get in
and out of. You have to at least let me help you get out of here, and
give you something decent to wear.”

I watched warily as he took the pack off his back. He unzipped it and
tossed me some pants and a T-shirt. After sizing me up, he gave me a
nylon belt that I’m not a hundred percent sure was really meant to
hold pants up.

He turned his back to me and waited. I stood there for a moment,
staring at the clothes in my hands, still gripping the bloody sheets
around my body.

“I’m not going to look. I promise. Just put some clothes on. I
need you to stay here in the present moment, no matter how unpleasant
it is. I don’t want you to go into shock. Start moving.”

I dropped the sheets on the ground and put the clothes on.

“O-okay, you can turn around.”

The walkie talkie crackled again. “Shannon. You okay? Where’s our
check-in?”

“I’m fine. But I think I’ve come down with a stomach bug. I’m
going to head out.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Where are you guys?”

“We set up clear on the other end of the park near the Ferris
wheel. We can’t even see the castle from here. Do you want us to
come to you?”

“Nah, I’ll be fine. Though I did throw up in here so... sorry
about that. It’s not pleasant.”

“Yeah, you sound sorry,” the guy on the other end said, laughing.
“We might brave it tomorrow. I assume you don’t feel well enough
to clean up?”

Shannon’s voice affected a sick sound, coming out more slow and
labored. “No such luck. I might be puking the whole way to the car.
You guys okay?”

“Yeah, we feel fine. We’ll catch you next trip.”

Shannon clicked the walkie talkie off. His gaze went across the room
in a calm, assessing way, finally landing on me. “Are you
absolutely sure you can’t face the world right now?”

I nodded.

“Then here’s what will happen. I’m going to dispose of the
body, then I will take you out of here. You will stay with me. I will
honor your desire to do this at your own pace. For now.”

That sounded too much like Trevor’s veiled rape threat that first
night when I hadn’t swooned in his arms immediately.

“What is it?” he asked.

“N-nothing.”

Shannon wasn’t talking about sex. It wasn’t enough that I didn’t
remember my life; now I had this new screaming vortex of horror to
deal with.

Chapter Three

Once things had been decided, Shannon went into
this laser-focused sort of zone—like the whole rest of the world
just shut off, and everything turned to auto-pilot. He was suddenly
so intense. I sat quietly while he assessed things. I think I
imagined if I was very quiet he would forget I was there and leave
without me. How hard could it be to get out of the park on my own in
the daylight? Even though I’d never ventured to the perimeter, as
it was so overgrown and Trevor’s warnings had kept me away, I felt
certain it couldn’t be
that
bad.

Shannon came over to the table where I was sitting like a piece of
statuary. He knelt in front of me and pulled a small flashlight from
his pocket and shined it into my eyes. He felt the skin on my face
with the back of his hand. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for.
Signs of shock? Were my pupils relevant in that? I didn’t know. Ask
me something about plants.

“Is there a big drain somewhere in the floor of the kitchen?” he asked. “Most
industrial kitchens have one somewhere.”

“I-I don’t know. I think so. Why?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to know.” He picked up Trevor’s body and carried him
back into the kitchen.

I stayed still and quiet where I was for half an hour—maybe
longer—wondering if I was in shock. I must be, right? Everything
felt like it had gone into slow motion. Dimly, in the back of my mind
I felt I should be doing something... I should leave... get out of
here. But I couldn’t quite figure out why that was so. My brain
didn’t seem able to process what was going on. Everything felt
foggy and surreal. Finally, I got up and went into the kitchen to see
what Shannon was doing.

He was right. I didn’t want to know.

He’d found the drain in the floor and had bound Trevor’s body to
a long metal food prep table. He’d propped it up with some heavy
crates so the body was upside down at an angle. Shannon had slit his
throat, and the blood was flowing out of Trevor straight into the
giant drain.

My hand went to my mouth. I thought I was going to be sick again. I
was sure of it.

“Oh---Oh God.”

“I told you you didn’t want to know,” Shannon said, not looking up from his work.

“Oh God.”

“If you’re going to vomit again, do it back out in the main room.”

I just stared at him. For some reason, I don’t know what I thought
was going to happen when he said he was getting rid of the body. I
just... I expected maybe he would bury it in the woods or something.
I mean... it’s understandable. I thought this was just some new
awful unpleasantness he would deal with for both our sakes.

But this... this wasn’t someone who’d never
killed a person before. This was someone who had a... a
method
for body disposal. How many people did you have to kill to develop a
method? They couldn’t
all
be self defense.