Tabula Rasa (7 page)

On the counter, he’d lined up all the
pitchers of water from the fridge. For clean-up most likely. There
were also about twenty gallons of purified water on the counter that
Trevor must have had hidden somewhere. That must have been our
well
water.
It reminded me briefly that Trevor was the only person here who had hurt
me so far. But then off to the side I noticed big thick plastic sheeting and a wicked sharp saw...
Oh... God.

Shannon finally glanced up. “I found that in the freezer. The
plastic makes sense, but I have no idea why Trevor had a saw in
there. I was sure I’d find something useful in the castle, it’s a
big place, but... the angels are smiling down tonight.”

Or the demons were smiling up.

“Do something useful and bring me that sheet with all the blood on it from the
other room,” he said.

But I stood there, frozen. My hands started to shake again, and the
tremor seemed to move through my whole body.

H-how do you know to do all this?” “

“That’s classified.”

I was sure he was some sort of ex-military. The way he moved. The way
he talked. The calculating precision of every movement that showed
signs of training well beyond that of a police officer but too
regimented for a garden variety psychopath.

But that didn’t explain how he knew so much about getting rid of
bodies. That couldn’t be standard military procedure.

“You think I’m a monster,” he said. He didn’t seem to be very bothered by the
possibility.

I didn’t respond, but I was sure the truth was easily readable in
my eyes.

“I’ve never killed an innocent. Are you innocent, Elodie?”

“Y-yes.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about. Now go get the sheets.”

Unsure what else to do, I started toward the door. His voice stopped
me.

“And Elodie? Don’t make me chase you.”

I should have run, I know I should have, but I was so scared I
couldn’t think straight. I didn’t know if I could trust he didn’t
kill innocents, but if I ran from him would I stop being innocent in
his eyes? Would it justify killing me too? He clearly knew his way
around places like this. I knew he could find me. I knew he could
outrun me. Then he would chop me up into little pieces just like he
was about to do with Trevor.

I tried to blank my mind of everything but the immediate task in
front of me and went into the other room to get the sheets. When I
returned, the body had been drained and he was moving it onto the
plastic.

Shannon arranged the body and then took the sheet from me. He
squeezed the blood out down the drain in the floor. “Now go put
that in one of the fireplaces to burn.”

I shook my head. “Please... I-I can’t...”

“Sure you can. You couldn’t survive what’s happened to you out here if you
weren’t strong. I need you to keep moving.”

But still I stood staring at the bloody sheet he held out to me like
it was nothing. All of this was nothing to him.

“Why do you need to drain and cut him up to bury him?”

“I’m not burying him.”

“Why? No one would find him out here.”

Shannon just stared at me, his eyes frigid blue ice. “No. I don’t
do loose ends.”

I got the terrified feeling that he was beginning to see me as a
loose end and I started to cry again. He ignored my tears and stood
up, cleaning his hands in one of the pitchers of water. “Come with
me,” he said.

“W-why?”

“Because I don’t
trust you. You look like you’ve changed your mind about things.
Have you changed your mind? Because now is a bad time for that. We
are past the point of return. I’m destroying evidence. That looks
bad. You’re in this with me for the long haul. I chose to help you
on your terms because, against all my training and better judgment, I
feel sorry for you and the fucked-up shit you’ve been put through.
But now that means I need to know I can trust you before you’re
allowed to be a free range human again.”

That didn’t sound good. So I was effectively a hostage now? Why
hadn’t I just let him call the police and get me help? But how
could I have known what he was? How could anyone expect... this?

“Let’s go,”
he said.

I couldn’t move. What if this guy was a million times worse than
Trevor? Whatever he’d gone through to develop into a person who
could do something like this had to have shut off the tap of at least
part of his humanity. Even if he’d shown some in being willing to
help me, it was such a small gesture compared to what I’d witnessed
from him since.

“Just leave me.
P-please. I swear I won’t say anything. How could it benefit me to
talk about this?” I sure as shit didn’t want the attention it
would bring.

Shannon’s expression closed off, and suddenly it was like any pity
he’d felt for me had been sucked away into another dimension
somewhere or maybe down that big drain with all the blood. He took a
coil of rope out of his bag and advanced on me. I turned and ran, my
self-preservation instincts finally coming to my aid. But he was far
too fast for me.

He grabbed my arm and hauled me over to a chair in the banquet room.

“Sit,” he
ordered.

I sat. “Please... I don’t know what I did wrong. A-are you going
to kill me, too?”

“No. I’m not
killing you but I can’t have you running.”

I sat there miserably while he tied me up. Why had I thought even for
a second this guy could be any better than Trevor when all evidence
had pointed to the opposite? I’d just been so desperate for
anything safe to hold onto that I was making up imaginary saviors
where they obviously didn’t exist.

Once he’d secured me, he disappeared back into the kitchen. He came
out with the bloody sheet and tossed it on the fire, then he was gone
again. He went to another part of the castle, then finally came back
with a wheelbarrow and shovel. I have no idea where he’d found
that, but he was right, the castle was big and contained all sorts of
useful things. He propped the shovel next to the fireplace and took
the wheelbarrow back with him into the other room.

It was a long time before he came back out. When he did, he had
Trevor in small pieces in the plastic inside the wheelbarrow. He
tossed the pieces on the flames of the fireplace he hadn’t used
yet, then he took the plastic and returned to the kitchen once again.

He didn’t seem remotely distressed by any of this, and I became
increasingly convinced he planned to kill me next, but now that I was
tied up there was nothing for me to do but cry and wish somehow I
could have made a different choice. I kept reviewing everything in my
head from the moment he’d shown up, trying to think how and when I
could have truly escaped. Would he have let me go if he hadn’t
started the process of getting rid of the body? If I didn’t know
what he was?

He took the plastic back into the kitchen and was gone another maybe
five minutes before he returned. The plastic was clean now. He’d
obviously rinsed the blood off down the drain. He folded the plastic
neatly and set it next to the fireplace. Why?

I tried to think of it all as a puzzle. I tried not to think about
what I was really witnessing or the horrifying smells of burning
flesh coming from the fireplace that contained pieces of Trevor.

Shannon went back into the kitchen again—I guess for further clean
up—while I tried not to gag from the smell of burning flesh and
equally tried not to think that it could be me in those flames next.
My lip trembled as I worked to keep my crying quiet. I was sure he
was just one minor annoyance away from deciding I wasn’t worth
sparing.

Finally he came back with another pitcher of water, some soap, and
some rags. I watched as he scrubbed up the blood on the floor from
the initial shooting. He went back to the kitchen for a moment, then
returned with wrung out rags that he tossed in the fire with the
sheet he’d tossed in earlier. The fire smoldered a bit from the
dampness still in the cloth, but quickly recovered.

I glanced over at the other fire that was still eating Trevor and I
somehow found the courage to speak. Maybe if I got him to talk to me
he wouldn’t see me as just more evidence to dispose of.

“Wasn’t there
any bleach?” I asked.

“There might
have been, but it leaves too strong a smell. If my friends come in
the room, they’d wonder why one room in an abandoned theme park
castle smells like bleach and is ridiculously clean. It’s why I
left the vomit. It works in our favor. They aren’t going to clean
it up. They’re going to stay away and out of this room because
they’re pansies. By the time another random group of people comes
exploring, nobody will know what it was or that anything of note ever
happened in here.”

“But that
smell... where you burnt him... that’s a lot worse than vomit.
They’ll smell it.”

“I guarantee you
they’ve never smelled anything like that. They’ll take one look,
get one small smell, and flee without analyzing it too deeply. People
notice what they want to and everything else gets filtered away and
buried.”

“O-okay...
but... the fire won’t burn him all the way... there will still be
bones.” I said this like I’d somehow figured out something he
didn’t know. But of course that was crazy, all things considered.

“I have a
contact at a crematorium. He can incinerate the rest. I just wanted
the body unrecognizable. I trust my contact, but you can never be too
careful, and I would prefer he not recognize this guy. Too many
questions with it being such a high profile case.”

I cringed when Shannon came over and sat next to me at one of the
tables. He brushed a long strand of hair out of my eyes.

“Don’t be
afraid of me, Elodie.”

“H-how can I
not? After what you just did... and how calmly you did it.”

He sighed and stared at me for a good long time while I tried to
perfect the art of invisibility. Finally he said, “Okay, I’ll
play your game. Hypothetically I just leave you. What’s your next
move?”

“I-I wait until
day, and then I get out of the park.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.
It can’t be that hard.”

He looked skeptical, but he let the logistics slide. “And then
what?”

“I-I don’t
know.”

“Do you have any
money?”

“No. I mean...
not on me. I don’t remember if I have any in general.” Was I the
type of person who saved? Had I been in the position to save? If I
was a botanist, did that mean I still had student debts, or did
botany pay pretty well? How could I know how fast kudzu grows but not
know how much botany pays? Maybe Trevor had lied about my job. Maybe
I had just been fixated on kudzu in my former life, and somehow it
slipped through the cracks of my amnesia.

I blinked a few times, realizing Shannon was still speaking to me.

“Where do you
live? Where do you bank? How will you get into your bank accounts?
What do you plan to do when that runs dry? If you don’t want to
have to deal with the police or the media or anyone else, how do you
plan to live under the radar and get money to survive long term?”

He just kept hitting me so fast with all these questions. Questions
he knew I couldn’t answer. Finally, I shouted, “Why are you doing
this?”

“I’m just
trying to show you that the anonymity and safety from scrutiny that
you asked for isn’t available going on your own. Even if I didn’t
have to worry about the fact that you just watched me kill a guy and
dispose of the body, it’s not feasible for you to do this alone.
And you know it.”

“M-maybe I’ll
just go to the police.”

Shannon laughed. “Not now, you’re not. Do you recall begging me
not to make you do that? I’m not hanging out to dry because you
can’t make up your mind. I’m sorry for what you’ve been
through, and I know you’re terrified, but honey, you’re coming
with me.”

“Maybe I’ll
scream. Maybe your friends are wandering around and will hear me.
Whatever you do to me, they’ll still know what you are. Is it worth
blowing your cover?”

He stared me down in that way wild predators do when defending
territory and space, and I instinctively flinched. If I hadn’t been
bound to a chair, I would have taken a step back. I’m not sure
where my sudden insane bravery had come from.

“You don’t
want to challenge me. I’m only a few degrees removed from the
psycho you just spent the last however many months with.”

A few degrees in which direction? Trevor ruined my life, but he
hadn’t beaten me or killed me. God, that sounded like some
Stockholm Syndrome right there. He’d basically fucking raped me and
held me captive living like a wild animal in Tetanus Land.

“I thought you
didn’t kill innocents.”

“I didn’t say
I would kill you. Now, are you coming with me when I go?” He asked
like I had a choice. He’d already made it clear I didn’t. I
didn’t blame him for not wanting to risk his freedom for a total
stranger. In his position with his strength and abilities, I might
have been on the same path to ambiguous felony he was on.

“I don’t know
who I can trust. And you just killed someone,” I said, deflated.

“You know that
was self defense. And as much as you don’t like the implications,
you know I know what I’m doing. Do you believe I’d also know if
someone was going to shoot me? That was his only option because there
was no way he could let a witness leave either.”

If this guy really wanted to hurt me, he could take me out like he
had Trevor. He wouldn’t even have to use his gun. It would be quiet
and easy. A quick snap of my neck—a little crunch of bone to
oblivion.

It didn’t seem plausible that with no plan or intention to, he’d
interrupt his weekend fun time to kidnap a woman he’d randomly
stumbled upon. But then, what Trevor had done seemed even weirder
when you thought about it. How long had he thought he’d get away
with it? How long could he have put me off about looking for other
survivors? Where was he getting the money to survive without his job
at the hospital? Wouldn’t he get tired of living like this? But
then there were long periods he was gone. I thought he’d been
hunting. Maybe not.