“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.