By this point, I was seriously contemplating trying to find a phone or make a weapon. How could I not? He kept putting the ideas in my head. If he’d just act like a normal person for five minutes, I might not be so paranoid.
What was I doing? I should have let him call the shooting in—back when it still looked like self-defense instead of like he was trying to cover crime tracks. Maybe I should have just let the police get involved and deal with the fall out and awfulness of being plastered all over the news some more and trying to cope with memory loss in the spotlight. Was my choice going to end up being... go to the police or die? Framed that way, I’d made the most foolish of all possible choices.
I’d just been so overwhelmed and didn’t want to go to the police or doctors or face a million questions and poking and prodding. I was terrified someone would finally come forward claiming to be someone close to me—someone else who might spin lies about my life that I had no choice but to go along with. I hadn’t thought about what asking Shannon not to make me face the world meant would happen next. Nor had I realized how quickly he’d spring into action and start hacking up a body like it was nothing. I mean... who did that?
What did they say about snakes? They’re more scared of you than you are of them? Shannon seemed in that category, like something had rattled him out of whatever in his world passed for comfortable. Now that it had happened, he saw me as a potential threat. And the last thing I wanted was for someone like Shannon to see me as a threat. So I sat very still and silent, hoping in another of his laser-focus moments, he’d somehow forget my existence so I could slip away quietly.
Chapter Four
He drove a few hours before stopping at a run-down motel off a small, barely marked exit. Half of the neon-lit vacancy sign was burned out, but the point still got across.
I swear every single thing Shannon did was like the lead-up to the climax of a horror movie. Nothing was normal. It was all weird or paranoid or terrifying. I wasn’t sure I wanted Shannon to continue being my tour guide for life outside the park. During the drive, he hadn’t made conversation, and he hadn’t turned on the radio. And though, by the second hour on the road, I’d desperately wanted to turn on the radio, I didn’t make a move for it because I had no idea what he’d do in response.
He’d taken me through a drive-thru where I could have screamed for help but didn’t, then he’d treated me like a criminal at the rest stop. I just didn’t know what to expect from him. And I wasn’t sure knowing would be better anyway. It was Trevor all over again, just in slightly different packaging and without a colorful apocalyptic back story.
Shannon turned in his seat toward me. The clock on the dash said 10:48. This probably wasn’t a place that kept a front desk person all night. There was no doubt a bored clerk inside ready to go home, annoyed we’d just pulled up.
“I’m going in to get us a room. I’m locking you in the car. Do not make any kind of scene. Do you see that kid in there?”
I looked through the window he pointed at. A skinny college-aged guy stood behind the front desk, watching the clock and sending a look of derision our way. It was exactly the type of person I’d expected to see.
I nodded.
“Even if you make a scene, you have no way of knowing that kid wants to get involved in this. Not everybody is a hero. Most people aren’t. And I’m really good at reading people. He isn’t a hero. Are we understanding each other?”
If Shannon was so good at reading people, why didn’t he know I wouldn’t rat him out for killing Trevor? Though in honesty, I wasn’t even sure I wouldn’t have said something to the police, so maybe his radar was right on the money. Despite saving me, Shannon had crumbled apart my entire frame for the world. As terrible as it had been, it was far worse to know I’d suffered for months for no purpose and that everything I thought I knew of the world was a lie. There was a part of me that was angry with Shannon for throwing me into more chaos and for changing the lens I’d been viewing my life through.
He snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Elodie. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes.”
He unbuckled his seat belt and started to open the car door.
“Shannon?”
“Yeah?”
“If you really don’t plan to hurt me, why are you acting like this?”
“Just protecting myself. You’re an unknown risk still. You’re too traumatized and flighty to trust.”
He was right about that, but still.
“You’re freaking me out. Can’t you just act normal?”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.” Shannon got out and locked me in and went inside to get a room.