After a few minutes, I clicked it off and left the tower. I looked through the office and the hotel rooms on the floor below. Nothing of interest. Though I don’t think I was looking to be entertained. I was looking for comfort, and absent that, distraction.
The gift shop on the second floor unbelievably had some T-shirts. One was in my size. I peeled off the hot, sweaty top I’d been wearing and exchanged it for a gift shop T-shirt. I took one that had been wrapped in plastic. After sitting there exposed to the elements for so long, the ones on the rack weren’t much better than what I’d had on.
Trevor was in the main restaurant’s kitchen, as promised, heating up food. Something from a can and something from a deep freezer the sun must have kept operational all this time.
I spotted a small handgun lying on the counter near him.
“W-why do you have that?”
Trevor glanced over at the gun and then back at me. “Why wouldn’t I have it? We’re lucky I have it and that I haven’t had to use it. This is a very different world, Elodie. You know that. I have to protect us.”
It wasn’t as if he’d waved the gun at me like a lunatic. He’d probably had it concealed on him earlier. And it wasn’t as if someone as strong as Trevor needed a weapon to harm me, particularly in such isolation, but it still scared me that he had it.
“How come this whole place isn’t looted?” I asked, trying to shift the subject away to something safer.
He looked up from a bag of frozen chicken nuggets. “Several of the stores on the main strip were looted. The castle may have been harder to get to when they came through. And the park is a bit off the beaten path. It wasn’t a well-known park. So not too many groups would have come through.”
The kitchen looked modern, but the main dining room was like a banquet hall in some old castle right out of a fairy tale. There were long banquet tables, which were positioned in a big square, leaving a wide-open space where there must have been some form of entertainment for the diners.
“Those are some big fireplaces out in the dining hall,” I said.
Trevor smiled. “Yeah. It’s great for when it gets cold out.”
We ate in the big, empty banquet hall on two throne-like chairs that I imagined had been set aside for actors playing the king and queen of the castle. Sitting there like royalty dining on food that was anything but royal fare was depressing as hell.
As if I didn’t already feel like I was one of the last two remaining humans on the planet.
For some reason it made me think of the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. I couldn’t pull out a single personal detail about my life, but somehow an old religious myth was right there perched on the surface of my brain.
The garden was supposed to be some utopian paradise, but I couldn’t imagine anything as a paradise that only contained two people. It seemed lonely. No wonder Eve began forming questionable friendships with reptiles.
I picked at the chicken nuggets on my plate.
“Something wrong with it?” Trevor asked.
“Just not very hungry.”
He looked concerned as if trying to remember if loss of appetite was related to concussion.
I stared down at the baked beans and chicken on my plate and wondered if I’d ever get my memory back. I wasn’t sure I wanted to remember a time that was happier when the world ran like clockwork and no one thought it could ever end. I had a sense of what things had once been like in general, though I couldn’t seem to project myself into any of the stories. Maybe that was for the best.
“When are we going to look for more survivors?” I asked, trying to stop thinking about my troubling loss of memory.
“Am I such poor company?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I’d seen proof positive that I at least knew him. We had at least, at some point in our history, sat together in a photo booth like we liked each other and gotten photos made. But the number of things he wasn’t telling me could no doubt fill libraries. Had we had a rocky relationship? Was there some awful shared trauma he’d been trying not to burden me with? A tragic loss?
Maybe I was the burden. Would it have been easier for him to survive this without me? Did he want to? It didn’t seem like this was a fantastic quality of life to aspire to. I wondered if anybody else out there had a life any better. The Amish were probably doing okay. If they hadn’t had to fight off hordes of previously comfortable people now without an internet connection.
So many questions. I thought back to the first moments after I’d woken. Trevor hadn’t seemed as surprised as I’d expected when I said I’d lost my memory.
It had all happened in a rush, but that part hadn’t seemed to ruffle him like it should have. He hadn’t even dwelt on it very long. The only part I was sure about was that when he tore through those woods after me, he’d been panicked.
Finally, he answered my earlier question about looking for others. “Let’s just give it a little while. We don’t know what we’ll encounter out there. I don’t think we should leave until we absolutely have to.”