Tabula Rasa

by Kitty Thomas

  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.

  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 folde
d 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.