by Kitty Thomas
I looked down at my hand. No wedding band. But why would anyone in some post-apocalyptic wasteland still have a wedding band? We’d probably bartered or sold it early on when we were just getting our bearings, when people still cared about things like that. Or maybe some marauders stole it. I felt like if something apocalyptic had happened that suddenly marauders must have popped up everywhere, and we would actually start using that word to describe them.
Did I have surviving family? Friends? Maybe it was better that I didn’t remember anything—I mean, if they hadn’t made it. Trevor had said a lot of people died. Why wouldn’t my family and friends be with us? Or his family and friends? Wouldn’t we have done better in a larger group instead of just the two of us so isolated like this? I had a feeling I was getting the warm-and-fuzzy edited version of events, which was terrifying in itself.
The bathroom had once been luxurious with a giant tub with jets, a walk-in shower built for two on the other end, and an enormous counter with a sink large enough to bathe a fat baby in. Everything had been meant to look as if it were made of gold, but the plating was flecking off, and the whole place smelled like it had been packed up in someone’s grandmother’s attic for several winters.
The main tower suite was a large open circle with some seating areas, a TV and DVD player, one king-sized bed, and a few windows. It was full dark now, so I couldn’t see anything out of the windows. Back when the park was running, it would have no doubt been beautiful all lit up at night. I wondered if any celebrities had stayed in this tower in the middle of the park with their entourage just below in the smaller rooms.
I clicked the button on the TV, not expecting it to work, but a snowy buzz lit up the screen. Of course TV itself wouldn’t work. Who would be broadcasting? I looked through the cabinet and found several rows of DVDs. I turned on the DVD player and popped in a romantic comedy. I couldn’t believe it worked.
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.”
“But, you said we’d be safer in a group. Shouldn’t we at least...”
“Elodie, that’s enough!” I flinched, and he quickly softened his tone as if trying to reason with a small child set on ice cream for dinner. “It’s not safe. And I don’t want you wandering outside the park on your own. We know the park is safe because I test it occasionally with the Geiger counter. I don’t want you wandering outside the guaranteed safe zone into a possible radiation pocket. We need to go together.”
“O-okay.” I didn’t even know if that was how radiation worked, but Trevor seemed sure of himself, so I let it go.
I finished my dinner, even though I didn’t really want it. But I might get hungry later, and the last thing I wanted to do was annoy this man I didn’t remember knowing. I also didn’t relish the idea of coming down here alone in the middle of the night foraging for canned goods like an insomniac squirrel. However unsure I might be of Trevor, I liked the idea of being by myself in this big artificial castle even less.
Trevo
r took the plates and cups back to the kitchen and washed them with some water he must have drawn from the mysterious well. There were several medieval-looking pitchers of it in the industrial-sized fridge, pitchers which waiters and waitresses no doubt had used to refill iced tea. I stayed off to the side out of his way, trying to pick out a memory of anything I had ever personally experienced before today.
When I thought really hard, I got a fuzzy image of a white room and Trevor’s face. But then it blurred back into nothing but a bright white visual noise that made me dizzy. I gripped the edge of the stainless steel island for support.
“Are you okay?”
“F-fine. Just a little disoriented still.”
Trevor nodded. “Given the spill you took, I’m sure that’s quite normal.” He left the dishes to drain near the sink and joined me on the other side of the kitchen.
“You can explore the park tomorrow. Just don’t climb on any more pirate ships.” He gave me a handsome crooked smile that somehow still felt overwhelmingly ominous despite how hard he tried to make it endearing. “Would you like to see the first floor?”
“Sure.” What I really wanted to say was ‘not really’, but I didn’t want to piss off the only other person possibly for miles—the only one who knew how to navigate this fresh new hellscape.
On the bottom level, Trevor turned a crank. The drawbridge we’d walked across to get into the castle actually came up, closing us in for the night.
“You can never be too careful,” he said.
It had taken a lot of strength for him to turn the crank and raise the drawbridge. There was no way I could do that on my own. It might be easier to lower it, but that was just me guessing because it seemed like letting it down should be less strenuous than bringing it back up. I didn’t like the idea of him being the one who said whether or not I could leave the castle by a simple display of brute strength.
But that was life now, wasn’t it? In a civilized world, there might have been some level of equality, enforced by laws, but mostly enforced by practicality and technology. Now, everything was back to the law of the jungle. And brute strength was king. This wouldn’t be a world of happy equality, no matter what type of person Trevor turned out to be.
“I’ll show you the castle ride. It’s the only one that works.”
Right. Because of the solar panels. Everything else in the park was dead, except for the scurrying creatures that had made the husks of rides into dens and nests. I shuddered at that thought, unsure I wanted to explore too deeply even in daylight.
When we reached the entrance to the ride, Trevor flipped a switch. The lights came on, illuminating wooden doors that ostensibly led into the castle ride. A carriage with cracking and peeling gold paint lurched forward and stopped in front of us. After about half a minute, it moved on and pushed its way through blue wooden doors, beyond which played the creepy music that went with the ride. It was made all the more unnerving by the fact that it didn’t play quite right as if the sound came from a record that spun on a warped turntable.
A second creaking carriage emerged from the same darkness the first one had.
“They’re on a timer,” Trevor said. “It keeps everything evenly spaced while giving the tourists time to get on or off the ride.” He spoke as if the park was still in operation, as if a swarm of people would be forming a line to ride this monstrosity at any moment. He held out a hand to me. “My Lady.”
“I don’t know if I want to...” The whole thing just felt fucked up to me. This isolated half broken down ride that time and the world forgot out in what felt like the middle of nowhere. I felt as if getting in that carriage would edge out the last bits of sanity contained in the universe.
“Come on. It’s not like it’s a run-down roller coaster. It’s perfectly safe. I’ll protect you.”
It wasn’t worth fighting over. I tried to remember what I’d decided about just trying to get along with him and took his hand and got into the carriage. I was barely inside when it pitched forward sending my chicken nuggets rattling around in my stomach.
The music was even more disturbing inside the ride. It was a song about a princess who had been captured and locked inside a castle tower (why did we have to be staying in the tower?) by an evil king who wanted to marry her. But she didn’t love him.
At some point in the story/song, there was a witch and some evil magic. Because how could a fairy tale even work without a witch and some evil magic? That part of the story seemed superfluous. The king was villain enough. There was no real need to add any magic, but the flashes and noises probably appealed to the children the ride was intended for—unless it gave them the awful nightmares I was sure it would give me.
Much of the story was the princess crying and hoping some prince she actually liked would come rescue her. The ride was a visual of the contents of the song. It really shouldn’t have taken an apocalypse to shut this place down.
The whole thing would have been better without the song. Maybe they could have just played some violins or piano without lyrics instead.
As our carriage moved deeper into the bowels of the ride, I closed my eyes against the eerie animatronic people and the wooden way they moved. It didn’t take long for rides like this to fall apart if unattended, unused, and uncared for. A few of the moving characters’ eyes were popping out. I imagined without the air conditioning constantly running, the humidity had just squeezed them right out.
Here or there an arm had fallen off. It was macabre. And I swear one of them looked right at me. Yeah, this was super fun.
I looked over to find Trevor watching my reactions. “You thought this was a hoot the first time we were on it,” he said.
I shrugged noncommittally, waiting for it to be over.
Finally, the carriage went through a second set of wooden doors. Right before it did, an animatronic court jester jumped out, waved, and laughed like a maniac, asking us to come back soon. Why on earth would we do that? I think my heart stopped for a second when the jester jumped out.
When our carriage came to a stop, I couldn’t get out of it fast enough. Trevor followed me and shut the ride off.
“I’m sorry, I thought you’d think it was funny. I thought it would lighten things a bit.” He flipped the switch. The lights faded off, and the music ground down into silence.
I wondered about the personal hell of the operator who had to listen to the front end of the song as well as the back end of the song as both sets of doors opened over and over for hours on end. And that creepy court jester. There wouldn’t be enough money in the world for me to take that job.
“It’s late. We should probably head back upstairs for the night. You can explore the rest of the park tomorrow. You need to exercise and keep your strength up.”
I bit my tongue to keep from blurting out the truth about how strange I felt. Had he noticed?
I wanted nothing more than to get out of this dead theme park, but he was right on the practicality of staying. There was clean water here, and it seemed to be a good store of food, and electricity with two large fireplaces to keep warm and plenty of wood to chop down. There were beds and linens. It was survivable. Whereas, we had no idea what awaited us on the outside beyond this tangled oasis.
As we made our way to the tower, I couldn’t stop thinking about that stupid ride and the even stupider story. I couldn’t shake how much I felt like that princess in the tower, and I knew in a way I can’t explain that there were things about our relationship Trevor was keeping from me.
There was a sofa in the tower suite, but only the one bed. It was a room meant for a couple, not a couple and a bunch of kids. Maybe it was the honeymoon suite.
I looked away as Trevor took off his shirt and then his pants. Thankfully he stopped at his boxers. He slid into the bed while I stood awkwardly, my arms wrapped around myself as if to ward off a chill that wouldn’t arrive for months yet.
My gaze shifted to the sofa, wondering if I could make that work and how offended he�
��d be if I did it. Shouldn’t he have the decency to take the sofa and offer me the bed? If he was my husband? If he supposedly loved me? Shouldn’t he be more concerned about my memory? About my general physical and mental well-being?
He seemed in denial, like he just refused to accept the facts of the situation. Somehow he’d accepted the rest of the world as it was, but me not being able to remember him or our life together was too much. That was his line in the sand.
He turned off the lights. “Elodie... get in the bed.”
I kept all of my clothes on and slid in on my side, staying as close to the edge as possible. I closed my eyes trying to get that ride out of my head, trying to get everything that had happened since I’d woken in the pirate ship out of my head. I wanted nothing more than to dream of a world where everything was normal, and all the trucks and trains still arrived on time.
I felt him scoot up behind me. His arm came over my waist like the safety lever on the ride downstairs. His warm lips pressed against my neck.
I tried to squirm away from him. “Please don’t. I don’t know you.”
“Goddammit, Elodie. I’m your husband.”
I cringed at his tone. There was no one I could go to for help here. I couldn’t stop thinking about the drawbridge that effectively sealed me in with him until he decided to let it down. I was now convinced that I probably couldn’t even turn the crank to lower it down by myself. Maybe I was being irrational, but I felt so helpless.
“But I don’t remember that,” I said. “Please be reasonable. You’re a stranger to me. Can’t you understand that?”
He stroked my hair and let out a long sigh. I lay there stiffly, just waiting for him to stop touching me. After a few minutes of this, he backed off to his side of the bed.
I sat up against the headboard. Carved golden cherubs stabbed me in the back. I put my pillow between the carvings and me. “Can we talk about this?”
