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Week Three
Cassie stared at the empty space between her and the trash bin in the alleyway. The daylight reflected off the green, plastic surface with a mute, grey glow. The sounds of the city echoed from up ahead, the tall building walls all around her veiling the alleyway in shadow. She ran her gloved hand down the plastic body, finding nothing but scars off weathering the years under the elements and rough handling. As far as she could tell, it was a perfectly normal trash bin. Yet a man had vanished here in the blink of an eye.
She opened the lid and looked inside, wrinkling her nose at the stench before she set her surgical mask over her face. Taking just one last moment to collect herself beforehand, she finally dug in. Her hands pushed the piles of trash bags aside, looking for something, anything inside, but still careful enough to avoid anything potentially infectious or that disgusting weeks-old sauce that oozed down from somewhere.
The corner of her eye caught the shape of a passerby. Somebody distinctly stopping in the intersecting street up ahead only to observe the crazy woman rummaging through the trash bin. She felt her cheeks redden, her hands hesitate. Still, in a last act of defiance against everything that had happened to her since then, she withhold her tears and ignored how humiliated she felt.
And dug deeper.
Week Two
She could hear her watch tick by in the police station. The cleanliness of the white, sterile walls in the waiting area conflicted with the stains on the floor, a myriad of muddy footsteps left behind by those that had sought justice earlier to her arrival.
Since that night two weeks ago, there had been no further leads. Her calls to the case's officer were no longer being returned either. Cassie was sure that they were missing something. Had they checked in with homeless shelters? Private clinics? She lacked the proper statistics but she suspected that a white male with delusions of time travelling and a gunshot to his stomach couldn't possibly be so easily lost in the masses. But not even her contacts in the local hospitals had provided her with any further leads. Like a ghost, the man named Cole had disappeared completely, before her eyes and from the world.
She looked at the time and she knew the unnecessary wait for what it meant. Despite her better judgement, she had been honest in her testimony about what she had witnessed that night. Little did she know then that the look on the officer's face would turn out to be a consistent trend carried out by everybody else in her life. Even during the psychiatric counsel following her testimony had her words fallen on deaf ears. No, she recalled saying, she had not been abused by Cole, not even by Aaron, for crying out loud. She had not been beaten or raped and she had not build up a fantasy to protect her psyche. She had not been taking any medication nor hallucinogenics, although, as a doctor, she wished she would have had the peace of mind then to think and check herself before anything would have left her system.
But despite her honesty from the start, despite her hopes against all the likelihood, nobody understood what had happened to her.
She was on her own.
Month Three
Cassie excused herself to the ladies bathroom. Aaron had insisted in a small, intimate family dinner with his parents in one of their favourite restaurants. No doubt her lover had sought to make her feel safe and protected in this familiar gathering. Perhaps so that she could finally forget, that she could finally let go. He could be so thoughtful.
Cassie locked herself in the stall and closed her eyes, sighing. After so many months, she knew that was not what she wanted. She didn't need security, she needed an update. An answer. Anything on the plague or that man. On Cole.
She would confess this but she could no longer talk to anyone about what happened. Despite his initial indulgence, Aaron turned out to be no different than her family, her close friends or the experts that she had consulted with so far about her kidnapping. Their vague gazes and kind smiles all betrayed their innermost thoughts: of how she'd become no more than a victim to their eyes. Somehow, that should mean that of all her judgements were unreliable, all of her senses crossed. That she was little more than a time-bomb or glasswork to be handled with care. But if anything was really driving her crazy however, it was this undue coddling she tolerated each day. Slowly, it dawned on her that she no longer could tell who was really caring for whom.
Cassie took out her phone, going over the details her colleague had sent her about recent outbreaks of disease outside the United States. She really should have thought of it earlier. This was how she should have started investigating. This was where she was really needed.
It was the only thing that she could do.
Day Zero
The drive home had gone past her in a flash. Back at the alleyway, when her kidnapped had vanished into thin air, she had nearly felt her heart stop in the shock, witnessed all the sounds of the world mute. She could remember how numbly she had gone through the motions as the officers followed protocol, how she had heard the siren of the ambulance in the distance and how her gaze had met the curious glances of the pedestrians nearby in the brief possibility that she might find him hiding among them.
But it was seeing Aaron arrive that had brought colour back into her world. That had grounded her, that had made her realise that her ordeal was over, that there was only one thing that she really wanted: to go home.
Once she got to sit down in his car, the smell of his morning's aftershave still perfuming the upholstery, she was able to breathe. She felt the adrenaline pumping through her body, her hands shaking but she still had years of practice of working under pressure behind her. So, taking a breath, she tried to go through every step, every incredible minutiae of her kidnap, lest something would go amiss in her later official testimony of the facts. She would not forget the moment she saw Cole in the rear-view mirror of her car, his questions, the desperation to his voice. She would remember her watch bearing the scar of his knife, the shot to his stomach. The second in which he vanished, breaking all laws of the world she'd taken for granted. On the drive home, she shared as much as she could with Aaron, if for the sake of being thorough, and thought nothing of it when her lover kept eyeing her with concern.
Because she was home now, she thought, stepping inside her house.
She would be alright.
Month Twelve
Her hotel room was much like a tiny storage compartment, the smell of sewer having heated up throughout the day and seeped into her bedsheets. Once she opened the windows, Cassie tucked herself in and let the fresh air of the night lull her to sleep.
Only her phone lit up the room now, the sudden light blinding her eyes for a moment. It was now one minute past midnight. It had been twelve months since her meeting with Cole and as of now there were another twelve months left until John Addams Hotel, Philadelphia. She repeated the names in her head. Sometimes she did so, much like a chant to remind her of purpose. Nevertheless, she was barely into her second year and she'd already have one more outbreak behind her. Fortunately, it had been contained, thanks to the efforts of her dedicated colleagues. The conditions for the patients here were still disastrous though and local medical assistance left much to be desired, despite their best efforts.
But everything turned out alright. There had been tragedy but it also had been a fake call. The world was still turning, unspoiled by any worldwide plague that would destroy it otherwise.
She went through the myriad of logged missed calls and attempts to contact her in the last month. Aaron repeated himself often in his messages now, mostly wondering when she'd be back. How could she reply? An outbreak of disease didn't bend to her schedule.
She missed him though. As she opened up the gallery of her photos on her phone, she could no longer remember the last time she'd had proper human contact. Or when she'd attended an intellectually rewarding lecture, sat down for a chat with friends or worn her mother's necklace to a nice restaurant. But regardless of attempts to get her life back on track, her choices were still consistently brought up and questioned by her peers. No one understood her need to be out here in the battlefront. In the greater scope of things though, with what she knew of the future, perhaps such things should no longer matter to her. With that thought in mind, sometimes, just sometimes, she almost felt confident that she was making the right, if hard, choices. Still, she longingly browsed on through the pictures, remembering her times with Aaron. Their better times.
Then she stopped at the last image in the gallery. A sketched portrait of a man past his thirties with shoulder-length hair and aquiline nose. The man from her memory, Cole, rendered by an artist at the police station over an year ago. It was an expertly accurate portrait yet the strokes somehow lacked that human element to him that had haunted her since. The look to Cole's eyes, one that she was intimately familiar with from her voluntary work with patients in developing nations such as this one. A look past rage and disappointment in a broken world. The look of somebody fighting with nothing left to lose.
"Who are you, Cole?" Cassie whispered in the darkness of her thirteenth month.