The Last One Read online

  Tracker feels something he hadn’t expected to feel: pride. He’s proud of his verbose and jolly teammate, for not asking him for help, for finding the sign—the most obvious sign, at least—for herself. “There’s also this rock here,” he says, pointing to a small round stone that’s been kicked up from the streambed and lies atop a bigger rock, breaching the water’s surface.

  “Oh, yeah,” says Zoo. “It kind of looks like a cairn.”

  A cairn is exactly what the small rock centered on top of the larger rock is meant to be, albeit a shorter, more subtle one than would usually be constructed. The Expert built it to draw the eye.

  Zoo and Tracker cross the stream. Zoo leaves several dirty tread marks on stone, which she notices, but Tracker’s already moving on and she follows. The trail is obvious from here, matted grass and snapped brush. They follow it toward a copse of birches. A wooden box hangs from the closest tree.

  Tracker opens the hanging box. The inside of the lid has HUNGRY? painted across it.

  “Yes,” chirps Zoo. “Yes, I am.” She and Tracker peer inside.

  The box contains five circular tokens hanging on pegs. Each token features a different etching: a deer, a rabbit, a squirrel, a duck, and a turkey.

  “What do you think?” says Zoo. “Deer?”

  “That’s what we’ve supposedly been following,” says Tracker, which she takes as assent. Zoo extracts the token. It’s the size of her palm and made of birch. She flips the token over. On the back is a bearing: nineteen degrees. She sets her compass.

  Banker and Black Doctor have nearly passed the crossing when Black Doctor says, “Hey, are those footprints?” Banker slips and leaves a tear in the far bank. With each crossing, the path becomes more obvious.

  The trees around Zoo and Tracker thicken, then thin, and then they see it: a doe, hanging from her hind legs in a tree. Her tongue lolls from her mouth about two feet off the ground. Next to the dead doe is a tarp with a bucket and cast-iron skillet on top of it, as well as a small box with an etching of a deer and a token-sized slot.

  Though she’s seen many dead animals, Zoo’s never seen a deer strung up like this. “Its eyes look like marbles,” she says as she deposits the token.

  “Looks like dinner to me,” says Tracker.

  “You know how to dress it?”

  Tracker nods. Intellectually, Zoo is interested in learning how to skin and gut an animal, but her stomach churns at the thought of getting all that gore on her hands. She wants to eat the doe; she doesn’t want to be the one to butcher it. And despite her good cheer, she’s exhausted. All she really wants to do right now is sit with her back against a nice, straight tree and close her eyes. “I’ll collect some wood and start a fire,” she says, tapping the fire starter that hangs from her hip.

  “Not here,” says Tracker. He already has his knife out.

  “Why not?”

  “The blood and offal might draw in predators. Cut back toward the stream and find a site with easy access to water.”

  Zoo won the Solo Challenge and she’s the one who chose him; shouldn’t that make her the leader? And yet she turns away and does exactly as he says. Before viewers see her walk off, they’ll see a clip from that night’s confessional. “Cooper is obviously very experienced,” she says, adjusting her glasses. Sweat has plastered a clump of hair to her forehead, and countless flyaways frame her face. “There’s no way I’d be in the lead right now without him. Plus, I think he’s just a bit of a stoic. No wasted movement, no wasted words, you know? I admire that, I could stand to be more like that. I’ve already learned a lot from him. If my choice is between keeping my mouth shut, doing what he says, and learning more, or”—she briefly employs air quotes—“ ‘standing up for myself,’ you better believe I’m going to keep my mouth shut.” She laughs. “Which doesn’t come easy.”

  Tracker makes his first cut at eye level, approximately an inch away from the doe’s anus. He saws a circle, then with his free hand pulls out the rectum, which he ties shut with a piece of string from inside the bucket. Off camera, the Expert has appeared. He was politely rebuffed upon offering advice, and sees now that Tracker indeed does not need his help. He stays and watches, however, since he’s being paid to be here and the next team isn’t yet close.

  Tracker ties off the doe’s urethra, then cuts a long line through her hide, end-to-end. Before he digs out the first organ, his cameraman prods him to speak with “You’ve got to narrate some of this, buddy.”

  Tracker pauses, his knife pressing up on the doe’s skin from her insides. “You need to be careful not to contaminate the meat,” he says, resuming his work. “That’s why I tied off the anus and urethra and that’s why I was so careful to avoid piercing the stomach. Now I’m going to sever the animal’s windpipe.” Tracker crouches by the doe’s head and reaches deep inside. When he withdraws his hands, they’re thickly red and holding not only a windpipe, but the deer’s heart and lungs. He drops the organs into the bucket and then pauses and turns to the camera. “Watch this,” he says. He reaches back into the bucket and pulls out the pink lungs, which hang limply from his hands. Then he lifts the severed windpipe to his lips and blows into it. Nearly every of the millions of viewers who watch this moment will recoil as the lungs inflate, quickly and hugely, like balloons. Balloons that curve into angularity and are netted with tiny blood vessels. Tracker pinches the windpipe closed and holds the inflated lungs away from his body. There is blood on his lips and his torso is eclipsed by the two pink lobes, which looked so small a moment ago. It is immediately clear that deer lungs could never fit inside a human rib cage.

  Tracker lets the lungs deflate, then stands still for a moment, thinking about when he first saw someone do what he just did. He was eighteen, taking a three-week wilderness survival course after graduating from high school. His eight-person group had just slaughtered and skinned a ram under the guidance of their instructor, who then took the lead in gutting, narrating her actions as she made them. Then, with utter nonchalance, the tiny, athletic, black-haired white woman lifted the lungs to her mouth and blew. That was the moment when everything changed for Tracker, when he knew: We’re all meat. Before that trip, he was on course for a very different life; he had vague thoughts about becoming an accountant or maybe going into IT. But a combination of having consumed fewer than one thousand calories over the previous four days, physical exhaustion, and realizing his own mortality made him determined to change all that. And though it would take him years to obtain proficiency, he fulfilled the ultimate human dream of figuring out exactly who he was meant to be. Unfortunately for Tracker, who he’s meant to be isn’t paid well and he has a cancer-ridden mother to care for. Staggering hospital bills have brought him here; this is his because that will never be shared. He turns back to the hanging carcass and carefully withdraws its bulging stomach.

  Black Doctor and Banker reach the box. They choose the duck. “It’s like chicken, but richer,” says Banker.

  “I know what duck tastes like,” Black Doctor replies.

  They follow the direction indicated on the back of their token and find a mallard hanging from a tree. Black Doctor takes the lead in plucking and gutting the bird; he may not have a surgeon’s hands, but he dissected a cadaver in medical school. Between that long-ago experience and the Expert’s off-camera guidance, he does just fine.

  Tracker walks into Zoo’s small camp carrying the bucket and the cast-iron skillet. His hands and wrists are covered in drying blood, which lends his dark skin a matte coating but is otherwise hard to distinguish—until his palms are exposed. Normally a soft peach color, his red-brown palms cry of slaughter. Zoo is tending their fire and is unfazed. But she has a thought: If Tracker were white, would the starker blood-to-skin-color contrast bother her more? She suspects that it might.

  “How’d it go?” she asks.

  “We have tenderloin for dinner,” Tracker replies.

  “Awesome.” Zoo takes the heavy skillet and turns back to the fire.
“I’ll start cooking if you want to clean up. I—”

  “Thank you,” says Tracker.

  A jolt like electricity runs through Zoo. She pauses, skillet in hand, and listens as Tracker walks away.

  When he returns from the stream, Tracker’s hands are clean and his lips loose. “There are a couple of things you should know about tracking,” he says. The meat sizzles in the pan, crisping in a thick layer of fat that Zoo melted like butter. “The first is that you need to start with the big picture. Don’t look for a footprint, look for a trail. It’s easy to get lost at the micro level when all you need to do is take a step back. An animal or person moving through the woods might not always leave a track, but they’ll always leave a trail. Overturned leaves, snapped branches—things like that. Anything recently disturbed will have a different color or texture from what’s around it. You need to train your eye to look for these macro differences. For example, scan where I came from. Can you see my path?”

  Zoo turns to look. She’s squinting.

  Tracker admits via confessional, “I’ve had many great teachers in my life. I’m honoring them by helping her. Besides, even if she gets better, she’ll never match me. Not in time to win.” Zoo’s husband will watch this scene and think, She’s done it again, eased some crotchety bastard out of his shell. He will marvel, as he has marveled before, at how easily she can win over anybody.

  Tracker says to Zoo, “Don’t look, scan. And if you don’t see anything, change your perspective—go high or low. Watch for changes in the light.”

  Zoo widens her eyes and drifts her gaze along the forest. She stands. She remembers approximately where he walked, but is trying not to rely on memory. “There?” she says, pointing. “The leaf litter looks a little different there.”

  “Exactly,” says Tracker. “I walked heavy, to make it clearer. Also, I followed your trail. Most animal trails won’t be so pronounced, but this is a good place to start.”

  “That was you walking heavy?” asks Zoo.

  Tracker surprises them both with a laugh. “The shoes help,” he says, picking up a foot and wiggling his toes. And then—this isn’t why he’s here—his face falls to neutral. “We’re losing light. I’m going to put this in the water to keep it from spoiling.” He takes the bucket, which still contains several pounds of muscle and fat, and turns away.

  “How do you make sure nothing gets it?” asks Zoo.

  Tracker pauses. “I’ll cover it with a flat rock. That should be enough to deter most animals.”

  After he walks off, Zoo says to the camera, “I don’t know what’s gotten into him, but I like it.”

  The next two teams to reach the wooden box do so in close succession. Air Force is the first to see it, and at his urging Biology races ahead before Engineer and Carpenter Chick notice. She chooses the rabbit, then jogs back over to her partner.

  “Turkey?” asks Carpenter Chick seconds later.

  “Yeah,” says Engineer, “that’s got a lot more meat than a squirrel.” The teams separate and find their prey. With guidance, they prepare their meals and shelters. The sun has nearly set.

  The trio is still a mile from the boulder. Exorcist is fuming. He feels unappreciated and spiteful. Waitress is glaring hatred at the back of his head, and Rancher is striding along, wary of the both of them. Anger makes Exorcist careless. He trips over a rock and falls to the ground.

  “Motherfucker!” he yells. The expletive is easily censored, but his rage cannot be. Waitress and Rancher recoil, and many viewers will do the same.

  Exorcist pulls himself up on one knee and waits, head hanging. His shoulders pulse. He can feel his monstrous self trying to break free. He knows he can’t let it. If he does, he’ll lose control, and he’s done terrible things after losing control.

  He used to have a wife. Young love: They married at nineteen. Life did not go as planned, and Exorcist’s inner monster grew fat on disappointment. One night, his wife complained about money and Exorcist lost control. He struck her, hard, with a closed fist, fracturing his fourth metacarpal and knocking his wife out cold. He remembers watching her head snap back, and how her blond hair whipped like a fan, and then her collapsing to the carpet, where she lay, unmoving, among a month’s worth of crumbs and cat hair. Her stillness—he thought she was dead. She came to, and left him that night. The blood vessels in her left eye had burst. The last look she ever gave him haunts him still; it was as though Satan himself was reflected in that bloody eye.

  The producers know nothing about this incident. Exorcist’s ex-wife didn’t press charges, so there was no criminal record for them to find. But at least one person who will watch this moment knows of it; she lived it. The ex-wife will watch Exorcist’s explosive crouch and think, Oh, no. And when Exorcist leaps to his feet, whirls to face Waitress, and sneers, “Stupid bitch,” she will feel Waitress’s fear as her own. “Run, honey,” she will plead, but where her own instincts tend toward flight, Waitress’s are to fight. Waitress rears to slap Exorcist, but Rancher grabs her in a bear hug and pulls her back.

  “Let me go!” Waitress yells, kicking. She’s taller than Rancher; he can barely hold her.

  “You’ll be disqualified,” says Rancher.

  “I don’t care.” Waitress’s face is painted with fury.

  But Exorcist has pulled away. Something has happened that he cannot articulate. He does not want to see his anger reflected, does not want to be the cause of this near-stranger’s fury. Add to this Rancher trying to restrain her; the nobility in that short, simple man. Exorcist calms. He is sorry for his outburst, and though his apology is plain in his eyes, he is too cowardly to speak it.

  Instead he says, “A woman scorned, indeed. Lesson learned,” and walks away.

  His sudden change confuses Waitress, who did not see the apology. She stills, and Rancher lets her go, reddening at the thought of his arms wrapped so tightly around her. He’s pretty sure he brushed a nipple.

  The sun falls and they reach the boulder. The moon is bright; the trio finds their next Clue easily.

  “We can’t track in the dark,” says Rancher.

  “Then what do you think we should do?” asks Waitress.

  “Camp here, start out at first light.”

  “But everyone is ahead of us.”

  Exorcist folds into a seated position and leans against the boulder. He takes off his boots and prods his blister. “They’ll still be ahead of us if we spend all night running around in the dark,” he says. “Only then we’ll be exhausted and will probably have destroyed the tracks we’re supposed to follow.”

  “Fine,” says Waitress. She can’t look at him, the pale bubble bursting from his hairy toe. “So, what, we’ve got to build a shelter?”

  Exorcist slaps the rock behind him. “Bracing a windbreak against this bad boy won’t take a minute.” He hauls himself to his feet with a groan and starts collecting long pieces of driftwood, barefoot.

  Rancher and Waitress exchange a look. “What’s his deal?” asks Waitress.

  “I think he’s just crazy.”

  “Wonderful,” says Waitress. “This’ll be fun.”

  The other groups have all eaten and most of the contestants are asleep, or drifting. Banker’s arms are tucked to his chest inside his jacket. Engineer still wears his glasses and with drooping eyelids watches as moonlight bounces off the inky exoskeleton of a passing beetle. Tracker snores, at his most vocal when sleeping. Beside him, Zoo is curled in his thermal blanket, counting sheep and thumbing the space on her finger where her wedding ring should be. She times the leaps so that Tracker’s rattling breath becomes nothing more than wind rustling wool.

  Only Biology is outside. She sits by a small fire with her arms curled around her legs. She misses her partner and feels very alone. She’s thinking about saying the safety phrase, but only vaguely—without intent. She’s wondering how she would leave, and if she did how long it would be before she could get a mango smoothie.

  “I’d give all the rabbit me
at in the world for a mango smoothie,” she says. “Or a chocolate sundae.” Her body is craving sugar so intensely her head hurts. She takes a sip from her water bottle, wishing that the water had flavor, maybe some bubbles.

  Exorcist, Rancher, and Waitress build their meager shelter and huddle together inside.

  11.

  “My uncle said it was in the water, so he stopped drinking any that wasn’t bottled,” says Brennan. “Mom thought it was terrorists, like an invisible bomb or something.”

  He expects me to respond, but I’m only listening in case there’s a Clue hidden in his tale. He’s been talking about his mother so much, too much. We’re walking. It’s midday and the weather is crisp, increasingly autumnlike. By my imperfect calculations, it must be well into September.

  He grows impatient with my silence. “You were probably lucky, being lost out here for the worst of it. From when I started hearing about it and when the president went on TV, it was only like a day. Then we were all told to stay home, and I heard these rumors about some kids down the street being sick. Day after that they moved us all into the church.”

  I still haven’t had my period. It’s overdue, I think.

  “Aiden was off at school doing this summer program, and Mom, she said he should come home and he said he’d try, but they wouldn’t let him, and then our phones stopped working.”

  I wonder if I’m supposed to know who Aiden is, then I remember that he said something about a brother. That must be Aiden, in which case he’s inconsequential—filler.

  “We were there for a few days,” says Brennan. Plastic bags hang from his hands, filled with soda bottles, candy, and other junk food. He had Cheetos and a bottle of Coke for breakfast. “I was bored, I couldn’t really keep track. Then people started getting sick. I mean, there were a few sick from the beginning, but they kept them separated—in the daycare room, I think. And then there were too many, and they were everywhere, and things were starting to smell really bad because people were puking and stuff.”