The Last One Page 19

  Waitress approaches a patch of blueberries. At the edge of the patch she picks a berry and rolls it around in her open palm. “I want to eat this,” she says. “But I don’t know if it’s poisonous. I mean, it looks like a blueberry, but…I better not. I better just look for that bear.” She drops the berry and pushes through the dense, waist-high plants. After a few minutes—seconds—she hears a groan and freezes. It’s just her and her cameraman here; the nearest other contestant is Biology, about fifty feet away. “Was that it?” Waitress whispers, and then she sees it: less than ten feet away, on the far side of a log, a rotund mass of black hair three feet tall and six feet long.

  Waitress starts shaking, and she mutters quickly and softly, “No way, no way, no way…”

  She doesn’t notice that the bear isn’t moving, not to look at her, not to eat the berries inches from its mouth, not even to breathe. A very long ten seconds pass, then the crunch of Biology coming her way shocks Waitress out of her stupor. She pushes through the blueberry bushes and walks up to the mount—it is a real bear, just long dead and expertly preserved—and looks closely at its face, the brownish muzzle, the unblinking glass eyes, the sharp teeth exposed in a mouth that looks ready to roar. And then she notices something around its neck: a single bear claw, dangling on a hide thong. A tiny tab of paper is taped to the thong. It reads: BRING PROOF.

  To the north, Air Force finds the second bear and takes its bear claw necklace for himself. But Waitress beats him back to the host, whose face falls into abject shock upon seeing her with the bear claw. He recovers quickly, at least enough to say, “Well…Congratulations.”

  “It was the berries,” Waitress says later via confessional. “I wasn’t following any trail. I was just wandering around, then I saw the berries and I thought, Don’t bears eat berries? And there it was!”

  Once Air Force returns, the other contestants are recalled with a series of shouts.

  “She found it?” Exorcist exclaims. “No way.”

  Waitress flips him off, a gesture that will be featured but blurred, and Exorcist is soothed because he knows that even though she won a Challenge, he can still get under her skin.

  “Our winners now get these,” says the host, who is holding two identical duffel bags. He hands one each to Waitress and Air Force. The sun is low on the horizon. The contestants all look exhausted, because they are. It has been a long day. The host looks them over gravely, then says, “Good night” and walks away.

  Murmurs of disbelief run through the contestants. “What do we do now?” asks Biology. Banker’s face is blank. “I guess we should build a shelter?” says Zoo. She looks at Tracker and is relieved when he meets her eye.

  Air Force unzips his duffel bag; Waitress notices and does the same. A cameraman moves in close to her, to record the contents. He coughs as he crouches next to her on the rock slick. The cough sounds like there’s sandpaper in his throat. “Hold on,” he chokes out to Waitress. He hawks and spits and then eases into a seated position, breathing heavily. “Just a bit of a cold. Sorry, go on.” His hands are shaking, enough that this footage will be useless; the editor will have to use that of the cameraman leaning over Air Force’s shoulder instead. The items will pop up as bullet points for viewers as they are revealed: two small metal cook pots with foldable handles—identical to the one Rancher obtained in the first Challenge—a bag of powdered vegetable bouillon, a five-pound sack of brown rice, a plastic salt and pepper shaker set, and a spool of fishing line.

  “It’ll get cold up here,” says Tracker. He speaks quietly; only Zoo, Carpenter Chick, and Black Doctor hear him. “We should move off the peak.”

  “One shelter to share?” asks Carpenter Chick.

  Tracker nods, then turns and starts walking away from the rock slick toward a gently sloping wooded area. Zoo and Carpenter Chick follow him.

  Black Doctor turns to the others and hollers, “One shelter tonight, this way!” He waits for Air Force to zip up his bag and stand, then the two walk together into the trees.

  Though it takes the contestants some time to get organized, viewers will next see their shelter halfway built. Carpenter Chick has taken the lead in construction, and this shelter is shaping up to be a beautiful lean-to. It’s positioned seventy-five feet below the crest of the mountain, in a flat area where the rocks have very little moss. “Less moss means less water,” explains Tracker. “So if it rains, we won’t be mired in runoff.” Viewers will next see Tracker approaching Air Force. “I don’t know how long we’ll be here,” he says. “I can’t catch enough to feed everyone with just deadfalls.”

  “You’re planning on feeding everyone?” asks Air Force.

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “I’ll help.”

  By nightfall the group shelter is twelve feet long, with a low sloping roof of cut pine branches. Its frame consists of three Y-shaped branches jammed deep into the earth, each with a hefty support log resting in its nook to form consecutive V’s. A foot of fallen leaves and needles carpet the inside of the shelter, and a roof of similar material covered with the cut pine completes it. Built in two hours with only wild resources, the lean-to looks remarkably professional and appealing.

  Twenty feet from the lean-to there’s a second shelter, little more than a pile of leaves against a rock. Exorcist remembers feeling warm last night, but also cramped. He wants to see the stars tonight. He’s lying atop the shallow duff, ignoring the others and waiting for the sun to go down.

  Waitress sits between the two shelters with her sack of rice, which is lighter now. Two cups of her rice is cooking, along with the same amount from Air Force, split among the five small pots. She was hesitant to share at first, but Air Force’s instantaneous generosity squashed her reluctance; tonight the contestants feast on a thick rice porridge flavored with salt, pepper, bouillon, and several cups of stewed dandelion greens that Biology, Black Doctor, and Engineer gathered while Zoo started the fire and the others collected firewood. Everyone has pitched in tonight, and all will share in the bounty.

  Everyone except Exorcist, who’s been relaxing off on his own for hours. As the others sit around the fire and begin passing around the camping cups, he stands up from his mattress of leaves, stretches, and then comes over and settles between Waitress and Engineer.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” asks Waitress, who is holding one of her cups and a plastic fork given to her by Rancher.

  “I’m starved,” he replies, patting his stomach. “Pass some of that over here.”

  “No way,” says Waitress. Then what viewers will not hear: “You left us, then went to sleep.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” says Exorcist.

  “She ain’t being ridiculous,” Rancher says from across the fire. He’s holding his own cup. “If you want to eat as a team, you gotta be part of the team.”

  Waitress’s animosity doesn’t surprise Exorcist, but Rancher’s agreement does, as do the many nodding heads around the campfire. Briefly, he looks into a camera lens, as though accusing the device of having put the others up to this. Indeed, that’s exactly what he’s doing; he thinks they’re performing—like he is. But the truth is most of the contestants have in this moment forgotten that they’re being recorded. An ancient instinct is kicking in, not so much a survival-of-the-fittest mentality as an unwillingness to carry an able but lazy individual. No one else would have actively stopped Exorcist from eating, but now that Waitress has, the others are all solidly on her side. Guilt flashes through almost everyone, but this doesn’t convince them they are doing anything wrong.

  “I’ll starve,” says Exorcist.

  “The human body can go a month without eating,” says Tracker. He is the one among them who feels no guilt.

  “Go find some grubs,” says Waitress. She takes a bite of rice, then closes her eyes and releases a hum of pleasure.

  Exorcist lunges forward and rips the metal cup out of her hands. Waitress’s eyes pop open and she launches herself at Exo
rcist, sending him tumbling and the rice flying through the air. She slaps at him with all her skinny might. Exorcist covers his face and curls into a ball, weathering the blows. Engineer scurries toward the fray: ineffectual intervention. A second later, Banker yanks Waitress up and away as she screeches, “Let me go!”

  And then Biology is with her, rubbing her arms, soothing. Of the many things she says then, the only phrase that will be played for viewers is “He’s not worth it.” Carpenter Chick stands with Waitress too, glaring at Exorcist. Zoo watches this and thinks, That’s what I’m expected to do—provide comfort. But she won’t allow her gender to define her role. Instead of rushing to soothe Waitress, she pokes a stick into the fire, breaking a glowing mass of wood at the bottom into several distinct orange-and-red-rimmed embers.

  Exorcist is fuming and embarrassed, still on the ground. “She hit me!” he shouts. “Our contracts said you couldn’t hit anyone!”

  One of the cameramen is on his radio. The producer at the other end says, “Jesus, what a day. It’s fine as long as it’s over. And—tell me you got it?” Later, to his off-site counterpart, he’ll add, “At least we can use this. Fucking waivers.”

  Back at the fire, Black Doctor points out, “The contracts only prohibited hitting someone’s head, face, or genitals.”

  Exorcist climbs to his feet and gestures at his own face. “And what do you call this?”

  “Looked to me like she only hit your knees and your arms.”

  “It’s true,” says Air Force. “You had a pretty good defensive fetal going on there.”

  Zoo laughs; Exorcist glares at her.

  “Whatever,” she says. “You brought it on yourself.” Her dismissive tone surprises Engineer, who had expected her to act as a peacemaker. None of the cameramen catch the slightly disappointed look on his face as he glances her way.

  Exorcist throws up his hands and retreats to his meager bedding. The others eat their meal in silence. The segment will end with a series of short confessionals.

  Carpenter Chick, heavily edited: “He deserved it.”

  Banker: “He just took a nap while the rest of us set up camp. I feel a little bad about it, but why should we carry his weight? Besides, it wasn’t my call. I didn’t win the rice. I was thankful to be getting any myself.”

  Waitress: “He’s been needling me for two straight days, and then he steals my food? No f-ing way. I hope he starves.”

  Exorcist: “Every society needs its pariahs; the fact that this is a small society doesn’t change that.” He runs a hand through his greasy red hair, stoking the flames. The second episode of In the Dark will end here, with his promise: “They want me to be their villain? Fine. I’ll be their villain.”

  15.

  Birch Street was a respite—from external nightmares, if not from those spun by my own subconscious. This means only that my next Challenge is pending. As Brennan and I leave the house, leave the neighborhood lined with streets named after trees, I wonder if they’re waiting for some signal from Brennan. Maybe there’s a landmark we’re supposed to reach.

  Mid-morning, we reach it: a neighborhood manipulated in a manner I haven’t seen before. It’s not abandoned—it’s destroyed. Windows are broken, signs bowled over. What I initially think is a very out-of-place boulder resolves into a car smashed against a brick wall. I feel my spine curl and I keep my eyes wide as we pass. What I do see of the car makes me think of high school, when the antidrug club got the local fire department to stage a drunk-driving accident using a wrecked van. Volunteers covered themselves with cornstarch blood and screamed from inside the van as the Jaws of Life gnashed toward them. I remember my friend David crawling from the van’s front door, stumbling to his feet, and then weaving toward the firemen. The front-seat passenger, Laura Rankle, “died.” She was nicer than the average popular girl, and David’s screams as she was pulled, limp, from the vehicle were deeply unsettling. Repeatedly I told myself it wasn’t real. It didn’t help. I did my best to hide my tears from my classmates, only later noticing that most were hiding tears of their own. My dad knew about the stunt; I remember him asking about it at dinner that night. Before I could answer, my mom chimed in with something about how she believed—how she knew—that it would save someone’s life, and that the van had crashed precisely for this purpose. I had been about to say how powerful the experience was, but after her comment I just shrugged and dubbed it overdramatic.

  A few blocks after the smashed car there’s a pileup. The color at the center is distinctive; I don’t need to know the shape to see it’s a school bus. A school bus and a handful of smaller vehicles. As we get close I see a charred prop hanging out the front door of a blackened sedan. For a moment I imagine it has Laura Rankle’s face—not the gaunt, defeated face she grew into after she got pregnant and the baby’s father abandoned her, but the face she had as a girl.

  “Mae?” says Brennan. “What’s wrong?”

  It’s an absurd question, designed to get me talking. I almost tell him to shut up, and then I think that if I give them a good story, maybe they’ll leave me alone. Maybe if I talk the Challenge will end. So I tell him. I tell him all about Laura Rankle and David Moreau. About fake blood and twisted metal, the awful amalgamation of pretend tragedy and the remnants of the real thing. “Afterward, when one of the firemen helped Laura out of the ambulance and she was smiling this nervous smile and she was fine—it was surreal,” I say. We take a short detour around an overturned shopping cart and I continue, “It felt real enough to give me this sense of what if that was hard to shake.”

  I look at Brennan. “Weird,” he says.

  The first fully true thing I’ve told him, and all he can say is “Weird.” I suppose that’s what I get for treating him like a person instead of the prop that he is. My own fault.

  Maybe it’s my eyesight, but even though we’re getting close to the bus, it still seems very distant. As I walk toward it, I find I don’t care about the bus. I don’t care about what’s inside the bus. Because this isn’t my world. This isn’t real.

  When I was growing up, my teachers and guidance counselor talked about “the real world” as if it were a distinct existence, something separate from school. Same thing in college, though I was living on my own in a city of eight million people. I never understood that. What is the real world if it’s not the world one exists in? How is being a child less real than being an adult? I remember prepping dinner one night of group camp: Amy working the tip of her knife into a rabbit’s naked shoulder, separating the limb. The care she took, the time, dividing the meat equally among our cooking pots. “I thought it would be different here,” she said. “I thought…” Her hesitation, I thought it was because her knife struck bone. “But turns out it’s no less fucked up than the real world.” This didn’t seem like such a strange thing to say, then. Those Challenges had frames: beginnings and endings that were easy to identify, a man shouting “Go!” and “Stop!” I miss that. Now it’s like everything is fake and real at the same time. The world in which I move is constructed, manipulated and deceptive, but then there’s that plane, and the trees, and squirrels. Rain. My maybe-late period. Things too big and too small to control, contributing and conflicting all at once. This empty world they’ve made is filled with contradiction.

  We’ve reached the bus. My skin prickles. The bus’s yellow front bleeds into the building’s gray, but I think there’s room to pass behind. There has to be.

  “Mae, let’s go around,” says Brennan.

  “I am going around.”

  “Around the block, Mae.”

  I know that’s what he meant. I walk toward the back of the bus.

  “Mae, please—don’t you see them?”

  He’s talking about the props spilling from the bus’s rear emergency exit. I see five or six, and there are probably more inside. I smell them too, like the others but with charcoal.

  I look at Brennan. He’s shaking, overdoing it. My high school friends were more convincing.
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  “Just get it over with,” I say. I cram my hand into my pocket, rub my glasses lens, and walk.

  Brennan follows in silence. These props are swollen and bursting, blackened with rot. A pile of newspapers and trash has coalesced like a snowdrift along the bus’s rear tire. I step on a paper bag and something mushes beneath my boot. I feel a fleshy pop and something thin, long and hard against my arch.

  It’s nothing. Don’t look.

  “Mae, I can’t do it.”

  I’m past the bus. I don’t want to turn around.

  “Mae, I can’t.” His voice has heightened in pitch. I force myself to turn back. I look directly at Brennan, tunneling my vision. He’s a brown and red blur, recognizable as human, but barely. “Mae, please.”

  He’s just another obstacle, another Challenge. A recording device creating drama.

  “Cut it out,” I say.

  “But I—” he interrupts himself with a sob. I can’t see his face, but I’ve seen him cry so many times already. I know how his mouth twists, how his nose leaks. I don’t need to see it again to know what it looks like.

  Leave him.

  I can’t.

  You don’t want to.

  They won’t let me. They want him with me. He needs to be with me.

  “You can do it, Brennan,” I say. I force softness into my tone and use his name because names seem to calm him. He calls me Mae with nearly every breath, so much so that I’m almost beginning to feel as though it’s my real name. Real. There it is again. When the unreal outweighs the real, which is true? I don’t want to know. “They can’t hurt you. Just come quick and we’ll get out of here.”

  He nods. I imagine that he’s biting his lip, as he tends to do.

  “We’re only a few days away,” I say. “We’ll be there in no time.”

  I see his arm move toward his face, and then he’s getting bigger, clearer, approaching. The black and white stripes of the pack hugging his shoulders. A moment later he’s at my side and I can see that yes, he’s crying. He’s also pinching his nostrils shut with his thumb and forefinger.