The Last One (25 page)

“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.

“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.

“Let’s go,” I say.

Within minutes, we clear the worst of the destruction. We’ve returned to simple desolation. All that work, all that money, and all we had to do was walk by a bus. Not that it was easy, but their wastefulness irks me.

“Mae?” asks Brennan. “Why don’t we take the highway?”

His question rests atop my lingering unease. It’s like he’s trying to get me to break the rules.

“No driving,” I say.

“Oh.” A beat of silence, then, “What about to walk on? It’s gotta be quicker than this.” Is this a Clue? Have they closed down the highways too? That’s big. Too big. I don’t believe him. “There’s a sign for it right there,” he says. “It’s close.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I can’t answer; I don’t know the answer.

“Mae, why not?”

I keep walking.

“Mae?”

The name burns through me.

“Mae?”

I can feel his fingers crawling through the air, approaching my arm.

“What did I say about touching me?” My voice shudders with all that I’m keeping inside.

He draws back, sputtering an apology. For a moment it seems that he’s let his question pass. Then he says, “So, the highway?”

“No, Brennan.” My frustration is building, turning to anger. “We’re not taking the highway.”

“Why not, Mae?”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Why?”

“And stop saying, ‘why.’ ”

Agitation speeds my steps. Why is he challenging me like this? Why doesn’t he have any regard for the rules of the game?

Why?

You know why.

I grasp my glasses lens, tight. My thumb’s callus catches as I rub. I remember all Brennan has said about quarantine and illness. I remember the flyer, a house filled with blue, so much blue, as blue as the summer sky and just as clear. I remember the teddy bear, watching me.

If I allow myself to doubt, I’ll be lost. I can’t doubt. I don’t. It all makes sense. Metal and fur, a drone far above. He’s a cog like everything else. Like me. His rules are just different.

I’m walking carelessly, faster than I should be. My foot catches on nothing; I stumble. Brennan reaches out to steady me, but I pull away.

“Mae,” he says.

“I’m fine.” I set my blurred gaze to the ground, start walking again.

“Mae, what’s that?”

He’s looking ahead. I try to see what he’s seeing, but the horizon is a fuzzed mass. I thumb my glasses lens, harder, creating heat. “What’s what?” I ask.

Brennan looks at me. His eyes are huge. He looks terrified. I feel my chest tighten.

Whatever’s up there, it’s not real.

But even if it’s not, it is, and contradictions can be dangerous. Remember the fine print. Remember the coyote. Teeth and gears and blood and fear. The doll’s pursed lips crying for Mama.

I pull the lens from my pocket and wipe it on my shirt. I close my left eye, hold the lens up to my right.

Suddenly, the trees have leaves. Crisp, singular leaves. The guardrail to my left has dings and dents and dots of rust. There are lines of white paint edging the road, faint but there, and a squashed frog has dried to jerky not three feet from where I stand. How much subtlety have I missed since my glasses broke? How much roadkill?

I look at Brennan. He has freckles, and a small scab on his cheek.

I look away, look ahead.

A fallen tree blocks the road. A white sheet is tied into the branches so that it falls flat like a sign. There’s writing on the sign, but it’s too far away to read, even with the lens to my eye. Another Clue, finally. I march forward.

“Mae, wait,” says Brennan.

“Can you see what it says?” I ask.

“No, but—”

“Then come on.” I open my left eye; clarity and ambiguity mingle in my vision, and I weave slightly, adjusting. Within seconds I can begin to make out the letters on the sign, the shapes of the words. There are two lines. The first is two words, maybe three; the second line is longer, giving the overall text a plateau shape. Runs in the paint further confuse the letters, but after a few more steps I can decipher the first word: NO.

I feel as though I’ve just scored a point. I read a word; I’m winning this Challenge.

“Mae…”

I want to figure out the message before I get too close, just to say I did. The second word starts with a
T.
I bet the word is “trespassing.” A sinuous middle increases my confidence. The second line is harder. A V-word to start. “Violators,” must be.

Brennan grabs my arm. “Mae, stop,” he says, frantic.

And then the text clicks into place and I read the full message:

NO TRESPASSING.

VIOLATORS WILL BE GUTTED.

“Gutted?” I say, lowering the lens. “That’s a bit much.” And yet I feel my body constricting, wanting to hide. I can barely remember how it feels to be held by someone I love, but I have no trouble imagining the sensation of a blade ripping into my abdomen. The fire, a moment of frozen time, then spilling outward. I imagine steam rising as my warm guts hit the cool air. Then I imagine myself as the one doing the gutting.

“Let’s go,” says Brennan, nodding back the way we came.

The only way out of a Challenge is to say the words, to quit.

“We’ll go around, Mae.”

Gutted,
I think. The sign is so extreme, so ridiculous. It’s like the flyer, meant for the viewing audience, not for me.

With the thought, a sense of extreme unimportance overwhelms me. This show isn’t about me. It’s not about the other contestants. It’s about the world we’ve entered. We’re bit players, our purpose one of entertainment, not enlightenment. I’ve been thinking about this whole experience the wrong way—I’m not here because I’m interesting or because I’m scared of having kids, I’m simply an accent on their creation. No one cares if I make it to the end. All they care about is that the viewers watch to the end.

I put the lens back into my pocket and stride forward.

“Mae!”

This is the game I agreed to play.

“Don’t!” His hand is on my arm again, but he’s not pulling. “Please.”

Yes, I think. This feels right. I bet Cooper is on the other side of that sign, waiting for me. Maybe one of the others. Probably one of the others. Complication comes in threes: love triangles, third wheels, the trinity.

I’m close enough now that I can read the sign without my lens; knowing what it says helps. Brennan is still with me, so I must be going the right way, no matter what he says. Will Cooper have a shadow too? A pouty white girl? Maybe the Asian kid—what
was
his name?—will be the third; that’d be fitting, a nice TV-friendly diversity. Or Randy, for a dash of drama? I doubt there will be another woman. There’s no way Heather’s made it this far, and Sofia—well, Sofia’s a possibility.

I reach the downed tree. I’m standing next to the banner. Is this a starting line or a finishing line? I don’t know, but I know it’s something. I reach forward. Touching the tree is going to be a trigger. For what, I don’t know. Bells and whistles, maybe, or flashing lights.

My hand slips into the blur, finds a solid branch.

Sirens don’t erupt. Signal flares don’t shoot into the sky. The earth doesn’t shake. The woods are unchanged.

Disappointment thrums through me. I was so certain this moment mattered.

It’s not the first time I’ve been wrong.

I climb over the tree, then take out my lens and scan the road ahead. It’s clear. Brennan hops down next to me on the pavement.

“Well,” I say. “We still have our guts.”

“Shh,” he whispers. He’s curled like a thief. “I heard about this kind of thing.”

I didn’t listen closely to his story, but I’m pretty sure this is a contradiction. “I thought you didn’t see anyone after leaving your church.” I speak at a normal volume and he shushes me again. “Fine,” I whisper.

“I met a few, at first,” he tells me. “They were always sick.”

That’s a fair revision, I think. And I have to admit, his worry is contagious. Are we about to meet my marauders? I creep forward and keep my lens in my palm, ready. As we advance, Brennan’s gaze darts from side to side.

I wonder how I’m being portrayed now. I know what my role was when we started. I was the earnest animal lover, always cheerful and up for a Challenge. But now? Will they cast me as off my rocker? Probably not; that’s Randy’s role, with his stupid gold cross and his tales of possessed toddlers. But whoever I am now, I’m no longer who I was.

I wonder if I can even do it anymore, be that person grinning until her cheeks ache. It was exhausting, as exhausting as this endless trekking, in its own way.

Give it a try.

Well, why not?

I look at Brennan and smile. I summon my most chipper voice and say, “Some weather we’re having, huh?” My stomach turns; being cheerful hurts.

He just looks at me, eyebrows raised. I drop the painful smile and look away. What if I can never be that person again? Not the exaggeration of myself I put on for the show, but the person I really was. The person I worked so hard to become after leaving my mother’s sour home. I hate the idea of being this miserable for the rest of my life. But I’ll readjust. Once this is over. I have to. My husband will help. As soon as I see him again, all this misery will be banished. This experience will become what it was meant to be—one last adventure. A story to tell. We’ll adopt the wacky-looking greyhound of our dreams, toss our condom supply in the trash, make a small family. I’ll do it, even if I’m not ready, because you can’t be ready for everything and sometimes overthinking a challenge makes overcoming it impossible and I am not my mother. Soon these hardships will be far enough in the past that I’ll be able to pretend I had fun here. Or maybe being pregnant will be so awful this will seem like a vacation. I read a book before I left that makes that seem possible, with its talk of grape-sized hemorrhoids and crusty gum growths.