The Last One (30 page)

Brennan is refilling his plate. I reach over and drizzle syrup over his portion too. He looks at me, surprised—about my sharing or the syrup itself, I don’t know. “Trust me,” I say, and then I think: hot chocolate. I want hot chocolate next. I stand, glancing at the lentil stew and giving it a stir. The quinoa hasn’t popped yet. I head back to the aisles and return with a box of Swiss Miss, a teakettle, and another gallon jug of water. I tear the packaging off the kettle, fill it, and set it on the grill. I forgot to get cups, though. I turn back toward the aisles.

Bang!

The violent metallic sound rings out from the front of the store. I turn, harried. I don’t see anything in the muddled dark where the cash registers rest.
Bang,
again, like thunder, and I’m frozen. Brennan appears beside me. Only when I hear the sound a third time am I able to puzzle out the source. Something—someone—is outside, beating on the metal shutters.

18.

Zoo’s group has been walking downstream for half a mile, searching for where their target left the water.

“You think we missed it?” asks Rancher.

“Probably,” says Zoo. “I mean, why would he stay in the water this long? And we should have seen another sign by now if he did. Right?”

“How much time do we have left?” asks Waitress.

Zoo looks toward the sun. She’s been told one can estimate the time by how far the sun is from the horizon, but that’s as much as she knows. She hazards a guess. “An hour?” The correct answer is: seventy-six minutes. They have seventy-six minutes left to find Timothy, and almost two miles to go.

They decide to double back. Approaching from a new angle, Rancher sees it—a snapped branch with a red smear, from where Timothy pulled himself onto a slightly raised bank and reentered the woods. Zoo and Waitress are on the opposite side of the stream from Rancher. They make their way over, balancing on the rocks. Rancher helps Zoo hop the last few steps, then reaches out for Waitress. Before she can take his hand, her left foot slips into the ankle-high water.

“Dammit,” she says. A moment later she’s back on land, shaking out her wet foot. She sits on a rock and unties her shoe.

“What are you doing?” asks Zoo.

“I can’t walk like this.” Waitress slips off her shoe, then her soaked cotton sock, which is yellowed and ringed with brown. She wriggles her toes; her green nail polish glints in the sun. She wrings out her sock. “Do we have time to let it dry?” she asks. Zoo and Rancher exchange a look. “Guess not.” Waitress grimaces as she pulls on the damp sock, followed by her sneaker. She stands and her frown deepens. “Wet feet are the
worst.
”

“We’re probably almost there,” says Zoo. “You won’t have to deal with it for long.” Her tone is consoling, but she’s anxious to keep moving. It’s harder for her to smile at Waitress than it used to be.

“I bet Cooper’s group found their guy hours ago,” says Waitress, following her teammates into the woods.

“Emery didn’t say order mattered,” Rancher replies over his shoulder. “Just that we get there before sunset.”

Zoo calls back to them both, “Yeah, I think we—”

“Goddammit!” shouts Waitress. Rancher and Zoo turn to find her hopping on her wet foot and muttering additional profanities. Their cameraman catches disdain painted across Zoo’s face, but the editor won’t use the shot.

“What happened?” asks Zoo.

“I think I broke my toe.” Waitress sits on the ground, tears in her eyes, her top lip pinched tightly between her teeth. She reaches for her dry foot and cradles it in her hands.

“What did you trip over?” Zoo sees twigs and some small rocks, but nothing hard or heavy enough to cause Waitress’s ear-splitting pain.

“I don’t know, but it hurt.” The camera saw: a root popping up from the earth and obscured by leaves. “My feet are fucked,” says Waitress.

Rancher kneels by her. “Take off your shoe, let’s have a look.”

An eighth-inch piece of Waitress’s big toenail is cracked, jutting upward. Blood wells from the wound, but Waitress wiggles the toe just fine. “That ain’t so bad,” says Rancher. “A Band-Aid ought to do it.”

Waitress is crying now, quietly but openly. She fumbles with her pack and pulls out her first-aid kit. Rancher pinches a piece of gauze around her toe until the bleeding stops, then deftly smears the toenail with antibiotic ointment and wraps it in a Band-Aid. He relaxes as he tends to Waitress, babying her as he would his daughter.

Zoo watches his careful tending and Waitress’s wet eyes. “Stubbed toes suck,” she says, just to say something. Once the toe is bandaged and Waitress makes no move to put her shoe back on, Zoo’s limited sympathy fades to nothing.

Waitress is feeling more than the pain of her stubbed toe. She’s feeling the frustration of her tired muscles, her body’s desperate need for caffeine and sugar, the dampness of her left foot like her spirits themselves have been soaked through. And now that she’s crying, she can’t seem to stop. “Sorry.” She sniffles. “I just need a minute.”

Most viewers will not understand why it is Rancher, not Zoo, comforting her. That Zoo stayed away that night at the campfire was excusable—there were two other women already handling Waitress—but now? Isn’t Zoo the one whose chromosomes cry out an unavoidable need to soothe and comfort? Isn’t Zoo the one biologically adapted to suckle young? Why isn’t she the one holding Waitress’s trembling hand?

The explanation most viewers will jump to is as common an assumption as maternal instinct: female jealousy. Waitress is younger, skinnier, and prettier, after all. But Zoo doesn’t care that Waitress is pretty, or skinny, or young. All she cares about is that she’s delaying their team. She would be equally annoyed at a man doing the same.

The minutes tick by as Waitress struggles to stop crying. She’s trying, really trying, but her body defies her will, and Rancher’s fatherly hand on her back only makes matters worse. She wants him to ignore her, so she can pull herself together. Thirteen minutes pass between Waitress stubbing her toe and being ready to move. The editor will portray the delay in less than a minute, but will cut in images of the setting sun to make it seem like she sat there for much longer, like she cried for hours.

The rest of the trail is clear; the trio soon emerges from the trees twenty feet from where Tracker’s group did earlier. The skyline is deeply flushed. A brown-haired white man wearing a red fleece stands at the edge of the cliff with one hand pressed to his forehead.

“That’s him,” says Zoo. “We made it.”

“Timothy!” calls Rancher.

The man turns toward them. Red runs down his face. His whole body wavers, and then he falls backward, tumbling over the side of the cliff.

Waitress screams and Rancher runs forward. Zoo stares dumbly. She sees the rope that follows the man over the cliff, watches it go taut. She knows that what she’s watching is staged, that the man did not fall. She also knows that her team just lost. Her jaw quakes with frustration.

For a long moment, the only sound is Waitress’s sniffling, the only movement her wiping her nose with her wrist. Then Rancher says, “Do we have to…verify that it’s him?” Zoo and Waitress stare at him, then Zoo says, “Yes.”

Rancher leads the way down a short switchback. The actor who played Timothy Hamm is long gone. In his place, a gussied-up dummy lies at the base of the cliff, its limbs twisted, a parody of death. The dummy is dressed as the actor was and surrounded by a pool of liquid crimson. It’s facedown and wearing a wig, which is split at the side and leaking pink jelly. Latex skin is adorned with gross wounds and a plaster bone juts through the side of one knee.

Waitress’s gentle tears explode into wild crying panic. Zoo looks up and thinks, even if the man had fallen for real, the drop isn’t far enough to cause this much damage. Rancher turns away from them both, and from the bloody dummy, crouching with hands on knees. Zoo watches him as he removes his hat and says, “Lord, hear our—”

Zoo’s face is drawn, her lip shaking just slightly. Neither of her teammates is doing what needs to be done, so she approaches. She steels herself as best she can, telling herself it doesn’t look real, it isn’t real. “It’s just a prop,” she whispers, inching closer. Her whole body is shaking now as she reaches toward the artificial corpse. She searches the fleece pockets first—empty. Then she sees the square lump in the dummy’s back pocket. She’s trying to stay outside the red pool, but she can’t reach. She edges her foot closer, into the red. She sneaks her fingers into the pocket and grabs the wallet, then steps quickly away. Waitress is still crying. Zoo opens the wallet and sees a driver’s license: Timothy Hamm.

“How could you?” says Waitress. It takes Zoo a moment to realize she’s talking to her.

“Excuse me?” she asks, turning.

“How could you get so close?” asks Waitress. Her voice is a mire of fear and awe, but there is something else in it—at least to Zoo’s ear. Disappointment. Accusation?

“This happened because of you,” Zoo says. Her voice is tight, angry, and not very loud. “You and your stubbed toe, whining and delaying like you’re the only one who’s ever felt pain.”

Waitress is shocked, as are Rancher and the cameraman. The producers will be shocked too, and the editor, who will work so hard to explain away this moment. But there is at least one viewer who won’t be shocked: Zoo’s husband. He knows this secret competitive side of her, her impatience for wallowing and delay. He also knows how fear can turn her mean.

Waitress knows only that she is being attacked. “You’re crazy,” she says. “I only stopped for like a minute. This isn’t my fault.”

“A minute?” says Zoo, furious and quiet. “By your reckoning we’ve been in these woods what, then, an hour? If that was a minute, I’ll quit right now.
You
ought to quit; you’ll never win, and you’d spare those of us who actually try from being dragged down with you, you fucking bimbo.”

She stares down Waitress, waiting for a retort that isn’t coming, then turns and stalks off into the trees. Waitress and Rancher watch her go, wide-eyed. The cameraman is grinning. He’s so happy he forgets the discomfort that’s been nipping the lining of his belly all day. When Zoo returns a few minutes later, he hopes for more.

“I’m sorry,” says Zoo. “I didn’t mean to…”

Waitress won’t meet her eyes.

But that night while the second episode of
In the Dark
airs and viewers gasp or laugh as Waitress tackles Exorcist over a pot of rice, Waitress sits with a cameraman and responds to Zoo via confessional: “There’s something messed up about being so nice all the time, all smiles and helpfulness, then exploding like that. I don’t really care about what she said, I’ve been called a lot worse than a bimbo, but I’m not going to be trusting
her
again. I mean, at least Randy’s up-front about being ass crazy. You know what you’re going to get with him. I’d rather deal with that than someone so fake.”

Zoo’s eyes are bloodshot behind her lenses, the sky above her full dark. “What can I say?” she asks the camera. “You guys got to me and I took it out on her. Yeah, I do think she’s the reason we lost, but I shouldn’t have…I just shouldn’t have.” She sighs and glances toward the stars. “It’s been what, a little over a week? If this is a sign of the direction this whole thing is moving in, I’m…well, I’m nervous.” She looks back to the camera. “But you know what? It’s not real. I know I’m not supposed to say that and you’ll just edit it out, but that guy jumping off the cliff, and that prop at the bottom? It’s all just part of the game. As long as I keep that in mind, I’ll be fine, no matter how twisted things get. And if everyone watching this learns that I can be a jerk sometimes, well, I can handle that too.”

She stands. The final shot of the show’s third episode will be of her walking away, returning to a fire viewers will not have seen her build. This is Zoo’s final confessional.

19.

Brennan whispers, “Who is it?”

“How should I know?” I say. My fear has thickened to anger. I should have known better than to relax—I
did
know better—and now they have another clip, another moment I will never be able to live down. What’s worse, I don’t know what to do next.

What do they
want
me to do? Answer the knock. It was a knock, after all.

“Should we leave?” asks Brennan.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “It’s dark out. And I don’t think they’ve found the window, otherwise they wouldn’t be knocking on the shutter.” I curse myself even as I say this; what better sound bite could I have given them? They’ll play it, then immediately cut to someone standing under that window, looking up.

“How do they know we’re here, Mae?”

“I don’t know, we weren’t being quiet. And maybe some smoke got out.” No, they were told. They were in a van playing pinochle as the sun went down, waiting for their moment.

“What do we do?” Brennan asks. All he has are questions.

“Let’s pack up,” I tell him, because I’m supposed to play along, aren’t I? “Quietly. Let’s wait this out and be ready to move.”

He nods and we both turn back to the fire and our packs. I’m shoving potatoes and onions into mine when the crashing knock sounds again. This time, I think I also hear a voice. I look toward the front of the store, again. I don’t see anything, again. Next thing I know, I’m walking toward the registers.

An urgent whisper from behind, “Mae!”

“Shh,” I tell him. “I want to hear what they’re saying.”

Funny, I keep saying—and thinking—
they.
It seems indisputable that there’s more than one person outside. Maybe because the sound is so large, so intrusive.

I creep to the front of the store and through a shadowy checkout aisle. As I reach the bagging area, there’s another
bang.
I sense the metal shutters shimmying with contact. A voice, masculine and muddled. The only word I’m certain I hear is “open.” Whoever they are, they want in.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not
they,
but
he.
Someone I know. Cooper in another moment of
enough.
Julio, seeking company after an age alone. The Asian kid, hardened by experience.