The Last One(45)

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.