The Last One(54)

“Someone must be hurt,” says Engineer.

They all—save Tracker, who is still off on his own—look to the host, who shrugs. The on-site producer soon comes over and takes the host aside. The contestants watch their conversation, the bobbing heads and thoughtful hand gestures, but are unable to make much sense of it.

“No one seems to be panicking,” says Zoo. “Whatever happened can’t be that bad.”

“I bet it was that rock,” says Biology.

“What rock?” asks Engineer, and they tell him about the Styrofoam boulders. “Wow,” he says, glancing at Zoo. He’s glad she’s not hurt. He thinks he will enjoy watching how she reacted to the boulder, later, once he’s home—his roommate promised to DVR the show for him.

Speculation fades to bored silence. Tracker returns and takes a silent seat next to Zoo. Then Exorcist crests the mountaintop, strutting toward the group. The others wait for Rancher and Waitress to appear. When they don’t—the EMT, the wait, and now this—assumptions are made.

Air Force stands, ready to take action. The others start talking over one another, asking questions. Tracker listens and watches the woods.

Exorcist basks in the attention. “It was wild,” he tells them. “This giant rock came rolling out of nowhere. I jumped out of the way, but it was so fast—” He pauses, shakes his head. Biology puts a kind hand on his shoulder. “It got our cameraman.”

Gasps. Then, “How bad is he hurt?” Air Force is the one to ask it, but they all want to know.

“Bad. Real bad.”

The host walks closer, intrigued.

Unease thrums through the contestants.

“I should go help,” says Black Doctor.

“If you go back down you forfeit second place,” the host tells him.

“This man nearly gets killed and you just leave him?” says Carpenter Chick to Exorcist. She turns to the host. “And this is okay?”

The host shrugs. “You get ranked by when the last member of your team finishes, and they were in last, so I don’t see that it matters.”

Carpenter Chick stares at him.

And Zoo thinks, It does matter. Because if Exorcist could leave them, then Tracker could have left her and now he knows it. She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t want to see him weighing whether finishing first was worth the burden of her. But Tracker is thinking instead about the injured man, about what injured him.

Below, the EMT reaches the cameraman and checks him over. His coccyx isn’t broken, only bruised. He also has a sprained wrist and a few smaller contusions and scrapes; his injuries are light, more the result of his impact with the earth than his impact with the boulder, whose momentum was already largely dissipated by the time they met. The EMT opts to help him to the base of the trailhead; his injuries don’t merit an airlift. The two men slink down the trail as the newly arrived cameraman asks Waitress and Rancher to gather around him.

“They don’t know how they’re going to portray this,” he says. “If at all. So for now don’t talk about it, okay? If they decide to use it, we’ll get your reactions later.”

That night the decision will be passed down from on high: Get the cameraman to sign a waiver. His likeness can’t be used without this explicit permission, a contractual concession to prove he and his brethren weren’t being manipulated. That they were on the in-the-know side of the production. The cameraman won’t sign, though. He doesn’t want to be known for freezing. The producers will grumble, but there’s nothing they can do. In the world of the show, the incident never happens. Nor does its aftermath on the mountaintop. Rancher will be shown scrambling out of the boulder’s path, and then footage of the previous boulder rolling to a stop, followed by a commercial break, after which Rancher and Waitress will join the others. Arrivals are stitched together; if Exorcist finished the Challenge before his teammates, it was only by seconds.

The host calls out a last-place welcome and Exorcist bounds over to sling his arms across his teammates’ shoulders. “Couldn’t stay away, could you?” he says to Waitress, ruffling her hair.

She recoils. “Can I please be on a different team?” she asks the host.

“Yes.”

Waitress stares. “Really?”

The host gestures to where the other contestants are seated. “But first, have a seat.” Waitress, Rancher, and Exorcist squeeze in so all eleven contestants are clustered together on the exposed rock face. Several interns and the producer appear, the former rushing about as the latter alternates between conferring and shouting orders. An intern hands the host a mirror. Rancher fields questions, answers them honestly.

“Tailbone?” asks Air Force. “He made it sound like the guy was dying.”

Waitress wonders about her new team, then notices additional cameramen approaching, covering the group from all angles. “Another Challenge?” she asks. “Don’t we get to rest?”

“Not when you’re last,” the host tells her, checking his teeth.

Waitress is about to protest that their tardiness isn’t her fault, that she shouldn’t be penalized, but she squelches the instinct as she realizes that though she’s not responsible for their cameraman being injured, her team’s position is in large part her fault. Either Rancher or Exorcist could have caught her mistake, but neither did, and it’s still her mistake.