The Last One(76)

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.