The Last One(87)

As Engineer and Zoo pack their new supplies, Rancher, Air Force, Biology, and Banker set off on their separate paths. Waitress looks at her map and bites her lip—unconsciously. She’s terrified. Exorcist sees this. He’s still a little rattled himself, and for the first time he approaches her with kindness. “You’ll be fine,” he says.

“I know,” she snaps.

Exorcist’s anger flares. “Or maybe you won’t be. Maybe you’ll starve, or fall down a hole. No loss either way.” He gives her one last sneer, then backtracks down the trail toward where the group spent the night.

Engineer pauses at Waitress’s side before following Exorcist. “Good luck,” he says. Waitress returns his honest smile.

Waitress takes a deep breath. “You can do this,” she says. Zoo watches her go, then follows her own map into the woods to the east.

The contestants dribble into their campsites—sparse patches of forest or field marked only by a bow-drill kit in each contestant’s color—and settle in with varying degrees of comfort. Zoo tosses the bow drill aside, uses her fire starter, and dines on plain pasta. “It’s nice to be alone,” she says. Engineer succeeds in bowing another coal and also eats hot food, though he cooks his in a leaf-lined hole in the ground. “Whatever works,” he says. He drapes the thermal blanket over his shoulders as he eats. He’s soon shivering anyway.

Waitress builds a shallow shelter and distracts herself from her fear by focusing on the swell of nausea in her otherwise empty belly. “I’m starving,” she says, though she knows that’s not right. Exorcist digs up some grubs from a rotting log and swallows them with great showmanship. Biology thinks about her partner back home and chews some mint she found near her campsite. Rancher takes off his boots and flicks a spur as he stretches his toes. Banker runs a hand through his sweaty hair, then builds a small fire. “Only nine matches left,” he says.

Two of the Solo camps are different. Air Force finds a dark blue tent at his destination, and Tracker finds a red one. Neither man realizes that this is their reward for reaching their lost hiker in time yesterday. They assume the others are also given shelter. Tracker ducks inside without comment, sprawls across the floor and closes his eyes. Air Force stands outside the tent flap for a moment, fuming silently. He wants to go back for Black Doctor. But this isn’t a war zone, or even a training exercise, and leaving men behind is essential to any race. “What do you think about—” his cameraman starts, but Air Force stalls him with a gruff, “No.”

Several hundred yards away, an intern disassembles a mustard-colored tent.





21.


He’s alive. He must be. I’m alive, Brennan too. The brothers whose cries drift in our wake, they survived. Others must have too. My husband could be among them. He could.

“Mae?” whispers Brennan. We’re hobbling down the street, moving too fast and not fast enough. “I had to. Right?”

I see the familiar rivulets running down his cheeks. I think of the machete, jutting.

“You had to,” I whisper back.

But I didn’t. I didn’t have to apply; I didn’t have to leave. None of it was necessary.

“How old are you?” I ask Brennan. My jaw throbs; it hurts to speak, to think, to breathe, to be.

“Thirteen,” he says.

The world rocks, and then he’s in my arms and all I can say is “I’m sorry,” and I’m saying it to him and to my husband and to the child I left to die in a cabin marked with blue. There was blue, I know there was. It wasn’t all blue, but there was some. There was.

Pink cheeks. Mottled arms.

“Everything you said about the sickness was true?” I ask.

Brennan nods in my arms and sniffles. His hair rubs against the open wound throbbing on my chin.

I close my eyes and think of my husband, alone through it all. Worrying, wondering, and then maybe a tickle in his throat or a burble in his stomach. Lethargy like lead weighing him down. I’m sorry, I say again, silently, but with all my heart. I’m sorry I implied that life with you wasn’t enough. I’m sorry I wasn’t ready. I’m sorry I left. Even if—even if this was all to come, at least we would have been together.

If the stories Brennan told are true, then the chances of any single individual surviving whatever this was are infinitesimal. For both my husband and me to have been immune is so statistically improbable as to be impossible. I know what’s waiting for me at home, yet here I am begging: please and maybe. The smallest maybe ever, and I know that if I don’t go I will wonder for as long as I continue to exist on this horrid, wiped-clean Earth.

An invasive thought: a cleaning-product commercial showing a microscope view of before and after—kills ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of bacteria. Those few stragglers in the “after” shown only for legal purposes—that’s us, Brennan and me. Residue. From what he said it was only a matter of days before everyone inside the church was dead except for him. At least a hundred people, he said. Extrapolate from there and it’s millions. When did it start, just as we left for Solo? Sometime between then and when I found the cabin four or five days later. Such a short window.

I remember the cameraman who left after the lost-hiker Challenge, too sick to work, and suddenly understand why Wallaby never showed that Solo morning. And I was relieved. I was thankful.