The Last One

by Alexandra Oliva

  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.

  I called the one who left Bumbles. I named him that.

  Self-revulsion slams through me.

  Did any of them survive? Did Cooper? Heather or Julio? Randy or Ethan or Sofia or Elliot? The sweet young engineer whose name I can’t remember? I need to remember his name, but I can’t.

  Brennan shudders in my arms and sorrowful wonder brushes through me: I thought he was a cameraman. I thought—

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” I say.

  I feel the tacky skin of my chin prickle and tear as the boy pulls away from me. “Why did you act like it wasn’t real?” he asks.

  Thirteen. I want to tell him the truth. I want to tell him everything, about the show and the cabin and the love I abandoned for adventure, but it hurts too much. I also don’t want to lie anymore, so I say, “Can you blame me?”

  He sniffles a laugh and I think, What a remarkable child.

  Soon we’re walking again, slowed by our respective aches and injuries. My right hand is swollen, useless. I can’t move my wrist or fingers. I’m concerned Brennan might have a concussion, but he seems steady and I don’t see anything wrong with his pupils, so I think he’s okay. Unless there are signs I’m not seeing, signs I don’t know to look for.

  Eventually he asks, “Have you ever killed someone, Mae?”

  I don’t know how to answer because I think the answer is yes but I didn’t mean to and I don’t want to lie anymore but I can’t tell him everything. I can’t speak everything. But he needs an answer because he’s thirteen and he stabbed a man. A man who was going to kill me and likely him too, but even so. I think of the rabid coyote. I still remember seeing gears, but I also remember seeing flesh, like two versions of that day both exist, equally true. And for a second I think, Well, why not—maybe I’m wrong and that was still part of the show. Maybe it didn’t become real until later—but the thought is sour and forced, and I know I’m reaching.

  Brennan is waiting for an answer. His puppy eyes watching me.

  “Not like that,” I tell him. “But there was someone I think I could have helped, and I didn’t.” My throat is closing; the last word barely escapes.

  “Why not?” he asks.

  In my memory the mother prop has green eyes I know from mirrors and I don’t know if that’s real, if her eyes were open or closed.

  She wasn’t a prop.

  “I didn’t know,” I croak, but that’s not right. “It was a baby,” I say, “and I thought…” But I didn’t think, I panicked and ran, and how can I explain something I’m not sure I remember? “I was confused,” I try. “I made a mistake.” Not that that excuses it, excuses anything.

  “I don’t regret it,” says Brennan. “I feel like I should, but I don’t. He was going to kill you.”

  The soreness at the base of my throat, where Cliff’s arm pressed. Bruising I can feel but not see. Why did he attack me? If this is the world, why would one’s instinct upon meeting another be aggression? Why would—

  His hand on my shoulder. I remember his hand. His breath. But that’s all: a stench.

  The first blow, was it mine?

  “Mae?”

  Was he defending himself from me?

  He was. He touched me, but he didn’t strike me. I can’t remember his words. I try to clenc
h my fist; a pulse of pain, but my fingers don’t move. Brennan’s guilt, that’s my fault too. But he didn’t know and he can’t know—that I brought it on myself. That he didn’t have to.

  “You have nothing to regret,” I tell him.

  But I regret everything. All of it.

  Their blood, meaningless. Their cries behind us, meaningless. All this death, meaningless. A meaningless observation. There is no why, no because. All there is is is. Systems colliding, wiping out existence, leaving me, an unlucky outlier. Worlds end, and I’m bearing witness.

  “Thank you for saving my life,” I tell Brennan. I’m not thankful for it, but he did; he shouldn’t have, but he did. He’s been left behind too, and at least he doesn’t have to be alone, at least I can carry this burden for him—this burden that I caused.

  I’m sorry.

  We soon cross the bridge, ducking through an E-ZPass lane, and break into an historic tollhouse to spend the night. I know what dreams will come, so I don’t sleep, and I shake Brennan toward wakefulness periodically because I think that’s what I’m supposed to do. He seems more annoyed than grateful, and I take that as a positive sign.

  After my fourth time waking Brennan I sneak outside and sit, leaning against the tollhouse beside the door. My clothing is heavy with dried blood; the weight of it pins me to the earth.

  “I miss you,” I whisper.

  Our children would have been born with blue eyes. But would that blue have turned to green or brown, or surprised us both by staying blue? Hair black or brown or blond, maybe even that beautiful auburn shade your mother wears in pictures from when you were young? No way to know. Roll the dice, have a kid. Cross your fingers that the genes are good. What if. Who knows. Questions become statements in this cowardly new world. Our children will never be. But that loss is nothing, nothing compared to the loss of you.

  The door beside me creaks open. I look up and feel the sting of my eyes, the pressure in my chest. I feel myself quaking. The physicality of knowing.

  Brennan sits down and leans wordlessly against me. I feel him trembling too.

  The night passes. The next two days are uneventful, painfully sluggish. I watch Brennan closely and try to identify birdcalls as we walk; anything not to think of my husband, because every time I do I think I might collapse. But it’s his impression of a Canada goose I hear in the sky, and when vague movement ahead of us is revealed by song as a cluster of chickadees, all I can see is my husband spilling birdseed as he refills the backyard feeder. In my dreams I’m always walking, and alone. Awake, Brennan’s at my side and the desolation all around no longer seems remarkable, not even when we enter streets I know. I leave my lens in my pocket. I don’t want to see what’s become of my home.

  We’re less than three miles from my house when the sun sets. I’m so stiff. Everything hurts. My hand isn’t any better. Brennan breaks the window of a small house and helps me inside. I whisper an apology as I cross the threshold. This homeowner may be a stranger, and gone, but he or she was also my neighbor.

  Between the physical pain and being so close to home, I can’t sleep. I stretch out on a rug and watch the speckled blue-gray blur to which my vision has reduced the ceiling. Brennan snores all night. I’d thought his night terrors might return after the supermarket, but he seems fine. Or, better than I expected. Better than me, though maybe it only seems that way because I can hear only my own thoughts, dream my own dreams. I’m holding our blue-eyed baby, shielding him from a storming crowd, and then a blade whose hand I never see pierces me from behind and skewers us both.

  In the morning I can barely stand, and it takes about an hour of walking for my muscles to loosen. By then, we’re close. We pass what was once my favorite café and a curiosity shop that operated on an unpredictable schedule. An elderly neighbor once told me about a time the store surprised her by being open Christmas Day. She found a china tea set identical to one she remembered her mother owning, but which had been lost in a fire. “Five dollars,” she said to me. “A Christmas miracle.” Her mother had never let her use the tea set, and owning it now, she told me, made her almost unbearably happy. I asked her if she used it daily to make up for lost time, and she looked at me like I was the devil. “I don’t use it,” she said.

  I squint through the store’s windows as we pass. There’s a dusty display of old cookbooks and vintage kitchenware: a blender, a utensil holder painted with daisies and sprouting a single plastic spatula, a blue cast-iron pot.

  Half an hour later, we reach my street. Windblown trash skitters across the asphalt. I pause. Brennan walks a few steps farther before noticing. “Mae?” he asks, turning.

  Four driveways down on the left: my mailbox.

  It’s there, really there. But I can’t see the house. A monstrous Tudor obstructs my view. Inside the Tudor, a tea set isn’t being used.

  As we walk down the block, I feel my nerves constricting, resisting each step. We pass the Tudor and my house comes into view on its little sloped lawn. Pale yellow siding, front door framed by a pair of leafy shrubs. A gutter that was loose when I left now hangs unabashedly from the roof. The lawn is long and yellowing and dotted with white clover flowers.

  “Where are we?” asks Brennan.

  I’m shaking as I walk up the stone steps. I peer toward the living room windows, but it’s dark inside and I can’t see beyond the glass. A plastic-wrapped newspaper rests by the path. Grass has grown around it as though it were a rock. I step over the paper. I’m listening as I walk, but I don’t hear anything from inside. Just my breath, my steps, blood pounding through my temples. Brennan behind me, and the autumn breeze teasing the long grass. A distant wind chime, maybe.

  Sunlight glints off the doorknob, and I stand still for a moment before finding the courage to wrap my hand around it. The knob is cold, as I envisioned, but also locked. A burst of anger courses through me: After everything else, they’re going to make me break into my own house.

  But there is no they, not anymore.

  I take a step back. Something feels off. Something specific. I glance around, and then I see it—the welcome mat is missing. My husband’s name and mine, playfully intertwined, gone.

  This isn’t my house.

  I can’t breathe, I can’t stop trying to suck in air.

  “Mae, what’s wrong?”

  I close my eyes, bend over, and put my hands on my knees.

  This is my house.

  This is my house.

  I look up again. I know that chipped paint on the window frame. I know the striped curtains barely visible through the living room window. This is my house. The mat isn’t here, but that’s just superficial. A legal issue. They didn’t want his name in the shot.

  If only there were a they.

  I wave away Brennan’s barks of concern and wait for my breath to settle. I refuse to break my own front door, so I walk around to the back. My defeated vegetable garden languishes beside an overgrown flowerbed, and there it is, curled over a bench—the welcome mat. An unraveled hose trails between it and the spigot on the side of the house.

  The screen door leading to the back porch isn’t latched. I enter, passing a small concrete statue of a meditating frog—one dollar, from the curiosity shop. I hear Brennan following me. A citronella candle sits centered on our glass-top table.

  I check the back door. It’s also locked, but it has windows, nine stately rectangles. I walk past Brennan and pick up the meditating frog. It’s compact and heavy. I use it to smash the glass panel nearest the doorknob. Shattering glass pricks my fingers. I reach through and unlock the door.

  The door leads into the kitchen. The first thing I notice as I enter is the smell. Stale, musty. I move slowly through the kitchen, squinting. There are dishes in the sink, a few bowls and a glass. I think the glass has a straw coming out of it. I walk past the refrigerator, toward the hall. My foot catches something, metal clatters, and I hop back, startled.

  A dog dish. For a moment, I can’t reconcile its presence,
and then I realize he must have been preparing for me to come home. A pet for a child. An absurd compromise, no wonder we never acknowledged it as such. I push the bowl back against the fridge with my foot and enter the hall. There’s a half bath across from me and the living room is just ahead through an archway to the left.

  As I walk toward the living room, my gaze catches on our framed wedding collage, which hangs at the base of the stairs. There we are, eight different freeze-frames of happily-ever-after. My favorite is of just him in his light gray suit and moss-green tie. He’s waiting for me to come down the aisle—an outdoor aisle framed with friends and trees and flowers and carpeted with clover. He looks serious. He means business. But the corner of his mouth is pinching toward a grin.

  I turn toward the archway. There could still be a banner. He could still be there, waiting.

  On our first real date, he compared my eyes to a bottle of Pellegrino. A full bottle, he said—because they sparkle. I laughed and teased him for his cheesiness, belittling the sentiment even as I tucked it away.

  The living room slides into view. He’s not there. There is no banner. It’s just me here in this empty, gently cluttered room. But there are signs of him: a few videogame cases on the floor by the entertainment center, his laptop closed on the coffee table. A pile of laundry on the couch, waiting to be folded. I sit on the couch, recognizing a pair of red boxers decorated with different types of knots. A blue T-shirt from a half marathon we ran together.

  Next to the laptop there are several remotes, a PlayStation controller, and the book of baby names we bought before I left. I pick up the book. My knuckles are bloody and my fingers leave bright smudges through dust on the cover. I thumb through dog-eared pages. My mouth tastes sour. Some of the ears are new to me. On one such page Abigail is underlined. On another, Emmitt.

  The first time we slept together, I rolled over the morning after and found him looking at me with those dark cocoa eyes. “It’s a little early for chocolate,” I said, “but okay, I’ll have a bite.” And I crammed my face in close to his and nibbled at his lashes. I felt him tense and regret spiked through me—I went too far, I ruined everything—but then he laughed, a Big Bang of laughter, the start of everything, the start of us.