Footage from the first full day of the Solo Challenge is sent to the studio, but the editor never sees it, never spins it. Never adjusts tint of the trees or the saturation of Zoo’s eyes. The contestants will search and hike and scratch at mosquito bites in real time, forever. That night the third episode of In the Dark airs, the first and only weekly finale. It’s widely watched, but few will remember it. Footage from the second day of Solo is never even sent in. A drone lands, never to rise again.
The third day, Exorcist wakes to find his cameraman collapsed outside his shelter with red mucus leaking from his nose. He uses the cameraman’s radio to call for help. The voice on the other side is panicked, but assures him help is coming. Exorcist holds the cameraman’s sweaty, bloody head on his lap for hours, telling him stories and dribbling water into his mouth. Help does not come, and the cameraman’s heart beats its final rhythm. Exorcist tries to carry the body out of the woods, but after a slow half mile falls to the ground, exhausted. He mutters a final blessing, crosses the man’s stiffening arms over his chest, and leaves him under a black birch. He soon mistakes a combination of deep thirst and pathogen-caused nausea for hunger, and decides to hunt. Stumbling through the woods, delirium falls over him like mist. A branch sways with the weight of a squirrel; he chucks his sharpened dowsing rod. The rod flies swiftly, hits the trunk of a different tree, and bounces into a bed of leaves. Exorcist searches for the dowsing rod until nightfall. In the dark he begins to sweat, and then his stomach heaves. He can’t stop coughing. He feels too warm. He wipes at his runny nose and his sleeve comes back red. He weeps, seeing the bloody eye of his ex-wife. His inner monster is nothing compared to this possession—so quick, so painful, so total. In a moment of semi-lucidity, he wonders why it never occurred to him to try to exorcise the cameraman’s sickness. And then the demon grasps his organs with its many claws and rends his innards.
Help does find four of the contestants. Air Force, Biology, Engineer, and Banker are brought back to the production camp by their still-well cameramen. And when Tracker’s cameraman doesn’t show the third morning of Solo, Tracker follows his trail from the previous night and finds him curled in his sleeping bag, feverish. Tracker helps the cameraman back to base camp. These five contestants are evacuated and sent with the remaining production crew into quarantine, where they are caged singularly in plastic cubicles. Here, surrounded by the sounds of crying, dying strangers, they are again recorded.
The quickly mutating and still unidentified pathogen strikes Tracker first, with no preamble. He sweats and weeps and dreams, but he does not bleed and he does not die. A combination of genetics and years of pushing his immune system to the limit spare him. He will live to old age, telling his story to few and never publicly, wondering always if he should have tried harder to find her.
All Banker catches is a cold. He spends his days in quarantine alternating between fear and boredom. When he’s later moved to a Californian refugee camp, he will tell his story to anyone who will listen.
By his second day in quarantine, blood leaks from Air Force’s eyes and nose to stain his perfect warrior face. He always thought that if he died young it would be in a singular, glorious crash. His last breath is the scream of a falcon missing its prey. Biology slips away with relative quiet, unconscious through the pain, dreaming of her partner. Engineer is conscious until the end. A lifelong optimist, the instant before he dies he will think, I’m going to get better.
Rancher is among those left behind in the scramble to evacuate. He finds the production camp, but not for days, not until it is empty of everyone except for the Expert, who insisted on staying behind to search for the others. When Rancher finds him, he is recognizable mostly by his flannel shirt. Flies feast on his leaked and drying blood. Rancher continues to search for the others, and after a week is felled not by the fast-spreading affliction all around him—which he has the genes to survive—but by microbes in ill-chosen standing water. When he dies, he will be delirious, dehydrated, covered in his own filth. But he will be smiling, watching his three children play in the distance. His sons and daughter will never know the details of their father’s death. They will grow up wishing they knew more, that he had never gone east. If he’d just stayed home, they’ll say.
Waitress does not have the genes to survive. The third morning of the Solo Challenge she wakes feverish, her throat a silent scream. She cannot sit up. Her cameraman stands above her, listening to the panicked callback on the radio, “Bring them in. Bring them all in!” He sees the trickle of red coming from her left nostril. He drops his camera and runs. Waitress sees him go. Her fever tells her it’s a mistake. She clutches the whistle given to her at the start of the bear-tracking Challenge and brings it to her lips, but she doesn’t have enough breath left to make a sound. The cameraman will lie and say he could not find her. He will die too quickly and in too much pain to feel remorse.
Zoo wakes that third morning feeling only a little stiff. She waits for her cameraman, but he doesn’t show. Unknown to her, he is lying among the fallen leaves of late summer about one hundred yards away, crying senselessly and uselessly into his radio. Within minutes, the cameraman too will die. Within hours, turkey vultures will find him. Within days, his remains will be scattered by coyotes.
If Zoo were to search for the cameraman now, she might find him. But she doesn’t search, she waits. She rests and ineffectually washes her clothing in a stream she crossed yesterday before making camp and receiving her most recent Clue. As she scrubs the sweat out of her socks, her body prepares for a fight her mind doesn’t know is coming. Her second morning truly alone, she concludes that she’s supposed to keep moving, to follow the Clue: You’re on track; it’s what you seek. Look for the sign past the next creek. While vultures swirl and land out of sight, Zoo dismantles her shelter, clips a water bottle to her side, and shoulders her pack.
“Well,” she says, speaking to the tiny camera posted above where her shelter used to stand, “I guess I better find that creek.” She dusts off the seat of her pants and starts walking, walking east because that is the direction they last sent her and the Clue says she’s on track. East, past a dry creek bed where an evacuated intern will never place a box. East, toward a brook that runs through a culvert, above which sits a road where driveways sprout like the many tendrils of a single root.
At the base of one of these driveways a new mother now stands, exhausted and slightly queasy—but happy, dismissing her discomfort as a nebulous postpartum affliction. The mother’s newborn baby boy gurgles from a carrier at her chest as she ties a trio of blue balloons to her mailbox, preparing for a party she will never host in a small brown house with red trim; a house decorated with a touch of blue. A classy amount, the new mother thinks.
Just enough.
23.
Everything has changed; nothing has changed. Brennan and I walk. To where, I don’t know. I can’t eat, but Brennan hands me a water bottle a few times a day and I drink. Beyond that, I walk through daylight and wait out the night, thinking of you.
I see you sleeping now, your peppered hair, your forehead smoothed of worry. Lids pale and veined, shielding inquisitive eyes, your cocoa eyes. Cold and empty, you lie alone in the bed where all those nights you tried to sleep and there I was, my nose an inch from your nose, just staring, waiting for you to smile or open your eyes. Occasionally I’d augment the stare with a prod, because I could never get over how much you loved me and this seemed an easy way to prove it. Sometimes—often—you complained, but even then you smiled. You felt lucky too.
I could have at least buried you. I could have burned you and carried the ash on my hip. I could have spread you across the garden.
I could have burned the house. I should have.
I didn’t even take a picture. I didn’t even take my ring. I barely remember leaving, and the only thing I have of us is me.
I couldn’t even look. I couldn’t look at you not being human. I couldn’t see what you’d become.
I’m sorry.
“Mae?”