“She ain’t being ridiculous,” Rancher says from across the fire. He’s holding his own cup. “If you want to eat as a team, you gotta be part of the team.”
Waitress’s animosity doesn’t surprise Exorcist, but Rancher’s agreement does, as do the many nodding heads around the campfire. Briefly, he looks into a camera lens, as though accusing the device of having put the others up to this. Indeed, that’s exactly what he’s doing; he thinks they’re performing—like he is. But the truth is most of the contestants have in this moment forgotten that they’re being recorded. An ancient instinct is kicking in, not so much a survival-of-the-fittest mentality as an unwillingness to carry an able but lazy individual. No one else would have actively stopped Exorcist from eating, but now that Waitress has, the others are all solidly on her side. Guilt flashes through almost everyone, but this doesn’t convince them they are doing anything wrong.
“I’ll starve,” says Exorcist.
“The human body can go a month without eating,” says Tracker. He is the one among them who feels no guilt.
“Go find some grubs,” says Waitress. She takes a bite of rice, then closes her eyes and releases a hum of pleasure.
Exorcist lunges forward and rips the metal cup out of her hands. Waitress’s eyes pop open and she launches herself at Exorcist, sending him tumbling and the rice flying through the air. She slaps at him with all her skinny might. Exorcist covers his face and curls into a ball, weathering the blows. Engineer scurries toward the fray: ineffectual intervention. A second later, Banker yanks Waitress up and away as she screeches, “Let me go!”
And then Biology is with her, rubbing her arms, soothing. Of the many things she says then, the only phrase that will be played for viewers is “He’s not worth it.” Carpenter Chick stands with Waitress too, glaring at Exorcist. Zoo watches this and thinks, That’s what I’m expected to do—provide comfort. But she won’t allow her gender to define her role. Instead of rushing to soothe Waitress, she pokes a stick into the fire, breaking a glowing mass of wood at the bottom into several distinct orange-and-red-rimmed embers.
Exorcist is fuming and embarrassed, still on the ground. “She hit me!” he shouts. “Our contracts said you couldn’t hit anyone!”
One of the cameramen is on his radio. The producer at the other end says, “Jesus, what a day. It’s fine as long as it’s over. And—tell me you got it?” Later, to his off-site counterpart, he’ll add, “At least we can use this. Fucking waivers.”
Back at the fire, Black Doctor points out, “The contracts only prohibited hitting someone’s head, face, or genitals.”
Exorcist climbs to his feet and gestures at his own face. “And what do you call this?”
“Looked to me like she only hit your knees and your arms.”
“It’s true,” says Air Force. “You had a pretty good defensive fetal going on there.”
Zoo laughs; Exorcist glares at her.
“Whatever,” she says. “You brought it on yourself.” Her dismissive tone surprises Engineer, who had expected her to act as a peacemaker. None of the cameramen catch the slightly disappointed look on his face as he glances her way.
Exorcist throws up his hands and retreats to his meager bedding. The others eat their meal in silence. The segment will end with a series of short confessionals.
Carpenter Chick, heavily edited: “He deserved it.”
Banker: “He just took a nap while the rest of us set up camp. I feel a little bad about it, but why should we carry his weight? Besides, it wasn’t my call. I didn’t win the rice. I was thankful to be getting any myself.”
Waitress: “He’s been needling me for two straight days, and then he steals my food? No f-ing way. I hope he starves.”
Exorcist: “Every society needs its pariahs; the fact that this is a small society doesn’t change that.” He runs a hand through his greasy red hair, stoking the flames. The second episode of In the Dark will end here, with his promise: “They want me to be their villain? Fine. I’ll be their villain.”
15.
Birch Street was a respite—from external nightmares, if not from those spun by my own subconscious. This means only that my next Challenge is pending. As Brennan and I leave the house, leave the neighborhood lined with streets named after trees, I wonder if they’re waiting for some signal from Brennan. Maybe there’s a landmark we’re supposed to reach.
Mid-morning, we reach it: a neighborhood manipulated in a manner I haven’t seen before. It’s not abandoned—it’s destroyed. Windows are broken, signs bowled over. What I initially think is a very out-of-place boulder resolves into a car smashed against a brick wall. I feel my spine curl and I keep my eyes wide as we pass. What I do see of the car makes me think of high school, when the antidrug club got the local fire department to stage a drunk-driving accident using a wrecked van. Volunteers covered themselves with cornstarch blood and screamed from inside the van as the Jaws of Life gnashed toward them. I remember my friend David crawling from the van’s front door, stumbling to his feet, and then weaving toward the firemen. The front-seat passenger, Laura Rankle, “died.” She was nicer than the average popular girl, and David’s screams as she was pulled, limp, from the vehicle were deeply unsettling. Repeatedly I told myself it wasn’t real. It didn’t help. I did my best to hide my tears from my classmates, only later noticing that most were hiding tears of their own. My dad knew about the stunt; I remember him asking about it at dinner that night. Before I could answer, my mom chimed in with something about how she believed—how she knew—that it would save someone’s life, and that the van had crashed precisely for this purpose. I had been about to say how powerful the experience was, but after her comment I just shrugged and dubbed it overdramatic.
A few blocks after the smashed car there’s a pileup. The color at the center is distinctive; I don’t need to know the shape to see it’s a school bus. A school bus and a handful of smaller vehicles. As we get close I see a charred prop hanging out the front door of a blackened sedan. For a moment I imagine it has Laura Rankle’s face—not the gaunt, defeated face she grew into after she got pregnant and the baby’s father abandoned her, but the face she had as a girl.
“Mae?” says Brennan. “What’s wrong?”
It’s an absurd question, designed to get me talking. I almost tell him to shut up, and then I think that if I give them a good story, maybe they’ll leave me alone. Maybe if I talk the Challenge will end. So I tell him. I tell him all about Laura Rankle and David Moreau. About fake blood and twisted metal, the awful amalgamation of pretend tragedy and the remnants of the real thing. “Afterward, when one of the firemen helped Laura out of the ambulance and she was smiling this nervous smile and she was fine—it was surreal,” I say. We take a short detour around an overturned shopping cart and I continue, “It felt real enough to give me this sense of what if that was hard to shake.”
I look at Brennan. “Weird,” he says.
The first fully true thing I’ve told him, and all he can say is “Weird.” I suppose that’s what I get for treating him like a person instead of the prop that he is. My own fault.