Page 2 of Monsters in Love: Lost in the Stars
Seeing yourself naked on TV does a lot for getting you comfortable with your body quickly. Add that to the fact I usually try to put on a little weight before a challenge, and I know that viewers everywhere are making cracks about my ass. The combination of lots of physical activity, and an active effort to have fat reserves, means that “voluptuous” is the best way to describe me. Though, I have also heard the term muscle fat, and I think it’s an equally fair description. My long, curly, brown hair sways behind my shoulders, because even a hair tie would be considered a personal item, and I’m not wasting my one personal item on a hair tie.
Though the trees are thick here, they are all taller than any earth tree I’ve ever seen, almost reminding me of walking through a bamboo forest. The vegetation near the ground is a dark green color, indicating a much higher concentration of chlorophyll cells than on Earth. Similarly, because the trees so often block out so much light, the flowers glow, even in the daytime. Their vibrant hues shine through the soft midmorning light making it so that I can see, despite the heavy canopy. Looking around, I see a snapped fern leaf, the crew’s signal of which way I should go.
It’s time for me to meet up with my partner, and I wonder who it will be… and if I know them. They’ve picked me, a veteran competitor, for this first episode, so I wouldn’t be surprised if my partner is as well. I think through my male counterparts, because that’s how it almost always is, a male and a female, naked in the wilderness for four weeks.
In very early seasons of the show, you could tell that they were really trying to play up the sexual tension, but when you’re covered in dirt, you stink, and you’re doing your best not to freeze to death, I promise: the last thing on your mind is sex. There’s a couple of guys that I really hope to see at our meeting point — capable survivalists, whose skills complement mine nicely — and a few that I may kill if I need to spend four weeks on an alien planet with them.
I follow the rough path indicated by the broken ferns, and break through to a clearing. With the trees out of the way, the shrubs and grasses grow in height, and my ears perk up, conscious of the different native animals that like to hunt in such areas.
Six months. Six months I’ve spent studying this planet, and I know that even six years wouldn’t be likely enough. Some survivalists—most of them men—are super cocky and always think themselves ready to survive anything. In my experience, that’s a good way to get yourself killed. I always assume that there is more that I don’t know than I do, and that everything around me is trying to kill me.
A few steps into the tall grasses, I spy a large rock that crests over the meadow. The grass only comes up to my navel, but I still hold my arms up rather than have them below the grassline.
Cara told me to expect my gear and my partner to be on a large rock, so I’m guessing that is my destination. If I got really lost, the drone would simply herd me where I needed to go, but so far, it seems I’m on the right trail. When I get to the rock, I scrabble up the side of it, some of it crumbling away in my hands. Once I’m on top, I stand up and look around. My partner should be coming from another direction, so I scan the horizon—or rather the edge of the forest—around me.
Nothing.
There are still two bags here, so I’m fairly certain he just hasn’t arrived yet. Though I’m sorely tempted to check his bag and see what his personal item is, I restrain myself. My drone hovers approximately 10 feet in front of my face, and I can see the lens twisting, focusing on my reaction. My eyes dart along the tree line, looking for movement, but there’s nothing. After thirty seconds or so, I hear the beep of the radio in my bag.
Worry rises in me, a thick cloying thing that flows through me like molasses. “Abbie, here.”
That signature sound of static precedes Cara’s voice “Abbie? I’ve got some bad news. Your partner tapped out.”
I blink several times, willing the words to make sense in my brain. Tapped out? We haven’t even started. There are now two drones that circle around me as I take in the news. If this was my first season, I would probably find it intrusive, but since this is my fifth, I barely noticed them anymore. I miss the days when it would be an actual camera crew that followed me, but I definitely don’t miss when they would whip out a granola bar after I’d been starving for the last two weeks. I shake my head and depress the button.
“Can you repeat that?“
“He tapped, Abs. We are still trying to figure out why, but from what it sounds like, he got out of the car, got undressed, and had a panic attack a few hundred feet into the woods. The drone operator alerted a producer when he hadn’t moved for ten minutes. By the time they got to him, he was curled up on the ground, deep in a panic attack.“
“Who was it?” I ask, wondering which of my colleagues might have had such a problem. “Was it a newbie? Were you guys sending a newbie out here for their first time? In space for god’s sake?”
OK, space wasn’t exactly fair, we are on a planet, but if the network was going to bill it as Bare Survival: Deep Space, that’s how I was going to refer to it.
“No,” Cara says. “It was Jake.”
Jake.
Everything clicks into place. Jake Zane is a survivalist out of Utah. He’s a nice guy, if overzealous, definitely the “I grew up a Boy Scout” type. We have been on a couple of episodes together, during the “maximum” seasons, where there were a bunch of us, so I don’t know him super well. What I do know is that he hasn’t been on the show for three years.
His last appearance was on a special season, Bare Survival: Solo, where they had taken some of us veterans and we did a full month alone. Jake’s last appearance didn’t end well. He spent the first few days laid out with food poisoning, huddled in his half built shelter, with a fire he could only keep going intermittently—when he was able to get up. If that had been all it was, he would’ve rallied. I know he would have. Instead, Jake was almost Bare Survival’s first casualty. He’d been in Africa fishing, when a hippo burst out of the water and bit off his leg out of nowhere.
Jake is no slouch, so you can bet your ass he poked that hippo in the eye with the stick he had been using for fishing, but they had had to medically tap him and rush him to hospital. Last I’d seen him, he had been settling in with his prosthetic leg.
From the network’s perspective, and probably Jake’s, him being my partner makes a lot of sense. He’s an experienced survivalist, and it would allow this new season to open with a bang. People love a comeback story, and Jake is probably desperate for one. Pairing him with me is actually kind of genius. They know I’m a team player—I’ll do anything to make sure we both make it to our pick-up day. And I like Jake, he’s a good guy. I certainly wouldn’t have killed him, and I would have made sure he was safe. It would have been a triumph… if only he had made it to me.
I press my lips together, momentarily feeling the pang of disappointment he must be feeling. I don’t blame him. It's a lot. Maybe an alien planet was too much for his first time back, but the fact remains: now, I’m alone… and naked.