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One of the nurses walked with Lauren as she leaned on the IV pole like a crutch. She’d spent the past few days taking walks like this between treatments, hoping to regain her strength. Today, it tired her out, and she said as much. They stopped at the nurses’ station for her to rest. “Sit down,” the nurse said. “I’ll go get you some water.”
Lauren complied, leaning her head against the wall. In the med room, two of the staff were having a raucous conversation. “I don’t know why I even bother watching that stupid show,” one of them said. “It’s not like they ever find anything.”
“I’ll admit, I only watch it to see who’s going to fall off a cliff or trip over a rock in the dark,” the other retorted. “Not like I believe in little green men from Mars or el chupacabra. It’s laughable at best.”
“I know, it’s all just a bunch of hokum.”
Lauren stood and directed an evil eye at them both. One of the women saw her. Her face turned red. Lauren could feel the heat rising in her own cheeks. The other turned and gasped. The first tried to apologize, but as soon as she opened her mouth to speak, Lauren took a hold of the IV pole and used the last of her energy to rise stiffly and return to her room. Her anger fueled the effort and she made the decision right then and there that she was going home.
* * *
Lauren was fumbling with the clothes she’d worn to the hospital when Bahati came that afternoon. The IV was in the way. She picked at the corner of the tape, trying to save ripping it off, along with the hair on her arms.
“What are you doing, Boss?”
No one else had tested positive for radiation poisoning, and Lauren reached the limit of her patience. The incident at the nurses’ station was the tipping point. She refused to take this lying down. She’d had enough.
“I’m going home,” she snapped. “I don’t have time for this.”
“You’re in no shape to go home.”
Lauren’s knees buckled; Bahati reached out and caught her arm. “Sit down before you fall down.”
Lauren knew it was futile. She surrendered.
“Did the doctor say you could go home?”
“It’s still a free country, isn’t it?”
“Lauren,” Bahati scolded. “You’re just going to make yourself even sicker. Didn’t you tell me the doctor said it would take a week to finish the treatments?”
“The treatments aren’t working.” Lauren lowered her voice an octave. “I’m not getting any better...and I sure as hell can’t get any work done tethered to this ... this ...” She held up her hand, inspecting the IV line pathetically. The medication that flowed through it was designed to bind with the radioactive metals that were plaguing her, so they could be flushed from her system “I don’t have time to be sick.”
“You don’t have the strength to waste fighting what must be done, Lauren,” Bahati sat down beside her. She put her arm around her and ran a hand down Lauren’s long braid. “What’s really bothering you?”
Lauren hung her head. She choked back her emotion. “We’re going to get cancelled, and it’s all my fault.”
“You don’t believe that, do you? It’s nothing more than gossip, you know. Right?”
“Most shows don’t last as long as we have. It’s inevitable. The Network is going to cut us.” She ran a weary hand over her face. “I don’t blame them. We never find anything. It’s all just a bunch of ... hokum.”
“We have over 800,000 followers on Twitter and Facebook.”
“We used to have a million.”
“Our Yeti episode was the number one most-watched reality show of all time.”
“All we found was a footprint in the snow. And the cast broke in shipping!” She looked over her friend’s shoulder and out the window, as completely devoid of emotion as the gray sky.
Bahati threw up her hands in disgust. “We had more people show up for our panel discussion at Comic-Con than the cast of The Walking Dead.”
“So?”
“So, we’re the anchor show for Friday night programming on the Exploration Channel. They’d be stupid to cancel our show. We make a lot of money for the Network.”
“It’s not enough. It’s never enough.” Lauren felt too weak to sit up anymore. She curled up against the head of the bed. “Ratings have been falling. Critics blast us at every turn. I needed that stupid little headless chicken man thing. I needed it to fix this.” She gestured vaguely, sucked in a deep breath, then trembled as she let it out. “Stupid Peruvian government. Can you imagine what our ratings would be like if we could have proven that thing was extraterrestrial?”
Bahati straightened and narrowed her brow. “Shame on you, Lauren Grayson.” She shook her finger at her boss. “Since when has our job been about proving headless chicken things were aliens? You preach it to us all the time. We’re doing this to find the truth. It’s not about revealing aliens or ghosts or proving monsters exist. Hoax or myth, fact or fiction. Finding the answers is our mission, period. You’ve lost your focus, Lauren. Don’t let them do that to you. Stick to the founding principle of our work—the truth.”
Lauren’s face twisted sarcastically. “The truth doesn’t make for good television.”
“If you’re dead, you won’t make for good television either. Now will you please forget about going home and stay where you belong? You don’t look so hot.”
Lauren wanted to put up a fight. She wasn’t one to let an argument go so easily. At the moment, her strength was waning. She decided to bide her time, for now. When they left her alone long enough, she’d get dressed, sign out AMA and call for an Uber. At least, that was the plan.