The Ruins (25 page)

 He
turned, stared toward the Mayans, who were standing in the center of
the cleared ground, watching him, their weapons lowered finally. They
seemed slightly bored by what they were seeing, and Jeff supposed he
could understand this also. After all, he'd done nothing here
that they hadn't witnessed on other occasions. The posting of
the sign, the circumnavigation of the hill, the discovery of the
bodies, the slowly dawning awareness of what sort of world
he'd become trapped in: they'd seen it all before.
And not only that; they could probably guess what was still to come,
too, could've told Jeff, if they'd only shared a
language, how the approaching days would unfold, how they'd
begin and how they'd end. It was with these thoughts in his
head that Jeff returned to the trail and began his slow climb up it to
tell the others of all he'd discovered.

S
tacy had opened her eyes to
the sound of screaming. Eric was writhing about beside her, obviously
in some sort of distress, and it took her a moment to realize that it
wasn't his cries that were filling the tent. The noise was
coming from outside. It was Pablo. Pablo was screaming. And yet
something was wrong with Eric, too. He was leaning on his elbow,
staring toward his legs, kicking them, saying, "Oh fuck, oh
my God, oh Christ." He kept repeating the words, and Pablo
kept screaming, and Stacy couldn't understand what was
happening. Amy was on the other side of her, just coming awake, looking
even more confused, even more lost than Stacy felt herself.

 The
three of them were alone in the tent; there was no sign of Jeff or
Mathias.

 Eric's
left leg was covered with the vine.

 "What
is it?" Stacy said. "What's going
on?"

 Eric
didn't seem to hear her. He sat up, leaning forward, and
began to yank at the vine, struggling to pull it free from his body.
The plant's leaves ripped and crumpled as he tugged at them,
sap oozing out, beginning to burn him, to burn her, too, when she
reached to help him. The vine had wound itself around his left leg,
climbing all the way to his
groin.
His
sperm,
Stacy thought, remembering the hand job
she'd given him the night
before.
It
was drawn to his sperm
. Because it was true: the vine had
wrapped itself not only around Eric's leg but also his penis,
his testicles. Eric was struggling to free himself from its hold,
pulling gingerly now, still repeating that string of words: "Oh fuck, oh my God, oh Christ…"

 Pablo's
screaming grew louder, if this were possible; the tent seemed to be
shaking beneath it. Stacy could hear Mathias yelling now, too. Calling
for them, she thought, but she couldn't focus on this, was
simply aware of it in a distant way while she continued to yank at the
vine, her hands not merely burning but feeling abraded, lacerated; the
tips of her fingers had begun to bleed. Amy was getting up, hurrying
toward the flap, unzipping it, stepping out. She left the flap hanging
open behind her, and sunlight poured through the opening, flooding the
tent, the heat entering, too, making Stacy, even in the midst of all
this chaos, abruptly aware of her thirst. Her mouth was webbed with it;
her throat felt swollen, cracked.

 It
wasn't just Eric's semen, she realized. It was his
blood, too. The vine seemed to have fastened, leechlike, to his wounded
knee.

 Outside,
quite suddenly, Pablo stopped screaming.

 "It's
inside me," Eric said. "Oh
Jesus—it's fucking inside me."

 And
it was true. Somehow the vine had pushed itself into his wound, opening
it, widening it, thrusting a tendril into his body. Stacy could see it
beneath his skin, the ridged rise of it, three inches long, like a
thick finger, probing. Eric tried to pull it free, but he was too
panicky, too quick, and the vine broke, oozing more sap, burning him,
leaving the tendril snagged beneath his skin.

 Eric
started yelling. At first, it was just noise, but then there were
words, too. "Get the knife!" he shouted.

 Stacy
didn't move. She was too stunned. She sat and stared. The
vine was inside him, under his skin. Was it moving?

 "Get
the fucking knife!" Eric screamed.

 And
then she was up, on her feet, rushing for the tent flap.

A
my had awakened a few seconds
after Stacy. She hadn't realized what was happening with
Eric; Pablo's screaming was too loud for her to take note of
anything else. Then Mathias was yelling for them, and for some reason
Eric and Stacy weren't responding. They were thrashing about;
they seemed to be wrestling. Amy couldn't make any sense of
this—she was still half-asleep, and not thinking very
clearly. Pablo was screaming; nothing else mattered. She jumped up and
hurried outside to see what was happening. The screaming was loud, full
of obvious pain, and it showed no sign of stopping, but she
wasn't particularly worried by this. After all,
Pablo's back was broken—why shouldn't he
be screaming? It might take some time, but they'd calm him
down, just as they had the night before, and then he'd slip
back into sleep.

 Outside,
she stood blinking for a long moment, the sun too bright for her to
see. She felt dizzy from it, disoriented, and was about to duck back
inside the tent to search for her sunglasses, when Mathias turned
toward her with a look of panic. It was as if a hand had grabbed Amy,
shaken her roughly; she felt a rush of fear.

 "Help
me!" Mathias called. He was crouched beside the backboard,
bent over the Greek's legs, and he had to shout to be heard
above the screaming.

 Amy
stepped quickly toward him, seeing and not seeing at one and the same
time. The sleeping bag was lying crumpled on the ground beside Mathias,
leaving Pablo bare beneath the waist. Or no, not bare, not bare at all,
because his legs were completely covered by the flowering vine, covered
so thickly that it almost looked as if he'd pulled on a pair
of pants made of the stuff. Not an inch of skin was visible from his
waist to his feet. Mathias was pulling at it, yanking long tendrils off
and throwing them aside, sap shining slickly on his hands and wrists.
Pablo had lifted his head enough to watch; he kept trying to rise onto
his elbow, but he couldn't seem to manage it. The tendons
were taut on his neck with the effort, and his mouth hung open in a
perfect
O
,
screaming. The sound was so loud, so terrible, that, moving toward
them, Amy felt as if she were wading through an actual physical
barrier, a zone of inexplicably heightened gravity. Then she, too, was
on her knees, tearing at the vine, ignoring the sap seeping across her
hands, cool at first, slightly slippery, but then burning with such
intensity that she might've stopped if it hadn't
been for the screaming, the incessant screaming, the screaming that
seemed to have entered her, to be inside her body
now—resonating, echoing—growing louder with each
passing second, impossibly louder, excruciatingly louder, far more
painful than the burning. She needed to stop it, to silence it, and the
only way she could think to do this was to keep pulling at the
vines—tugging, yanking, tearing—freeing
Pablo's body from their grip. And still she was seeing and
not seeing, the legs coming into view finally, a flash of white beneath
the knee, not the white of skin, but deeper, brighter—shiny
and wet—a bone white. She kept clearing the vine away,
buffeted by Pablo's screaming, seeing and not seeing, not
bone white, but bone itself, the flesh stripped cleanly from it, blood
beginning to pool now, pool and drip, as the plant was pulled free,
revealing more white, more bone white, more bone, his lower leg nothing
but bone, the skin and muscle and fat gone, eaten, blood dripping from
the Greek's knee, dripping and pooling, a long tendril
wrapped completely around his shinbone, gripping it, refusing to
relinquish its hold, a trio of flowers hanging from the length of
green, red flowers, bright red,
bloodred
.

 "Oh
my God," Mathias said.

 He'd
stopped pulling at the vines, was crouched now, staring in horror at
Pablo's mutilated legs, and suddenly Amy's not
seeing wasn't working anymore; it was just seeing
now—the bones, the flowers, the pooling blood—and
the screaming didn't matter any longer, nor the burning;
there were only the bones shining so whitely up at her, and a sense of
pressure in her chest, her stomach rising, a surge of nausea. She
jumped up, took three quick steps away from the lean-to, and vomited
into the dirt.

 Pablo
stopped screaming. He was crying now—she could hear him
crying, whimpering. She didn't turn around; she stood, bent
over, with her hands on her knees, a long string of drool hanging from
her mouth, swinging slightly, a little puddle of bile spreading between
her feet, all that precious water she'd stolen in the night,
gone now, draining slowly into the dirt. She wasn't done yet;
she could feel more coming, and she shut her eyes, waiting for it.

 "He
woke up and just started screaming," Mathias said.

 Amy
didn't move, didn't glance toward him. She coughed
once, spit, her eyes still closed.

 "I
pulled off the sleeping bag. I didn't—"

 Then
it was there, worse than the first surge; she bent low, a thick torrent
spewing from her mouth. It was painful; she felt as if she were
vomiting part of herself up, part of her body. Mathias fell
silent—watching, Amy assumed. And, an instant later, inside
the tent, Eric began to yell. Just shouting at first, just noise, but
then words, too.

 "Get
the knife!" he screamed.

 Amy
lifted her head, puke still dripping from her mouth, down her chin,
across her shirt. She turned toward the tent. They all
did—even Pablo, pausing in his whimpering, lifting his head,
straining to see.

 "Get
the fucking knife!"

 Then
Stacy appeared, stooping past the tent flap, hesitating for an instant
just beyond it, staring at Amy, at the string of drool hanging from her
mouth, the puddle of vomit between her feet. Stacy squinted, the sun
too bright for her—
seeing and not
seeing,
Amy
thought—turned toward the lean-to, toward Mathias.

 "I
need the knife," she said.

 "Why?"
Mathias asked.

 "It's
inside him. Somehow…I don't
know…it's gotten inside."

 "What
has?"

 "The
vine. Through his knee. It pushed inside." Even as she spoke,
her gaze drifted toward Pablo, who'd resumed his whimpering,
but more softly
now.
Seeing
and not seeing:
the exposed bones, the pooling blood, the
vine still half-covering his legs.

 From
inside the tent came Eric's voice, shouting, sounding
frightened: "Hurry!"

 Stacy
glanced back toward the open flap, then at Pablo again, then at
Mathias. Amy could tell that she wasn't taking it in,
wasn't understanding what had happened, any of it. Her face
was slack, her voice
flat.
Shock
,
Amy thought.

 "I
think he wants to cut it out," Stacy said.

 Mathias
turned, rummaged for a moment through the debris beside the lean-to,
the remaining strips of blue nylon, the jumble of aluminum poles. When
he stood up, he had the knife in his hand. He was just starting for the
tent, when he stopped suddenly, staring toward Amy, toward her feet,
toward the ground beyond them. Stacy, too, turned to look,
and—instantly—went equally still. Their faces
shared an identical expression, a mix of horror and incomprehension,
and even before Amy spun to see what it was, she felt her heart begin
to accelerate, adrenaline rushing through her body. She
didn't want to see, but that was over, the not seeing; that
wasn't an option any longer. There was movement behind her, a
shuffling sound, and Stacy lifted her right hand, covered her mouth,
wide-eyed.

 Amy
turned.

 To
look.

 
To
see
.

 She
was in the center of the little clearing before the tent. There were
fifteen feet of dry, rocky dirt in any direction, and then the vines
began, a knee-high wall of vegetation. Emerging from this mass of
green, directly in front of her, was what Amy took at first to be a
giant snake: impossibly long, dark green, with bright red spots running
along its length.
Bloodred
spots, which weren't spots at all, of course, but flowers,
because—although it moved like a snake, slithering toward her
in
wide
S
-shaped curves—that wasn't what it was. It was the
vine.

 Amy
stepped backward, quickly, away from the puddle. She kept going until
Mathias was in front of her, the knife held low at his side.

 Pablo
was watching from the backboard, silent now.

 Eric
called from the tent again, but Amy hardly heard him. She watched the
vine snake its way across the clearing to her little pool of vomit. It
hesitated there, as if sniffing at the muck, before sliding into it,
folding itself into a loose coil. Then, audibly, it began to suck up
the liquid, using its leaves, it seemed. They flattened across the
surface of the puddle, siphoning it dry. Amy couldn't say how
long this took. Not long, though—a handful of seconds,
perhaps, half a minute at most—and when it was over, when the
puddle was dry, just a damp shadow on the rocky soil, the vine began,
with that same slithering motion, to withdraw across the clearing.

 Stacy
started to scream. She looked from one to the other of them, pointing
toward the vine, horror-struck, screaming. Amy stepped toward her, took
her in her arms, hugging her, stroking her, struggling to quiet her,
both of them watching as Mathias pushed past them, carrying the knife
into the tent.