The Ruins (26 page)

E
ric had stopped shouting when
he heard Stacy begin to scream. His hands and legs and feet were
burning from the vine's sap, and there was that three-inch
tendril still inside him, under his skin, just to the left of his
shinbone, running parallel to
it.
Moving
,
he thought, though maybe it was his body doing this—the
muscles,
spasming
. He
wanted it out of him—that was all he knew—and he
needed the knife to get it out, to cut it free from his flesh.

 But
what was happening out there? Why was Stacy screaming?

 He
called to her, shouting, "Stacy?"

 And
then, an instant later, Mathias was ducking in past the flap, coming
toward him with the knife, a clenched expression on his face. It was
fear, Eric realized.

 "What
is it?" he asked. "What's
happening?"

 Mathias
didn't answer. He was scanning Eric's body. "Show me," he said.

 Eric
pointed toward his wound. Mathias crouched beside him, examined it for
a moment, the long bump beneath his skin. It was moving again,
wormlike, as if intent on burrowing into Eric. Outside, Stacy finally
stopped screaming.

 Mathias
held up the knife. "You want to?" he asked. "Or me?"

 "You."

 "It's
going to hurt."

 "I
know."

 "It's
not sterilized."

 "Please,
Mathias. Just do it."

 "We
might not be able to stop the bleeding."

 It
wasn't his muscles, Eric realized. It was the vine; the vine
was moving of its own accord, pushing its way deeper into his leg, as
if it had somehow sensed the knife's presence. He felt the
urge to cry out, but he bit it back. He was sweating, his entire body
slick with it. "Hurry," he said.

 Mathias
straddled Eric's leg, sitting on his thigh, clamping it to
the floor of the tent. His body blocked Eric's view; Eric
couldn't see what he was doing. He felt the bite of the
knife, though, and yelped, tried to jerk away, but Mathias
wouldn't let him; the weight of his body held him in place.
Eric shut his eyes. The knife sliced deeper, moved down his leg with a
strange zippering sensation, and then he felt Mathias's
fingers digging into him, grasping the length of vine, prying it free.
Mathias threw it away from them, toward the pile of camping supplies at
the rear of the tent. Eric heard it smack wetly against the
tarped
floor.

 "Oh
Jesus," he said. "Oh fuck."

 He
could feel Mathias applying pressure to his wound, struggling to
staunch the fresh flow of blood, and he opened his eyes.
Mathias's back was bare; he'd taken off his shirt,
was using it as a makeshift bandage.

 "It's
all right," Mathias said. "I got it."

 They
stayed like that for several minutes, not moving, each of them
struggling to catch his breath, Mathias using all his weight to press
against the incision. Eric thought Stacy would come to check on him,
but she didn't. He could hear Pablo crying. There was no sign
of the girls.

 "What
happened?" he asked finally. "What happened
outside?"

 Mathias
didn't answer.

 Eric
tried again. "Why was Stacy screaming?"

 "It's
bad."

 "What
is?"

 "You
have to see. I can't—" Mathias shook his
head. "I don't know how to describe it."

 Eric
fell silent at this, taking it in, struggling to make sense of it. "Is it Pablo?" he asked.

 Mathias
nodded.

 "Is
he okay?"

 Mathias
shook his head.

 "What's
wrong with him?"

 Mathias
made a vague gesture with his hand, and Eric felt a tightening
sensation in his chest: frustration. He wished he could see the
German's face.

 "Just
tell me," he said.

 Mathias
stood up. He had his T-shirt in his hand, crumpled into a ball; it was
dark now with Eric's blood. "Can you
stand?" he asked.

 Eric
tried. His leg was still bleeding, and it was hard to put weight on it.
He managed to pull himself to his feet, though, then nearly fell.
Mathias grabbed him by the elbow, held him up, helped him hobble slowly
toward the open flap of the tent.

J
eff found the four of them in
the little clearing, sitting beside the orange tent. When they saw him
approaching, they all started to talk at once.

 Amy
seemed to be on the edge of tears. "What are you doing
here?" she kept asking him.

 It
turned out that he'd been gone so long, they'd
begun to think he might've found a way to flee, that
he'd sneaked past the guards at the base of the hill and
sprinted off into the jungle, that he was on his way to
Cobá
now, that help
would soon be coming. They'd talked through this scenario in
such depth, playing out the various steps of his journey, imagining the
time line—Would he be able to flag down a passing car once
he'd reached the road, or would he have to hike the entire
eleven miles? And was it only eleven miles? And would the police come
immediately, or would they need time to gather a large enough force to
overcome the Mayans?—that Amy seemed to have pushed past the
murky realm of possibility into the far clearer, sharper-edged one of
probability. His escape wasn't something that might be
happening; it had become something
that
was
happening.

 Over
and over again, the same question: "What are you doing
here?"

 When
he told her he'd been down at the base of the hill, that
he'd walked completely around it, she stared at him in
incomprehension, as if he'd said he'd spent the
morning playing tennis with the Mayans.

 There
was something wrong with Eric. He kept standing up, limping about,
talking over everyone else, then dropping back down, his wounded leg
extended in front of him. He was wearing shorts now—rifled,
Jeff assumed, from one of the backpacks. He'd sit for a bit,
rocking slightly, staring at the dried blood on his knee and shin, only
to jump back up again: talking, talking, talking. The vine was inside
him: that was what he was saying, repeating it to no one in particular,
not waiting for a response, not seeming even to expect one.
They'd gotten it out, but it was still inside him.

 Stacy
was the one who explained it to Jeff, what had happened to Eric, the
vine pushing its way in through his wound while he slept, Mathias
cutting it free with the knife. At first, she seemed much calmer than
the other two, surprisingly so. But then, in mid-sentence, she suddenly
jumped topics. "They'll come today," she
said, her voice low and urgent. "Won't
they?"

 "Who?"

 "The
Greeks."

 "I
don't know," Jeff began. "I—" Then he saw her expression, a tremor
moving across her face—
terror
—and
he changed direction. "They might," he said. "This afternoon, maybe."

 "They
have to."

 "If
not today, then in—"

 Stacy
interrupted him, her voice rising. "We can't spend
another night here, Jeff.
They
have
to come today."

 Jeff
went silent, staring at her, startled.

 She
watched Eric for a moment, his pacing and muttering. Then she leaned
forward, touched Jeff's arm. "The vine can
move," she said, whispering the words. As she spoke, she
glanced toward the low wall of vegetation that surrounded the little
clearing, as if frightened of being overheard. "Amy threw up,
and it reached out." She made a snakelike motion with her
arm. "It reached out and drank it up."

 Jeff
could feel them all watching him, as if they expected him to deny this,
to insist upon its impossibility. But he just nodded. He knew it could
move—knew far more than that, in fact.

 He
got Eric to sit still so that he could examine his leg. The cut on his
knee had closed again; the scab was dark red, almost black, the skin
around it inflamed, noticeably hot to the touch. And beneath this wound
was another, running perpendicular to it, moving down the left side of
Eric's shinbone, so that it looked as if someone had carved a
capital
T
into his flesh.

 "It
seems okay," he said. He was just trying to calm Eric, to
slow him down; he didn't think it seemed okay at all.
They'd smeared some of the Neosporin from the first-aid kit
on the cuts—Eric's leg was shiny with
it—and there were flecks of dirt stuck in the gel. "Why didn't you bandage it?" Jeff asked.

 "We
tried," Stacy said. "But he kept tearing it off. He
says he wants to be able to see it."

 "Why?"

 "It'll
grow back if we don't keep watching," Eric said.

 "But
you got it out. How would it—"

 "All
we got was the big piece. The rest is still inside me. I can feel
it." He pointed at his shin. "See? How puffy it
is?"

 "It's
just swollen, Eric. That's natural. That's what
happens after you've been hurt."

 Eric
waved this aside, a tautness entering his voice. "That's bullshit. It's fucking growing in
there." He pushed himself up onto his feet, limped off across
the clearing. "I've got to get out of
here," he said. "I've got to get to a
hospital."

 Jeff
watched him pace, startled by his agitation. Amy still looked as if she
might begin to cry at any moment. Stacy was wringing her hands.

 Mathias
was wearing a dark green shirt; he must've pulled it from one
of the backpacks. This whole time, he hadn't spoken. But now,
finally, in his quiet voice, with its almost unnoticeable accent, he
said, "That's not the worst of it." He
turned, looked toward Pablo.

 Pablo.
Jeff had forgotten about Pablo. He'd given him a quick glance
when he'd first come walking back into the clearing, seen him
lying so still beneath his lean-to, his eyes
shut.
Good
,
he'd
thought,
he's
sleeping
. And then that was it; there'd been Amy
repeating her strange question—"What are you doing
here?"—and Stacy worrying over the
Greeks' arrival and Eric insisting the vine was growing
inside him, all of it distracting him, making no sense, pulling his
mind from where it ought to be.

 The
worst of it.

 Jeff
stepped toward the lean-to. Mathias followed him; the rest of them
watched from across the clearing, as if frightened to approach any
closer. Pablo was lying on his backboard, the sleeping bag covering him
from the waist down. He didn't look any different, so Jeff
couldn't understand why he was feeling such a strange
intimation of peril. But he was: a sense of imminent danger, a
tightness in his chest.

 "What?"
he asked.

 Mathias
crouched, carefully pulled back the sleeping bag.

 For
a long moment, Jeff couldn't take it in. He stared, he saw,
but he couldn't accept the information his eyes were offering
him.

 The
worst of it.

 It
wasn't possible. How could it be possible?

 On
both legs, from the knees down, Pablo's flesh had been almost
completely stripped away. Bone, tendon, gristle, and ropy clots of
blackened blood: this was all that remained. Mathias and the others had
tightened a pair of tourniquets around the Greek's thighs,
clamping shut the femoral arteries. They'd used some of the
strips of nylon from the blue tent. Jeff bent low to examine them; it
was an effort at escape—he could admit this to
himself—a way of not having to look at the exposed bones. He
needed to occupy his mind for a moment, distract it, give it time to
adjust to this new horror. He'd never tied a tourniquet
before, but he'd read about them, and knew—in the
abstract at least—how to apply them. You were supposed to
loosen them at regular intervals, then retighten them, but Jeff
couldn't remember the exact time frame, or even what it was
supposed to accomplish.

 It
didn't matter, he supposed.

 No:
He
knew
it didn't matter.

 "The
vines?" he said.

 Mathias
nodded. "When we pulled them off, the blood started to spurt.
They were holding it back somehow, and once they were
gone…" He made a spraying motion with his hands.

 Pablo's
eyes were shut, as if he were asleep, but his hands seemed to be
clenched, the skin across his knuckles drawn to a taut whiteness. "Is he conscious?" Jeff asked.

 Mathias
shrugged. "It's hard to tell. He was screaming at
first; then he stopped and shut his eyes. He's rolled his
head back and forth, and he shouted once. But he hasn't
opened his eyes again."

 There
was an oddly sweet smell coming off of Pablo, stomach-turning once you
began to notice it. This was decay, Jeff knew. It was the
Greek's legs beginning to rot. He needed to be operated on,
needed to get to a hospital—and sooner rather than later.
Help would have to arrive by tonight for him to survive. If it
didn't, they'd spend the coming days watching Pablo
die.

 Or
maybe there was a third option.

 Jeff
was fairly certain help wasn't going to arrive before
nightfall. And he didn't want to sit and watch Pablo die. But
this third option…he knew the others wouldn't be
ready for it, not nearly—not in concept, not in practice. And
he'd need their help, of course, if he was going to attempt
it.

 So
it was with the idea of preparing them, of hardening them, that he
turned from Pablo's mutilated body and began to speak of his
own discoveries that morning.

G
iven everything
she'd seen of the vine's capabilities since
dawn—how it had pushed its way into Eric's leg,
stripped Pablo of his flesh, snaked across the clearing to suck dry
Amy's vomit—Stacy felt little surprise at
Jeff's revelations. She listened to him with a strangely numb
sensation; her only noticeable emotion was a low hum of irritation
toward Eric, who continued to pace about the little clearing, paying no
attention whatsoever to Jeff and his story. Stacy wanted him to sit
down, to stop obsessing on what she was certain was the purely
imaginary presence of the plant inside his body. The plant
wasn't inside his body; the very idea seemed absurd to her,
pointlessly frightening. Yet assuring Eric of this had no effect at
all. He just kept pacing, stopping now and then to probe wincingly at
his wounds. The only thing one could do was struggle to ignore him.