The Ruins (27 page)

 The
vine was the reason they were being held captive here: that was the
gist of what Jeff was telling them. The Mayans had cut the clearing
around the base of the hill in an attempt to quarantine the plant,
sowing the surrounding soil with salt. Jeff's theory was that
the vine spread through contact. When they touched it, they picked up
its seeds or spores or whatever served as its means of reproduction,
and if they were to cross the cleared swath of ground, they'd
carry these with them. This was why the Mayans refused to allow them
off the hill.

 "What
about birds?" Mathias asked. "Wouldn't
they—"

 "There
aren't any," Jeff said. "Haven't you noticed? No birds, no
insects—nothing alive here but us and the plant."

 They
all stared about the clearing, as if searching for some refutation of
this. "But how would they know to stay away?" Stacy
asked. She pictured the Mayans stopping the birds and mosquitoes and
flies, just like they'd attempted to stop the six of them,
the bald man waving his pistol toward the tiny creatures, shouting at
them, keeping them at bay. How, she wondered, could the birds have
known to turn aside when she hadn't?

 "Evolution,"
Jeff said. "The ones who've landed on the hillside
have died. The ones who've somehow sensed to avoid it have
survived."

 "All
of them?" Amy asked, clearly not believing this.

 Jeff
shrugged. "Watch." His shirt had plastic buttons on
its pockets; he reached up, yanked one off, tossed it out into the
vines.

 There
was a jumping movement, a blur of green.

 "See
how quick it is?" he asked. He seemed oddly pleased, as if
proud of the plant's skill. "Imagine if that were a
bird. Or a fly. It wouldn't have a chance."

 No
one said anything; they were all staring out into the surrounding
vegetation, as if waiting for it to move again. Stacy remembered that
long arm swaying toward her across the clearing, the sucking sound it
made as it drank up Amy's vomit. She realized she was holding
her breath, felt dizzy with it, had to remind herself to
exhale…inhale…exhale.

 Jeff
pulled the button off his other pocket and tossed it, too. Once more,
there was that darting flash. "But here's the
amazing thing," he said, and he reached up to his collar,
plucked a third button from the shirt, threw it out into the vines.

 Nothing
happened.

 "See?"
He smiled at them. There was that sense of pride again; he
couldn't seem to help himself. "
It
learns
,
" he said. "
It
thinks
."

 "What're
you talking about?" Amy asked, as if affronted by
Jeff's words. Or scared, maybe—there was an edge to
her voice.

 "It
pulled down my sign."

 "You're
saying it can read?"

 "I'm
saying it knew what I was doing. Knew that if it wanted to succeed in
killing us—and maybe others, too, whoever else might come
along—it had to get rid of the sign. Just like it had gotten
rid of this one." He kicked at the metal pan with that single
Spanish word scraped across its bottom.

 Amy
laughed. No one else did. Stacy had heard everything Jeff was saying,
but she wasn't following his words, wasn't grasping
that he meant them
literally.
Plants
bend toward the light:
that was what she was thinking. She
even, miraculously, remembered the word for this reflex—a
darting glance back toward high school biology, the smell of chalk dust
and formaldehyde, sticky bumps of dried gum hanging off the underside
of her desk—a little bubble rising toward the surface of her
mind, breaking with a popping
sound:
phototropism
.
Flowers open in the morning and shut at night; roots reach toward
water. It was weird and creepy and uncanny, but it wasn't the
same as thinking.

 "That's
absurd," Amy said. "Plants don't have
brains; they can't think."

 "It
grows on almost everything, doesn't it? Everything
organic?" Jeff gestured at his jeans, the pale green fuzz
sprouting there.

 Amy
nodded.

 "Then
why was the rope so clear?" Jeff asked.

 "It
wasn't. That's the reason it broke. The
vine—"

 "But
why was there any rope left at all? This thing stripped the flesh off
Pablo's legs in a single night. Why wouldn't it
have eaten the rope clean, too?"

 Amy
frowned at him; she clearly didn't have an answer.

 "It
was a trap," Jeff said. "Can't you see
that? It left the rope because it knew whoever came along would
eventually decide to look in the hole. And then it could burn through,
and—"

 Amy
threw up her hands in disbelief. "It's
a
plant
,
Jeff. Plants aren't conscious. They
don't—"

 "Here,"
Jeff said. He reached into his pockets, emptied them one after another
onto the dirt at his feet. There were four passports, two pairs of
glasses, wedding rings, earrings, a necklace. "They're all dead. These are the only things left.
These and their bones. And I'm telling you that the vine did
this. It killed them. And right now, even as we're speaking,
it's planning to kill us, too."

 Amy
shook her head, vehement. "
The
vine
didn't kill them. The Mayans did. They tried to flee and the
Mayans shot them. The vine just claimed their bodies once
they'd been shot. There's no thought involved in
that. No—"

 "Look
around you, Amy."

 Amy
turned, glanced about the clearing. Everyone did, even Eric. Amy lifted
her hands: "What?"

 Jeff
started across the clearing, stepped into the surrounding vegetation.
Half a dozen strides and he reached one of those odd waist-high mounds.
He crouched beside it, began yanking at the
vines.
He's
going to get burned,
Stacy thought, but she could tell he
didn't care. As he pulled at the plants, she began to glimpse
bits of yellowish white beneath the mass of
green.
Stones
,
she thought, knowing better even as she fashioned the word in her head.
Jeff reached into the center of the mound, pulled out something vaguely
spherelike
, held it
toward them. Stacy didn't want to see what it was; that was
the only explanation she could devise for how long it took her to
recognize the object, which was otherwise so instantly identifiable,
that smiling Halloween image, that pirate flag flapping from the mast
of Jeff's arm, poor
Yorick
of infinite jest. He was holding a skull toward them. She had to repeat
the word inside her head before she could fully absorb it, believe in
it.
A
skull, a skull, a skull…

 Then
Jeff waved across the hilltop, and all their heads swiveled in unison
to follow the gesture. Those mounds were everywhere, Stacy realized.
She started to count them, reached nine, with many more still to
number, and flinched away from the task.

 "It's
killed them all," Jeff said. He strode back toward them,
wiping his hands on his pants. "
The
vine
,
not the Mayans. One by one, it's killed them all."

 Eric
had finally stopped pacing. "We have to break out,"
he said.

 Everyone
turned to stare at him. He was flipping his hand quickly back and forth
at his side, as if he'd just caught it in a drawer and was
trying to shake the pain out. That was how jumpy he'd become,
how anxious.

 "We
can make shields. Spears, maybe. And charge them. All at once. We
can—"

 Jeff
cut him off, almost disdainfully. "They have guns,"
he said. "At least two, maybe more. And there are only five
of us. With what? Thirteen miles to safety? And
Pablo—"

 Eric's
hand started to go faster, blurring, making a snapping sound. He
shouted, "We can't just sit here doing
nothing!"

 "Eric—"

 "It's
inside me!"

 Jeff
shook his head, very firmly. His voice, too, was firm, startlingly so. "That's not true. It might feel like it is, but
it's not. I promise you."

 There
was no reason for Eric to believe this, of course. Jeff was simply
asserting it—even Stacy could see that. But it seemed to work
nonetheless. She watched Eric surrender, watched the tension ease from
his muscles. He lowered himself to the ground, sat with his knees
hugged to his chest, shut his eyes. Stacy knew it wasn't
going to last, though; she could tell he'd soon be back up on
his feet, pacing the length of the clearing. Because even as Jeff
turned away, thinking that he'd solved this one problem and
could now move on to the next, she saw Eric's hand drifting
down toward his shin again, toward the wound there, toward the subtle
swelling around its margins.

T
hey each took a swig of water.
They sat in the clearing beside Pablo's lean-to, in a loose
circle, and passed the plastic jug from hand to hand. Amy
didn't think of her vow from the night before—her
intention to confess her midnight theft and refuse the
morning's ration—she accepted her allotted swallow
without the slightest sense of guilt. She was too thirsty to do
otherwise, too eager to wash the sour taste of vomit from her mouth.

 The
Greeks are coming
: this was what she kept telling herself,
imagining their progress with each passing moment, the two of them
laughing and capering in the
Cancún
bus station, buying the tickets with their names printed on
them—Juan and Don Quixote—the delight
they'd feel at this, slapping each other's
shoulders, grinning in that impish way of theirs. Then the bus ride,
the haggling for the taxi, the long walk along the trail through the
jungle to the first clearing. They'd skip the Mayan village,
Amy decided—somehow they'd know
better—they'd find the second trail, and hurry down
it, singing, perhaps. Amy could picture their faces, their utter
astonishment, when they emerged from the trees and glimpsed the
vine-covered hill before them, with her or Jeff or Stacy or Eric
standing at its base, waving them away, miming out their predicament,
their peril. And the Greeks would understand, too. They'd
turn, rush back into the jungle, go for help. All this was hours away,
Amy knew. It was still so early. Juan and Don Quixote weren't
even at the bus station yet; maybe they weren't even awake.
But they were going to come. She couldn't allow herself to
believe otherwise. Yes, it didn't matter if the vine was
malevolent, if—as Jeff asserted—it could think and
was plotting their destruction, because the Greeks were hurrying to
their rescue. Any moment now they'd be rousing themselves,
showering and breakfasting and studying Pablo's
map….

 Jeff
had them empty their packs so they could inventory the food
they'd brought.

 Stacy
produced her and Eric's supplies: two rotten-looking bananas,
a liter bottle of water, a bag of pretzels, a small can of mixed nuts.

 Amy
unzipped Jeff's knapsack, pulled out two bottles of iced tea,
a pair of protein bars, a box of raisins, a plastic bag full of grapes
going brown.

 Mathias
set down an orange, a can of Coke, a soggy tuna fish sandwich.

 They
were all hungry, of course; they could've easily eaten
everything right then and there and still not been satisfied, not
nearly. But Jeff wouldn't let them. He crouched above the
little pile of food, frowning down at it, as if hoping that he might,
simply through his powers of concentration, somehow manage to enlarge
it—double it, triple it—miraculously providing
enough food for them to survive here for as long as might be necessary.

 As
long as might be
necessary.
That
was the
sort of phrase he'd use, too, Amy knew—objective
and detached—and she felt a brief push of anger toward him.
The Greeks would show up this afternoon. Why was he so stubbornly
refusing to acknowledge this? They'd find a way to warn the
two of them off, turn them back for help; rescue would arrive by
nightfall. There was no need to ration food. It was alarmist and
extreme. Later, Amy believed, they'd tease him about it,
mimic the way he'd picked up the tuna fish sandwich,
unwrapped it, then used the knife to cut it into five equal sections.
Amy spent a few moments imagining this scenario—all of them
back on the beach in
Cancún
,
laughing at Jeff. She'd hold her finger an inch away from her
thumb to show everyone how small the pieces had been, how absurdly
small—yes, it was true, no bigger than a
cracker—she could fit the whole thing in her mouth. And this
was what she was doing now, too, even as she busied herself picturing
that happier scene still to come—tomorrow, showered and
rested, on the beach with their brightly colored towels—she
opened her mouth, placed the little square of sandwich inside it,
chewed a handful of times, swallowed, and it was gone.

 The
others were tarrying over theirs—taking tiny,
mouselike
bites—and
Amy felt a lurch of regret. Why hadn't she thought to do
this, to draw the process out, elongate what couldn't really
even be called a snack into something that might almost resemble a
meal? She wanted her ration back, wanted a new one altogether, so that
she might find a way to consume it more gradually. But it was gone; it
had dropped irretrievably into her stomach, and now she had to sit and
wait while the others lingered over theirs, nibbling and sniffing and
savoring. She felt like crying suddenly—no, she'd
felt like crying all morning, maybe ever since they'd arrived
here on this hill, but now it was only more so. She was thrashing about
in deep, deep water, trying to pretend all the while that this
wasn't true, and it was wearing her down—the
thrashing, the pretending—she didn't know how much
longer she could keep it up. She wanted more food, more water, wanted
to go home, wanted Pablo not to be lying there beneath the lean-to with
the flesh stripped from his legs. She wanted all this and more, and
none of it was possible, so she kept thrashing and pretending, and any
moment now she knew it would become too much for her, that
she'd have to stop thrashing, stop pretending, and give
herself over to the drowning.