The Ruins (31 page)

 Amy
stood up without knowing what she intended to do. She didn't
feel herself reacting yet, was numb to the news. But she
must've been feeling something, because her expression
changed in some way. She could see Stacy reacting to it, stepping back
from her, looking scared.

 "I
shouldn't have said yes, should I?" Stacy asked.

 "Yes
to what?"

 "We
voted on it, and I—"

 "Why
didn't anyone tell me?"

 "You
were down here. Jeff said it only mattered if there was a tie. But
there wasn't. Eric said yes, and then
I…" There was that same frightened expression
again. She stepped forward now, reached out to clutch Amy's
forearm. "I shouldn't have, should I? You and
Mathias and I—we could've stopped them."

 Amy
couldn't bring herself to accept that this was happening. She
didn't believe that it was possible to cut
someone's legs off with a knife, didn't believe
that Jeff would ever attempt such a thing. Perhaps they'd
only been talking about it, were still talking about it now; perhaps
she could stop them if she hurried. She pulled herself free of
Stacy's grip. "Stay here," she said. "Watch for the Greeks. Okay?"

 Stacy
nodded, still with that fear in her face, that trembling coming and
going in the muscles around her mouth. She sat down, dropping awkwardly
in the center of the path, as if some supporting string had been cut.

 Amy
waited another moment, watching her, making sure she was all right.
Then she started hurriedly up the hill.

J
eff and Mathias were the ones
who did it. They didn't ask Eric to help, which was a good
thing, because he knew he wouldn't have been able to. He kept
pacing about the clearing while they worked, pausing to watch and then
turning quickly away, finding both states unbearable, the seeing and
the not seeing.

 First,
they put the belts back on. They found them lying in the dirt beside
the backboard, three tangled snakes, abandoned there the night before.
Jeff and Mathias needed only two of them; they bound the Greek at his
chest and waist. Pablo's eyes remained shut through all this
jostling; he hadn't opened them, not once, since
he'd stopped screaming earlier that morning. Even when Jeff
prodded him now, calling his name, wanting to mime out what they were
about to attempt, the Greek refused to respond. He lay there with a
clenched expression on his face, everything—his mouth, his
eyes—closed against the world. He seemed beyond their reach
somehow, not quite present any longer. Past caring, Eric supposed, long
past.

 Next,
they built a fire, a small one—it was all they could manage.
They used three of the archaeologists' notebooks, a shirt, a
pair of pants. They crumpled two sheets of paper for kindling, then
added the notebooks whole. The clothing, they doused with tequila. The
fire was almost smokeless; it burned with a low blue flame. Jeff set
the knife in its midst, along with a large rock, shaped like an ax
head. While these heated—the stone making a snapping sound as
it took on a deep reddish glow—Jeff and Mathias crouched over
Pablo, murmuring back and forth, pointing first at one leg, then the
other, planning their operation. Jeff looked grim and downcast
suddenly, as though he'd been coerced into this undertaking
despite his better intentions, but if he was having any second
thoughts, he wasn't allowing them to slow the procedure down.

 Eric
was standing right over them when they started. Jeff used a small towel
he'd found in one of the backpacks to pull the stone from the
fire; he wrapped it around his hand,
glovelike
,
to protect himself from the heat. Moving quickly, in one fluid motion,
he scooped up the stone, raised it over his head, turned toward the
backboard. Then he slammed it down with all his strength against the
Greek's lower leg.

 Pablo's
eyes jerked open; he began to scream again, writhing and bucking
beneath his bonds. Jeff seemed hardly to notice; his face showed no
reaction. He was already dropping the stone back into the fire,
reaching for the knife. Mathias, too, remained expressionless, focused
on his task. It was his job to keep the fire burning hot, to feed in
new notebooks if they were needed, to sprinkle more alcohol, to stir
and blow upon the embers.

 Jeff
was hunched over the backboard, muscles taut with the strain of his
labor, sawing and chopping. There was the stench of the hot knife
against Pablo's flesh, a cooking smell, meat burning. Eric
glimpsed the shattered bone below the Greek's left knee, the
bloody marrow spilling out, Jeff's knife pushing and cutting
and prying. He saw the bottom half of Pablo's leg come free,
the foot and ankle and shin bones a separate thing now, cut off, gone
forever. Jeff sat back on his haunches, catching his breath. Pablo
continued to scream and writhe, his eyes rolling, flashing white.
Mathias took the knife from Jeff, returned it to the fire. Jeff picked
up the little towel, started to wrap it around his hand again. As he
reached for the glowing stone, Eric turned quickly away, started off
across the clearing. He couldn't watch any longer, had to
flee.

 But
there was nowhere to go, of course. Even on the far side of the
clearing, with his back turned to the scene, he could still hear what
was happening, the crunch of the stone slamming into Pablo's
other leg, and the screaming—louder now, it seemed,
higher-pitched.

 Eric
glanced over his shoulder—he couldn't stop himself.

 Mathias
was holding the black pan, the one Jeff had brought back from the
bottom of the hill, with that word carved across its bottom—
peligro
.
Eric watched him place it in the fire. They were going to use it to
cauterize the Greek's wounds, pressing it flat across his
stumps, one after the other.

 Jeff
was bent low over the backboard, working with the knife, a steady
sawing motion, his shirt soaked through with sweat.

 Pablo
was still screaming. And there were words now, too. They were
impossible to understand, of course, but Eric could hear the pleading
in them, the begging. He remembered how he'd fallen on the
Greek when he'd jumped down into the shaft, that feeling of
his body bucking beneath him. And he thought of how Amy and he had
thrown Pablo onto the backboard, that clumsy, lurching, panic-filled
toss. He could feel the vine moving inside him, in his leg, and his
chest, too—that insistent pressure at the base of his rib
cage, pushing outward. It was all wrong; everything here was wrong, and
there was no way to stop it, no way to escape.

 Eric
turned away again, but he couldn't maintain it. He had to
glance back almost immediately.

 Jeff
finished with the knife, dropped it into the dirt at his side. Eric
watched him pick up the towel; he wrapped it around his hand, turned to
pull the pan from the fire. Mathias had to help him now. He squatted
beside the backboard, bent to lift Pablo's left leg, what
remained of it, grasping it with both hands just above the knee. Pablo
was crying, talking to the two of them, Mathias and Jeff both, using
their names. Neither of them showed any sign of hearing, though; they
wouldn't look at him. The pan was glowing orange now, and the
letters scratched into its bottom were a deeper color, almost red, so
that Eric could still read the word they spelled there, even as Jeff
swung it free of the flames. He watched Jeff spin, place the pan
against the base of Pablo's stump, holding it in place,
pressing hard, using all his weight. Eric could hear the flesh burning,
a spitting, snapping sound. He could smell it, too, and was appalled to
feel his stomach stirring in response—not in nausea, either,
but, shockingly, in hunger.

 He
turned away, dropped into a crouch, shutting his eyes, pressing his
hands to his ears, breathing through his mouth. He remained like this
for what seemed like an impossibly long time, concentrating on the
sensation of the vine inside his body, that insistently probing spasm
in his leg, that pressure in his chest, trying to feel them as
something else, something benign, some trick of perception, as Stacy
kept insisting they must be: his heartbeat, his overtired muscles, his
fear. He couldn't do it, though, and he couldn't
wait any longer, either; yet again, he had to look.

 When
he turned, he found Jeff and Mathias still crouched over the backboard.
Jeff was pressing the pan into Pablo's right stump now. There
was that same sickeningly enticing smell in the air. But silence
now—Pablo had gone still, stopped screaming. He seemed to
have lost consciousness.

 Then
there was the sound of footsteps approaching. Amy was coming up the
path. She entered the clearing at a run, out of breath, her skin
shining with sweat.

 Too
late,
Eric
thought,
watching her stagger to a stop, staring—seeing—a
look of horror on her
face.
She's
come too late.

J
eff didn't know what
to feel. Or no: He knew what he thought, and then he knew what he felt,
and he couldn't seem to bring the two into line. It had gone
well, maybe even better than he'd expected—this was
what he thought. They'd gotten the legs off fairly quickly,
each of them a few inches below the knee, saving the joint.
They'd cauterized the stumps thoroughly enough so that when
they removed the tourniquets, there was only a minimal amount of
bleeding.
Seepage
,
really, would be the word for it, nothing too serious. Pablo had lost
consciousness toward the end, more from shock, it seemed, than anything
else. It wasn't pain—Jeff was almost certain of
this—he shouldn't have been able to feel a thing.
But he'd been awake; he'd been able to lift his
head and see what they were doing, and that must've counted
as its own sort of anguish. He was safer now, Jeff believed, though
still in peril. All they'd done was buy him some
time—not much, maybe another day or two. But it was
something, and Jeff believed that he ought to feel proud of himself,
that he'd done a brave deed. So he couldn't
understand why he felt so sick at heart, almost breathless with it, as
if holding back the threat of tears.

 Amy
wasn't helping much. None of them were. Mathias seemed
reluctant to look at him, was hunched into himself beside the remains
of their little fire, completely withdrawn. Eric had resumed his
pacing, his fretful probing at his leg and chest. And Amy, without even
bothering to take the time to understand what he'd
accomplished—while they were still removing the tourniquets,
carefully smearing Neosporin on the seared stumps—had
immediately begun to attack him.

 "Oh
Jesus," she'd said, startling him. He
hadn't heard her approach. "Jesus fucking Christ.
What've you done?"

 Jeff
didn't bother to answer. It seemed clear enough.

 "You
cut off his legs. How could you fucking—"

 "We
didn't have a choice," Jeff said. He was bent over
the second stump, spreading the gel across it. "He was going
to die."

 "And
you think this will save him? Chopping off his legs with a dirty
knife?"

 "We
sterilized it."

 "Come
on, Jeff. Look what he's lying on."

 It
was true, of course: The sleeping bag they'd used to cushion
the backboard was soaked through with the leakage from
Pablo's bladder. Jeff shrugged it away. "We've bought him some time. If we're
rescued tomorrow, or even the next day,
he'll—"

 "You
cut off
his
legs
,
" Amy said, almost shouting.

 Jeff
finally turned to look at her. She was standing over him, sunburned,
her face smudged with dirt, a half-inch-deep layer of green fuzz
growing across her pants. She didn't look like herself
anymore; she looked too ragged, too frantic. He supposed it must be
true for all of them, in one way or another. He certainly had stopped
feeling like himself at some point in the past twenty-four hours.
He'd just used a knife and a stone to cut off a
man's legs—a friend's, a
stranger's, it was hard to say any longer. He
didn't even know Pablo's real name. "What
chance do you think he would've had, Amy?" he
asked. "With his bones exposed like that?"

 She
didn't answer; she was staring to his right, at the ground,
with an odd expression on her face.

 "Answer
me," he said.

 Was
she starting to cry? Her chin was trembling; she reached up, touched it
with her hand. "Oh God," she whispered. "Oh Christ."

 Jeff
followed her gaze. She was peering down at Pablo's severed
limbs, the remains of his feet and ankles and shins, the bloodstained
bones held together with a few remaining cords of flesh. Jeff had
dropped them beside the backboard, carelessly, planning to bury them
when he was through cauterizing Pablo's stumps. But it
wasn't going to come to that, apparently. The vine had sent
another long tendril snaking out into the clearing. It had wrapped
itself around one of Pablo's severed feet and was dragging
the bones away now, back through the dirt. As Jeff watched, a second
tendril slithered forward, more quickly than the first, and laid claim
to the other foot.

 They
were all staring now—Eric and Mathias, too. And then Mathias
was in motion, jumping to his feet, the knife in his hand. He stepped
on the first length of vine, bent to slash at it with the blade,
severing it from its source. He swooped toward the second one, slicing
again. Even as he did this, though, a third tendril slithered into the
clearing, and then a fourth, reaching for the bones. Amy
screamed—once, short and loud—then clapped her hand
over her mouth, retreating toward Jeff. Mathias bent and slashed, bent
and slashed, and the vine kept coming, from all directions now.

 "Leave
it," Jeff said.