The Ruins (40 page)

 They
needed it to rain. That was the first thing, the most crucial. Without
water, they weren't going to last much longer than Pablo.

 And
then there was the question of food. They had the small amount
they'd brought with them—snacks,
really—which might, through aggressive rationing, sustain
them for two or three more days. But after that?

 Nothing.
Fasting. Starving.

 Eric
was in trouble, Jeff knew. The cutting, the pacing, the
muttering—bad signs, all of them. And his wounds would become
infected soon; there was no way Jeff could think of to prevent this.
Time, once more, would come into play here. Gangrene,
septicemia—they'd be slower than thirst, probably,
but far faster than starving.

 Jeff
didn't think about the vines—didn't want
to, wouldn't have known how to. They moved, made sounds; they
thought and planned. And worse was to come, he suspected, though what
this might entail, he couldn't begin to guess.

 He
sat. He watched the Mayans watching him. He waited for the Greeks to
arrive, believing even as he did so that this wasn't going to
happen. He thought about water and food and Pablo and Eric. When clouds
began to build to the south, he peered toward them, willing them to
grow, to darken, to drift ever northward. Rain. They would have to
gather it. They hadn't spoken of this. He ought to have made
some plan with the others, left directions for them to follow, but he
was tired, had too much to think about; he'd forgotten. He
rose to his feet now, stared back up the trail. Why wasn't
someone coming to relieve him? This, too, they should've
spoken of, should've planned, yet hadn't.

 The
clouds continued to build. There was that plastic toolbox from the blue
tent. They could empty it, use it to collect some of the rain. There
had to be other things they could adapt for this purpose, too, but he
needed to be up on the hilltop to think of them, needed to see what was
available.

 He
paced. He sat again. He watched the Mayans, the clouds, the trail
behind him. The Mayans stared back, mute and impassive. The clouds
continued to build. The trail behind him remained empty. Jeff stood and
stretched, then paced some more. The sky had clouded over completely
now; rain was imminent, he could tell, and he was just beginning to toy
with the idea of turning, hurrying up the hill, balancing the risk of
leaving the path unguarded against that of the rain coming while they
were still unprepared for its arrival—brief and intense, as
all such storms in this part of the world appeared to be—when
he heard footsteps approaching down the trail.

 It
was Mathias.

 Something
was wrong; Jeff could see this just in the way Mathias moved. There was
a taut quality to his walk; he was hurrying and holding himself back
all at once. His face retained its usual expression of guardedness, but
with a slight shift to it, almost indiscernible. It was the eyes, Jeff
thought: a sense of wariness in them, even alarm. He stopped a few
yards short of Jeff, out of breath.

 "What
is it?" Jeff asked.

 Mathias
waved behind him, up the hill. "You didn't
hear?"

 "Hear
what?"

 "They
were talking."

 "Who?"

 "The
vines."

 Jeff
stared at him—not disbelieving, exactly, but too startled to
speak.

 "Mimicking
us," Mathias said. "Stacy and Amy and
Eric—mimicking their voices."

 Jeff
considered this. He didn't believe it was enough to explain
Mathias'
sagitation
;
there had to be something more. "Saying what?" he
asked.

 "I
fell asleep, in the tent. And when I woke up…"
Mathias trailed off, as if uncertain how to proceed. Then, finally: "They were fighting."

 "Fighting?"

 "The
girls. Shouting things at each other."

 "Oh
Christ." Jeff sighed.

 "They've
been drinking. The tequila. Quite a bit, I think."

 "All
of them?"

 Mathias
nodded.

 "They're
drunk?"

 Again,
Mathias nodded. "They called me a Nazi."

 "
What?
"

 "The
vines. Or Eric, I guess. It was his voice, but the vines were shouting
it."

 Jeff
watched him. This was it, he realized; this was what had upset him. And
why not? He had to feel alone here among them—he hardly knew
them. He was an outsider, easily
scapegoated
.
Jeff struggled to reassure him. "It was a joke, I'm
sure. Eric, you know—that's what he's
like."

 Mathias
remained silent, neither confirming nor denying this.

 "I
should get up there," Jeff said. "You'll
watch for the Greeks?"

 Mathias
nodded.

 Jeff
started to leave, then caught himself. "What about
Pablo?"

 Mathias
made a vague gesture, throwing out his hand. "The
same," he said. "Not good."

 With
that, Jeff started quickly up the hill, running on the flatter
stretches, slowing to a walk whenever it grew steep. He seemed to be
losing his breath far more easily than he ought to have. It had only
been a day since they'd arrived here, and already he could
feel himself growing weaker. He had the sense that this physical
decline somehow mirrored a more general deterioration: everything was
slipping beyond his control. Stacy and Amy and Eric had spent the
afternoon drinking tequila. How stupid could they be? Myopic,
impulsive, irresponsible—three fools flirting with their own
destruction. Then, of course, they'd turned on one another;
they'd fought, shouting insults. And Eric, for some unknown
reason, had called Mathias a Nazi. Jeff's disbelief in this
tangle of events slowly surrendered to a building sense of rage. This
was its own folly, he knew, and yet he couldn't resist its
pull, couldn't quell the desire to punish the three of them
in some way, to slap them back into a proper sense of gravity. He was
still riding this wave of emotion when he finally reached the hilltop,
stepped into the little clearing, and glimpsed Amy force-feeding a
grape to the barely conscious Pablo.

 "What
the fuck are you doing?" he said, and they all turned to
stare at him, startled by his presence there, the fury in his voice.

 Pablo
was vomiting, though that seemed the wrong word for it. Vomiting
implied something dynamic and forceful; what Pablo was doing was much
more passive. His head rolled to the side, his mouth opened, and a
stream of black liquid spilled out. Blood, bile—it was hard
to tell what it was. There was too much of it, though, more than Jeff
would've thought possible. Black liquid with thicker skeins
running through it, like clots. It formed a shallow pool alongside the
backboard, too jellylike, it seemed, for the dirt to absorb. Jeff was
four yards away, but even at that distance he could smell
it—putridly sweet.

 "He
was hungry," Amy said. Jeff could hear in her voice how drunk
she was, the threat of a slur haunting each of her words. In her left
hand, she was clenching the plastic bag that had once held their supply
of grapes; there were three left now. The nearly empty tequila bottle
was lying in the dirt beside Stacy. Eric was pressing a bloody T-shirt
to his side.

 Jeff
felt his rage begin to expand inside his body, filling him, pressing
outward against his skin, as if searching for an exit. "You're drunk. Aren't you?"

 Amy
looked away. Pablo had stopped vomiting; his eyes were shut now.

 "All
of you," Jeff persisted, surprising himself by how quiet he
was managing to keep his voice. "Am I right?"

 "I'm
not," Eric said.

 Jeff
turned on him, almost
lunging.
Stop
,
he
thought.
Don't
.
But it was too late; he'd already begun to speak, his voice
rising with each successive word, coming faster, harder, propelled by
his anger. "You're not drunk?"

 Eric
shook his head, but it didn't matter, because Jeff hardly
noticed the gesture. He hadn't paused for a response; no, he
just kept talking, knowing he was handling this in the worst possible
manner, but no longer able to stop himself, and not wanting to, either,
because there was joy in it, too: the relief of speaking, of shouting.
The release felt physical, almost sexual in its intensity.

 "Because
being drunk is really your only defense here, Eric—you
understand? You fucking cut yourself again, didn't you? You
cut your fucking chest. You have any idea what you're
doing—how profoundly stupid you're being?
You're sticking a dirty knife into your body every few hours,
and we're trapped here, with a tiny fucking tube of
Neosporin, whose shelf date has already expired. You think
that's smart? You think that makes the slightest fucking
sense? Keep it up and you're
gonna
die here. You're not
gonna
make it—"

 "Jeff—"
Amy began.

 "Shut
up, Amy. You're just as bad." He turned on her. It
didn't matter whom he was yelling at; any of them would do. "I would've expected you, at least, to know better.
Alcohol is a diuretic—it dehydrates you.
You
know
that.
So how the fuck could you—"

 You
think that's
smart?
It
was his
own voice, coming from somewhere to his left, jarring him into
silence.
You
think that makes the slightest fucking sense?
He turned,
stared, knowing what it was but still half-expecting to see a person
standing there, mimicking him. A wind had come up; it pulled at the
vines, making their hand-shaped leaves sway and bob, as if in mockery.

 Now
it was Amy's
voice:
Slut
!

 And
then
Stacy's:
Bitch
!

 "It's
because you're yelling," Stacy said, her voice
almost a whisper. "It does it when we yell."

 Boy
Scout,
Eric's
voice
called.
Nazi
!

 The
clouds had thickened almost to the point of dusk; it was hard to tell
what time it was. The storm was upon them, clearly, but night, too,
seemed close at hand. And they weren't ready for it, not
nearly, not any of it.

 "Look,"
Amy said, gesturing skyward. She was trying very hard not to slur, he
could tell, yet without much effect. "It doesn't
matter—we'll get our water."

 "But
have you prepared for it?" Jeff asked. "It'll come and go, and you'll just be
sitting here, watching it, won't you? Watching it run down
into the soil, vanishing, wasted." Jeff could feel his anger
dissipating, not in a satisfying way, either, not in a rush or a jolt,
but in a slow, implacable seepage. He didn't want it to go,
felt abandoned by its departure, as if it were a form of strength that
was leaving him; his body seemed weaker for its withdrawal. "You're pathetic," he said, turning away
from them. "All of you—fucking pathetic. You
don't need the vine to kill you. You're
gonna
make that happen all on
your own."

 Stacy's
voice
called:
Then
who's the villain?

 Sing
for us,
Amy,
Eric's
responded.

 Bitch!

 Slut!

 Nazi!

 And
then his own voice again, sounding hateful in its
anger:
You're
drunk, aren't you?

 Jeff
stepped to the orange tent, unzipped its flap, pushed his way inside.
He scanned the supplies piled against the tent's back wall.
The toolbox was waiting there, but nothing else of any relevance to his
present needs. He crouched over the box, opened its lid, and found,
oddly, not tools inside, but a sewing kit. A little pincushion
cactused
full of needles. Spools
of thread on a double rack, covering the full spectrum of colors, like
a box of crayons. Scraps of cloth, a small pair of scissors, even a
tape measure. Jeff dumped everything onto the tent's floor,
carried the empty box back out into the clearing.

 Nothing
had changed. Eric was still lying on his back, the bloody T-shirt
pressed to his abdomen. Stacy was sitting at his side, with that same
frightened expression on her face. Pablo's eyes remained
shut, the ragged sound of his breathing rising and falling. Amy was
beside him; she didn't look up when Jeff appeared. He set the
box in the middle of the clearing, open to catch the rain. Then he
started across the hilltop, toward the mouth of the shaft, where the
supplies from the blue tent still lay tumbled together in a mound.

 The
plants continued their mimicry. Sometimes the voices came in a shout,
other times very softly. There were long pauses, during which, it
seemed, they might've stopped altogether, then sudden
flurries of speech, the words and voices merging one into another. Jeff
tried not to pay attention to them, but some of the things they said
surprised him, gave him pause, made him wonder. He assumed that was the
point, as hard as this was to believe, suspected that the vines had
begun to speak now in an effort to drive the six of them apart, turn
them one against another.

 Stacy's
voice
said,
Well
,
Jeff isn't here, is he?
And then Eric's
came:
Was
Jeff a Boy Scout? I bet Jeff was a Boy Scout.
Laughter
followed: Eric and Stacy's, mixing together, with an edge of
mockery to it.

 It
was as if the vine had learned their names, knew who was who, and was
tailoring its mimicry accordingly, the better to unsettle them. Jeff
tried to think back over the past twenty-four hours, to remember the
things he'd said, searching for possible difficulties. He was
so tired, though, so benumbed, that his mind refused to help him. It
didn't matter anyway, because the vine knew, and as Jeff
started to pick through the pile of supplies beside the open shaft, he
heard his voice begin to speak.