The Ruins (48 page)

 "Me?"

 "Are
you angry?"

 A
humming had risen in Stacy's skull—hunger or
fatigue or fear. She couldn't have said which, knew only that
one would account for it just as well as any other. She was far too
worn out for anything as vigorous as anger to have much hold over her;
she'd been here too long, gone through too much. She shook
her head.

 "Good,"
Jeff said. And then, as if he were announcing a prize she'd
won for choosing the correct answer: "Why don't you
take the first shift down the hill."

 Stacy
didn't want to do this. Yet even as she sat there searching
for a reason to refuse him, she knew she had no choice. Amy was gone,
and it seemed like this ought to change everything. But the world was
carrying on, and Jeff was moving with it, worrying about sunscreen and
the Greeks—planning, always planning—because that
was what it meant to be alive.

 Am
I
alive?
she
wondered.

 Jeff
picked up the water, held it out to her. "Hydrate
first."

 She
took the jug from him, uncapped it, drank. It helped her nausea enough
for her to stand.

 Jeff
handed her the sunshade. "Three hours," he said. "Okay? Then Mathias will relieve you."

 Stacy
nodded, and then he was turning away, already moving on to his next
task. There was nothing left for her to do but leave. So that was what
she did, the sunscreen making her feet feel slippery in her sandals,
that humming sound rising and falling in her
head.
I'm
okay,
she said to
herself.
I
can do this. I'm alive.
And she kept repeating the
words, mantra-like, as she made her way slowly down the
trail.
I'm
alive. I'm alive. I'm alive….

E
ric was lying on his back in
the center of the clearing. He could feel the sun against his
body—his face, his arms, his legs—hot enough to
carry a trace of pain. There was pleasure in it, too,
though—pleasure not despite the pain but because of it. He
was getting a sunburn, and what could be so terrible about that? It was
normal; it could happen to anyone—lying beside a pool,
napping on a beach—and Eric found a definite measure of
reassurance in this. Yes,
he
wanted
to be sunburned, wanted to be in the grip of that mundane discomfort,
believing that it might somehow obscure the far more extraordinary
stirrings of his body, the sense that his wounds would rip open if he
were to move too suddenly, the suspicion—no, the
certainty—that the vine was still lurking within his body,
sewed up tight by Jeff's stitches, interred but not dead,
merely dormant,
seedlike
,
biding its time. With his eyes shut, his mind focused on the surface of
his body, the burning tautness of his skin, Eric had stumbled upon a
temporary refuge, all the more alluring for its tenuousness. But he
knew he couldn't take it too far. There was an element of
balance to the process, a tipping point he had to avoid. He was
exhausted—he kept having to resist the urge to
yawn—he was certain that if he relaxed even slightly,
he'd drop into sleep. And sleep was his enemy here; sleep was
when the vine laid claim to him.

 He
forced open his eyes, rose onto his elbow. Jeff and Mathias were
tending to Pablo's stumps. They used water from the jug to
flush the seared tissue; then Jeff threaded a needle, sterilized it
with a match. Pablo still had half a dozen blood vessels leaking their
tiny rivulets of red. Jeff was bending now to stitch them shut. Eric
couldn't bear to watch; he lowered himself onto his back
again. The smell of the match alone was too much for him, bringing back
as it did the previous day's horror—Jeff pressing
that heated pan against the Greek's flesh, the aroma of
cooking spreading across the hilltop.

 He
should go into the tent, he knew; he should get out of the sun. But
even as he thought this, he was shutting his eyes. He heard his own
voice inside his
head:
I'll
be okay. Jeff is right there. He'll watch over me.
He'll keep me safe.
The words just came; Eric
wasn't conscious of forming them. It was as if he were
overhearing someone else.

 He
could feel himself falling asleep, and he didn't fight it.

 He
awoke to find that the day had shifted forward—dramatically
so. The sun was already beginning its long descent toward evening.
There were clouds, too. They covered more than half the sky and were
visibly advancing westward. These obviously weren't the usual
afternoon thunderheads Eric and the others had witnessed here thus far,
with their abrupt appearance and equally rapid dispersal. No, this
seemed to be some sort of storm front sweeping down upon them. For the
moment, the sun remained
unobscured
,
but Eric could tell this wouldn't be true much longer. He
could've sensed it even without glancing upward: the light
had a feeling of foreboding to it.

 He
turned his head, stared about the clearing, still feeling sleep-dazed.
Stacy had returned from the bottom of the hill; she was sitting beside
Pablo, holding his hand. The Greek appeared to have lost consciousness
again. His respiration had continued to deteriorate. Eric lay there
listening to it—the watery inhalation, the wheezing
discharge, that frightening, far too long pause between breaths.
Amy's corpse was resting in the dirt to his left, enveloped
in its dark blue sleeping bag. Jeff was on the far side of the
clearing, bent over something, in obvious concentration. It took Eric a
moment to grasp what it was. Jeff had sewn a large
bucketlike
pouch out of the
scraps of blue nylon to collect the coming rain. Now he was using some
of the leftover aluminum poles to build a frame for it, taping them
together, so that the pouch's sides wouldn't
collapse as it filled.

 There
was no sign of Mathias. He was guarding the trail, Eric assumed.

 He
sat up. His body felt stiff, hollowed out, strangely chilled. He was
just bending to examine his wounds, probing at the surrounding skin,
searching for signs of the vine's growth within
him—bumps, puffiness, swelling—when Jeff rose to
his feet, moved past him without a word, and disappeared inside the
tent.

 Why
am I so cold?

 Eric
could tell that it wasn't a matter of the temperature having
dropped. He could see the damp circles of sweat on Stacy's
shirt; he could even sense the heat himself, but at an odd remove, as
if he were in an air-conditioned room, staring through a window at a
sunbaked
landscape. No, that
wasn't it; it was as if
his
body
were the air-conditioned room, as if his skin were the windowpane, hot
on the surface, cold underneath. This must be an effect of his hunger,
he supposed, or his fatigue or loss of blood, or even the plant inside
him, parasitically sucking the warmth from his body. There was no way
to say for certain. All he knew was that it was a bad sign. He felt
like lying down again, and would've if Jeff hadn't
reappeared then, carrying the two bananas.

 Eric
watched him retrieve the knife from the dirt, wipe it on his shirt in a
halfhearted effort to clean the blade, then crouch and cut each of the
bananas in half, with their peels still on. He waved for Eric and Stacy
to approach. "Choose," he said.

 Stacy
leaned forward to lay Pablo's hand gently across his chest,
then came and stooped beside Jeff, peering down at the proffered food.
The bananas' peels were almost completely black now; Eric
could tell how soft they must be just by looking at them. Stacy picked
one up, cradling it in her palm. "Do we eat the
peel?" she asked.

 Jeff
shrugged. "It might be hard to chew. But you can
try." He turned toward Eric, who hadn't stirred. "Pick one," he said.

 "What
about Mathias?" Eric asked.

 "I'm
going to go relieve him now. I'll take it down."

 Eric
kept feeling as if he were about to shiver. He didn't trust
himself to stand up. It wasn't only his wounds, which felt so
vulnerable, so easily reopened; he was worried his legs might not hold
him. He held out his hand. "Just toss it."

 "Which?"

 "There."
He pointed to the one closest to him. Jeff threw it underhand; it
landed in Eric's lap.

 They
ate in silence. The banana was far too ripe: it tasted as if it had
already begun to ferment, a mush of tangy sweetness that, even in his
hunger, Eric found difficult to swallow. He ate quickly, first the
fruit, then the skin. It was impossible to chew the skin more than
partially; it was too fibrous. Eric gnawed and gnawed, until his jaw
began to ache, then forced himself to swallow the clotted mass. Jeff
had already finished, but Stacy was taking her time with her own
ration, still nibbling at the little nub of fruit, its skin resting on
her knee.

 Jeff
lifted his eyes, examined the clouds darkening above them, the sun in
its diminishing quadrant of blue. "I put soap out for you in
case it starts to rain while I'm still down there."
He gestured toward the blue pouch. A bar of soap was lying in the dirt
beside it. The plastic toolbox was there, too; Jeff had used the duct
tape to cover the crack along its bottom. "Wash yourselves,
then get inside the—" He stopped in mid-sentence,
turned toward the tent with a startled expression.

 Eric
and Stacy followed his gaze. There was a rustling sound: the sleeping
bag was moving. No—
Amy
was
moving, kicking at the bag, thrashing, struggling to rise. For a
moment, they simply watched, not quite able to believe what they were
seeing. Then they were rushing forward, all three of them, even Eric,
his wounds forgotten, his weakness and fatigue, everything set aside,
momentarily transcended by his shock, his astonishment, his hope. Part
of himself already knew what they were about to find even as he watched
Jeff and Stacy stoop beside the bag, but he resisted the knowledge,
waited for the sound of the zipper, for Amy to come laboring toward
them, gasping and
bewildered.
A
mistake, it was all a mistake.

 He
could hear Amy's voice, calling from inside the bag. Muffled,
panic-filled: "Jeff…Jeff…"

 "We're
right here, sweetie," Stacy shouted. "We're right here."

 She
was scrambling for the zipper. Jeff found it first, yanked on it, and
an immense tangle of vine erupted out off the bag, cascading onto the
dirt. Its flowers were a pale pink. Eric watched them open and close,
still
calling,
Jeff
…Jeff…Jeff…
The thick clot of tendrils was writhing spasmodically, coiling and
uncoiling. Entwined within it were Amy's bones, already
stripped clean of flesh. Eric glimpsed her skull, her pelvis, what he
assumed must be a femur, everything tumbled confusedly together; then
Stacy was screaming, backing away, shaking her head. He stepped toward
her, and she clutched at him, tightly enough for him to remember his
wounds again, how easy it would be to begin to bleed.

 The
vine stopped calling Jeff's name. Perhaps three seconds of
silence followed, and then it started to laugh: a low, mocking chuckle.

 Jeff
stood over the bag, staring at it. Stacy pressed her face into
Eric's chest. She was crying now.

 "
Shh
,"
Eric said. "
Shh
."
He stroked her hair, feeling oddly distant. He thought of how people
sometimes described accidents they'd suffered, that
floating-above-the-scene quality that so often seemed to accompany
disaster, and he struggled to find his way back to himself.
Stacy's hair was greasy beneath his hand; he tried to
concentrate on this, hoping the sensation might ground him, but even as
he did so, his gaze was slipping back toward the sleeping bag, toward
the skein of vines—still writhing, still
laughing—and the bones tangled within it.

 Amy.

 Stacy
was sobbing now, uncontrollably, tightly embracing him. Her nails were
digging into his back. "
Shh
,"
he kept saying. "
Shh
."

 Jeff
hadn't moved.

 Eric
could feel it inside his chest—the vine—could feel
it shifting deeper, but even this seemed strangely far away to him, not
really his concern at all. It was shock, he decided; he must be in
shock. And maybe that was a good thing, too; maybe that was his psyche
protecting him, shutting down when it knew events had gone too far.

 "I
wanna
go
home," Stacy moaned. "I
wanna
go home."

 He
patted at her, stroked her. "
Shh
…
shh
."

 The
vine had eaten Amy's flesh in half a day. So why
shouldn't it inflict something similar upon him? All it would
have to do was make its way to his heart, he supposed, and
then—what? Slowly squeeze it, still its beating? Thinking
this, Eric became conscious of his pulse, of the fact—both
banal and profound all at once—that it would stop someday,
whether here or somewhere else, and that when it did, he'd
stop, too. These beats sounding faintly in his head—they were
finite, there was a limit to them, and each contraction of his heart
brought him that much closer to the end. He was thinking, irrationally,
that if he could only slow his pulse, he might manage to live longer,
to stretch out his allotted heartbeats—add a day, maybe two,
or even a week—was probing at the illogic of this, when the
vine fell silent. For a moment, there was only the rasp of
Pablo's breathing in the clearing—stopping and
starting, stopping and starting. Then, quietly at first, but rapidly
growing in volume, there came the sound of someone gagging.

 It
was Amy, Eric knew. She was vomiting.