The Ruins (49 page)

 Jeff
turned from the bag, the tangle of vine, the loosened bones. There was
a clenched immobility to his face. Eric could see how hard he was
working not to cry. He wanted to say something, wanted to comfort him,
but Jeff was moving too quickly, and Eric's mind
wasn't supple enough; he couldn't find the proper
words. He watched Jeff stoop to retrieve the remaining piece of fruit,
then rise, start toward the trail. He was just exiting the clearing
when Amy's voice emerged, very faintly, through the
gagging:
Help
me.

 Jeff
stopped, turned back toward Eric.

 Help
me, Jeff.

 Jeff
shook his head. He looked helpless suddenly, startlingly young, a boy
fighting tears. "I didn't know," he said. "I swear. It was too dark. I couldn't see
her." He didn't wait for Eric's response;
he spun away and strode quickly off.

 Eric
stood there, staring after him—Stacy still pressed tightly
against his body, weeping—while Amy's voice grew
fainter and fainter, pursuing Jeff down the hill.

 Help
me, Jeff…. Help me…. Help me….

J
eff hadn't gone more
than a hundred feet before the vine fell silent. He would've
thought he'd find some relief in this, but it
wasn't true. The quiet was even worse, the way the voice
stopped so abruptly, the inexplicable feeling of aloneness that
followed in its wake. It was the sound of Amy dying, of
course—that was what Jeff was hearing—her voice cut
off in mid-cry. He felt the tears coming and knew they were too strong
for him this time, that he had no choice but to submit. He crouched in
the center of the trail, folded his arms across his knees, buried his
face within them.

 It
was absurd, but he didn't want the vine to know he was
crying. He had the instinct to hide himself, as if he feared the plant
might find some pleasure in his suffering. He wept but didn't
sob, restricting himself to a furtive sort of gasping. He kept his head
bowed the entire time. When he finally managed to quiet, he rose back
to his feet, using his shirtsleeve to wipe clean the dampness, the
snot. His legs felt shaky, his chest strangely hollow, but he could
sense that he was stronger for the purging, and calmer, too. Still
grief-stricken—how could he not be?—still
guilt-ridden and bereft, but steadier nonetheless.

 He
started down the hill again.

 Above
him, to the west, clouds were continuing to build, darkening ominously.
A storm was coming—a big one, it appeared. Jeff guessed they
had another hour, maybe two, before it reached them. They'd
have to huddle together in the tent, he supposed, and it made him
anxious, the thought of all four of them in that confined space, time
stretching slowly out. There was also the question of Pablo. They
couldn't just leave him in the rain, could they? Jeff
searched vainly for an answer to this dilemma; he imagined the
backboard dragged inside with them, the wind whipping at the nylon
walls, water dripping from the fabric above, while that terrible stench
rose off the Greek's body, and he realized immediately that
it wasn't possible. Yet no other solution
came.
Perhaps
it won't rain,
he thought, knowing even as he did
so that he was acting like a child, no better than the rest of them,
passively hoping that whatever he found too horrible to contemplate
might simply go away if he could only avert his eyes for a sufficient
stretch of time.

 Mathias
was sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the hill, facing the tree
line. He didn't hear Jeff approach, or, hearing him,
didn't bother to turn. Jeff sat beside him, held out the
halved banana. "Lunch," he said.

 Mathias
took the fruit without a word. Jeff watched him begin to eat. It was
Friday; Mathias and
Henrich
were supposed to have flown back to Germany today. Jeff and the others
would've given them their E-mail addresses, their phone
numbers; they would've made vague but heartfelt promises to
visit. There would've been hugs in the lobby; Amy
would've taken their picture. Then the four of them
would've stood together at the big window, waving, as the van
pulled away, bearing the two brothers toward the airport.

 Jeff
wiped his face on his sleeve again, worried that there might be some
residue of his weeping still visible there, tear tracks down his
dirt-smeared cheeks. It seemed clear that Mathias hadn't
heard the vine, and Jeff was surprised by the degree of relief he felt
in this. He didn't want the German to know, he realized, was
frightened of his judgment.

 She
called me. She called my name.

 The
Mayans were stringing up a plastic tarp just inside the tree
line—to provide some shelter from the coming storm, Jeff
assumed. There were four of them working at it—three men and
a woman. Two other men sat near the smoldering campfire, facing Jeff
and Mathias, their bows in their laps. One of them kept blowing his
nose in a dirty-looking bandanna, then holding the cloth up to examine
whatever he'd expelled. Jeff leaned forward, peered left and
right along the corridor of cleared ground, but he could see no sign of
their leader, the bald man with the pistol on his belt. They were
probably working in shifts, he supposed, some of them guarding the
hill, while the others remained back at the village, tending to their
fields.

 "You'd
think they'd just kill us," he said.

 Mathias
paused in his eating, turned to look at him.

 "It
takes so much effort, sitting here like this. Why not just slaughter us
from the start and be done with it?"

 "Maybe
they feel it would be a sin," Mathias said.

 "But
they're killing us by keeping us here, aren't they?
And if we tried to leave, they wouldn't hesitate to shoot
us."

 "That's
self-defense, though, isn't it? From their perspective? Not
murder."

 
Murder,
Jeff
thought.
Was that what was happening here? Had Amy been murdered? And if so, by
whom? The Mayans? The vine? Himself? "How long do you think
it's been going on?" he asked.

 "It?"

 Jeff
waved about them, at the hillside, the cleared ground. "The
vine. Where do you think it came from?"

 Mathias
started in on the banana's skin, frowning slightly, thinking.
Jeff waited while he chewed. There was a trio of large black birds
shifting about in the trees above the Mayans' tarp. Crows,
Jeff guessed. Carrion birds, drawn by the smell of Pablo or Amy, but
too wise to venture any nearer. Mathias swallowed, wiped his mouth with
his hand. "The mine, I guess," he said. "Don't you think? Someone must've dug it
up."

 "But
how did they contain it? How did they have time to seal off the hill?
Because they would've had to hack down all this jungle, plow
the dirt with salt. Think how long that must've
taken." He shook his head—it didn't seem
possible.

 "Maybe
you're wrong about them," Mathias said. "Maybe it isn't about quarantining the vine. Maybe
they know how to kill it but choose not to."

 "Because?"

 "Maybe
it would just keep coming back. And this is a way of holding it at bay,
confining it. A sort of truce they've stumbled
upon."

 "But
if it's not about quarantining it, why won't they
let us leave?"

 "Maybe
it's just a taboo they have among themselves, passed down
through the generations, a way of ensuring that the vine never escapes
its bounds. If you step into it, you can't come back. And
then, when outsiders started to arrive, they simply applied the taboo
to them, too." He thought about this for a moment, staring
off toward the Mayans. "Or it could even be religious, right?
They see the hill as sacred. And once you step on it, you
can't leave. Maybe we're some sort of
sacrifice."

 "But
if—"

 "This
is just us guessing, Jeff," Mathias said, sounding fatigued,
a little impatient. "Just talk. It's not worth
arguing about."

 They
sat together for a stretch, watching the crows flap from branch to
branch. The wind was picking up, the storm almost upon them. The Mayans
were moving their belongings back into the tree line, beneath the
shelter of the tarp. Mathias was right, of course. Theorizing was
pointless. The vine was here, and so were they, while the Mayans were
over there. And beyond the Mayans, far out of reach, lay the rest of
the world. That was all that mattered.

 "What
about the archaeologists?" Jeff asked.

 "What
about them?"

 "All
those people. Why hasn't someone come searching for
them?"

 "Maybe
it's still too early. We don't know how long
they've been missing. If they were supposed to be here for
the summer, say, would anyone even be worried yet?"

 "But
you think someone will come? Eventually, if we can just hold out long
enough?"

 Mathias
shrugged. "How many of those mounds do you guess there are?
Thirty? Forty? Too many people have died here for us all simply to
vanish. Sooner or later, someone's bound to find this place.
I don't know when. But sooner or later."

 "And
you think we can last that long?"

 Mathias
wiped his hands on his jeans, stared down at them. His palms were
burned a deep red from the vine's sap; his fingertips were
cracked and bleeding. He shook his head. "Not without
food."

 Reflexively,
Jeff began to catalog their remaining rations. The pretzels, the nuts.
The two protein bars, the raisins, the handful of saltines. A can of
Coke, two bottles of iced tea. All of it divided among four
people—five, if Pablo ever revived enough to
eat—and meant to last for…how long? Six weeks?

 One
of the crows dropped into the clearing, began to edge its way
hesitantly toward the two men sitting by the campfire. The man with the
bandanna flapped it at the bird, and the crow flew back up into the
trees, cawing. Jeff stared after it.

 "Maybe
we could spear one of those birds," he said. "We
could take a tent pole, tape the knife to it, then use some of the rope
from the shaft, tie it to the bottom of the pole, like a harpoon. That
way, we could throw it into the trees, then drag it back to us. All
we'd have to do is figure out a way to barb the knife, so
that—"

 "They
won't let us get close enough."

 It
was true, of course; Jeff could see this immediately, but he felt a
brief flicker of anger nonetheless, as if Mathias were purposely
thwarting him. "What if we tried to clear the hill? Just
started chopping at the vine. Pulling it up. If we
all—"

 "There's
so much of it, Jeff. And it grows so fast. How could
we—"

 "I'm
just trying to find a way through this," Jeff said. He could
hear how peevish he sounded, and he disliked himself for it.

 Mathias
didn't seem to notice, though. "Maybe there
isn't a way," he said. "Maybe all we can
do is wait and hope and endure for as long as we're able. The
food will run out. Our bodies will fail. And the vine will do whatever
it's going to do."

 Jeff
sat for a moment, examining Mathias's face. Like the rest of
them, he looked shockingly depleted. The skin on his nose and forehead
was beginning to peel; there was a gummy paste clinging to the corners
of his mouth. His eyes were shadowed. But within this deterioration
there nonetheless appeared to be some remaining reservoir of strength,
which no one else, including Jeff, seemed to possess. He looked calmer
than the rest of them, oddly composed, and it suddenly struck Jeff how
little he actually knew about the German. He'd grown up in
Munich; he'd gotten his tattoo during a brief service in the
army; he was studying to become an engineer. And that was all. Mathias
was generally so silent, so retiring; it was easy to convince yourself
that you knew what he was thinking. But now, talking with him at such
length for the first time, Jeff felt as if the German were changing
moment by moment before his eyes—revealing
himself—and he was proving to be far more forceful than Jeff
ever would've guessed: steadier, more mature. Jeff felt small
beside him, vaguely childish.

 "You
have this phrase in English, don't you? A chicken whose head
has been chopped off?" Mathias used two fingers to mime
running about in circles.

 Jeff
nodded.

 "We're
all becoming weaker, and that's only going to get worse. So
don't waste yourself on
unessentials
.
Don't walk when you can sit. And don't sit when you
can lie down. Understand?"

 The
Mayan boy had reappeared while they were talking, the tiny one. He was
sitting beside the campfire now, practicing his juggling. The Mayan men
were laughing at his efforts, offering what seemed to be advice and
commentary.

 Mathias
nodded toward them. "What did your guidebook say about these
people?"

 Jeff
pictured the glossy pages; he could almost smell them, feel their cool,
clean smoothness. The book had been full of the Mayans'
past—their pyramids and highways and astrological
calendars—but seemingly indifferent to their present. "Not much," he said. "It had a myth of
theirs, a creation myth. That's all I remember."

 "Of
the world?"

 Jeff
shook his head. "Of people."

 "Tell
me."

 Jeff
spent a few seconds thinking back, pulling the story into order. "There were some false starts. The gods tried to use mud
first, and the people they fashioned out of it talked but made no
sense—they couldn't turn their heads, and they
dissolved in the rain. So the gods tried to use wood. But the wooden
people were bad—their minds were empty; they ignored the
gods. So the whole world attacked them. The stones from their hearths
shot out at their faces, their cooking pots beat them, and their knives
stabbed them. Some of the wooden people fled off to the trees and
became monkeys, but the others were all killed."