by Scott Smith
"Give him some of that," Jeff said, pointing at the tequila.
Mathias handed the bottle to Eric, who held it in both hands, looking up at Jeff uncertainly.
Jeff nodded, gesturing for him to drink. "For the pain."
Eric took a long swallow, paused to catch his breath, then drank again.
Mathias was holding the box of matches now. He'd opened it, taken one of them out. "Tell me when you're ready," he said.
Jeff poured some water onto the blade, rinsing it. When he was done, he took the tequila from Eric, set it on the ground. "After I cut it out, I'm going to sew you up, okay?"
Eric shook his head, looking scared. "I don't want to be sewn up."
"They won't close on their own."
"But it'll still be in there."
"I'm not going to leave any behind, Eric. I'll-"
"You won't be able to see it all. Some of it'll be too small. And if you sew it inside me-"
"Listen to me, all right?" Jeff was fighting to keep his voice low-reasonable and reassuring. "If we leave the wounds open, it'll just keep happening. Understand? You'll fall asleep, and it'll push its way in again. Is that what you want?"
Eric shut his eyes. His face began to twitch. Jeff could see he was struggling not to cry. "I want to go home," he said. "That's what I want." He inhaled deeply, something close to a sob, which he caught at the last moment. "If you sew it up, it'll-"
"Eric," Stacy said.
Eric opened his eyes, turned to look at her. She was still sitting beside Amy, clutching her hand.
"Let him do it, honey. Okay? Just let him do it."
Eric stared at her-at Amy, too. He took another deep breath, then a third one, and the trembling slowly left his face. He shut his eyes again, opened them. He nodded.
Jeff turned to Mathias, who'd been waiting through all this, the unlighted match pinched between finger and thumb. "Go ahead," Jeff said.
And then they all watched as Mathias coaxed the little fire into life.
Stacy was just a few yards away; she could see everything.
Jeff started on Eric's abdomen, enlarging the original wound, tugging gently at one of the tendrils as he sliced. He didn't have to go far-a couple of inches, no more-before the plant came free. Then he began to cut in the other direction, pulling on the second tendril. Again, it was only two or three inches before the vine slipped easily from Eric's body. It must've hurt, of course, but Eric just grimaced, his hands tightening into fists. He didn't make a sound.
Jeff handed the knife to Mathias, took the needle from him. Mathias had heated it in the tiny fire; he'd even threaded it for him. They didn't seem to have to talk, those two; somehow, they just knew what the other wanted, and did it. Like Amy and me, Stacy thought, and nearly broke into tears. She had to shut her eyes to stop herself, clenching them-clenching Amy's hand, too. The heat from her own body had warmed Amy's skin by now; if Stacy hadn't known better, she could've imagined that Amy was merely sleeping. But no, that wasn't really true. Already, an odd stiffness had begun to set in, the fingers curling slightly in her grasp.
She opened her eyes. Jeff was mopping away some of Eric's blood with the little towel, bending low, clasping the needle in his other hand, ready to begin his stitching.
Eric lifted his head slightly, stared. "What're you doing?"
Jeff hesitated, the needle poised an inch above Eric's abdomen. "I told you. We have to stitch it closed."
"But you didn't get it all."
"Sure I did. It came right out."
Eric gestured with his hand. "Can't you fucking see? It goes all the way up my chest."
Jeff examined where Eric was pointing-across the left side of his rib cage, then along his sternum. "That's just swelling, Eric."
"Bullshit."
"That's how the body reacts to physical trauma."
"Cut me there." He pointed at his sternum.
"I'm not gonna-"
"Do it and see."
Jeff glanced toward Mathias, then Stacy, as if hoping one of them would help.
Stacy tried, weakly. "Just let him stitch it up, honey."
Eric ignored her. He reached his hand toward Mathias. "Give me the knife."
Mathias looked at Jeff, who shook his head.
"Either cut me or give me the knife and let me do it."
"Eric-" Jeff began.
"It's inside me, damn it. I can feel it."
Jeff wavered for another moment, then handed the needle back to Mathias, took the knife from him. "Show me," he said.
Eric ran his finger along the left edge of his sternum. "Here. Where it's puffy."
Jeff bent over him, pressed the blade into his skin, then drew it downward, carving a line three inches long. Blood spilled out of the wound, ran down Eric's rib cage.
"You see?" Jeff asked. "No vine."
Eric was sweating, his hair clinging to his forehead. It was the pain, Stacy assumed. "Deeper," he said.
"No way." Jeff shook his head. "There's nothing there."
"It's hiding. You have to-"
"If I go deeper, I'll hit bone. Know what that'll feel like?"
"But it's in there. I can feel it."
Jeff was using the towel to blot at the blood. "It's just swelling, Eric."
"Maybe it's under the bone. Can you-"
"We're done. I'm stitching you up." Jeff handed the knife back to Mathias, took the needle from him.
"It'll start to eat me. Like Pablo."
Jeff ignored him. He kept swiping the blood away with his towel. Then he bent close, started to stitch.
Eric winced, shutting his eyes. "It hurts."
Jeff was hunched low over Eric's body, stitching and blotting, stitching and blotting, tugging at the thread to tighten it, drawing the wound closed. Very quietly, so softly that Stacy had to lean forward to hear him, he said, "You've gotta get ahold of yourself."
Eric was silent, his eyes still closed. He took a deep breath, held it, then let it out slowly. "I just…I don't want to die here."
"Of course not. None of us do."
"But I might-don't you think? All of us might."
Jeff didn't answer. He finished with the cut on Eric's sternum, knotted it off, then returned to the wound at the base of Eric's rib cage.
Eric opened his eyes. "Jeff?"
"What?"
"Do you think we'll die here?"
Jeff was starting to stitch, concentrating on the task, squinting. "I think we're in a hard place. I think we have to be really, really careful. And smart. And alert."
"You're not answering me."
Jeff considered this, then nodded. "I know." It seemed like he might add something further, but he didn't. He stitched and blotted, stitched and blotted, and when he finished with Eric's abdomen, he reached for the knife once more, shifting downward to the wounds on Eric's leg.
When it was over, Jeff let him drink some more tequila. Not much, not enough, but some. And he gave him aspirin, too, which seemed almost like a joke. Eric laughed when Jeff held out the bottle. Not Jeff, though, not the Eagle Scout-he didn't even smile. "Take three," he said. "It's better than nothing."
The stitches hurt; everything did. Eric's skin felt too tight for his body, as if it might begin to tear at any moment. It scared him to move, to try to sit up or stand, so he didn't attempt either. He lay on his back in the clearing, staring up at the sky, which was a startling blue, not a cloud in sight. A perfect day for the beach, he thought, then tried to imagine their hotel back in Cancún, the bustle going on there, how he and the others would've occupied themselves on a morning like this. An early swim, perhaps, before breakfast on the veranda. And then, in the afternoon, if it hadn't rained, maybe they'd have gone horseback riding: Stacy had said she'd wanted to try it before they left. Amy, too. Thinking this, Eric turned to look at them. Stacy kept pushing Amy's eyes shut, but each time she did it, they eased back open. Amy's mouth was hanging open, too. The vine's sap had burned the skin on her face; it looked like a birthmark.
They'd have to bury her, Eric supposed, and he wondered how they'd manage to dig a hole big enough to accommodate her body.
It was his hunger he noticed first, not the smell that aroused it. He had a tight, crampy feeling in his stomach; his mouth was pooling with saliva. Reflexively, he inhaled. Bread, he thought.
At the same moment, Stacy said, "You smell that?"
"It's bread," Eric replied. "Someone's baking bread."
The others were lifting their heads, sniffing at the air. "The Mayans?" Stacy asked.
Jeff was on his feet, trying to track the scent, which was growing stronger and stronger, a bakery smell. He moved slowly along the periphery of the clearing, inhaling deeply.
"Maybe they've brought us bread," Stacy said. She was smiling, almost giddy with the idea; she actually seemed to believe it. "One of us should go down and-"
"It's not the Mayans." Jeff was crouching now at the very edge of the clearing, with his back to them.
"But-"
He turned toward Stacy, gestured for her to come and see for herself. "It's the vine," he said.
Mathias and Stacy both got up and went to sniff at the plants' tiny red flowers; Eric didn't need to. He could tell just from their expressions that Jeff was right, that, somehow, the vine had begun to give off the odor of freshly baked bread. Stacy returned to Amy's body, sat beside it. She pressed her hand over her mouth and nose, trying to block the smell. "I can't handle this, Jeff. I really can't."
"We'll eat some," Jeff said. "We'll split the orange."
Stacy was shaking her head. "It's not going to help."
Jeff didn't answer. He vanished into the tent.
"How can it do that?" Stacy asked. She glanced from Eric to Mathias and then back again, as if expecting one of them to have some explanation. Neither of them did, of course. She seemed like she was about to cry; she was pinching her nose shut, breathing through her mouth, panting slightly.
After a moment, Jeff reappeared.
"It's doing it on purpose, isn't it?" Stacy asked.
No one answered her. Jeff sat down, started to work on the orange. Eric and Mathias watched him, the fruit slowly emerging from beneath its peel.
"Why now?" Stacy persisted. "Why didn't it-"
"It wanted to wait until we were hungry," Jeff said. "Until our defenses were low." He sectioned the fruit, counting out the segments; there were ten of them. "If it had started earlier, it wouldn't have bothered us as much. We would've gotten used to it. But now…" He shrugged. "It's the same reason it waited to start mimicking our voices. It waits till we're weak before it reveals its strength."
"Why bread?" Stacy asked.
"It must've smelled it at some point. Someone must've baked bread here, or heated it at least. Because it imitates things-things it's heard, things it's smelled. Like a chameleon. A mockingbird."
"But it's a plant. "
Jeff glanced up at her. "How do you know that?"
"What do you mean?"
"How do you know it's a plant?"
"What else would it be? It's got leaves, and flowers, and-"
"But it moves. And it thinks. So maybe it just looks like a plant." He smiled at her, as if pleased, once again, with the vine's many accomplishments. "There's no way for us to know, is there?"
The smell changed, grew sharper, more intense. Eric was reaching for the word inside his head when Mathias said it: "Meat."
Stacy lifted her face skyward, sniffing. "Steak."
Mathias shook his head. "Hamburgers."
"Pork chops," Eric countered.
Jeff waved them into silence. "Don't."
"Don't what?" Stacy asked.
"Talk about it. It'll only make it worse."
They fell silent. Not pork chops, Eric thought. Hot dogs. The plant was still inside him; he was certain of this. Stitched inside him, biding its time. But maybe it didn't matter. It could mimic sounds and smells; it could think, and it could move. Inside his body or outside, the vine was going to triumph.
Jeff divided the orange into four equal piles, two and a half segments apiece. "We should eat the peel, too," he said. And then he portioned that out also. He gestured at Stacy. "You choose first."
Stacy stood up, approached the little mounds of fruit. She crouched over them, appraising each ration, measuring with her eyes. Finally, she reached down and scooped one up.
"Eric?" Jeff said.
Eric held out his hand. "I don't care. Just give me one."
Jeff shook his head. "Point."
Eric pointed at a pile, and Jeff picked it up, carried it to him. Two and a half slices of orange, a small handful of peels. If there'd been five of them still, there'd only be two segments apiece. That Amy's absence could be measured in such a paltry manner, half a slice of orange, seemed terribly sad to Eric. He put one of the sections into his mouth and shut his eyes, not chewing yet, just holding it on his tongue.
"Mathias?" Jeff said.
Eric heard the German stand up, go to claim his ration. Then everything was silent, each of them retreating to some inner place as they savored what would have to pass for their breakfast this morning.
The smell changed again. Apple pie, Eric thought, still not chewing, and struggling suddenly, inexplicably, against the threat of tears. How does it know what apple pie smells like? He could hear the others beginning to eat, the wet sound of their mouths working. He pulled his hat down over his eyes.
A hint of cinnamon, too.
Eric chewed, swallowed, then placed a piece of orange peel in his mouth. He wasn't crying; he'd fought off the impulse. But it was still there-he could feel it.
Whipped cream, even.
He chewed the tiny strip of peel, swallowed, slipped another one into his mouth. He could see the pie's crust in his mind-slightly burned on the bottom. And it wasn't whipped cream; it was ice cream. Vanilla ice cream, slowly melting across the plate-a small tin plate, with a mug of black coffee sitting beside it. Imagining this, Eric felt that urge to weep again. He had to squeeze his eyes shut, hold his breath, wait for it to recede, while the same four words kept running through his head.
How does it know? How does it know? How does it know?
There are some things we need to figure out," Jeff said.
The orange had been divided, then eaten, peel and all. Afterward, they'd passed the jug of water around their little circle, and he'd told the others to drink their fill. Water wasn't his chief concern anymore; after the previous night's downpour, he felt confident it would rain again-almost daily, he believed. And he knew it would help morale if they could manage to eliminate at least that one discomfort. So they ate their meager breakfast, then drank water until their stomachs swelled.
Later, they could try to sew a pouch out of the leftover blue nylon. Maybe they'd even manage to collect enough rain to wash themselves. That, too, would help lift their spirits.
They weren't sated, of course. How could they be? An orange, split between the four of them. Jeff tried to think of it as fasting, a hunger strike: how long could these last? In his head, he had a picture, a newspaper photograph, black and white, of three young men staring defiantly from their cots-weak, emaciated, but undeniably alive, their eyes ablaze with it. Jeff struggled to see the headline, to remember the story that went with the picture. Why couldn't he do this? He wanted a number, wanted to know how long. Weeks, certainly-weeks with nothing but water.
Fifty days?
Sixty?
Seventy?
But eventually, there had to come a moment past which fasting blurred into starving, and in Jeff's mind this was connected in some way to their meager store of provisions, to its continued existence, no matter how little they might actually be consuming. He'd convinced himself that as long as some small scrap of food remained for them to portion out, they'd be okay; they'd be in control. Because they were rationing, not starving.
Denial. A fairy tale.
And then there were the things he knew and couldn't hide from, the things he'
d read about over the years, the details he'd absorbed. At some point, their hunger pangs would disappear. Their bodies would start to break down muscle tissue, start to digest the fatty acids in their livers, the machine consuming itself for fuel. Their metabolic rates would fall, their pulses slow, their blood pressures drop. They'd feel cold even in the sun, lethargic. And all this would happen relatively quickly, too. Two weeks, three at the most. Then things would rapidly get worse: arrhythmia, eye problems, anemia, mouth ulcers-on and on and on until there were no more and s for them to claim. It didn't matter if he couldn't remember whether it was fifty or sixty or seventy days; what mattered was that it was finite. There was a line drawn across their path-a wall, a chasm-and with each passing hour they edged one step closer to it.
After bread had come meat and after meat apple pie and after apple pie strawberries and after strawberries chocolate, and then it had stopped. "It's so we don't get used to it," Jeff had told the others. "So it catches us off guard each time it comes."
There was something they could do, of course, a resource at their disposal, but Jeff doubted the others would accept it. Unpalatable was the word that came to mind, actually-They'll find the idea unpalatable-and, even in his present extremity, he saw the humor in this.
Gallows humor.
There are some things we need to figure out. That was how he phrased it, the words sounding so misleading in their banality, so falsely benign. But how else was he to begin?
Eric was still lying on his back, his hat covering his face. He showed no sign of having heard.
"Eric?" Jeff said. "You awake?"
Eric lifted his hand, removed the hat, nodded. The skin was puckered around his wounds, drawn tight by the stitches, still oozing blood in places. Ugly-looking-raw and painful. Mathias was to Jeff's left, the water jug in his lap. Stacy was sitting beside Amy's body.
Amy's body.
"You need some sunblock on your feet, Stacy," Jeff said, pointing.
She peered down at her feet, as if not quite seeing them; they were bright pink, slightly swollen.
"And take Amy's hat. Her sunglasses."