SSmith - Ruins

by The Ruins (v1. 0) [lit]

  “Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh fuck.”

  He could feel Mathias applying pressure to his wound, struggling to staunch the fresh flow of blood, and he opened his eyes. Mathias’s back was bare; he’d taken off his shirt, was using it as a makeshift bandage.

  “It’s all right,” Mathias said. “I got it.”

  They stayed like that for several minutes, not moving, each of them struggling to catch his breath, Mathias using all his weight to press against the incision. Eric thought Stacy would come to check on him, but she didn’t. He could hear Pablo crying. There was no sign of the girls.

  “What happened?” he asked finally. “What happened outside?”

  Mathias didn’t answer.

  Eric tried again. “Why was Stacy screaming?”

  “It’s bad.”

  “What is?”

  “You have to see. I can’t—” Mathias shook his head. “I don’t know how to describe it.”

  Eric fell silent at this, taking it in, struggling to make sense of it. “Is it Pablo?” he asked.

  Mathias nodded.

  “Is he okay?”

  Mathias shook his head.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  Mathias made a vague gesture with his hand, and Eric felt a tightening sensation in his chest: frustration. He wished he could see the German’s face.

  “Just tell me,” he said.

  Mathias stood up. He had his T-shirt in his hand, crumpled into a ball; it was dark now with Eric’s blood. “Can you stand?” he asked.

  Eric tried. His leg was still bleeding, and it was hard to put weight on it. He managed to pull himself to his feet, though, then nearly fell. Mathias grabbed him by the elbow, held him up, helped him hobble slowly toward the open flap of the tent.

  Jeff found the four of them in the little clearing, sitting beside the orange tent. When they saw him approaching, they all started to talk at once.

  Amy seemed to be on the edge of tears. “What are you doing here?” she kept asking him.

  It turned out that he’d been gone so long, they’d begun to think he might’ve found a way to flee, that he’d sneaked past the guards at the base of the hill and sprinted off into the jungle, that he was on his way to Cobá now, that help would soon be coming. They’d talked through this scenario in such depth, playing out the various steps of his journey, imagining the time line—Would he be able to flag down a passing car once he’d reached the road, or would he have to hike the entire eleven miles? And was it only eleven miles? And would the police come immediately, or would they need time to gather a large enough force to overcome the Mayans?—that Amy seemed to have pushed past the murky realm of possibility into the far clearer, sharper-edged one of probability. His escape wasn’t something that might be happening; it had become something thatwas happening.

  Over and over again, the same question: “What are you doing here?”

  When he told her he’d been down at the base of the hill, that he’d walked completely around it, she stared at him in incomprehension, as if he’d said he’d spent the morning playing tennis with the Mayans.

  There was something wrong with Eric. He kept standing up, limping about, talking over everyone else, then dropping back down, his wounded leg extended in front of him. He was wearing shorts now—rifled, Jeff assumed, from one of the backpacks. He’d sit for a bit, rocking slightly, staring at the dried blood on his knee and shin, only to jump back up again: talking, talking, talking. The vine was inside him: that was what he was saying, repeating it to no one in particular, not waiting for a response, not seeming even to expect one. They’d gotten it out, but it was still inside him.

  Stacy was the one who explained it to Jeff, what had happened to Eric, the vine pushing its way in through his wound while he slept, Mathias cutting it free with the knife. At first, she seemed much calmer than the other two, surprisingly so. But then, in mid-sentence, she suddenly jumped topics. “They’ll come today,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “Won’t they?”

  “Who?”

  “The Greeks.”

  “I don’t know,” Jeff began. “I—” Then he saw her expression, a tremor moving across her face—terror—and he changed direction. “They might,” he said. “This afternoon, maybe.”

  “They have to.”

  “If not today, then in—”

  Stacy interrupted him, her voice rising. “We can’t spend another night here, Jeff. Theyhave to come today.”

  Jeff went silent, staring at her, startled.

  She watched Eric for a moment, his pacing and muttering. Then she leaned forward, touched Jeff’s arm. “The vine can move,” she said, whispering the words. As she spoke, she glanced toward the low wall of vegetation that surrounded the little clearing, as if frightened of being overheard. “Amy threw up, and it reached out.” She made a snakelike motion with her arm. “It reached out and drank it up.”

  Jeff could feel them all watching him, as if they expected him to deny this, to insist upon its impossibility. But he just nodded. He knew it could move—knew far more than that, in fact.

  He got Eric to sit still so that he could examine his leg. The cut on his knee had closed again; the scab was dark red, almost black, the skin around it inflamed, noticeably hot to the touch. And beneath this wound was another, running perpendicular to it, moving down the left side of Eric’s shinbone, so that it looked as if someone had carved a capitalT into his flesh.

  “It seems okay,” he said. He was just trying to calm Eric, to slow him down; he didn’t think it seemed okay at all. They’d smeared some of the Neosporin from the first-aid kit on the cuts—Eric’s leg was shiny with it—and there were flecks of dirt stuck in the gel. “Why didn’t you bandage it?” Jeff asked.

  “We tried,” Stacy said. “But he kept tearing it off. He says he wants to be able to see it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll grow back if we don’t keep watching,” Eric said.

  “But you got it out. How would it—”

  “All we got was the big piece. The rest is still inside me. I can feel it.” He pointed at his shin. “See? How puffy it is?”

  “It’s just swollen, Eric. That’s natural. That’s what happens after you’ve been hurt.”

  Eric waved this aside, a tautness entering his voice. “That’s bullshit. It’s fucking growing in there.” He pushed himself up onto his feet, limped off across the clearing. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “I’ve got to get to a hospital.”

  Jeff watched him pace, startled by his agitation. Amy still looked as if she might begin to cry at any moment. Stacy was wringing her hands.

  Mathias was wearing a dark green shirt; he must’ve pulled it from one of the backpacks. This whole time, he hadn’t spoken. But now, finally, in his quiet voice, with its almost unnoticeable accent, he said, “That’s not the worst of it.” He turned, looked toward Pablo.

  Pablo. Jeff had forgotten about Pablo. He’d given him a quick glance when he’d first come walking back into the clearing, seen him lying so still beneath his lean-to, his eyes shut.Good, he’d thought,he’s sleeping . And then that was it; there’d been Amy repeating her strange question—“What are you doing here?”—and Stacy worrying over the Greeks’ arrival and Eric insisting the vine was growing inside him, all of it distracting him, making no sense, pulling his mind from where it ought to be.

  The worst of it.

  Jeff stepped toward the lean-to. Mathias followed him; the rest of them watched from across the clearing, as if frightened to approach any closer. Pablo was lying on his backboard, the sleeping bag covering him from the waist down. He didn’t look any different, so Jeff couldn’t understand why he was feeling such a strange intimation of peril. But he was: a sense of imminent danger, a tightness in his chest.

  “What?” he asked.

  Mathias crouched, carefully pulled back the sleeping bag.

  For a long moment, Jeff couldn’t take it in. He stared, he saw, but he couldn’t acce
pt the information his eyes were offering him.

  The worst of it.

  It wasn’t possible. How could it be possible?

  On both legs, from the knees down, Pablo’s flesh had been almost completely stripped away. Bone, tendon, gristle, and ropy clots of blackened blood: this was all that remained. Mathias and the others had tightened a pair of tourniquets around the Greek’s thighs, clamping shut the femoral arteries. They’d used some of the strips of nylon from the blue tent. Jeff bent low to examine them; it was an effort at escape—he could admit this to himself—a way of not having to look at the exposed bones. He needed to occupy his mind for a moment, distract it, give it time to adjust to this new horror. He’d never tied a tourniquet before, but he’d read about them, and knew—in the abstract at least—how to apply them. You were supposed to loosen them at regular intervals, then retighten them, but Jeff couldn’t remember the exact time frame, or even what it was supposed to accomplish.

  It didn’t matter, he supposed.

  No: Heknew it didn’t matter.

  “The vines?” he said.

  Mathias nodded. “When we pulled them off, the blood started to spurt. They were holding it back somehow, and once they were gone…” He made a spraying motion with his hands.

  Pablo’s eyes were shut, as if he were asleep, but his hands seemed to be clenched, the skin across his knuckles drawn to a taut whiteness. “Is he conscious?” Jeff asked.

  Mathias shrugged. “It’s hard to tell. He was screaming at first; then he stopped and shut his eyes. He’s rolled his head back and forth, and he shouted once. But he hasn’t opened his eyes again.”

  There was an oddly sweet smell coming off of Pablo, stomach-turning once you began to notice it. This was decay, Jeff knew. It was the Greek’s legs beginning to rot. He needed to be operated on, needed to get to a hospital—and sooner rather than later. Help would have to arrive by tonight for him to survive. If it didn’t, they’d spend the coming days watching Pablo die.

  Or maybe there was a third option.

  Jeff was fairly certain help wasn’t going to arrive before nightfall. And he didn’t want to sit and watch Pablo die. But this third option…he knew the others wouldn’t be ready for it, not nearly—not in concept, not in practice. And he’d need their help, of course, if he was going to attempt it.

  So it was with the idea of preparing them, of hardening them, that he turned from Pablo’s mutilated body and began to speak of his own discoveries that morning.

  Given everything she’d seen of the vine’s capabilities since dawn—how it had pushed its way into Eric’s leg, stripped Pablo of his flesh, snaked across the clearing to suck dry Amy’s vomit—Stacy felt little surprise at Jeff’s revelations. She listened to him with a strangely numb sensation; her only noticeable emotion was a low hum of irritation toward Eric, who continued to pace about the little clearing, paying no attention whatsoever to Jeff and his story. Stacy wanted him to sit down, to stop obsessing on what she was certain was the purely imaginary presence of the plant inside his body. The plant wasn’t inside his body; the very idea seemed absurd to her, pointlessly frightening. Yet assuring Eric of this had no effect at all. He just kept pacing, stopping now and then to probe wincingly at his wounds. The only thing one could do was struggle to ignore him.

  The vine was the reason they were being held captive here: that was the gist of what Jeff was telling them. The Mayans had cut the clearing around the base of the hill in an attempt to quarantine the plant, sowing the surrounding soil with salt. Jeff’s theory was that the vine spread through contact. When they touched it, they picked up its seeds or spores or whatever served as its means of reproduction, and if they were to cross the cleared swath of ground, they’d carry these with them. This was why the Mayans refused to allow them off the hill.

  “What about birds?” Mathias asked. “Wouldn’t they—”

  “There aren’t any,” Jeff said. “Haven’t you noticed? No birds, no insects—nothing alive here but us and the plant.”

  They all stared about the clearing, as if searching for some refutation of this. “But how would they know to stay away?” Stacy asked. She pictured the Mayans stopping the birds and mosquitoes and flies, just like they’d attempted to stop the six of them, the bald man waving his pistol toward the tiny creatures, shouting at them, keeping them at bay. How, she wondered, could the birds have known to turn aside when she hadn’t?

  “Evolution,” Jeff said. “The ones who’ve landed on the hillside have died. The ones who’ve somehow sensed to avoid it have survived.”

  “All of them?” Amy asked, clearly not believing this.

  Jeff shrugged. “Watch.” His shirt had plastic buttons on its pockets; he reached up, yanked one off, tossed it out into the vines.

  There was a jumping movement, a blur of green.

  “See how quick it is?” he asked. He seemed oddly pleased, as if proud of the plant’s skill. “Imagine if that were a bird. Or a fly. It wouldn’t have a chance.”

  No one said anything; they were all staring out into the surrounding vegetation, as if waiting for it to move again. Stacy remembered that long arm swaying toward her across the clearing, the sucking sound it made as it drank up Amy’s vomit. She realized she was holding her breath, felt dizzy with it, had to remind herself to exhale…inhale…exhale.

  Jeff pulled the button off his other pocket and tossed it, too. Once more, there was that darting flash. “But here’s the amazing thing,” he said, and he reached up to his collar, plucked a third button from the shirt, threw it out into the vines.

  Nothing happened.

  “See?” He smiled at them. There was that sense of pride again; he couldn’t seem to help himself. “Itlearns, ” he said. “Itthinks .”

  “What’re you talking about?” Amy asked, as if affronted by Jeff’s words. Or scared, maybe—there was an edge to her voice.

  “It pulled down my sign.”

  “You’re saying it can read?”

  “I’m saying it knew what I was doing. Knew that if it wanted to succeed in killing us—and maybe others, too, whoever else might come along—it had to get rid of the sign. Just like it had gotten rid of this one.” He kicked at the metal pan with that single Spanish word scraped across its bottom.

  Amy laughed. No one else did. Stacy had heard everything Jeff was saying, but she wasn’t following his words, wasn’t grasping that he meant them literally.Plants bend toward the light: that was what she was thinking. She even, miraculously, remembered the word for this reflex—a darting glance back toward high school biology, the smell of chalk dust and formaldehyde, sticky bumps of dried gum hanging off the underside of her desk—a little bubble rising toward the surface of her mind, breaking with a popping sound:phototropism. Flowers open in the morning and shut at night; roots reach toward water. It was weird and creepy and uncanny, but it wasn’t the same as thinking.

  “That’s absurd,” Amy said. “Plants don’t have brains; they can’t think.”

  “It grows on almost everything, doesn’t it? Everything organic?” Jeff gestured at his jeans, the pale green fuzz sprouting there.

  Amy nodded.

  “Then why was the rope so clear?” Jeff asked.

  “It wasn’t. That’s the reason it broke. The vine—”

  “But why was there any rope left at all? This thing stripped the flesh off Pablo’s legs in a single night. Why wouldn’t it have eaten the rope clean, too?”

  Amy frowned at him; she clearly didn’t have an answer.

  “It was a trap,” Jeff said. “Can’t you see that? It left the rope because it knew whoever came along would eventually decide to look in the hole. And then it could burn through, and—”

  Amy threw up her hands in disbelief. “It’s aplant, Jeff. Plants aren’t conscious. They don’t—”

  “Here,” Jeff said. He reached into his pockets, emptied them one after another onto the dirt at his feet. There were four passports, two pairs of glasses, wedding rings, earr
ings, a necklace. “They’re all dead. These are the only things left. These and their bones. And I’m telling you that the vine did this. It killed them. And right now, even as we’re speaking, it’s planning to kill us, too.”

  Amy shook her head, vehement. “Thevine didn’t kill them. The Mayans did. They tried to flee and the Mayans shot them. The vine just claimed their bodies once they’d been shot. There’s no thought involved in that. No—”

  “Look around you, Amy.”

  Amy turned, glanced about the clearing. Everyone did, even Eric. Amy lifted her hands: “What?”