SSmith - Ruins

by The Ruins (v1. 0) [lit]

  Eric was standing right over them when they started. Jeff used a small towel he’d found in one of the backpacks to pull the stone from the fire; he wrapped it around his hand, glovelike, to protect himself from the heat. Moving quickly, in one fluid motion, he scooped up the stone, raised it over his head, turned toward the backboard. Then he slammed it down with all his strength against the Greek’s lower leg.

  Pablo’s eyes jerked open; he began to scream again, writhing and bucking beneath his bonds. Jeff seemed hardly to notice; his face showed no reaction. He was already dropping the stone back into the fire, reaching for the knife. Mathias, too, remained expressionless, focused on his task. It was his job to keep the fire burning hot, to feed in new notebooks if they were needed, to sprinkle more alcohol, to stir and blow upon the embers.

  Jeff was hunched over the backboard, muscles taut with the strain of his labor, sawing and chopping. There was the stench of the hot knife against Pablo’s flesh, a cooking smell, meat burning. Eric glimpsed the shattered bone below the Greek’s left knee, the bloody marrow spilling out, Jeff’s knife pushing and cutting and prying. He saw the bottom half of Pablo’s leg come free, the foot and ankle and shin bones a separate thing now, cut off, gone forever. Jeff sat back on his haunches, catching his breath. Pablo continued to scream and writhe, his eyes rolling, flashing white. Mathias took the knife from Jeff, returned it to the fire. Jeff picked up the little towel, started to wrap it around his hand again. As he reached for the glowing stone, Eric turned quickly away, started off across the clearing. He couldn’t watch any longer, had to flee.

  But there was nowhere to go, of course. Even on the far side of the clearing, with his back turned to the scene, he could still hear what was happening, the crunch of the stone slamming into Pablo’s other leg, and the screaming—louder now, it seemed, higher-pitched.

  Eric glanced over his shoulder—he couldn’t stop himself.

  Mathias was holding the black pan, the one Jeff had brought back from the bottom of the hill, with that word carved across its bottom—peligro. Eric watched him place it in the fire. They were going to use it to cauterize the Greek’s wounds, pressing it flat across his stumps, one after the other.

  Jeff was bent low over the backboard, working with the knife, a steady sawing motion, his shirt soaked through with sweat.

  Pablo was still screaming. And there were words now, too. They were impossible to understand, of course, but Eric could hear the pleading in them, the begging. He remembered how he’d fallen on the Greek when he’d jumped down into the shaft, that feeling of his body bucking beneath him. And he thought of how Amy and he had thrown Pablo onto the backboard, that clumsy, lurching, panic-filled toss. He could feel the vine moving inside him, in his leg, and his chest, too—that insistent pressure at the base of his rib cage, pushing outward. It was all wrong; everything here was wrong, and there was no way to stop it, no way to escape.

  Eric turned away again, but he couldn’t maintain it. He had to glance back almost immediately.

  Jeff finished with the knife, dropped it into the dirt at his side. Eric watched him pick up the towel; he wrapped it around his hand, turned to pull the pan from the fire. Mathias had to help him now. He squatted beside the backboard, bent to lift Pablo’s left leg, what remained of it, grasping it with both hands just above the knee. Pablo was crying, talking to the two of them, Mathias and Jeff both, using their names. Neither of them showed any sign of hearing, though; they wouldn’t look at him. The pan was glowing orange now, and the letters scratched into its bottom were a deeper color, almost red, so that Eric could still read the word they spelled there, even as Jeff swung it free of the flames. He watched Jeff spin, place the pan against the base of Pablo’s stump, holding it in place, pressing hard, using all his weight. Eric could hear the flesh burning, a spitting, snapping sound. He could smell it, too, and was appalled to feel his stomach stirring in response—not in nausea, either, but, shockingly, in hunger.

  He turned away, dropped into a crouch, shutting his eyes, pressing his hands to his ears, breathing through his mouth. He remained like this for what seemed like an impossibly long time, concentrating on the sensation of the vine inside his body, that insistently probing spasm in his leg, that pressure in his chest, trying to feel them as something else, something benign, some trick of perception, as Stacy kept insisting they must be: his heartbeat, his overtired muscles, his fear. He couldn’t do it, though, and he couldn’t wait any longer, either; yet again, he had to look.

  When he turned, he found Jeff and Mathias still crouched over the backboard. Jeff was pressing the pan into Pablo’s right stump now. There was that same sickeningly enticing smell in the air. But silence now—Pablo had gone still, stopped screaming. He seemed to have lost consciousness.

  Then there was the sound of footsteps approaching. Amy was coming up the path. She entered the clearing at a run, out of breath, her skin shining with sweat.

  Too late,Eric thought, watching her stagger to a stop, staring—seeing—a look of horror on her face.She’s come too late.

  Jeff didn’t know what to feel. Or no: He knew what he thought, and then he knew what he felt, and he couldn’t seem to bring the two into line. It had gone well, maybe even better than he’d expected—this was what he thought. They’d gotten the legs off fairly quickly, each of them a few inches below the knee, saving the joint. They’d cauterized the stumps thoroughly enough so that when they removed the tourniquets, there was only a minimal amount of bleeding.Seepage, really, would be the word for it, nothing too serious. Pablo had lost consciousness toward the end, more from shock, it seemed, than anything else. It wasn’t pain—Jeff was almost certain of this—he shouldn’t have been able to feel a thing. But he’d been awake; he’d been able to lift his head and see what they were doing, and that must’ve counted as its own sort of anguish. He was safer now, Jeff believed, though still in peril. All they’d done was buy him some time—not much, maybe another day or two. But it was something, and Jeff believed that he ought to feel proud of himself, that he’d done a brave deed. So he couldn’t understand why he felt so sick at heart, almost breathless with it, as if holding back the threat of tears.

  Amy wasn’t helping much. None of them were. Mathias seemed reluctant to look at him, was hunched into himself beside the remains of their little fire, completely withdrawn. Eric had resumed his pacing, his fretful probing at his leg and chest. And Amy, without even bothering to take the time to understand what he’d accomplished—while they were still removing the tourniquets, carefully smearing Neosporin on the seared stumps—had immediately begun to attack him.

  “Oh Jesus,” she’d said, startling him. He hadn’t heard her approach. “Jesus fucking Christ. What’ve you done?”

  Jeff didn’t bother to answer. It seemed clear enough.

  “You cut off his legs. How could you fucking—”

  “We didn’t have a choice,” Jeff said. He was bent over the second stump, spreading the gel across it. “He was going to die.”

  “And you think this will save him? Chopping off his legs with a dirty knife?”

  “We sterilized it.”

  “Come on, Jeff. Look what he’s lying on.”

  It was true, of course: The sleeping bag they’d used to cushion the backboard was soaked through with the leakage from Pablo’s bladder. Jeff shrugged it away. “We’ve bought him some time. If we’re rescued tomorrow, or even the next day, he’ll—”

  “You cut off hislegs, ” Amy said, almost shouting.

  Jeff finally turned to look at her. She was standing over him, sunburned, her face smudged with dirt, a half-inch-deep layer of green fuzz growing across her pants. She didn’t look like herself anymore; she looked too ragged, too frantic. He supposed it must be true for all of them, in one way or another. He certainly had stopped feeling like himself at some point in the past twenty-four hours. He’d just used a knife and a stone to cut off a man’s legs—a friend’s, a stranger’s, it was hard to say any lo
nger. He didn’t even know Pablo’s real name. “What chance do you think he would’ve had, Amy?” he asked. “With his bones exposed like that?”

  She didn’t answer; she was staring to his right, at the ground, with an odd expression on her face.

  “Answer me,” he said.

  Was she starting to cry? Her chin was trembling; she reached up, touched it with her hand. “Oh God,” she whispered. “Oh Christ.”

  Jeff followed her gaze. She was peering down at Pablo’s severed limbs, the remains of his feet and ankles and shins, the bloodstained bones held together with a few remaining cords of flesh. Jeff had dropped them beside the backboard, carelessly, planning to bury them when he was through cauterizing Pablo’s stumps. But it wasn’t going to come to that, apparently. The vine had sent another long tendril snaking out into the clearing. It had wrapped itself around one of Pablo’s severed feet and was dragging the bones away now, back through the dirt. As Jeff watched, a second tendril slithered forward, more quickly than the first, and laid claim to the other foot.

  They were all staring now—Eric and Mathias, too. And then Mathias was in motion, jumping to his feet, the knife in his hand. He stepped on the first length of vine, bent to slash at it with the blade, severing it from its source. He swooped toward the second one, slicing again. Even as he did this, though, a third tendril slithered into the clearing, and then a fourth, reaching for the bones. Amy screamed—once, short and loud—then clapped her hand over her mouth, retreating toward Jeff. Mathias bent and slashed, bent and slashed, and the vine kept coming, from all directions now.

  “Leave it,” Jeff said.

  Mathias ignored him. Cutting and stomping and tearing at the vines, faster and faster, but still too slow, the tendrils fighting back, wrapping themselves around his legs, hindering his movements.

  “Mathias,” Jeff said, and he stepped toward him, grabbed his arm, pulled him away. He could feel the German’s strength, the taut, straining muscles, but also his fatigue, his surrender. They stood side by side, watching as the vine pulled the severed limbs into itself, the white of the bones dragged into the larger mass of green, vanishing altogether.

  They were still standing like this, all four of them, perfectly motionless, when, from across the hilltop, there came that familiar chirping again, the sound of a cell phone plaintively ringing at the bottom of the shaft.

  Stacy sat beneath her jerry-rigged umbrella, in her little circle of shade, cross-legged, hunched into herself. She kept having to resist the temptation to glance at her wrist, kept having to remind herself that her watch wasn’t there, that it was resting on a table beside a bed in Cancún, in her hotel room, where she ought to be right now, too, but wasn’t. Or perhaps not: perhaps her fears had finally come true and a maid had stolen the watch. In which case, it would be where? With her hat, she supposed, and her sunglasses, adorning some stranger, some woman laughing over lunch at a restaurant on the beach. Stacy could feel the absence of these possessions in a way that was almost physical, an ache inside her chest, a bodily yearning, but it was her glasses that she missed most of all. There was too much sun here, too much glare. Her head throbbed with it—throbbed with hunger, too, and thirst, and fatigue, and fear.

  Behind her, up the hill, they were amputating Pablo’s legs. Stacy tried not to think of this. He was going to die here; she couldn’t see any way around it. And she tried not to think of that, too.

  Finally, she couldn’t help it: She gave in, glanced at her wrist. There was nothing there, of course, and her thoughts began to circle once again—the night table, the maid, the hat and sunglasses, the woman eating lunch at the beach. This woman would be rested and fed and clean, with a bottle of water at her elbow. She’d be careless, carefree: happy. Stacy felt a wave of hatred for this imaginary stranger, which quickly metastasized, jumping to the boy who’d squeezed her breast outside the bus station, to the—probably fictional—felonious maid, to the Mayans sitting across from her with their watchful faces, their bows and arrows. One of the boys was there now, the one who’d followed them on the bike yesterday, the little one, riding on the handlebars. He was sitting in an elderly woman’s lap, staring toward Stacy, expressionless, like all the other Mayans, and Stacy hated him, too.

  Her khakis and T-shirt were covered with the pale green fuzz from the vine, her sandals also. She kept brushing it away, burning her hands, but the tiny tendrils quickly grew back. They’d already eaten several holes in her T-shirt. One, just above her belly button, was as big as a silver dollar. It was only a matter of time, Stacy knew, before her clothes would be hanging off her in shreds.

  She hated the vine, too, of course, if it was possible to hate a plant. She hated its vivid green, its tiny red flowers, the sting of its sap against her skin. She hated it for being able to move, for its hunger, and its malevolence.

  Her feet were still caked with mud from the long walk across that field the previous afternoon, and the mud continued to give off its faint scent of shit.Like Pablo, Stacy thought, her mind jumping up the hill, to what was happening there, the knife, the heated stone. She shuddered, shut her eyes.

  Hate and more hate—Stacy was drowning in it, dropping downward, with no bottom in sight. She hated Pablo for having fallen into the shaft, hated him for his broken back, his fast-approaching death. She hated Eric for his wounded leg, for the vine moving wormlike beneath his skin, for his panic in the face of this. She hated Jeff for his competence, his coldness, for turning so easily to that knife and heated stone. She hated Amy for not stopping him, hated Mathias for his silences, his blank looks, hated herself most of all.

  She opened her eyes, glanced about. A handful of minutes had passed, but nothing had changed.

  Yes, she hated herself.

  She hated herself for not knowing what time it was, or how much longer she’d have to sit here.

  She hated herself for having stopped believing that Pablo was going to live.

  She hated herself for knowing that the Greeks weren’t going to come, not today, not ever.

  She tilted back her umbrella, risked a quick look at the sky. Jeff was hoping for rain, she knew, depending on it. He was working to save them; he had plans and schemes and plots, but they all had the same flaw, the same weakness lurking within them—they all involved a degree of hope. And rain didn’t come from hope; rain came from clouds, white or gray or the deepest of black—it didn’t matter—they had to be there. But the sky above her was a blinding blue, stubbornly so, without a single cloud in sight.

  It wasn’t going to rain.

  And this was just another thing for Stacy to hate herself for knowing.

  They decided to drop back into the hole.

  It was Jeff’s idea, but Amy didn’t argue. The Greeks weren’t coming today. Everyone was admitting this now—to themselves at least, if not to the others—and thus the cell phone, the perhaps mythical cell phone calling to them from the bottom of the shaft, was the only thing left to pin their hopes on. So when Jeff proposed that they try one final time to find it, Amy startled him by agreeing.

  They couldn’t leave Pablo alone, of course. At first, they were going to have Amy sit with him while Eric and Mathias worked the windlass, lowering Jeff into the shaft. But Jeff wanted her to go, too. He was planning on making some sort of torch out of the archaeologists’ clothes, soaking them in tequila, and he wasn’t certain how long the light would last from this. Two sets of eyes down there would be more efficient than one, he said, allowing the search to be more thorough, more methodical.

  Amy didn’t want to go down into the hole again. But Jeff wasn’t asking what she wanted; he was telling her whathe wanted, describing it as something that had already been decided, a problem they needed to solve.

  “We could carry it to the hole,” Mathias said, meaning the backboard, meaning Pablo, and they all thought about this for a moment. Then Jeff nodded.

  So that was what they did. Jeff and Mathias lifted the backboard out from under the little lean-to, ca
rried it across the hilltop to the mouth of the shaft—carefully, working hard not to jostle Pablo. There were some terrible smells coming off the Greek’s body: the by-now-familiar stench of his shit and urine, the burned-meat stink of his stubs, and that sweeter scent, lingering underneath everything else, that first ominous hint of rot. No one said anything about it; no one said anything about Pablo at all, in fact. He was still unconscious, and appeared worse than ever. It wasn’t just his legs Amy had to avoid looking at; it was also his face. When she’d first applied to medical school, she’d gone on some campus tours, and she’d seen the cadavers the students dissected: gray-skinned, sunken-eyed, slack-mouthed. That was what Pablo’s face was beginning to look like, too.