The Ruins

'I can,' she said. Eric didn't respond. He stood beside her, with one hand resting lightly on her shoulder, waiting for her to call out. She craned back her head, yelled, 'Ready!'

And then the windlass began its squeaking, and suddenly she was rising into the air, her feet dangling free, Eric's hand falling from her shoulder, vanishing into the darkness behind her.

The chirping began again. At first, it seemed to be coming from above Eric; then it was right in front of him, nearly at his feet. He reached toward the sound, patting with his hands, but found only more of the vine, its leaves slick to his touch, slimy even, like the skin of some dark-dwelling amphibian.

The windlass paused in its creaking, leaving Amy dangling somewhere up above him.

'Can you see it?' Jeff yelled.

Eric didn't answer. The chiming had moved away now, toward the open shaft in front of him, then into it, down it, growing fainter.

'Eric?' Amy called.

There was a pale yellow balloon bobbing to his left. It wasn't real, of course, just a trick of his eyes, and he knew this. So why should the chirping be real? He wasn't going to follow the sound down the shaft, wasn't going to move, was determined to keep crouching here, with one hand on the oilless lamp, the other on the box of matches, waiting for the sling to come dropping back toward him.

'I can't see it,' he shouted up at them.

The windlass resumed its creaking.

The wound on his knee throbbed steadily. He had a headache-he was hungry, thirsty. And tired now, too. He was trying not to think about everything he and Amy had discussed, trying to fill his mind with static, because it was so much harder now, all alone down here, to keep believing in the hopeful scenarios they'd created. The Mayans weren't going to leave-which of them had been the one to propose such a foolish idea? And how did they imagine they'd ever be able to signal a plane for help, it flying so far above them, so quickly, so tiny in the sky? Chiropractor, he thought, struggling to mute these questions. Credentials. Collision. Celestial. Cadaver. Circumstantial. Curvaceous. Cumulative. Cavalier. Circumnavigate.

The chirping stopped. And then, a moment later, so did the windlass. Eric could hear them helping Amy out of the sling.

What if the Greeks didn't come? Or, having come, were simply trapped here on the hill with them? Derisive, he thought. Dilapidated. Decadent. And what if it didn't rain? What would they do then for water? Delectable, he thought Divinity. Druid. Jeff had told him that he had to wash the cut on his elbow, that even something as small as that could get infected very quickly in this climate, and now he had a much deeper wound on his knee, with no chance of cleaning it. It could become gangrenous. He could lose his leg. Dovetail, he thought. Disastrous. Devious.

And Pablo…what about Pablo and his broken back?

The creaking resumed, and Eric stood up. Effervescent, he was thinking. Eunuch. He had the matches in one hand, the lamp in the other, and he lifted his arms, held them blindly out before him, waiting to receive the sling.

Stacy and Amy sat next to each other on the ground, a few feet away from Pablo's backboard. They were holding hands, watching Jeff examine Eric's knee. Eric had gingerly lowered his pants, grimacing as he pulled them free of his wound, the fabric tearing at the dried blood. Jeff crouched over him, struggling unsuccessfully in the darkness to get a sense of how badly Eric had been injured. Finally, he gave up; it would have to wait till morning. All that mattered for now was that it had stopped bleeding.

Mathias was building a shelter for Pablo, using the duct tape to fashion a flimsy-looking lean-to from what remained of the blue tent's nylon and aluminum poles.

'One of us should probably stay on watch while the others sleep,' Jeff said.

'Why do we need someone on watch?' Amy asked.

Jeff nodded toward Pablo. They'd removed the belts, and he was lying on the backboard, eyes shut. 'In case he wants something,' Jeff said. 'Or…' He shrugged, glanced across the clearing, toward the trail that led down the hill. The Mayans, he was thinking, but he didn't want to say it. 'I don't know. It just seems smarter.'

Everyone was silent. Mathias tore off a strip of tape, using his teeth.

'Two-hour shifts,' Jeff said. 'Eric can skip his.' Eric was sitting there, looking dazed, his pants bunched around his ankles. Jeff couldn't tell if he was listening. 'I'm thinking we should probably start collecting our urine, too. Just to be safe.'

'Our urine?' Amy asked.

Jeff nodded. 'In case we run out of water before it rains. We can hold ourselves over for a little while by-'

'I'm not going to drink my urine, Jeff.'

Stacy nodded in agreement. 'There's no way,' she said.

'If we reach the point where it's either drinking urine or dying of-'

'You said the Greeks would come tomorrow,' Amy protested. 'You said-'

'I'm only trying to be careful, Amy. To be smart. And part of being smart is thinking about the worst-case scenario. Because if it comes to that, we'll wish we'd planned for it. Right?'

She didn't answer.

'Our urine's only going to get more and more concentrated as we become dehydrated,' Jeff continued. 'So now's the time to start saving it.'

Eric shook his head, rubbed tiredly at his face. 'Jesus,' he said. 'Jesus fucking Christ.'

Jeff ignored him. 'Tomorrow, once it's light, we'll figure out how much water we have and how we should go about rationing it. Food, too. For now, I think we should each just take a single swig and then try our best to get some sleep.' He turned to Mathias, who was still working on the lean-to. 'You have that empty bottle?'

Mathias stepped toward the orange tent. His pack was lying in the dirt beside it. He unzipped it, rummaged about for a moment, then pulled out his empty water bottle. He handed it to Jeff.

Jeff held it up before the others; it was a two-liter bottle. 'If you have to pee, use this. Okay?'

Nobody said anything.

Jeff placed the bottle beside the doorway to the tent. 'Mathias and I will finish Pablo's shelter. Then I'll take the first watch. The rest of you should try to get some sleep.'

They talked only long enough to agree that they shouldn't talk, that they'd just end up agitating themselves, lying in the darkened tent, whispering back and forth. Stacy was in the middle, between Eric and Amy, on her back, holding hands with both of them. They'd left enough space for Mathias on the far side of Amy. There were two sleeping bags remaining in the tent, but it was too hot to think of using them. They'd pushed them and everything else-the backpacks, the plastic toolbox, the hiking boots, the jug of water-into a pile against the tent's rear wall. They'd talked, briefly, about drinking some of the water, whispering conspiratorially, hunched over the plastic jug. Amy was the one who'd suggested it, saying it as if it were a joke, her hand poised above the cap. It was hard to tell if she'd meant it-maybe she would've taken a long, gulping swallow if they'd agreed-but when they'd shaken their heads, insisting it wouldn't be fair to the others, she'd set the jug quickly aside, laughing. Stacy and Eric had laughed, too, but it had sounded odd in the darkness, the musty closeness of the tent, and they'd quickly fallen silent.

Eric removed his shoes, and then Stacy helped him pull his pants the rest of the way off. She and Amy remained fully clothed. Stacy didn't feel safe enough to disrobe; she wanted to be ready to run. She assumed Amy felt the same way, though neither of them admitted to it.

Not that there would be anywhere to run, of course.

Stacy lay very still, listening to the other two breathe, trying to guess if they were close to sleep. She wasn't;