The Ruins

'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 Coba 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 that was 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 capital T 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 accept 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.