The Ruins

'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. 'It learns, ' he said. 'It thinks.'

'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 a plant, 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, earrings, 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. 'The vine 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?'

Jeff started across the clearing, stepped into the surrounding vegetation. Half a dozen strides and he reached one of those odd waist-high mounds. He crouched beside it, began yanking at the vines. He's going to get burned, Stacy thought, but she could tell he didn't care. As he pulled at the plants, she began to glimpse bits of yellowish white beneath the mass of green. Stones, she thought, knowing better even as she fashioned the