The Ruins

to stop himself, and not wanting to, either, because there was joy in it, too: the relief of speaking, of shouting. The release felt physical, almost sexual in its intensity.

'Because being drunk is really your only defense here, Eric-you understand? You fucking cut yourself again, didn't you? You cut your fucking chest. You have any idea what you're doing-how profoundly stupid you're being? You're sticking a dirty knife into your body every few hours, and we're trapped here, with a tiny fucking tube of Neosporin, whose shelf date has already expired. You think that's smart? You think that makes the slightest fucking sense? Keep it up and you're gonna die here. You're not gonna make it-'

'Jeff-' Amy began.

'Shut up, Amy. You're just as bad.' He turned on her. It didn't matter whom he was yelling at; any of them would do. 'I would've expected you, at least, to know better. Alcohol is a diuretic-it dehydrates you. You know that. So how the fuck could you-'

You think that's smart? It was his own voice, coming from somewhere to his left, jarring him into silence. You think that makes the slightest fucking sense? He turned, stared, knowing what it was but still half-expecting to see a person standing there, mimicking him. A wind had come up; it pulled at the vines, making their hand-shaped leaves sway and bob, as if in mockery.

Now it was Amy's voice: Slut!

And then Stacy's: Bitch!

'It's because you're yelling,' Stacy said, her voice almost a whisper. 'It does it when we yell.'

Boy Scout, Eric's voice called. Nazi!

The clouds had thickened almost to the point of dusk; it was hard to tell what time it was. The storm was upon them, clearly, but night, too, seemed close at hand. And they weren't ready for it, not nearly, not any of it.

'Look,' Amy said, gesturing skyward. She was trying very hard not to slur, he could tell, yet without much effect. 'It doesn't matter-we'll get our water.'

'But have you prepared for it?' Jeff asked. 'It'll come and go, and you'll just be sitting here, watching it, won't you? Watching it run down into the soil, vanishing, wasted.' Jeff could feel his anger dissipating, not in a satisfying way, either, not in a rush or a jolt, but in a slow, implacable seepage. He didn't want it to go, felt abandoned by its departure, as if it were a form of strength that was leaving him; his body seemed weaker for its withdrawal. 'You're pathetic,' he said, turning away from them. 'All of you-fucking pathetic. You don't need the vine to kill you. You're gonna make that happen all on your own.'

Stacy's voice called: Then who's the villain?

Sing for us, Amy, Eric's responded.

Bitch!

Slut!

Nazi!

And then his own voice again, sounding hateful in its anger: You're drunk, aren't you?

Jeff stepped to the orange tent, unzipped its flap, pushed his way inside. He scanned the supplies piled against the tent's back wall. The toolbox was waiting there, but nothing else of any relevance to his present needs. He crouched over the box, opened its lid, and found, oddly, not tools inside, but a sewing kit. A little pincushion cactused full of needles. Spools of thread on a double rack, covering the full spectrum of colors, like a box of crayons. Scraps of cloth, a small pair of scissors, even a tape measure. Jeff dumped everything onto the tent's floor, carried the empty box back out into the clearing.

Nothing had changed. Eric was still lying on his back, the bloody T-shirt pressed to his abdomen. Stacy was sitting at his side, with that same frightened expression on her face. Pablo's eyes remained shut, the ragged sound of his breathing rising and falling. Amy was beside him; she didn't look up when Jeff appeared. He set the box in the middle of the clearing, open to catch the rain. Then he started across the hilltop, toward the mouth of the shaft, where the supplies from the blue tent still lay tumbled together in a mound.

The plants continued their mimicry. Sometimes the voices came in a shout, other times very softly. There were long pauses, during which, it seemed, they might've stopped altogether, then sudden flurries of speech, the words and voices merging one into another. Jeff tried not to pay attention to them, but some of the things they said surprised him, gave him pause, made him wonder. He assumed that was the point, as hard as this was to believe, suspected that the vines had begun to speak now in an effort to drive the six of them apart, turn them one against another.

Stacy's voice said, Well, Jeff isn't here, is he? And then Eric's came: Was Jeff a Boy Scout? I bet Jeff was a Boy Scout. Laughter followed: Eric and Stacy's, mixing together, with an edge of mockery to it.

It was as if the vine had learned their names, knew who was who, and was tailoring its mimicry accordingly, the better to unsettle them. Jeff tried to think back over the past twenty-four hours, to remember the things he'd said, searching for possible difficulties. He was so tired, though, so benumbed, that his mind refused to help him. It didn't matter anyway, because the vine knew, and as Jeff started to pick through the pile of supplies beside the open shaft, he heard his voice begin to speak.

End it. Cut his throat. Smother him.

The longer we stay here, the better its chances.

It mimics things. It's not really laughter.

Then the whole hillside seemed to erupt at once-there were giggles and guffaws and chuckles and snickers-it went on and on and on. Interspersed with this was his own voice, shouting, as if trying to silence the noise, repeating the same phrase over and over again: It's not really laughter… It's not really laughter… It's not really laughter…

Jeff retrieved the Frisbee from the tangle of supplies, the empty canteen, carried them back across the hilltop toward the orange tent. His idea was that as the Frisbee filled with rain, he could pour it into the canteen, the plastic jug, the bottle they'd been using to collect their urine. It wasn't the best plan, but it was all he could think of.

Amy and Stacy and Eric hadn't moved. The vine had sent forth another tendril; it was feasting on Pablo's vomit now, audibly sucking at it. The three of them were watching, slack-jawed: drunk. When the vine finished with the little puddle, it retreated back across the clearing. No one moved; no one said a thing. Jeff felt his anger stirring at the sight of this-their impassivity, their collective stupor-but he didn't speak. That was over now, the urge to yell. He set the Frisbee beside the open toolbox, then emptied Mathias's water bottle of their urine. The others watched him, silent, all of them listening to the vines as they quieted for a moment, only to jump again in volume, still laughing. The sound of strangers, Jeff assumed. Cees Steenkamp, maybe. The girl whom Henrich had met on the beach. All these piles of bones, their flesh stripped clean, their souls long ago unhoused, but their laughter preserved here, remembered by the vine, and called forth now, wielded like a weapon.

It's not really laughter… It's not really laughter… It's not really laughter…

There were still some strips of nylon left over from the blue tent, and Jeff fiddled with them now, trying to think of a way to use them to catch the rain, or store the water once they'd collected it. He should've thought of this earlier, he knew; he could've used the sewing kit he'd found in the orange tent to stitch the lengths of nylon together into a giant pouch. But now he no longer had the time.

Tomorrow, he thought.

And then the rain began to fall.

It came in a rush, as if a trapdoor had swung open in the clouds above them, releasing it. There was no warning, no preparatory drizzle; one moment the sky was merely brooding, dark gray, with that held-breath quality the tropics often have before a storm's approach, a breeze lightly stirring the vines, and then, seemingly without transition, the air was full of falling water. Daylight faltered, took on a greenish hue one step short of darkness; the hard-packed earth beneath them turned instantly to mud. It felt difficult to breathe.

The plants fell silent.