The Ruins (19 page)

 "Tell
us when," Jeff called back.

 Amy
could hear Eric breathing beside her. "Are you
sure?" she asked.

 "Definitely,"
he said. And then he laughed, or pretended to. "Just
don't forget to send it back down."

 "How
do I do it?"

 "Pull
it over your head. Tuck it under your arms."

 She
let go of his hand, pushed her arms through the sling's
opening, her head. Eric helped her, adjusting it beneath her armpits.

 "You're
sure it's okay?" she asked again.

 Somehow,
she could sense him nodding in the darkness, cutting her off. "Want me to shout?"

 "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.

T
he 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.

S
tacy 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."

T
hey 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; she was tired to the
point of tears, but she didn't believe she'd ever
be able to find any rest here. She could hear Jeff and Mathias talking
softly outside the tent, without being able to tell what they were
saying. After awhile, Amy let go of her hand, rolling away from her,
onto her side, and Stacy almost cried out, calling her back. Instead,
she shifted closer to Eric, pressing against him. He turned his head
toward her, started to speak, but she put a finger to his lips,
silencing him. She laid her head on his shoulder, snuggling. She could
smell his sweat, and she stuck out her tongue, licked his skin, tasted
the salt. Her hand was resting on his stomach, and without really
thinking, she slid it down his body, slipping beneath the waistband on
his boxers. She touched his penis, tentatively, the sleepy softness of
it, let her fingers rest on top of it. She wasn't thinking of
sex—she was too tired, too frightened for this to be any sort
of motivation. What she was searching for was reassurance. She was
fumbling for it, not knowing how to find it, trying this particular
route only because she couldn't think of any other. She
wanted to make him hard, wanted to jerk him off, wanted to feel his
body arch as the sperm spurted out of him. She believed she'd
find some comfort in this, some illusory sense of safety.

 So
that was what she did. It didn't take long. His penis slowly
stiffened beneath her touch, and then she began to stroke him, fast,
grimacing with the effort. His breath deepened, with a rasp hiding in
it, and then—just as her arm was beginning to ache with the
exertion—rose to a moan as he climaxed. Stacy heard the
first, thick shot of semen splatter wetly to the tent's floor
beside him. She could feel his body relax in the aftermath, could even
feel the moment when he fell asleep, the tension easing from his
muscles. It was infectious, that abrupt sense of relief, that sudden
abatement, like an emptiness sweeping through her, and in the face of
it, her fear seemed, if only temporarily, to retreat a step. That was
enough, though; it was all she needed. Because in that brief
moment—somehow, miraculously—with her hand still
clasping Eric's sticky, slackening penis, Stacy, too, slipped
into sleep.

A
my heard the whole thing. She
lay there listening to Stacy's furtive rustling, its rhythmic
push and pull, growing faster and faster, tugging Eric's
breathing along behind it, the steady climb in volume, the suppressed
moan, the silence that followed. In another context, she
would've found the whole thing funny, would've
teased Stacy in the morning, maybe even said something at the moment of
climax, clapped, shouting, "Bravo! Bravo!" But
here, in the stuffy darkness of the tent, she simply lay on her side
with her eyes shut, enduring it. She could tell when they fell asleep,
and she felt a moment's envy, a yearning for Jeff to be here,
holding her, soothing her out of consciousness. Then the flap zippered
open, and Mathias entered in his stocking feet. He stepped over her
body and lowered himself into the empty space beside her. It was
startling, how rapidly he joined the other two in sleep, as if it were
a shirt he'd pulled over his head, adjusting it, tucking it
into his pants, brushing out the wrinkles, before, his eyes drifting
shut, he began to snore. Amy counted his snores. Some were so deep,
they echoed in the air above her, while others were like whispers she
had to strain to hear. When she reached one hundred, she sat up,
crawled to the tent's flap, unzipped it, and slipped out into
the night.

 It
wasn't as dark outside as in; Amy could see Jeff's
shape beside the longer shadow of the lean-to, could sense him lifting
his head to look at her. He didn't say anything; she assumed
he didn't want to wake Pablo. She picked up the plastic
bottle, unbuttoned her pants, and—crouching right there in
front of the tent, with Jeff watching her through the
darkness—started to urinate. It took her a moment to guide
the mouth of the bottle beneath her stream, and she peed on her hand in
the process. The bottle was already bottom-heavy with someone
else's piss—Mathias's, Amy
guessed—and there was something disturbing about this, the
sound of her urine spurting into his, sloshing and spattering and
merging. She wasn't going to drink it, she assured herself;
it would never come to that. She was just humoring Jeff, showing him
what a good sport she could be. If he wanted her to pee in the bottle,
that was what she'd do, but in the morning the Greeks would
arrive, and none of it would matter anymore. They'd send them
off to get help, and by nightfall everything would be resolved. She
capped the bottle, returned it to its spot beside the doorway, then
pulled her pants back up, buttoning them as she moved toward Jeff.