Scott Smith - The Ruins

"What is it?" Jeff asked.

Mathias waved behind him, up the hill. "You didn't hear?"

"Hear what?"

"They were talking."

"Who?"

"The vines."

Jeff stared at him-not disbelieving, exactly, but too startled to speak.

"Mimicking us," Mathias said. "Stacy and Amy and Eric-mimicking their voices."

Jeff considered this. He didn't believe it was enough to explain Mathias's agitation; there had to be something more. "Saying what?" he asked.

"I fell asleep, in the tent. And when I woke up…" Mathias trailed off, as if uncertain how to proceed. Then, finally: "They were fighting."

"Fighting?"

"The girls. Shouting things at each other."

"Oh Christ." Jeff sighed.

"They've been drinking. The tequila. Quite a bit, I think."

"All of them?"

Mathias nodded.

"They're drunk?"

Again, Mathias nodded. "They called me a Nazi."

" What? "

"The vines. Or Eric, I guess. It was his voice, but the vines were shouting it."

Jeff watched him. This was it, he realized; this was what had upset him. And why not? He had to feel alone here among them-he hardly knew them. He was an outsider, easily scapegoated. Jeff struggled to reassure him. "It was a joke, I'm sure. Eric, you know-that's what he's like."

Mathias remained silent, neither confirming nor denying this.

"I should get up there," Jeff said. "You'll watch for the Greeks?"

Mathias nodded.

Jeff started to leave, then caught himself. "What about Pablo?"

Mathias made a vague gesture, throwing out his hand. "The same," he said. "Not good."

With that, Jeff started quickly up the hill, running on the flatter stretches, slowing to a walk whenever it grew steep. He seemed to be losing his breath far more easily than he ought to have. It had only been a day since they'd arrived here, and already he could feel himself growing weaker. He had the sense that this physical decline somehow mirrored a more general deterioration: everything was slipping beyond his control. Stacy and Amy and Eric had spent the afternoon drinking tequila. How stupid could they be? Myopic, impulsive, irresponsible-three fools flirting with their own destruction. Then, of course, they'd turned on one another; they'd fought, shouting insults. And Eric, for some unknown reason, had called Mathias a Nazi. Jeff's disbelief in this tangle of events slowly surrendered to a building sense of rage. This was its own folly, he knew, and yet he couldn't resist its pull, couldn't quell the desire to punish the three of them in some way, to slap them back into a proper sense of gravity. He was still riding this wave of emotion when he finally reached the hilltop, stepped into the little clearing, and glimpsed Amy force-feeding a grape to the barely conscious Pablo.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he said, and they all turned to stare at him, startled by his presence there, the fury in his voice.

Pablo was vomiting, though that seemed the wrong word for it. Vomiting implied something dynamic and forceful; what Pablo was doing was much more passive. His head rolled to the side, his mouth opened, and a stream of black liquid spilled out. Blood, bile-it was hard to tell what it was. There was too much of it, though, more than Jeff would've thought possible. Black liquid with thicker skeins running through it, like clots. It formed a shallow pool alongside the backboard, too jellylike, it seemed, for the dirt to absorb. Jeff was four yards away, but even at that distance he could smell it-putridly sweet.

"He was hungry," Amy said. Jeff could hear in her voice how drunk she was, the threat of a slur haunting each of her words. In her left hand, she was clenching the plastic bag that had once held their supply of grapes; there were three left now. The nearly empty tequila bottle was lying in the dirt beside Stacy. Eric was pressing a bloody T-shirt to his side.

Jeff felt his rage begin to expand inside his body, filling him, pressing outward against his skin, as if searching for an exit. "You're drunk. Aren't you?"

Amy looked away. Pablo had stopped vomiting; his eyes were shut now.

"All of you," Jeff persisted, surprising himself by how quiet he was managing to keep his voice. "Am I right?"

"I'm not," Eric said.

Jeff turned on him, almost lunging. Stop , he thought. Don't . But it was too late; he'd already begun to speak, his voice rising with each successive word, coming faster, harder, propelled by his anger. "You're not drunk?"

Eric shook his head, but it didn't matter, because Jeff hardly noticed the gesture. He hadn't paused for a response; no, he just kept talking, knowing he was handling this in the worst possible manner, but no longer able 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.