Scott Smith - The Ruins

After bread had come meat and after meat apple pie and after apple pie strawberries and after strawberries chocolate, and then it had stopped. "It's so we don't get used to it," Jeff had told the others. "So it catches us off guard each time it comes."

There was something they could do, of course, a resource at their disposal, but Jeff doubted the others would accept it. Unpalatable was the word that came to mind, actually- They'll find the idea unpalatable -and, even in his present extremity, he saw the humor in this.

Gallows humor.

There are some things we need to figure out. That was how he phrased it, the words sounding so misleading in their banality, so falsely benign. But how else was he to begin?

Eric was still lying on his back, his hat covering his face. He showed no sign of having heard.

"Eric?" Jeff said. "You awake?"

Eric lifted his hand, removed the hat, nodded. The skin was puckered around his wounds, drawn tight by the stitches, still oozing blood in places. Ugly-looking-raw and painful. Mathias was to Jeff's left, the water jug in his lap. Stacy was sitting beside Amy's body.

Amy's body.

"You need some sunblock on your feet, Stacy," Jeff said, pointing.

She peered down at her feet, as if not quite seeing them; they were bright pink, slightly swollen.

"And take Amy's hat. Her sunglasses."

Stacy shifted her gaze toward Amy. The sunglasses were hooked into the collar of Amy's T-shirt. Her hat had fallen off, was lying a few feet away-mud-stained and misshapen and still damp from the rain. Stacy didn't move; she just sat there staring, and finally Jeff rose to his feet. He stepped forward, picked up the hat, carefully plucked the sunglasses from Amy's shirt. He offered them to Stacy. She hesitated, seemed about to refuse, but then slowly reached to take them.

Jeff watched her put on the glasses, adjust the hat on her head. He was pleased; it seemed like a good sign, a first step. He returned to his spot, sat down again. "One of us ought to go and watch the trail soon. In case the Greeks-"

Mathias stood up. "I'll go."

Jeff shook his head, waved him back down. "In a minute. First we need to-"

"Shouldn't we, you know…" Stacy pointed at Amy's body.

Amy's body.

Jeff turned to her, startled. Despite himself, he felt a strange mix of hope and relief. She's going to say it for me. "What?" he asked.

"You know…" She pointed again.

Jeff waited her out, wanting her to be the one, not him. Why did it always have to be him? He sat watching her, willing her to speak, to say the words.

But she failed him. "I guess…I don't know…" She shrugged. "Bury her or something?"

No, that wasn't it, was it? That missed the point entirely. It would have to be him; he'd been a fool to imagine any other possibility. He inclined his head, as if nodding, though it wasn't a nod at all. "Well, that's the thing," he said. "Sort of. The thing we need to talk about."

The others were silent. No one was going to help him here, he realized; no one but him had made the leap. Like cows, he thought, examining their faces. Perhaps the orange had been a bad idea-maybe he should've waited, should've spoken at the height of their hunger, with the smell of bread in the air, or meat.

Yes, meat .

"I think we're okay," he began. "Waterwise, I mean. I think we can count on the rain coming often enough to keep us alive. We can maybe sew a big pouch even, out of the nylon." He waved across the clearing, toward the scraps from the blue tent. The others followed his gesture, stared for a moment, then turned back to him.

Like sheep, he thought. He was waiting for the right words to arrive, but they weren't coming.

Stacy shifted, reached, picked up Amy's hand again, held it in her own, as if for reassurance.

There were no right words, of course.

"It's all about waiting, you know," he said. "That's what we're doing here. Waiting for someone to come and find us-the Greeks, maybe, or someone our parents might send." He was having trouble holding their eyes, and he felt ashamed of this. It would be better if he could look one of them in the face, he knew, but somehow it didn't seem possible. His gaze drifted from his lap to Stacy's sunburned feet to the puckered wounds on Eric's leg, then back again. "Waiting. And surviving through the waiting. If we can maintain a supply of water, that'll help, of course. But then it becomes a question of food, doesn't it? Because we don't have that much. And we don't know…I mean, if it's not the Greeks, if we have to wait for our parents, it could be weeks we're talking about, weeks before someone comes and rescues us from this place. And the food we have, even if we ration it, it's not going to last more than a couple days. If we could hunt, or snare things, or catch fish, or dig up roots, or search for berries…" He trailed off, shrugged. "The only thing besides us on this hill is the vine, and obviously we can't eat that. We've got our belts, I guess-and we could figure out a way to boil them, maybe. People have done that sort of thing, people lost in the desert, or adrift at sea. But it wouldn't really change much, would it? Not when we're talking weeks."

He girded himself for a quick scan of their faces. Blank, all of them. They were listening, he could see, but without any sense of where he was headed. He was trying not to startle them, trying to creep up to the thing that needed saying, and in this way give them the chance to anticipate it, to prepare themselves for it, but it wasn't working. He needed their help for it to work, and none of them was equal to the task.

"Fifty, sixty, seventy days," he said. "Somewhere in there, I can't remember-that's as long as anyone can last without food. And even before that, long before that, things start to go wrong, start to fail, break down. So let's say we're talking thirty days, okay? Which is what? Four weeks or so? And if it's not the Greeks, if it's our parents we're waiting for, how long will that take? Realistically, I mean. Another week before they expect us home, maybe a week beyond that before they really start to worry, then some calls to Cancún, the hotel, the American consulate-all that's easy enough. But then what? How long to trace us to the bus station, to Cobá, to the trail and the Mayan village, to this fucking hill in the middle of the jungle? Can we really depend on it being less than four weeks for all that to happen?"

He shook his head, answering his own question. Then he risked another glance at their faces-but no, they weren't understanding him. He was depressing them-that was all-frightening them. It was right in front of them, and they couldn't see it.

Or wouldn't, maybe.

He gestured toward Amy's body, kept his arm out in front of him, pointing, long enough so that they didn't have any choice. They had to look, had to stare, had to take in her graying skin, her eyes, which refused to stay shut, the burned, raw-looking flesh around her mouth and nose. "This-what's happened to Amy-it's terrible. A terrible thing. There's no way around it. But now that it's happened, we need to face it, I think, need to accept what it might mean for us. Because there's a question we have to answer for ourselves-a really, really difficult question. And we have to use our imagination to do it, because it's something that'll only start to matter as the days go by here, but which we have to answer now, beforehand." He scanned their faces again. "Do you understand what I'm trying to say?"

Mathias was silent, his expression unchanged. Eric's eyes had drifted back shut. Stacy was still clasping Amy's hand; she shook her head.

Jeff knew it wasn't going to work, but he still felt he had to raise the issue, felt it was his duty to do so. He plunged forward: "I'm talking about Amy. About finding a way to preserve her."