Scott Smith - The Ruins

"But how did they contain it? How did they have time to seal off the hill? Because they would've had to hack down all this jungle, plow the dirt with salt. Think how long that must've taken." He shook his head-it didn't seem possible.

"Maybe you're wrong about them," Mathias said. "Maybe it isn't about quarantining the vine. Maybe they know how to kill it but choose not to."

"Because?"

"Maybe it would just keep coming back. And this is a way of holding it at bay, confining it. A sort of truce they've stumbled upon."

"But if it's not about quarantining it, why won't they let us leave?"

"Maybe it's just a taboo they have among themselves, passed down through the generations, a way of ensuring that the vine never escapes its bounds. If you step into it, you can't come back. And then, when outsiders started to arrive, they simply applied the taboo to them, too." He thought about this for a moment, staring off toward the Mayans. "Or it could even be religious, right? They see the hill as sacred. And once you step on it, you can't leave. Maybe we're some sort of sacrifice."

"But if-"

"This is just us guessing, Jeff," Mathias said, sounding fatigued, a little impatient. "Just talk. It's not worth arguing about."

They sat together for a stretch, watching the crows flap from branch to branch. The wind was picking up, the storm almost upon them. The Mayans were moving their belongings back into the tree line, beneath the shelter of the tarp. Mathias was right, of course. Theorizing was pointless. The vine was here, and so were they, while the Mayans were over there. And beyond the Mayans, far out of reach, lay the rest of the world. That was all that mattered.

"What about the archaeologists?" Jeff asked.

"What about them?"

"All those people. Why hasn't someone come searching for them?"

"Maybe it's still too early. We don't know how long they've been missing. If they were supposed to be here for the summer, say, would anyone even be worried yet?"

"But you think someone will come? Eventually, if we can just hold out long enough?"

Mathias shrugged. "How many of those mounds do you guess there are? Thirty? Forty? Too many people have died here for us all simply to vanish. Sooner or later, someone's bound to find this place. I don't know when. But sooner or later."

"And you think we can last that long?"

Mathias wiped his hands on his jeans, stared down at them. His palms were burned a deep red from the vine's sap; his fingertips were cracked and bleeding. He shook his head. "Not without food."

Reflexively, Jeff began to catalog their remaining rations. The pretzels, the nuts. The two protein bars, the raisins, the handful of saltines. A can of Coke, two bottles of iced tea. All of it divided among four people-five, if Pablo ever revived enough to eat-and meant to last for…how long? Six weeks?

One of the crows dropped into the clearing, began to edge its way hesitantly toward the two men sitting by the campfire. The man with the bandanna flapped it at the bird, and the crow flew back up into the trees, cawing. Jeff stared after it.

"Maybe we could spear one of those birds," he said. "We could take a tent pole, tape the knife to it, then use some of the rope from the shaft, tie it to the bottom of the pole, like a harpoon. That way, we could throw it into the trees, then drag it back to us. All we'd have to do is figure out a way to barb the knife, so that-"

"They won't let us get close enough."

It was true, of course; Jeff could see this immediately, but he felt a brief flicker of anger nonetheless, as if Mathias were purposely thwarting him. "What if we tried to clear the hill? Just started chopping at the vine. Pulling it up. If we all-"

"There's so much of it, Jeff. And it grows so fast. How could we-"

"I'm just trying to find a way through this," Jeff said. He could hear how peevish he sounded, and he disliked himself for it.

Mathias didn't seem to notice, though. "Maybe there isn't a way," he said. "Maybe all we can do is wait and hope and endure for as long as we're able. The food will run out. Our bodies will fail. And the vine will do whatever it's going to do."

Jeff sat for a moment, examining Mathias's face. Like the rest of them, he looked shockingly depleted. The skin on his nose and forehead was beginning to peel; there was a gummy paste clinging to the corners of his mouth. His eyes were shadowed. But within this deterioration there nonetheless appeared to be some remaining reservoir of strength, which no one else, including Jeff, seemed to possess. He looked calmer than the rest of them, oddly composed, and it suddenly struck Jeff how little he actually knew about the German. He'd grown up in Munich; he'd gotten his tattoo during a brief service in the army; he was studying to become an engineer. And that was all. Mathias was generally so silent, so retiring; it was easy to convince yourself that you knew what he was thinking. But now, talking with him at such length for the first time, Jeff felt as if the German were changing moment by moment before his eyes-revealing himself-and he was proving to be far more forceful than Jeff ever would've guessed: steadier, more mature. Jeff felt small beside him, vaguely childish.

"You have this phrase in English, don't you? A chicken whose head has been chopped off?" Mathias used two fingers to mime running about in circles.

Jeff nodded.

"We're all becoming weaker, and that's only going to get worse. So don't waste yourself on unessentials. Don't walk when you can sit. And don't sit when you can lie down. Understand?"

The Mayan boy had reappeared while they were talking, the tiny one. He was sitting beside the campfire now, practicing his juggling. The Mayan men were laughing at his efforts, offering what seemed to be advice and commentary.

Mathias nodded toward them. "What did your guidebook say about these people?"

Jeff pictured the glossy pages; he could almost smell them, feel their cool, clean smoothness. The book had been full of the Mayans' past-their pyramids and highways and astrological calendars-but seemingly indifferent to their present. "Not much," he said. "It had a myth of theirs, a creation myth. That's all I remember."

"Of the world?"

Jeff shook his head. "Of people."

"Tell me."

Jeff spent a few seconds thinking back, pulling the story into order. "There were some false starts. The gods tried to use mud first, and the people they fashioned out of it talked but made no sense-they couldn't turn their heads, and they dissolved in the rain. So the gods tried to use wood. But the wooden people were bad-their minds were empty; they ignored the gods. So the whole world attacked them. The stones from their hearths shot out at their faces, their cooking pots beat them, and their knives stabbed them. Some of the wooden people fled off to the trees and became monkeys, but the others were all killed."

"And then?"

"The gods used corn-white corn and yellow corn. And water. And they made four men out of this who were perfect. Too perfect, actually, because the gods became frightened. They were worried that these creatures knew too much, that they'd have no need for gods, so they blew on them and clouded their minds. And these things of corn and water and blurred thoughts-they were the first men."

There was a roll of thunder, sounding surprisingly close. Jeff and Mathias both glanced skyward. The clouds were about to obscure the sun; any moment now it would happen. "We didn't see any monkeys," Mathias said. "Coming here through the jungle." This seemed to sadden him. "I would've liked that, wouldn't you? To have seen some monkeys?"

There was such an air of resignation to this statement, of looking back at something now forever unattainable, that it made Jeff nervous. He spoke without thinking, startling himself. "I don't want to die here."