The Ruins - Страница 50

"You?" Eric said.

"Who's going to play me?"

Eric pursed his lips, considering this. He uncapped the bottle, took another sip, then held it out toward Stacy, a peace offering. She accepted it, tilting her head back, taking a big swallow, almost chugging. She giggled as she lowered the bottle, pleased with herself, her eyes shining strangely, looking glazed.

"Someone who can sing," Eric said.

"That's right." Stacy nodded. "So they can have musical numbers."

Eric was smiling. "A duet with the Boy Scout."

"Madonna, maybe."

Eric snorted. "Britney Spears."

"Mandy Moore."

They were both laughing. "Sing for us, Amy," Eric said.

Amy was smiling, feeling confused, ready to be affronted. She couldn't tell if they were laughing at her or if it was something she should find funny, too. She was just as drunk as they were, she realized.

"Sing ‘One is the loneliest number,'" Stacy said.

"Yeah," Eric nodded. "That's perfect."

They were both grinning at her now, waiting. Stacy offered her the bottle, and Amy took a swallow from it, shutting her eyes. When she opened them again, they were still waiting. So she started to sing: "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do. Two can be as bad as one. It's the loneliest number since the number one. No is the saddest experience you'll ever know. Yes, it's the saddest experience you'll ever know. 'Cause one is the loneliest number that you'll ever do. One is the loneliest number, worse than two…" She trailed off, feeling out of breath, dizzy with it. She handed the bottle to Eric. "I can't remember the rest," she said. It wasn't true; she just didn't want to sing anymore. The lyrics were making her sad, and for a while there she'd been feeling okay-or almost okay, at least. She didn't want to feel sad.

Eric took a long swallow. They were two-thirds of the way through the bottle now. He clambered to his feet, stepped across the clearing, a little unsteady in his gait. He bent, picked something up, then came teetering back toward them. He had the bottle in one hand; in the other, he was holding the knife. Amy and Stacy both stared at it. Amy didn't want it to be there, but she couldn't think of anything to say that might make him put it down. She watched him spit on its blade, try to clean it on his shirt. Then he waved the knife toward her. "You can sing it at the end. When you're the last one left."

"‘The last one left?'" Amy asked. She wanted to reach out and take the knife from him, tried to order her arm to rise, to move in his direction, yet nothing happened. She was very, very drunk, she knew-and so tired, too. She wasn't equal to this.

"When everyone else is killed off," Eric said.

Amy shook her head. "Don't. That's not funny."

He ignored her. "The Boy Scout'll live-he's the hero; he has to survive. You'll just think he's dead. You'll sing your song, and he'll pop back to life. And then you'll escape somehow. He'll build a hot-air balloon out of the tent and you'll float away to safety."

"I'll die?" Stacy said. She seemed alarmed by the possibility, wide-eyed with it. She was beginning to slur her words. "Why do I have to die?"

"The slut has to die. No question. Because you're bad. You have to be punished."

Stacy looked hurt by this. "What about the funny guy?"

"He's the first-he's always the first. And in some stupid way, too. So people will laugh when he goes."

"Like how?"

"He gets cut, maybe, and the vine pushes its way into his leg. It eats him from the inside out."

Amy knew what he was going to do next, and she raised her hand, finally, to stop him. But she was too late. He was doing it-it was done. He'd lifted his shirt, cut a four-inch slit along the base of his rib cage. Stacy gasped. Amy sat with her arm held out, uselessly, before her. A horizontal line of blood crested the lip of Eric's wound, swept downward across his stomach, soaking into the waistband of his shorts. He watched it, frowning, probing at the cut with the point of the knife, prying it farther open, the bleeding increasing.

"Eric," Stacy cried.

"I thought it would just come tumbling out," he said. It had to be painful, but he didn't seem to mind. He kept pushing at the wound with the knife. "It's right under here. I can feel it. It must sense me cutting, somehow, must pull back into me. It's hiding."

He felt with his left hand, pressing at the skin above the wound; it looked like he was about to cut himself again. Amy leaned forward, snatched the knife from him. She thought he'd resist her, but he didn't; he just let her take it. The blood kept coming, and he made no effort to staunch it.

"Help him," Amy said to Stacy. She dropped the knife into the dirt at her side. "Help him stop it."

Stacy looked at Amy, openmouthed. She was panting; she seemed to be on the verge of hyperventilating. "How?"

"Pull off his shirt. Press it to the cut."

Stacy set down her umbrella, stepped toward Eric, started to help him out of his T-shirt. He'd become very passive; he lifted his arms like a child, letting her tug the shirt up and off him.

"Lie down," Amy ordered, and he did it, on his back, the blood still coming, pooling in the tiny hollow of his belly button.

Stacy balled up the T-shirt, held it to the wound.

Things had gotten bad again, and Amy knew there was no way to alter this, no way to force the afternoon back into its false air of tranquillity. There'd be no more mimicry now, no more joking, no more singing. She and Stacy sat in silence, Stacy leaning forward slightly, applying pressure to stop the bleeding. Eric lay on his back, uncomplaining, strangely serene, staring up at the sky.

"It's my fault," Amy said. Stacy and Eric both turned to look at her, not understanding. She wiped at her face with her hand; it felt gritty, sweat-stained. "I didn't want to come. When Mathias first asked us, I knew I didn't want to. But I didn't say anything; I just let it happen. We could be on the beach right now. We could be-"

"Shh," Stacy said.

"And the man in the pickup. The taxi driver. He told me not to go. He said it was a bad place. That he'd-"

"You didn't know, sweetie."

"And after the village, if I hadn't thought of checking along the trees, we never would've found the path. If I'd kept silent-"

Stacy shook her head, still pressing the T-shirt to Eric's abdomen. The blood had soaked all the way through now; it wasn't stopping. Her hands were covered with it. "How could you've known?" she asked.

"And I'm the one, aren't I? The one who stepped into the vines? If I hadn't, that man might've forced us to leave. We might've-"

"Look at the clouds," Eric said, cutting her off, his voice sounding dreamy, oddly distant, as if he were drugged. He lifted his hand, pointed upward.

And he was right: clouds were building to the south, thunderheads, their undersides ominously dark, heavy with the promise of rain. Back in Cancún, at the beach, they'd be gathering their things, returning to their rooms. Jeff and she would make love, then slip into sleep, a long nap before dinner, the rain blurring their window, an inch-deep puddle forming on their tiny balcony. Their first day, they'd seen a gull sitting in it, partially sheltered from the downpour, staring out to sea. Rain meant water, of course. Amy knew they should be thinking of ways to gather it. But she couldn't; her mind was empty. She was drunk and tired and sad; someone else would have to figure out how to collect the rain. Not Eric, of course, with his blood rapidly soaking through that T-shirt. And not Stacy, either, who looked even worse than Amy felt: sunstruck, shaky, all dazed behind the eyes. They were useless, the three of them, with their silly stories, their singing, their laughter in a place like this; they were fools, not survivors.

And how was it possible, with such little warning, that the sun had sunk so low? It was nearly touching the horizon. In another hour-two at the most-it would be night.

When did it first begin to go wrong?

Afterward, the next morning, whenall of them suddenly meant one less than it had before, Eric would spend a long time trying to unravel this. He didn't believe it was the drinking, nor even the cutting. Because things were still manageable then-unmoored, maybe, a little out of control, but still endurable in some essential way. Lying on his back like that, with Stacy pressing the T-shirt to his wound, struggling to staunch the flow of blood, while the clouds built in the sky above them, Eric had felt an unexpected sense of serenity. Rain was coming; they weren't going to die of thirst. And if that was true, if they could so easily overcome this most pressing obstacle to their survival, why shouldn't they be able to overcome all obstacles? Why shouldn't they make it home alive?

There was the need for food, of course, hiding just behind the need for water-and what could rain possibly do for that? Eric peered up at the sky, puzzling over this dilemma, but without any success. All he managed to accomplish by focusing upon it was to rouse his lurking sense of hunger. "Why haven't we eaten again?" he said, his voice sounding far away even to himself-thick-tongued, weak-lunged. The tequila, he thought. And then: I'm bleeding.

"Are you hungry?" Amy asked.

It was a stupid question, of course-how could he not be hungry?-and he didn't bother to answer it. After a moment, Amy stood up, stepped to the tent, unzipped the flap, slipped inside.

Right there, Ericwould decide the next morning. When she went to get the food. But he didn't note it at the time, just watched her vanish into the tent, then turned his attention back to the sky again, those clouds boiling upward above him. He wasn't going to move, he decided. He was going to stay right there, on his back, while the rain poured down upon him.