The Ruins by Scott Smith Page B

they'd have to come searching for us."
     Again,
he nodded.
     "So
you're talking—what, a month?"
     He
shrugged. "Maybe."
     Amy
looked appalled by this. Her voice jumped a notch. "We
can't live here for a month, Jeff."
     "If
we try to leave, they'll shoot us. That's the one
thing we know for certain."
     "But
what will we eat? How will we—"
     "Maybe
the Greeks will come," Jeff said. "They could come
tomorrow, for all we know."
     "And
then what? They'll just end up trapped here with
us."
     Jeff
shook his head. "We'll keep someone posted at the
base of the hill. To warn them away."
     "But
those men won't let us. They'll force
them—"
     Again,
Jeff shook his head. "I don't think so,"
he said. "It wasn't until you stepped beyond the
clearing that they made us climb the hill. In the beginning, they were
trying to keep us away. I think they'll try to stop the
Greeks from coming up, too. All we have to do is figure out a way to
communicate to them, to let them know what's happened, so
that they can go get help."
     "Pablo,"
Eric said.
     Jeff
nodded. "If we can get him to understand, then he can warn
them off."
     They
all turned and stared at Pablo. He'd emerged from the blue
tent and was wandering around the hilltop. He seemed to be talking to
himself, very softly, muttering. He had his hands in his pants pockets,
his shoulders hunched. He didn't sense them watching him.
     "Planes
might fly over, too," Jeff said. "We can signal to
them with something reflective. Or maybe pull up some of the vines, dry
them out, start a fire. Three fires in a
triangle—that's supposed to be a signal for
help."
     He
stopped talking then; he didn't have any more ideas. And
neither Stacy nor the others had any ideas at all, so they just sat
without speaking for a stretch. In the silence, Stacy gradually became
aware of a strange chirping sound—steady, insistent, barely
audible. A bird, she thought, then knew immediately she was wrong. No
one else seemed to notice the noise, and she was turning to track its
source when Pablo started yelling. He was jumping up and down beside
the mine shaft, pointing into it.
     "What's
he doing?" Amy asked.
     Stacy
watched him pressing his hand to his head, to his ear, as if he were
miming talking on a phone, and she sprang to her feet, started quickly
toward him. "Hurry," she said to the others, waving
for them to follow. She'd realized suddenly what that steady
chirping was: somehow—miraculously,
inexplicably—there was a cell phone ringing at the bottom of
the hole.
       
    A my didn't believe
it. She could hear the noise coming from the hole, and—along
with the others—she had to admit it sounded like a cell
phone, yet even so, she had no faith in it. Jeff had told her not to
pack her own phone before they left; it would be too expensive to use
in Mexico. But that didn't mean there weren't local
networks, of course, and why shouldn't it be possible that
what they were hearing was a phone linked to one of these? It should be
possible—there was no reason for it not to be
possible—and Amy struggled to convince herself of this. It
wasn't working, though. Inside, in her heart, she'd
already dropped into a place of doom, and the plaintive beeping coming
from the darkness wasn't enough to pull her free. When she
peered into the hole, what she imagined was not a phone calling out to
them, but a baby bird, open-beaked, begging to be fed— chirrrp … chirrrp … chirrrp —a
thing of need rather than assistance.
     The
others were enthusiastic, however, and who was Amy to question this?
She stayed silent; she feigned hope along with the rest of them.
     Pablo
had already uncoiled a short length of rope from the windlass. He was
wrapping it around his chest, tying it into a knot. It seemed he wanted
them to lower him into the hole.
     "He
won't be able to answer it," Eric said. "We have to send someone who speaks Spanish." He
reached for the rope, but Pablo wouldn't relinquish it. He
was tying