"Mathias?" Jeff said.
Eric heard the German stand up, go to claim his ration. Then everything was silent, each of them retreating to some inner place as they savored what would have to pass for their breakfast this morning.
The smell changed again. Apple pie, Eric thought, still not chewing, and struggling suddenly, inexplicably, against the threat of tears. How does it know what apple pie smells like? He could hear the others beginning to eat, the wet sound of their mouths working. He pulled his hat down over his eyes.
A hint of cinnamon, too.
Eric chewed, swallowed, then placed a piece of orange peel in his mouth. He wasn't crying; he'd fought off the impulse. But it was still there-he could feel it.
Whipped cream, even.
He chewed the tiny strip of peel, swallowed, slipped another one into his mouth. He could see the pie's crust in his mind-slightly burned on the bottom. And it wasn't whipped cream; it was ice cream. Vanilla ice cream, slowly melting across the plate-a small tin plate, with a mug of black coffee sitting beside it. Imagining this, Eric felt that urge to weep again. He had to squeeze his eyes shut, hold his breath, wait for it to recede, while the same four words kept running through his head.
How does it know? How does it know? How does it know?
There are some things we need to figure out," Jeff said.
The orange had been divided, then eaten, peel and all. Afterward, they'd passed the jug of water around their little circle, and he'd told the others to drink their fill. Water wasn't his chief concern anymore; after the previous night's downpour, he felt confident it would rain again-almost daily, he believed. And he knew it would help morale if they could manage to eliminate at least that one discomfort. So they ate their meager breakfast, then drank water until their stomachs swelled.
Later, they could try to sew a pouch out of the leftover blue nylon. Maybe they'd even manage to collect enough rain to wash themselves. That, too, would help lift their spirits.
They weren't sated, of course. How could they be? An orange, split between the four of them. Jeff tried to think of it as fasting, a hunger strike: how long could these last? In his head, he had a picture, a newspaper photograph, black and white, of three young men staring defiantly from their cots-weak, emaciated, but undeniably alive, their eyes ablaze with it. Jeff struggled to see the headline, to remember the story that went with the picture. Why couldn't he do this? He wanted a number, wanted to know how long. Weeks, certainly-weeks with nothing but water.
Fifty days?
Sixty?
Seventy?
But eventually, there had to come a moment past which fasting blurred into starving, and in Jeff's mind this was connected in some way to their meager store of provisions, to its continued existence, no matter how little they might actually be consuming. He'd convinced himself that as long as some small scrap of food remained for them to portion out, they'd be okay; they'd be in control. Because they were rationing, not starving.
Denial. A fairy tale.
And then there were the things he knew and couldn't hide from, the things he'd read about over the years, the details he'd absorbed. At some point, their hunger pangs would disappear. Their bodies would start to break down muscle tissue, start to digest the fatty acids in their livers, the machine consuming itself for fuel. Their metabolic rates would fall, their pulses slow, their blood pressures drop. They'd feel cold even in the sun, lethargic. And all this would happen relatively quickly, too. Two weeks, three at the most. Then things would rapidly get worse: arrhythmia, eye problems, anemia, mouth ulcers-on and on and on until there were no more and s for them to claim. It didn't matter if he couldn't remember whether it was fifty or sixty or seventy days; what mattered was that it was finite. There was a line drawn across their path-a wall, a chasm-and with each passing hour they edged one step closer to it.
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.