amy, stacy, and eric sit in the clearing, beside the shaft, passing a bottle of water among themselves. eric is struggling to calm the girls:
amy is crouched, adjusting the lamp's flame. jeff and eric have mended the rope.
amy, jeff, and eric have taken down the blue tent; its contents lie tumbled in a pile in the little clearing. all three of them look sun struck, sweat-stained, worn out.
stacy's screaming continues. jeff and amy are on their feet, hurrying across the clearing. mathias has opened his eyes.
amy is crouched by the backboard, watching the tent, trying to grasp what's happening. mathias startles her by speaking:
amy is crouched over mathias, frantically yanking the vines off him. mathias is struggling impotently to sit up. he continues to scream, staring down at his legs. jeff emerges-from the tent, hurries to help amy, both of them tearing at the vine, a flash of white appearing beneath the green, shiny and bright: bones. mathias's legs have been stripped completely clean of flesh from the knee down. as they keep pulling the tendrils free, blood starts to drip from mathias's knees, slowly at first, but then suddenly spurting, spraying them: their chests, their faces. amy jerks backward, gagging, retching.
eric is crouched, dribbling the tequila onto the clothes, pausing to let it soak in, saturating the fabric. jeff is kneeling by the backboard, talking to mathias.
jeff saws and chops at the shattered bones with the knife. mathias continues'to scream. eric is using all his weight to hold him still, his head averted, his eyes clenched shut. jeff lifts the severed bones.away from the backboard, drops them at his side. then he scoops up the canteen again. as he presses it to mathias's stump, mathias finally passes out, his body going slack, his screams falling silent. for a long beat, there's just the spitting, snapping sound of mathias's flesh being seared. then eric pulls back into a crouch, shaking his head, looking utterly depleted.
eric is pulling the rope off the windlass, laying it out in a long zigzag across the clearing. jeff is crouched by the shaft, making a torch. the girls stand over him, watching.
jeff is crouched beside the backboard, unzipping the sleeping bag. eric tosses the flimsy lean-to aside, exposing mathias's corpse-to the sun. amy and stacy stand watching.
amy holds up the bottle of tequila. jeff is crouching over the fire, heating the knife's blade. be glances toward her, nods. stacy is sitting down, staring at the bulge in her leg with a dazed expression. eric is beside her. amy offers the bottle to stacy;-they all watch as she takes a long swallow. then she hands the bottle back to amy, and jeff pulls the knife from the fire, carries it toward her. he gestures to eric and amy.
they've pulled a shirt from one of the backpacks, torn it into strips, and used these to bandage stacy's wounds, tying them around her leg and torso. she's lying on her side, eyes shut, her head in eric's lap. he's stroking her hair. jeff is counting the grapes into four separate piles. amy sits watching him. when he finishes, he gestures for her to take a pile. then he scoops stacy and eric's rations up, carries them over.
stacy stands just beyond the tent's.flap. all is still, quiet.- she moves to eric's pack, crouches over it, pulls out his phone. she flips it open, stares down at its screen: there's still no signal. she drops it back into the pack. she turns-to examine the clearing, her eyes falling upon the two backpacks from the blue tent. their pockets are zippered open: jeff and eric's hurried pillaging during the downpour has scattered their contents across the dirt. stacy rises, steps toward this tangled mound. she starts to dig through it, casually at first, but then with growing intensity, throwing t-shirts and jeans and shorts aside, probing deeply into the pile. suddenly she goes still. staring. amid the sodden mass of clothing sits a knife in a small scabbard. as stacy crouches there, the vines start to rustle, a rippling motion passing across them, as. if a wind were sweeping the hillside. stacy watches with a look of horror: it looks like the pelt of some giant animal, shaking itself. when it finally stops, she bends, reaching for the knife.
eric emerges from the tent, then jeff, then amy. they stand there, staring, too horrified to move.
amy sits beside stacy, who lies on her back in the puddle of blood, arms thrown out, the knife stuck hilt-deep in her chest. eric's body is barely visible at the edge of the clearing; the vine rustles softly as it consumes him.