Thomas Hoover - Life blood

"Sar, oh, Sar." I rushed over and threw my arms around her. She'd been freshly bathed and perfumed-a fragrance like chocolate-but she felt like a bag of bones. "Are you okay?"

"I was afraid Baalum was all just a dream." She hugged me back, then started rising to her feet. God, could she walk? "But now I remember everything."

"Sar, I've come to take you home." I grasped her hand, warm and soft, to help her stand-though it wasn't necessary. "You're not safe-"

"No, it's wonderful now" Then she turned and said something to one of the women. It took me a moment to realize she was speaking their language; I guessed it was Kekchi Maya.

I was stunned. How did she learn it? Finally she looked back at me and switched to English again. "I didn't understand before. I was… sick so much."

"Sar, come on." I slipped my arm around her. "We're going to get you out of here."

I'd never felt so helpless. Alan Dupre had said there was a road, but it was controlled by the Army. Right now, I didn't even know where it was. Maybe I could find a phone, or radio. Call the embassy. There must be something. Alex Goddard has to be here somewhere, but he's not going to stop me. I'll strangle him if he tries.

I hugged her again, the feel of her skin-and-bones frame making my soul ache. But most hurtful of all, I wasn't sure she would want to leave.

"Sar, can you understand me?" I tried to catch her deep blue eyes. "I'm taking you home. Your father's very worried about you."

Mention of Lou seemed to finally get through to her. She turned and examined me with a quizzical look, and then her eyes hardened.

"Morgy, he was never there for me." Her voice was filled with certainty, and pain. "But when I went to see Dr. Goddard he let me come here for the ceremony. It's so spiritual. After-"

"Sar, come on." What did she mean by "ceremony"? Whatever it was, I had to get her out of this place. Immediately. "We've-"

"Are you here for the ceremony?" Her face flooded with renewed joy. "It's two days from now. Maybe he'll let you-"

"She should be resting." It was a harsh voice, directly behind us.

I recoiled, then whirled around. Three men were standing there, two of them young privates in uniforms of the Guatemalan Army and carrying AK-47 assault rifles, the ones with the long, ominous curved clip Steve called cuerno de cabrio, the "horn of the goat."

The third was in a black sweatshirt and black jeans, his long salt-and-pepper hair tied back in a ponytail.

"They should have known better than to bring her out here," Alex Goddard said. "Not in her condition."

The bastard. It was all coming together in my mind. He'd tried to kill her once before, and now he was going to finish the job. But he'd have to kill me first.

"I'm here to take her home." I marched up to him. "You're not about to get away with kidnapping. I'm going to get the embassy to-"

"She's here for important medical reasons." He met my eyes. "I hope you'll allow me the opportunity to help her."

"What do you mean, 'help'?"

"I'll explain if you'll give me a chance." He revolved and delivered some brusque orders in Kekchi Maya to the women, who nodded apologetically and began helping Sarah back onto the palanquin. After he admonished her in the same language, he then said something in quick Spanish to the two young Army privates, who gave him a firm salute, turned, and walked over to pick the palanquin up, to carry it for the women. The sense of authority he exuded reminded me of that first morning we met at Quetzal Manor. His eyes flashed from benign to demanding to benign in an instant.

"No, damn it, alto!" I strode over, shoved the soldiers aside, and took her hand. "Sar, honey, don't you understand what's going on? Something terrible happened to you when you were here before. I'm so worried-"

"But he says I need to stay, Morgy." She drew back. "It's best. He's helping me."

As I watched the two privates carry her away, down the cobblestone pathway, AK-47's swung over their shoulders, I felt my helplessness become complete. The Army here was under his control, just like everything else.

How was I going to tell Lou about this, that Sarah had been brainwashed? Whatever Alex Goddard had done to her had turned her into some kind of "Moonie," ready to denounce her own father. So now did I have two battles to wage: one with Alex Goddard and one with her?

Then he walked over to me.

"I'm not going to ask how you got here, though I assume it wasn't easy." He smiled, like a kindly priest, and put his hand on my shoulder. "But however you did it, I'm glad you decided to come. It's important for you to be here. She needs you now."

"Cut the crap." I pulled away, still in shock from seeing Sarah so addled. I wanted more than anything else in the world just to slug him. "Why did you bring her here? Think about your answer. Kidnapping is a serious crime in the States."

"I've been very concerned about her." He looked up at the groves of Cebia trees around the square, a quiet glance, as though to inhale the misty morning air. My legal threat had gone right past him-probably because here he was the only law. "But now she's receiving the treatment she needs. I expect she'll be fine before long."

"Treatment?" I was caught off guard. Okay, let's start getting things straight. "When she was here before, somebody tried to beat her to death. How-?"

"What happened then was beyond my control." He motioned me to join him as he settled onto the first step of the pyramid sadness in his eyes. We were alone in the square now, and I felt like I'd become his personal prisoner, trapped. "Sarah was… is very dear to me. I care for her deeply."

"You cared so much for her she ended up in a coma, over on the Mexican border." I didn't sit. Instead I just bored in, hoping to stare him down, but his eyes had grown distant, that little trick he had of alternating between intimacy and remoteness. Again it reminded me of that first morning we'd met, looking out over the bluffs of the Hudson.

"If you'll let me, I'd like to try and tell you something of the circumstances surrounding that tragedy." He was gazing off in the direction the women had gone. "You see, when Sarah first appeared at Quetzal Manor in New York, she was a very troubled young woman. She declared she was a person of pure spirit and she wanted to have a baby without so much as touching a man, some procedure that would produce a divine child created of cosmic energy."

Cosmic energy. I had a flashback, hearing the words, to the time when she'd just turned six and we'd been sent by my mother to the hayloft to track down nests secreted there by rogue chicken hens. When we came across a cache of eggs, she asked if baby chicks came out of them. I assured her they did, and then she asked if human babies came from eggs too. My biology was pretty thin, but I told her I supposed they did, sort of, but then the eggs were probably hatched, or something, before babies were born. She thought about that a moment, scrunching up her face, then declared "No!" and bitterly began smashing the eggs. Babies and all living things came from another world, she declared, a special place we could not see. They came directly from God…

That was why she would seek out someone like Alex Goddard. For her, he must have seemed a messenger of the Unseen. Who better to create a child for her? The ironic part was, I'd found him for almost the same reason, seeking a miracle when all else had failed. Were Sarah and I even more alike than I'd realized?

"So I began trying to work with her." He was turning back to me. "But then I discovered she'd been born with an abnormality of the uterus. It has a medical name, but suffice to say it's very rare, and afflicts only about one woman in twenty thousand. Even after my diagnosis, though, she refused to give up. She was a person of enormous tenacity."