Thomas Hoover - Life blood

The tunnel. Now it was all around me, shadowy and dim. I thought I glimpsed Sarah at the end of it, wearing a white shift, beckoning me, but when I reached out for her, to take us away, all I could touch was empty mist.

I'm on a bed, in a dreamscape room enveloped in pastel fog, watching a Melania butterfly the size of a man pump his massive orange and black wings above me. His voice is mellifluous, hypnotic, and I feel the soft wind of his wings against my face, cooling, scented, enveloping. It is the softness of eternal peace.

"Your body is a realm of fertility," he is saying, his tones echoing in the shadowy haze around me, sonorous and caring. "You are special." Then, iridescent blues and purples shimmering off his wings, his face evolves into the orange and black mask of a jaguar. "You are one of the special ones. Together we will create life."

Did he say "special"? Marcelina said I was… like Sarah…

Now his eyes are boring in and I'm thinking of the Chinese… Am I human, dreaming I'm a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I'm human?

As he moves over me, the rest of his butterfly form disappears and he's become a lithe jaguar whose lips are touching mine. The sheet over me melts into my skin as the soft spotted fur of his underbelly presses onto me. And his face has turned even more feline and sensuous, with dark eyes that look directly through me. I can feel his whiskers against me as he sniffs down my body, then explores my groin with his probing tongue.

Before I realize what's happening, his thighs press against mine and he knowingly insinuates himself into me. It all happens so naturally and effortlessly I scarcely… I see only an intense twitch of his animal ears, erect and directed toward me, as he enfolds me completely, his hot male breath urgent. As he grinds his thighs against mine, he emits growls, low in his throat, then nips lightly and lovingly at my cheek, his pale fangs benign and delicious.

I cling to him, bathed in sweat, falling into him, wanting him, but now…

He's changing… My God. No! He's…

His face is becoming a jade mask with eyes that burn a fiery red, a spirit of evil. He's plunging something deep into me, metal, cold and cutting. Far inside, reaching, while my mind fights through the waves of pain that course down my lower body. I struggle back, but my arms just pass through empty air. Stop. The eyes, the hard metal… Time turns fluid, minutes are hours, lost, and I don't know…

Finally-it could be years later-he growls one last time and the room begins fading to darkness. Then a blessed numbness washes over me. He's gone…

And I dream I am dead.

Sometime, probably hours later, I sensed my consciousness gradually returning. Around me the room was still dark and, remembering the "dream," I came fully awake with a start, my heart pounding. What had… it done to me? I was shivering, with a piercing, pointed ache in my groin. I needed air.

I rose up unsteadily and reached out, and realized I was in a hospital bed with metal bars along one side.

What! How did I come to be in this? Then I began remembering. I was at Baalum, in Alex Goddard's Ninos del Mundo clinic. And I'd been trying to get Sarah and take her home.

Instead, I'd passed out and then… an attack, some unspeakably evil…

Get out of here. Now.

I settled my feet onto the floor with a surge of determination, and that was when I sensed I was in a different place from where I'd… Where-!

I gazed around in the dark, then reached out and felt something on a table beside the bed. It was a clay bowl full of wax. What… a candle. And next to it I touched a plain book of matches. My hand was trembling from the pain in my groin, but I managed to light the candle, a flickering glow.

My wristwatch was lying nearby on the table. Someone must have taken it off and placed it there. I picked it up and held it by the candle, and for a moment I was confused by the seconds ticking off. Then I realized the time was… How could that be! It read 4:57 A.M. Had I been out for hours?

I gasped, then raised the candle and gazed around. The walls were brown stone-or maybe they just looked like stone. Yes, now I recognized it. I was in the fiberglass-walled operating room I'd seen on Alex Goddard's closed-circuit monitor.

What was I doing in here?

My arm brushed against the table and I felt an odd sensation. Glancing down, I realized there was a Band-Aid on the inside of my left wrist. What was that about? Earlier he'd taken blood from my right arm, but then he'd just swabbed it, so why this bandage? And what in hell was I doing in an operating room? I hadn't agreed to any procedures. Did he come back for a second-?

Or… that was what he'd done. He'd injected me with an IV drug. The bizarre vision I'd had was his cover for some perverse invasion of my body. My God, I'd been unconscious since yesterday afternoon. During all that time, what could he have done to me?

I was fist-clenching furious. Looking around the "operating room," I wanted to rip the place apart.

When I tried to stand, I realized my groin was tender and sore as hell, all across my panty-line, only somewhere deep, deep inside, in my reproductive… It was like after he'd given me those shots up at Quetzal Manor. I checked and saw no red needle-punctures this time, but the pain was much worse. That sick butterfly-jaguar dream was no dream. I'd been raped by… The bastard.

I pushed aside the pain, edged across to the door, and tested it. Unlocked. Good. Go find the SOB right now. Tear his head off.

I pulled back the door, took a deep breath, and checked out the hallway.

Whoa! How did they get here? In the dim light I made out two uniformed Army privates down at the end near the slatted windows, dozing in folding metal chairs, their AK- 47's propped against the plaster wall.

Why were they here? Just a cool, breezy place to hang out? Or were they in place to guard me?

The breeze was causing the candle's flame to cast flickering shadows across the hall, so I quickly re-closed the door.

Now what? I was trembling as I returned the candle bowl to the table and sat down on the bed. Soldiers with guns were outside my room at five in the morning. In the farthest end of Guatemala. What was I going to do?

I gazed around at the "stone" walls and tried to think. My mind still felt clouded from whatever drug he'd given me, but it was beginning to…

Wait. I saw Alex Goddard come into this very room with embryos from the lab, which is connected by the steel door to his office…

Where there was a phone.

Time to call the embassy, get some help to get the hell out of here.

I sat there thinking. All right. I'd need to wait an hour or so-now I'd get some low-level flunkie stuck with the graveyard shift-but there was something I was damned well going to do immediately. With the lab right next door, I could try to find out why Goddard had just performed medical rape on me. There had to be some connection. According to him, the lab was for "plant research." But if that was all he was doing, why was the Army here? Right outside my door? I felt a pump of adrenaline that made me forget all about my pain. Before I got the hell out of Baalum, I was going to know what he was really up to here.

God, I feel miserable. I really hurt. All the more reason…

I took the candle, stood up, and moved to the opposite wall to begin looking for an opening in the fiberglass "stone." It appeared to have been made from impressions from the room atop the pyramid, rows and rows of those little cartoon-face glyphs, mixed in with bas-reliefs, but there had to be a door somewhere. I'd seen him walk right through it. As I ran my hand along the surface, I was struck by how their hardness felt like stone. But it couldn't be.