Thomas Hoover - Life blood

I glanced at my watch. NO! The time was 4:58 A.M. He was coming at nine o'clock last night…

I was standing there in horror, unnatural colors flitting across my vision, when I heard…

"It's almost morning."

I jumped as Alex Goddard walked into the room, dressed in white, hair falling around his shoulders. He took Tz'ac Tzotz from his crib, checked the number on his amulet, and then absently put him back. Next he examined me, his eyes brimming with concern.

"How're you feeling?" He placed his hand on my brow. When I looked around for Marcelina, I realized she'd vanished.

"Where's Steve?" I felt the bottom dropping out of my world, my whole body trembling. "If you've harmed so much as a hair on his head, I'll-"

"He's here," he said quietly.

"I want to see him." Dear God, what had I done? I wanted to die.

"He's been given something to help him rest. Are you sure you want to disturb him?"

"I told you I want to see him." I could barely get out the words. "Now."

"If you insist. He's just downstairs."

We slowly walked down the marble steps, my mind flooding with more and more hallucinations. When we reached the first floor, he opened the door of a room adjacent to his office. I realized the window slats were open, sending a rush of moist air across my face. Then he motioned me forward and clicked on the bedside light.

Steve was there on the bed, comatose. I walked over and lifted his upper torso, then cradled his head in my arms. Baby, I love you. Please forgive me. Please.

His eyes were firmly shut and he didn't stir in the slightest. He was in a deathlike stupor, and there were large bruises on his face and a bandage across his nose. Then his bed shift fell open and I noticed another bandage on his groin.

"You've already done it!" I whirled back, ready to kill the bastard.

"As I said, he was injected with a mild sedative." He had walked over and started taking Steve's pulse. "Given the… condition he was in, I decided to go with the simplest procedure possible. After he was brought in, I made a small incision in the vas deferens and extracted a substantial quantity of motile sperm." He was turning down the lights. "Don't worry. I've performed the procedure before. The last was a Swedish tourist who was in a car accident up by Lake Atitlan and then lay in a coma in Guatemala City for weeks on end."

I listened to him, my mind racing. I'd thought Kevin and Rachel looked Nordic, big and blond. That Swede must have been their father.

"Those ova of mine you took, the way you stole Sarah's, and all the other women you've brought here-you don't use them for research."

"I have ample leftover embryonic material here for that." He started helping me onto the bed next to Steve. Now his face was undulating through my vision, as though I were seeing it in a wavy mirror. "Please understand, it's very expensive to run a laboratory up here. But the good I'm doing-"

"You're a criminal." I remembered the frightened eyes of the women upstairs and felt myself seething with anger.

"No! I am, in my special way, giving them back a small part of what they had taken away by people exactly like us. I'm providing them proof, living proof, their truths are still powerful."

He strolled over to the window and looked out. "The women come to me for my blessing whenever they hope to bear a child. They know that if they wish, I can cause their first child to be a descendant of their white deity Kukulkan. For them it is a sacred event."

"They believe that?" It was sickening. I felt a knot growing in my stomach, even as my hallucinations flashed ever bolder, bright rainbows that flitted about the room, then wound themselves around me.

"A great philosopher once said, All religions are true.' Who are we to judge?" He paused. "Let me try and explain something. Those patterns you see the women weaving on the fabrics down in Baalum, those patterns are actually just like the designs on that thousand-year-old pyramid. But though that pyramid had been buried and lost to them for so many years, they still made the designs all those years, because those symbols are a road map of their unseen world. Not the forest here where we are now, but their real world, where the gods dwell who rule the lightning bolts, the germination of corn." He was at the door, preparing to leave, but he paused. "They also understand the… special infants who come are miracles that must be returned. They receive but they also must give. Now they wish you to be part of that."

With that he closed the door with a swing of his long hair, a slam followed by a hard click.

As I watched him depart, hallucinations swirling through my brain like furious fireworks, I had a bizarre thought. In an ancient rainforest all things are still possible. The old fairy tales we grew up with mostly took place in a deep wood where evil could lurk unfettered. Today, though, the earth's forests no longer symbolize the unknowable dark within us. Nowadays, the ogres of our nightmares descend from outer space or even from our inner selves, places we can't physically know or subdue. Here, though, at this very moment, Steve and Sarah and I were marooned in a thousand-year-old forest where horror still lived.

I got off the bed and steadied myself, breathing deeply, forcing my brain to clear. Steve was wearing a shift, but his clothes were hanging from a hook on the door. For a long moment I just stared at the bruises on his face.

"God, baby, what did he do to you?"

No answer.

"Come on, love. Please wake up."

He didn't move, but his breathing was normal, not labored. I immediately decided I'd slap him around if I had to, anything to get him going and able to walk.

"Honey, wake up. Please." I pulled his feet out of the bed and slid them around and onto the linoleum floor. I didn't know what kind of sedative he'd been injected with, but if I had to shake him out of it, fine. This was no time for half measures. "Come on."

I pulled him to his feet and dragged him across the floor to the slatted window at the rear of the room, where the predawn sounds of the forest beyond filled the air, mingled with the rain. What I needed was a gallon of black coffee, but the wet breeze would have to do.

It took ten minutes of working on him, with me barely able to hold a grasp on my own reality, but then his eyelids began to flutter. I kept talking to him, pleading and badgering, and when he finally started coming around, I began to walk him back and forth in front of the window.

Steve, I thought, I'm so sorry, so terribly sorry I dragged you into this.

"Can I please lie down?" His timorous voice startled me, but it gave me a burst of hope. Come on.

"Baby, just walk a little more. Try to get the blood flowing and flush the damned chemicals out of your brain."

"Morgy, are you okay?" His eyes had finally started to focus. And the first thing he asked about was me. I impulsively hugged him.

"I'm going to be." I pulled back and examined him. "You know where you are?"

He grinned with only half his face, and I could tell even that hurt. Then he stared around the room.

"Tell you one thing," he said, "this ain't Kansas anymore. Last thing I remember is, Alan and I were setting down. Then out of nowhere, your Colonel Ramos and about twenty kid soldiers with AK-47's were all over us." He groaned. "They took me and then he told Dupre to get back in the chopper and disappear. I think that son of a bitch tipped Ramos off we were coming. Then Ramos worked me over and gave me an injection. About five minutes later I passed out. It's the last thing I remember."

Ramos. Was he going to kill us both, now that Alex Goddard had gotten everything he wanted? I thought about it and decided this was not the moment to share that possibility with Steve. Instead I turned him around and lifted up his head.