Thomas Hoover - Life blood

What are they going to do? They have no idea what just happened.

"Morgy," Sarah said, gazing blankly at the sky, "the colors are so beautiful. Can we-?"

"Shhh, we'll talk in a minute."

I smiled and nodded and began walking past the young privates, holding my breath. Then a spectral form emerged out of the rain just behind them.

It took me a moment to recognize who it was. I was hoping it might be Steve, but instead it was a man dressed in white, now covered with mud, and holding a knife, not obsidian this time but long and steel. His eyes were glazed, and I wasn't sure if he even knew exactly where he was. Why had he come down to the river? Had he known I'd come here, too?

For a moment we just stood staring at each other, while the Army privates began edging up the hill, as though not wanting to witness what surely was coming next.

"Why don't you put an end to all the evil?" I yelled at him finally, trying to project through the rain. "Just stop it right now."

"Baalum was my life's work," he said. Then he looked down at the knife a moment, as though unsure what it was. Finally he turned and flung it in the direction of the river.

"It could have been beautiful," I said back. Thank God the knife was gone. But what would he do next? "But now-"

"No," he said staring directly at me, his eyes seeming to plead. "It is. It will be again. To make a place like Baalum is to coin the riches of God. I want you to stay. To be part of it. Together, we…" But whatever else he said was lost in the cloudburst that abruptly swept over the embankment. In an instant it was a torrent, the last outpouring of the storm, powerful and unrelenting. Nature had unleashed its worst, as though Kukulkan was rendering his final judgment.

"Morgy, I'm falling," Sarah screamed. The ground she and I had been standing on began turning to liquid as though it were a custard melting in the tropical heat. As we began slipping down the embankment toward him, I gripped her arm with my left hand and reached up to seize a low-lying branch of the Cebia with my right.

Then, under the weight of the water, all the soil beneath us gave way, tons of wet riverbank that abruptly buckled outward.

Alex Goddard made no sound as the mass of earth lifted him backward toward the river. His sullied garb of white blended into the gray sludge of mud and rain, then faded to darkness as the embankment dissolved into the swirling Rio Tigre.

"Sar, hold on. Please hold on." I felt my grasp of the tree slipping, but now the mud slide had begun to stabilize.

I managed to cling to the limb for a few seconds more, the bark cutting into my fingers, and then my hold slipped away, sending us both spiraling downward till we were temporarily snagged by the Cebia's newly exposed undergrowth. I still had her hand though just barely, but the torrent of rain and mud was subsiding, and finally we collapsed together into the gnarled network of roots.

After a moment's rest, I managed to crawl out and pull her up.

"Come on, Sar. Try and walk."

Together we stumbled and slid down the last incline before the river's edge, then turned upstream along the bank. After about fifty yards, sure enough, the native cayucos, the hollowed-out mahogany canoes I'd told Steve about, were still there just as I'd seen them that first morning, bobbing and straining at their moorings. In the rain I couldn't tell how usable they were, but I figured going downriver was the only way we'd ever be able to get out. We'd have to flee the way Sarah had that first time.

For a moment I thought they all were empty-dear God, no-but then I realized there was a drenched figure in the last one in the row. When I recognized who it was, I think I completely lost it; all the horror of the last two days swallowed me up. I grabbed Sarah and hugged her for dear life, feeling the tears coursing down my cheeks. I literally couldn't help myself.

"They were tied up here just like you said." Steve wiped the rain from his eyes, then reached to take my hand. His bandaged nose was bleeding again, and he looked like he'd just been half killed. "I told those little Army chicos I was a big amigo of el doctor and they saluted and showed me where these were tied up."

"Thank God you're okay. What happened? Did-?"

"Ramos, the son of a bitch. He came in and… I guess it was time to finish me off. But I wasn't as drugged out as he thought." He was staring at Sarah, clearly relieved but asking no questions. "I brought along his nine-millimeter"-he indicated the silver automatic in his belt-"in case we run into problems."

I wanted to kiss him, but I was still too shaken up. Instead I focused on helping Sarah in without capsizing everything. After I'd settled her, I pulled myself over the side and reached for a paddle.

"If we go with the current," I said, "we'll get to the Usumacinta. Hopefully the flooding will help push us downstream."

"Honestly, I didn't think the fire would get away from me like it did." He shoved off amidst the swirling debris. "Jesus. I heard them taking you away, and I assumed you didn't get to mess up his lab. So I figured there was one way… I just threw around some ether and pitched a match. The place was empty, so…"

I looked around at the roiling waters, snakes and crocodiles lurking, and felt a lifetime of determination. Was Alex Goddard still alive? I no longer cared…

Sunrise was breaking through the last of the rain, laying dancing shadows on the water as we rowed for midstream. Someday, I knew, what was real about Baalum and what I'd dreamed here might well merge together, the way they had for Sarah. But for now, true daylight never looked better.

We got picked up by a ragged crew of Mexican fishermen just before dark. Aside from being sunburned to medium rare, we were physically okay. The fresh air and sunshine did a lot to bring Sarah back, though she did have lapses of non-rationality, and once tried to dive over the side of their fishing cutter. They dropped us off at the tourist site of Yaxchitan, a Mayan ruin on the western bank of the mighty Usumacinta, where we joined an American day-tour on its way back to San Cristobal de las Casas. There we caught a prop flight to Cancun, and then American Airlines to New York. We had no luggage, but I flew us first-class, and I still have the MasterCard slip to prove it.

As things turned out, though, returning Sarah to normalcy-or me, for that matter-was another struggle entirely. For me, time, after that rainy morning in the Peten, became an essence that flowed around me as though I were aswim in the ether of interstellar space, pondering the conjunction of good and evil. I suffered flashbacks, late-night reveries of forests and children that must have been like those Sarah struggled to bury. For weeks after that, I had a lot of trouble remembering meetings, returning phone calls, giving David an honest day's editing.

For her own part, Sarah just seemed to drift at first, to the point I sometimes wondered if she realized she was back at Lou's loft. Then abruptly, one day she snapped into her old self and started sending for re-registration materials from Columbia. I really needed to talk with her about our mutual nightmare, but she seemed to have erased all memories of Baalum, except for occasional mumbles in Kekchi Maya. Perhaps that was best, I consoled myself. Maybe it was wise for us all just to let the ghosts of that faraway place lie sleeping.

As for Lou, I told him as little as I could about what happened to her there. He hadn't returned to work, had mainly stayed at his Soho place to be near her, as though he was fearful she might be snatched away from him once more. Frankly, I think all his enforced closeness was starting to grate on her nerves, though I dared not hint such a thing to him.