"Come," Alex Goddard was saying as he lifted me up. "They're ready."
[Chapter Twenty-eight]
When we reached the parking lot, several more Army thugs were waiting, grown-ups now, khaki shirts and dense mustaches, the regulation G-2 sunglasses even though it was still dark, with 9mm automatics in holsters at their belt. I took one look at them and I think I blacked out. Steve and I were about to "disappear," and possibly Sarah too. Probably in another hour or two. My tattered mind finally just slipped away.
Soon afterward, I sensed myself being transported in a large vehicle, and after that I was being carried, up, up, as though I were floating into the coming dawn. When I regained consciousness, I realized I was standing in a rainstorm near a small stone building. A dozen Army men were huddled inside, shielding their cigarettes from the blowing rain while they guarded a row of olive-green bassinets. Around me, censers were spewing copal smoke into the soggy air.
I became aware of the cooling sensation of the fresh rain across my face, and wondered if it might clear some of the toad venom (surely that was what it was) from my brain. Maybe it was working. Instead of seeing vivid colors everywhere, I was abruptly experiencing a hyper acute clarity of every sensation. The stones beneath my bare feet were becoming so articulated, I felt as though I could number every granule, every crystal, every atom. The paintings and carvings on the lintel above the door to the stone room—I recognized it as where I'd spent the first night—sparkled, leapt out at me.
"Stand there on the edge of the platform," Alex Goddard commanded, urging me forward. It was only then I realized we'd come up the back steps of the pyramid, where the G-2 men had parked their black Land Rovers, unnoticed and ready.
Looking down at the crowd of people gathered in the square, I realized they couldn't really see much of what was going on atop the pyramid. To them it was just a cloud of copal smoke and foggy rain. Although the sun was starting to brighten the east, the only real light still came from the torches stationed around the plaza.
Then like a ghost materializing out of the mist, Marcelina moved up the steep front steps, leading a line of Maya mothers from the clinic—I counted twelve—each carrying her newborn, the "special" baby she would give back to Kukulkan, perhaps the way Abraham of the Old Testament offered up his son Isaac in sacrifice to Jehovah. It was a sight I shall never forget, the sadness but also the unmistakable reverence in their eyes. I wanted to yell at them to run, to take Sarah's votive babies and disappear into the forest, but I didn't have the words.
Next the women arrayed themselves in a line across the front of the pyramid, facing not the crowd below, but toward Alex Goddard and me. Then, holding out a jade-handled obsidian knife, he walked down the line, allowing each woman to touch her forehead against its flint blade. I assumed each one believed it was the instrument that would take her child's life, ceremonially sending it back to the Maya Otherworld whence it came. Had he drugged them too, I fleetingly wondered, hypnotized them or given them some potion to prevent them from comprehending what was really going on?
I kept remembering . . . a hundred other insane episodes of immortal yearning leading to a mass "transport" to some other "plane." This, I thought, must be what it was like in the jungles of Jonestown that death-filled morning. And Alex Goddard was their "Jim Jones," the spiritual leader of the moral travesty he'd imposed upon the lost village of Baalum.