Twelve Hours Prior
A bleak silhouette of a gray wooden shack with its rusted tin roof lay nestled within the trees of the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains. It stood in somber silence at the southeastern boundary of the Estancia Del Valle ranch.
Inside, Juan, a forty-year-old Huichol Indian and caretaker for the ranch, was wrapped tightly in thick woolen blankets. He dreamed of his beautiful wife, Maria. Her golden locket hung loose around his neck warming his heart and inducing pleasant memories. It was Maria’s gift from the owner’s wife on their wedding day. The Señora had their pictures placed on one side and their names engraved on the other above two touching doves. Now the gold remnant and his grief was all he had left after her death. He was the eyes and ears of the ranch owner watching the supposed decommissioned military base below in the valley.
A deep rumbling startled him from his sleep. Earthquake? He bolted straight up and ran outside into a predawn sky. The noise increased in intensity with clanking, shifting and excessive grinding of mechanical gears. Engines screamed as they climbed. It was manmade. Relieved, Juan exhaled, making a quick sign of the cross.
He went over to the mountain’s edge and peered down. Ant-like figures moved on the military base below. Dim incandescent lights illuminated the outlines of military transport trucks. Khaki-clothed soldiers paced under the metal door of the empty aircraft hangar. He retrieved the owner’s binoculars given to him, and viewed the heavily rutted dirt road carrying the noisy caravan of misshapen behemoths. He figured they were nearly a mile south of the military base entrance and inching up the road. Billowing dust clouds trailed the vehicles. What is happening and what are these strange vehicles? He dropped the binoculars to his chest.
Juan knew this base had been deserted until two years ago, when the strange soldiers’ training began. The ranch owner, Mexican President Diego Dominguez’s brother had told him a new army division was using the base for training for the Olympics, but the owner was unsure why.
With nervous fingers Juan touched Maria’s gold wedding locket for reassurance and courage and sighed. His heart was racing, but he knew the owner counted on him to check out and report what he saw, and this was too strange. Juan threw a rope halter over his thin grey burro and jumped on its back.
Dense forest vegetation and tall leafy trees obscured the narrow ribbon of rocks and shale Juan used to travel down to the lower valley. It was muddy from the frequent rains, and its rocks sharp and slippery. Juan prayed as he clung tightly and let his burro pick its way down the treacherous path.
At the bottom, he let out a sigh and made another sign of the cross. Jumping off the burro, he left it tied to a nearby tree. He hid from the sight of the distant soldiers, as he crawled into the muddy bottom of a four-foot rocky arroyo. The approaching roar of a four-wheeled machine frightened him, and he heard voices. The machine stopped near the fence. His chest pounded and his hands trembled as he burrowed deep into the mud.
“Why’d you stop?”
“Thought I saw something in the arroyo.”
“Yeh, it’s probably a coyote. Why don’t you singe its fur a little?”
The soldier fired into the arroyo, in front, on top, and behind the buried Juan, but the bullets missed him. He heard the engine start up and the soldiers laughed as they left. Juan waited and lifted his head up. His heart was still pounding. He crept along in the cold wet arroyo situated just outside a perimeter fence topped with razor coils of concertina wire. Juan kept moving closer. Muted voices drifted across the chilled pristine air. He was near. Juan strained to listen, “… last night… Mexico City… too many bodies… get rid of…” A fearful chill gripped him. Something terrible had happened! Praying the arroyo’s dark muddy wall hid him, he trembled as he inched his head upwards to look. The morning sun warmed his face. He was grateful for its heat. Four monstrous trucks, driven by soldiers, rumbled into view and crawled toward the open hangar on the base. Juan noted they were green garbage trucks from Mexico City with a distinct Distrito Federal painted on their sides. Two troop transport carriers loaded with soldiers rode in escort followed by a tan panel truck. The soldiers wore a strange insignia on the shoulder of their tan uniforms, a dark green skull crossed with two scimitars.
The first garbage truck backed into the hangar, elevated its bed, and dumped its contents onto the hangar floor. Juan fought an impulse to cry out. It wasn’t garbage that tumbled out, but blood drenched bodies of young males and females with a few older adults and children. One after another, the trucks discharged their macabre loads with a wet crunching sound as the bodies hit the gray cement slab. Hundreds of bodies were dumped into blood-drenched grisly mounds. Soldiers hosed the blood from the insides of the trucks and drove them from the base down the muddy access road and towards Mexico City.
Juan’s fists squeezed tight in the arroyo’s mud dirt. He watched the soldiers work with their grim indifferent efficiency, His stomach churned as he watched the bodies being stripped of their clothing and jewelry. The clothing was searched for money and anything of value before it was dumped into rusted fifty-gallon fuel drums outside the hangar. When full, the drums were doused with gasoline and set ablaze.
Juan suppressed his sobs as he watched the naked bodies, like slabs of beef, being tossed into large military transport trucks. His breathing was ragged and shallow. The stacks of bodies piled into each truck were too numerous to count. He sickened, putting his hand up to his mouth. Any unfortunate victims found moving or crying out, were coldly dispatched with multiple bayonet thrusts. The soldiers hid their gruesome loads with canvas tarpaulins pulled over the top and sides of the trucks.
Juan gagged as his stomach heaved, and then he vomited. It was too much. He wiped a hand across his mouth cleaning off the residue and put his head in the mud and cried. He took deep breaths. Lifting his head, he viewed the loading of the remaining troop trucks and their departures. They headed northwest. That’s a road leading deeper into the mountains, and towards abandoned mineral mines. Why?
Juan shook so badly he could barely hold the binoculars. Two bodies remained on the hangar floor, a young adult male and a female with long black hair. They had been kept separate. Three soldiers lifted each body up, wrapping it in a brown blanket and securing it with thick rope. Both bodies were then tossed into the back of a tan panel truck.
A stocky soldier with close-cropped hair, pockmarked face, and a jagged scar on his left cheek climbed a narrow metal ladder inside the hangar wall. It took him to a small door that opened onto the roof. Unlocking the door, he crawled out along the corrugated metal until he found a good observation point. The soldier lay motionless. He scrutinized the base’s perimeter fence line looking for the shimmering glass reflections he’d seen in the distant arroyo. Adjusting the sight of his sniper rifle through its scope, he acquired his target, inhaled, held his breath and with remorseless precision, squeezed the trigger.
Juan didn’t see the puff of white or hear the sharp crack, His head exploded in a flash of red mist, and his lifeless body gave its final shudder. Two soldiers arrived in a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle at the perimeter fence near the arroyo. They cut the wire and pulled his body under the fence and threw it on the back seat of the vehicle. When they neared the hangar area, Juan’s body was thrown into the last of the body-filled troop transports. The truck left and headed in the same northwestern direction the previous trucks had taken. The all-terrain vehicle was wiped off and driven into an adjacent small shed near the hangar. The remaining soldiers closed the articulated hangar door. The rusted fuel drums smoldered with small plumes of smoke and ash carried away by the breeze. Two waiting troop transports picked up the soldiers and traveled southeast in the direction of Mexico City.
The tan panel truck with its driver and cargo of two blanketed young bodies followed behind the larger trucks heading off the base. It stopped and turned in the opposite direction of the transport trucks. It was eight in the morning, as the panel truck headed in the direction of Guadalajara.
