Free The Mayan Resurrection by Steve Alten

foster home of the Reverend Quenton Morehead and his wife, Rachel.
     
    It soon became apparent that something was seriously wrong with the young Mexican immigrant. Bizarre infantile behavior, including public masturbation and finger painting with her feces led the God-fearing Quenton to declare the girl possessed. His wife, being more grounded, suspected a chemical imbalance and made an appointment with a child psychiatrist.
     
    After two visits and a battery of tests, doctors diagnosed Madelina’s problem as a form of disorganized schizophrenia, probably inherited from one of the girl’s biological parents. Drugs were prescribed, therapy recommended.
     
    Two weeks later, Rachel Morehead found a lump on her left breast. She would not last the year.
     
    Deeply depressed over his wife’s death, Quenton was forced to endure the additional burden of Madelina’s illness alone. Unable to accept the doctor’s psychiatric ‘mumbo jumbo,’ the minister decided the best course of action was simply to exorcise the girl’s demons himself.
     
    Prayer, empowered by Quenton’s fire-and-brimstone delivery, would cleanse Madelina’s soul. Daily Bible readings and nightly services would fill her idle time after school, preventing her mind from wandering back toward Satan. Jesus would shine His guiding light into the girl’s valley of darkness.
     
    It was a long, exhausting ‘road to salvation,’ complicated by Quenton’s own disease: alcoholism.
     
    After staggering home drunk, the ordained minister would often strip naked and crawl into bed with his frightened nine-year-old foster child. On good nights, Quenton simply passed out.
     
    On a few terrible nights … he stayed awake.
     
    Weeks after the first episode, the girl began carrying on conversations with imaginary friends. The voices ‘stopped’ with Quenton’s beatings.
     
    By the time she turned sixteen, Madelina had been molested by her foster parent dozens of times. Meanwhile, the adolescent’s girl’s schizophrenia had grown worse, and the minister feared he might be stuck caring for his foster daughter the rest of his days.
     
    What he needed was a son-in-law to relieve him of his burden.
     
    Prior to the introduction of Lake Ockeechobee’s legalized ‘river boat gambling’ in 2009, Belle Glade had predominantly been a seasonal farming town, most of its worker force minorities, primarily African-American and Hispanic. The big sugar companies recruited strong backs, having little use for brains, a fact that reflected poorly upon the school district, which boasted the worst standardized test scores in the county. For most high-school males growing up in the area, college wasnot an option. In Belle Glade, you either labored in the fields, sold drugs, or played sports.
     
    Seventeen-year-old Virgil Robinson could play sports, especially football. After three years of high-school ball, he had earned the coveted title, ‘Nastiest Linebacker in the State.’ While Glades Central High might have had a bad reputation for standardized test scores, they were tops in the nation when it came to sports, producing more professional athletes than any other school in the country. Virgil was the cream of the football class of 2011, a 257-pound man-child standing an imposing six-foot-five, who could cover forty yards in just under 4.4 seconds and had a fifty-two-inch vertical leap. What’s more, the speedy junior middle linebacker loved delivering bone-jarring hits, the more savage, the better. ‘Don’t wanna just hit the dude, I wanna bleed him from the inside out.’
     
    Running backs trembled. College recruiters salivated.
     
    Young Virgil’s parents had died when he was six, leaving him to toil in his uncle’s fields ever since. He could barely read and write, and admittedly didn’t know ‘much about nothing,’ but what he did know was that football was his ticket out of Belle Glade. Now in his senior year, he was finally enjoying the first whiffs of