Burial Ground (40 page)

At least now he understood why they had lost
contact with Gearhardt's son's expedition. If only he could answer
the question regarding how they had been caught unaware and so
mercilessly butchered.

All he had to go on was that two of the men
had presumably been in the process of bedding down for the night,
while the other two had been overcome inside the mountain. Their
attackers must have entered the cave via the tunnel from the room
filled with feces, where they had killed one man and sent the other
running for his life. But what did that imply? Had their assailants
descended under the cover of darkness?

And how had Hunter managed to escape? Why
hadn't he been similarly ripped apart?

Colton looked again to the sky. The
encroaching night was advancing far more quickly than he had
anticipated, as though a blanket were slowly settling over the
entire region.

He returned the magnetometer to the crate
and headed back toward where the others labored. The torches merely
cast elongated shadows and did precious little to provide actual
illumination. They were going to need more light if they were to
properly secure their impromptu compound, but the forest was
drenched and there was nothing combustible for miles. They had
brought no fuel or---

Colton stopped dead in his tracks. The rain
pattered his poncho and the grumble of thunder rolled down the
hillside.

A lopsided grin spread on his face as he
hurried toward the staircase leading up to the building.

"You're wasting your time," he said to Leo
in passing. "The whole area's solid magnetite."

He ducked past Sorenson and through the
partially barricaded threshold. He was certain he had seen what he
was looking for in here.

The fluttering glow of the torch behind him
made his shadow dance on the stone floor in the rectangle of orange
light from the doorway. A metallic glint drew his eye to the left
side of the chamber, opposite the mess of bones to his right. He
approached what at first appeared to be an ancient mound of
crumbling bricks, but as he neared, the metal inside of them
glimmered, even in the wan glare.

He remembered the pots they had found near
the fire pit. Perhaps whoever had holed up in here had used one of
them to cook the dead, but the other one, the one with the carbon
scoring, had been used to concoct something else entirely.

This was how the survivors before them had
held the darkness at bay.

He lifted one of the jagged bricks and
appreciated its weight.

Thermite.

They weren't just going to light up the
night. They were going to set it on fire.

6:02 p.m.

One minute a murky gloaming had reigned, and
the next, darkness had descended with the speed of the rain,
forcing Jay to turn on the light mounted to his camera in order to
see the slippery trail well enough to get a foothold on anything.
They had kept up with the others for as long as they could, but he
could no longer see them on the path ahead. Surely they were just
around the next bend, and it was only a matter of time before he
and Dahlia caught up. He was tired of falling, and drenched through
and through. Somehow the mud had managed to find its way beneath
his clothing, where it felt like mucus against his skin. The sludge
even made it difficult for his socked feet to maintain traction
inside his boots.

And then there was the fear. The images of
what remained of the slain men rose to the forefront of his mind,
stimulating his heart to beat faster and his breathing to grow
shallow. Finding all of the ancient bones on the ground had been
exhilarating, and would only enhance the documentary, but stumbling
upon bloody carcasses that were only weeks old wasn't even remotely
cool. Well, maybe at first. The lens did tend to sterilize
everything viewed through it in the same fashion that the impact of
certain atrocities was somehow lessened when watching them on
television. Once he rationalized how the deaths related back to him
on a personal level, the initial excitement had vanished in a
nanosecond.

They were isolated from the rest of the
world by forty-some miles and several days' travel. And there was
something out there in the forest capable of ripping them to
shreds.

A cricket chirped from somewhere off to his
right. Or had it been a frog? He still couldn't tell the
difference. He was a city boy at heart, and would happily give his
left nut to be back in the States with a beer in one hand and a
remote control in the other, living the American dream. A chorus of
chirruping answered the call before immediately falling silent once
again.

Jay's foot slipped. It was all he could do
to hold the camera up out of the muck as he slid down the path on
his chest. When his heels finally snagged on a root, he pushed
himself to his feet and spat out a mouthful of filth.

"Jesus." He flung mud from his left hand and
looked up just in time to see a dark shape hurtling downhill toward
him. Lunging to the side, he narrowly avoided Dahlia, who careened
into the underbrush behind him.

She struggled to all fours, but didn't even
try to rise. Her long hair had pulled loose from her ponytail and
hung in front of her face in muddy ropes. When she finally raised
her head, her face brown, save the circles of white around her
eyes, he noticed that she was crying.

"Hey..." He offered his hand. "We'll get
through this. Don't you worry."

Dahlia was the strongest woman he had ever
known. She never cracked under pressure and she was brutal in her
ambition. Seeing her like this scared him. She wasn't the emotional
type. He couldn't fathom anything inside of her ever snapping to
the point of summoning tears. The only thing he ever imagined could
break through her defenses was actual physical pain.

"I'm fine," she snapped, but she still
accepted his help in returning to her feet.

Jay gasped. What he had at first thought
were tears were lines of blood pouring over her eyebrows from a
gash across her hairline.

"What?" She dabbed at her forehead, winced,
and drew her fingertips away bloody. "Oh, great. This is absolutely
perfect."

"Just a second." Jay shed his backpack and
removed a tee-shirt from the main pouch. He raised it to her
forehead and pressed it to the wound.

"You could have at least picked a clean
one."

"Would you just hold still already?"

She rested her hand on his and held the
shirt in place. Her blue eyes met his around the cloth.

"Thank you," she whispered. Her skin against
his created an electric sensation that shot through his entire
body. "You've always been there for me, haven't you? Every step of
the way."

He could feel himself blushing and nervously
retreated a step, slipping his hand out from beneath hers.

"Just keep pressure on that cut." Even his
voice trembled. "We need to catch up with the others, and I don't
think the path is the easiest route."

"Neither do I." She offered the bloody shirt
as evidence before placing it back against the laceration. "I'll
bet if we stay just to the side of the path and cut through the
trees we'll find more solid footing."

"It couldn't be any worse."

"Besides, it can't be much farther to the
top."

She struck off into the jungle, winding
around massive trunks and using vines and branches to pull herself
up the steep slope. Jay followed, shining the light over her
shoulder, for all the good it did. The manly thing to do would have
been to sweep her up in his arms and carry her to safety---or at
least take the lead, for God's sake---but he wanted to capture as
much of this moment on film as possible. She had let her guard down
for just a moment, and only for him. Perhaps after all these years,
his perseverance was finally about to pay off.

Twenty minutes of strenuous exertion passed
before a shifting aura of light bloomed through the trees
ahead.

"It's a fire," Dahlia called back to him.
"It looks like they managed to light the torches."

Another few steps and Jay could see the
small flames and the flickering glow on the wall beyond them. A
swell of relief passed through him. He didn't think his legs had
the strength to carry him much farther.

Movement drew his eye to the forest to his
right, where the branches of a cluster of saplings swayed
gently.

"Are you coming or what?"

He turned at the sound of her voice. She
stared back over her shoulder at him, poised to step from the
thicket into the clearing. Had something changed in the way she
looked at him?

"Yeah," he said, spurring his aching feet
toward the crest, where she waited for him at the tree line.

He panned the camera across the clearing.
The entire area was awash with an amber glow from the row of
torches, minus the darkened section where one of the stone columns
had long ago collapsed, and the arches of shadows built into the
fortifications.

"I don't know what you want to do with
this," she said, proffering his shirt.

"You can keep that." He smirked. "Consider
it a gift."

"You are far too generous."

A large, broad-leaved shrub shivered beside
them. A handful of flies buzzed softly from beneath its protective
branches.

Jay shined the beam toward the source of the
motion, shoving aside shadows to reveal the slender trunk and the
tangles of branches. Several black flies swirled in the light. To
the left, a pair of almost milky, bluish spheres appeared behind
the dripping leaves.

"It's another one of those weird
butterflies," he said. "They must not be that rare out here after
all."

He turned the camera toward the creature,
and twin golden rings reflected the beam.

The pattern on the wings hadn't done that
before. But he hadn't filmed the butterfly at night either.

Another bush shook to his right, diverting
his attention.

When he looked back at the butterfly, its
lower wings shifted to reveal---

They weren't wings at all.

The light reflected from interlocking rows
of razor-honed teeth.

Jay barely had time to turn as vegetation
was shredded and thrown into the air. A heavy object slammed into
him from behind, driving him to the ground. Pain exploded between
his shoulder blades and what felt like frozen spikes prodded
through his muscles and between his ribs.

The camera fell from his hand and landed on
its side. The beam glared blankly toward a snarl of underbrush,
momentarily highlighting Dahlia's pale face. Her eyes grew wide and
her mouth opened in surprise. A blur of brown and shimmering green,
and she was thrown sideways beyond the light's reach.

Arcs of crimson trailed in her wake.

Something flailed at his back as more
shadows raced in from the periphery. His whole body convulsed in
agony. He threw back his head to scream, exposing his neck---

He heard a whistle of air and then a
gurgle.

Scaled appendages flashed past.

Feathers.

Claws.

A rush of blood flooded across the mud into
the camera's light as he was jerked with a crash into the bushes
and the blackness waiting within them, which buzzed with the wings
of flies.

Andes Mountains, Peru

October 30
^th

6:41 p.m. PET

Sam had been so focused on the tedious
ascent and her own frustrations that she hadn't noticed when Dahlia
and Jay fell behind. Galen had run ahead to relay the news that the
river was impassable to the rest of their party in the camp. She
and Merritt had already been waiting at the trailhead for more than
fifteen minutes, during which they thought they'd heard a scream in
the distance before it was silenced by a clap of thunder. It felt
as though the entire world was crashing down around her. There was
no place left to run. The aura of death hung over the mountain in a
palpable cloud that promised only pain and suffering. Hunter and
the rest of his party had been killed here, the most recent
casualties in a chain that spanned centuries.

"The path leads straight here." Merritt
nearly had to shout to be heard over the storm. "There's no way
they could have gotten lost."

"We need to go back for them. What if one of
them fell and is lying there in the mud, injured and in need of
help?"

The expression on Merritt's face suggested
he feared as much, but at the same time, she too could feel the
oppressiveness of the situation, the dire inevitability of what was
to come. It was an electrical sensation in the air, like the
tingling potential that raised the hairs on one's arms before a
lightning strike.

"I'll go back for them," Merritt said. "You
find the others and try to figure out some other way to get us off
this mountain."

"We can't split up. I'm staying with
you."

"The hell you are. I need to know that
you're safe."

The look in his eyes startled her. For the
first time, all pretense of cockiness was gone and she recognized
genuine fear.

She took his hand and repeated the same
words, more softly this time. "I'm staying with you."

He looked down at the union of their hands
and then back into her eyes.

"Then stay behind me at all times. We're
going no more than half a mile. We can't afford to waste any more
time if we're---"

A blinding light flared from the north. They
both whirled toward where one of the torches burned so brightly it
appeared as though the sun itself had been captured inside that
iron cage. A shape advanced in their direction, made shadow by the
brilliant glare behind it. Based on the figure's size and stature,
there was only one man it could have been.

"What are you guys doing out here?" Sorenson
shouted. "You should be back inside the walls with the others."