Burial Ground (41 page)

"We lost Dahlia and Jay," Sam called over
the deluge.

"I'll send them along when I see them." He
crumbled something in his hands and threw it onto the next torch in
the series. The low flames expanded with a dazzling white light. He
slid the remainder of what looked like a rusted chunk of metal
through the grate. "They won't stay lost long. You can probably see
these fires from space."

Sorenson smiled briefly before he lowered
his brow in an expression of confusion. He turned and struck off
toward the edge of the forest. As he walked, he shouldered an
automatic rifle.

"Where are you going?" Sam asked.

"I thought I saw something---" Sorenson said,
but the storm drowned out the rest of his words.

Raindrops the size of marbles pounded down
on them with increasing force. Even the branches above no longer
provided adequate protection. They were going to have to seek
shelter, and soon.

Sam trailed Merritt as they followed
Sorenson toward the line of shrubbery. He crouched and surveyed the
shadowed jungle before returning his attention to the ground in
front of him. They were nearly at his side when they caught a
circular flash of reflected light. The tiny red light beside the
lens on Jay's digital recorder diffused into the standing
water.

Sorenson's stare never left the jungle as he
lifted the video camera out of the mud.

"It's still recording," he said, passing it
back to her over his shoulder. He rose and scrutinized the dense
vegetation down the barrel of his rifle.

Leaves and twigs littered the area as though
torn from their moorings by a tornado. The ground was choppy with a
riot of footsteps. When Sorenson took his first step into the
brush, the absence of his shadow revealed that the mud here was a
deeper shade of black than the rest.

Sam stared at the camera. There was no
denying to whom it belonged. The spotlight mounted to it was
shattered and the lens cracked, and yet still it vibrated softly as
the digital feed continued to record. She wanted to call for Jay,
but something stopped her. There was no way he would have willingly
abandoned his camera, his very lifeblood. Not unless something
horrible had happened.

Sorenson's footsteps slurped and crunched on
the mud and detritus.

"We should get out of here," Merritt said.
"I don't like this. Something's not right here."

Leaves rustled and branches snapped as
Sorenson shoved through the underbrush.

"We were just standing thirty feet from
here," Sam said.

That thought chilled her. Something had
happened on this spot, a mere ten yards from where they had waited
at the trailhead, something awful, and they had been completely
oblivious.

"Jesus Christ," Sorenson gasped. He held
back the leathery leaves of a heliconia plant. The mud beneath it
was gouged, and there was a trench as though something heavy had
been dragged---

A hand. There was a hand on the ground,
collecting rain in the palm. The fingers curled inward, minus the
middle finger, which was a blunt, ragged stub. Skin muddy and torn,
the wrist a collection of jagged bones and severed tendons where it
had been torn from the forearm. What could have been an upper arm
or a lower leg lay past it, a bloody long bone missing large chunks
of muscle and flesh.

Sam clapped her hand over her mouth and
turned away, only to see a large clump of blonde hair, still
attached to a swatch of scalp, tangled in the branches.

"We're out of here," Merritt said. "Make no
sudden movements. Slowly back away."

Sam could hear herself crying as though from
miles away, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. She
clung to the camera, its whirring mechanical heartbeat against her
chest.

Her eyes darted from one shadow to the next.
Even the gentle bowing of branches under the weight of the rain and
the shifting of saplings brought the forest to life with menace.
The flickering glow of the flames along the obsidian wall made her
feel like there was someone behind her, but she couldn't force
herself to so much as glance over her shoulder.

"As soon as we're clear of the jungle, I
want you two to make a run for the collapsed section of the
northern wall," Sorenson said. "I'll cover you from behind. Head
for the main building at the center of the courtyard."

"What about you?" Merritt asked.

"You'd better believe I'll be right on your
heels."

Merritt reached back and took Sam's free
hand. She squeezed for dear life.

"You ready?" he asked. Sam couldn't summon
the voice to respond. "On my mark." The tension on her arm
increased. "Now!"

She spun around and sprinted toward the
sheer, vine-shrouded fortification, careful not to look directly
into the flames for fear of creating blind spots in her vision. Her
legs churned and her feet slipped in the muck, but Merritt pulled
her onward. They rounded the corner and sprinted toward the
crumbled mound of stones.

Behind her, the savage light faded, allowing
the darkness to again enfold them.

She risked a glance back as they ascended
the rubble.

There was no sign of Sorenson.

She hadn't heard any shots fired, but she
didn't find that comforting in the slightest.

7:00 p.m.

Leo shielded his eyes from the rain and
surveyed their work. The entire front half of the structure glowed
as though struck by the midday sun. Colton had just finished
crumbling the edges of the thermite onto the once-diminutive flames
to make them flare with blinding intensity, and had laid the bricks
in the heart of the iron chambers. They had yet to determine how
long the thermite would burn with such force, but surely they had
more than enough stacked in the main chamber to get them through
the night. At least that should buy them enough time to figure out
what they were going to do next.

Once the storm abated, they would merely
have to get far enough away from the mountain to escape the
magnetic interference. With just a few precisely placed phone
calls, Leo could have them airlifted out of there in no time. It
would cost him an arm and a leg, but once he returned with the
properly outfitted group and the necessary supplies, he would
easily be able to recoup his loss with the sheer amount of gold
under his feet. Maybe he'd have the entire mountainside napalmed
first. That would take care of whatever stalked the ruins once and
for all. He just hoped he would have the opportunity to see the
expressions cooked onto the charred faces of the creatures that had
slaughtered his son's men, and had cost him the one thing in his
life that had ever truly mattered.

"What's the plan from here?" he asked
Colton, who, having finished his task, strode back toward the
entrance to the building.

"We bolster our defenses. Fill the gaps
where the structure has crumbled over time and clear some of this
godforsaken jungle. We'll run two-man patrols at the perimeter, and
station another two at the lone remaining doorway. We can't trust
the civilians with the weapons or our lives, so they'll be penned
inside the main chamber. You too, Leo."

Leo didn't even consider arguing. He
recognized his shortcomings. And, after all, this was what he was
paying them for.

He turned and surveyed the courtyard. A wall
of tangled trees and shadows waited at the edge of the light's
reach, roughly twenty-five feet away. Morton and Webber walked
uneasily through the trees, burdened by the assault of raindrops,
which beat a tinny rhythm on the iron caps over the torches. Leo
detected their unease in their twitchy movements, the way their
rifles jerked from side to side, and the way their heads snapped
toward even the slightest sound or movement.

There were no torches on the rear or to
either side of the stone structure, where the forest grew right up
against it. While the nearly impregnable blackness back there
worried Leo, he knew there was no way anything could get through
the walls without breaking through several tons of fitted
rocks.

If Colton was right, and that whatever was
out there hunted exclusively under the cover of darkness, then all
they had to do now was survive the night. With their firepower and
their defensible position, he saw it as a foregone conclusion. They
weren't savages with bows and arrows after all.

A peal of thunder grumbled down from the
peak.

Webber swung to his right, toward where Leo
caught movement from the corner of his eye. His heart leapt into
his throat as shadows raced around the side of the building.

Leo braced himself for the sound of gunfire
and the resultant chaos.

"Don't shoot!" one of the shadows shouted.
It thrust its hands into the air, one of which held a video camera.
The whole scene was incongruous. It was Sam's voice, but Jay's
video camera.

Sam stepped into the light and had to cup
her free hand over her brow against the glare. Merritt was right
behind her. A moment later, Sorenson burst from the forest and
headed straight toward his armed companions.

"They're dead," Sam called. Her already pale
features were whitewashed by the bright flames.

"Who?" Leo asked.

Merritt and Sam hurried up the overgrown
staircase between the stages and stopped when they reached him.
Both of them were panting as though they'd sprinted a great
distance.

"Dahlia and Jay," Merritt said.

"Are you sure?"

"We discovered what was left of them in the
jungle outside the fortress," Sam said.

"They'd been torn apart like the others,"
Merritt said. "We found Jay's camera. And it was still
recording."

"Let me see it," Colton said. In all of the
commotion, Leo hadn't noticed Colton walk right up behind him.
Galen eased across the threshold from inside the stone domicile and
stood warily at Colton's hip.

Sam held out the recorder. Colton snatched
it from her and performed a cursory topical inspection before
snapping out the side view screen. He tilted the camera to the
light so he could clearly see the buttons and brought the small
monitor to life. The screen was cracked and the image warped.
Colton pressed the rewind button and twin horizontal lines of
static shivered in the center. For several moments, there was no
movement at all, then the blackness appeared to shake before
eventually brightening to footage of the outer fortifications with
dim haloes of light surrounding the evenly spaced stone
columns.

None of them spoke as Colton allowed the
footage to play at regular speed.

Leo held his breath.

The recorded rain sounded like someone
clapping in the distance.

"You are far too generous," Dahlia's warped
voice said from Colton's palm.

The image shifted to a large shrub. Flies
swarmed in the halogen light, framed by the undersides of the
dripping leaves. The camera struggled to focus, and then zoomed in
on twin orbs that appeared as clear as stars through a mist. The
pale blue spheres shifted ever so slightly, and there was a glimmer
of white below them, but the screen was too cracked to discern
exactly what they were viewing.

"It's another one of those weird
butterflies," Jay's garbled voice said. "They must not be---"

The video shivered and Jay's words were
swallowed by static.

"What did he say?" Leo asked, but by then
the answer was irrelevant.

The footage resumed. Golden rings flashed
behind the bluish spheres. Eyeshine. Leo recognized it
immediately.

Tattered vegetation exploded toward the
camera. Rows of savage teeth knifed past. The camera fell to the
ground with a clatter, speeding past a blur of leaves. Or were they
feathers? The image settled to a sideways view of the clearing. The
top glowed with torchlight, while the bottom was filled with
shrubbery. A portion of the left side of the screen was eclipsed by
water. Beyond lay a field of mud.

Screams erupted from the small speaker, so
loud and close to the microphone that they sounded like
feedback.

A cluster of branches slapped to the ground,
followed by the upper half of Dahlia's body. A skein of blood
covered her face, her mouth frozen in a scream. A dark blur yanked
her out of the camera's view. A wash of fluid splashed down where
she'd been a second prior. The screams intensified with sheer
terror before being cut short.

The steady clamor of the rain droned from
the speaker.

The image remained still for several eternal
moments while they watched with baited breath.

"Jesus Christ," Galen said from where he
peered over Colton's shoulder.

A dark gray object appeared from the bottom
of the screen with a splash of filthy water and blocked the
majority of the screen. It looked like a hazy tree trunk at first,
but when the lens finally rationalized the focus, it showed that
the gray post had tightly knit scales. A sharp arch curled upward
in front of it, then stabbed the ground several times like a
scorpion's tail.

Shadows raced behind it, drawing the
auto-focus in and out. Branches rustled and the audio came to life
with crunching and tearing noises.

A heartbeat later, the gray object pried
itself out of the muck, revealing several long digits capped with
sharp nails, dripping with mud. The hooked object rose with them,
attached to a stunted toe that held it elevated above the
others.

"It's a claw," Galen whispered.

Several minutes passed in stunned silence
before Sorenson's voice emerged from the feed and he lifted the
camera from the mire.

"Oh my God," Sam said. "They hadn't been
dead for more than a few minutes when we arrived."

"Those monsters were probably still there,"
Merritt said. "We could have walked within inches of them."

"They aren't monsters," Galen said, his
voice softened by reverence and fear. "They're avians. Raptors
specifically. Did you see that foot? It looked just like a
condor's, only the claw on the first digit was much larger. And did
you notice the extent of its arch? It could have passed for a meat
hook."