Burial Ground (42 page)

Leo gasped. The Medical Examiner's voice
echoed inside his head from what felt like another lifetime.
Angled entrance with inferior curvature of roughly thirty
degrees. Possibly some kind of hook with a shallow arch
. He
thought of his son, his baby boy, and the two stab wounds in his
back. He imagined a creature cloaked in feathers made of shadow
leaping onto Hunter's back and his cries of pain as he tumbled over
a stone cliff and plummeted toward the waiting river.

Tears flooded from his eyes and a hideous
mewling sound rose from his chest.

"It doesn't matter what it is," Colton
snapped. "Right now, all of you need to get inside where we can
effectively protect you. There's nothing out there that we can't
kill. Especially some sort of bird."

"I didn't say bird," Galen whispered. "I
said raptor."

7:38 p.m.

Tasker crouched on a broad branch a dozen
feet up in the canopy, leaning his shoulder against the trunk. The
leaves were so thick all around him that there was no way anyone
could see him from below, especially now that he had rolled in mud.
Saved from the brunt of the storm by the dense vegetative shield
above him, it wouldn't wash away until the very last minute. By
then it would be too late for his prey. Beards of moss shrouded him
and vines snaked through and around the surrounding branches. He
studied the ground in shades of green through the night vision
goggles. He had positioned himself in such a way that if he craned
his head just right, he could see the distant entrance to the
domicile and the guards posted to either side of the opening,
through which flames flickered. The occasional shadow crossed in
front of the fire. Smoke plumed from the random holes in the
earthen roof. To see any real detail, he needed to push the goggles
back up onto his forehead due to the intense glow from the outer
torches. What were they burning to create such bright flames
anyway?

McMasters was roughly two hundred yards to
the west, closer to the steep hillside, similarly hidden in the
boughs of another massive kapok tree. Their watches were
synchronized. In just over two hours, the siege would commence.

Their prey would never know what hit
them.

The outer perimeter had been simple to
breach considering there hadn't been a single guard stationed along
the obsidian walls, granting them free access to half of the
overgrown village, which made their initial approach far easier
than Tasker could have even hoped. However, it also complicated the
logistics of the final assault. The two roaming sentries would be
easy to eliminate. Hell, both men had walked nearly directly
beneath him twice. He could have dropped down on their heads and
slit their throats without much effort. The two men flanking the
entryway would prove more challenging. He and McMasters would be
seen too soon if they attempted a frontal assault, so they were
going to have to come around from the rear. Slipping around the
sides of the building still left them too exposed for his liking,
so they were going to have to scale the roof from behind. The
guards would never suspect a thing, even after two quick shots
through the tops of their skulls. And then there would be nothing
left to do but mop up the civilians inside.

In a matter of hours, the site would be
theirs to ransack as they pleased. He only wished he could account
for the fly in the ointment, the lone element of
unpredictability.

The thought of what had been contained in
those funereal bundles made him shudder. Desiccated, scaled skin
pulled tightly over a framework of thin bones, curled back from
sharp, interlaced teeth. Dried feathers that crumbled with the
slightest touch. Slender legs with feet like those of an ostrich,
only with a hooked claw that looked strong enough to punch a hole
through the hood of a truck.

He forced down the image. There was no point
in chasing that line of thought. Unlike Jones, he and McMasters
were prepared for this contingency.

Caressing the barrel of his rifle, he
glanced at his watch.

Soon the ancient ground would again taste
the blood of the dying.

7:59 p.m.

The walls felt like they were closing in on
him, compressing the chamber to such an extent that he could hardly
breathe the stale air. A pall of smoke hung over them, but he
wasn't about to let the fire wane for even a second. Its light was
the only thing staving off the panic.

Merritt paced the room. He had tried to sit
in the ring around the bonfire with the others, but the nervous
energy had built inside him to the point that if he didn't burn off
at least some of it, he was going to explode. The stone walls, the
low ceiling, the smoke. All he was missing were the screams, and he
would have been back in Afghanistan, in his own personal version of
hell. He needed to get out of there, but where could he possibly
go?

He tried to occupy his mind by checking and
rechecking their preparations. The mound of thermite would last for
several more days at their current rate of usage. All of the
doorways leading deeper into the heart of the building had been
sealed with piles of rubble. He threw a shoulder into them
repeatedly to test their stability. Not once did any of them so
much as budge. That left only the small gaps in the ceiling,
through which the majority of the smoke fled the fire, but none of
the holes were large enough to grant entrance to anything wider
than the clumps of roots that dangled to the floor. Save the lone
entrance, they were completely entombed.

Raindrops dripped through the roof into
widening pools on the floor with a metronomic
plip
...
ploop
...and mosquitoes whined from the darkened
corners, away from the flames.

Merritt stared at the disheveled heaps of
bones and wondered if this was how the natives had felt when they
barricaded themselves in here. Had they known they were going to
die?

"Why didn't they leave when they had the
chance?" he asked. "I mean, some of them had to have survived to
build the fortress down in the valley." He gestured to the skeletal
remains. "Why did these people choose to stay where they were
forced to cannibalize each other, only to end up dying anyway?"

"You have to look at it in a historical
context," Sam said. Until now, she had hardly said a word since
being ushered into the dank, manmade cavern. "These people
worshipped the creatures. Viracocha, Kakulcán, Quetzalcoatl. All of
the native Mesoamerican tribes had a name for them, and revered
them as the strongest and most important within their pantheon of
deities. One can only speculate. Perhaps the people who died in
here were some sort of sacrifice. Or maybe they feared angering the
gods by abandoning them to flee to the lowland jungles. Primitive
religions were based upon the natural world as much as
superstition. It's possible that these people saw their deaths as
an inevitable consequence of their beliefs. Or they could have
offered their lives in exchange for the safe passage of their
families and the security of future generations."

"Their descendents, the ones in the fortress
near the lake, they knew these things would hunt us," Leo said.
"That's why they allowed us to cross through their village. What
did their chief say?"

"Let them pass," Sam said. And then in a
whisper, "They are dead already."

"But they've figured out a way to live in
peace with them," Merritt said. "Look at the sheer walls of their
fortress and the surrounding torches. And the alpaca pen."

"They sacrifice the alpacas to these things.
They still revere them."

"No," Galen said. "Look at it from the most
simplistic biological perspective. It's a symbiotic relationship of
sorts. They make sure that the raptors are fed, while the raptors
protect them from the outside world."

"Like the ants in that hollow tree at the
center of their courtyard," Merritt said.

"Exactly. You can't possibly think that
these people have remained hidden for so long based solely on
geography. They've been discovered on countless occasions. Remember
the pistol in that hut from the late nineteenth century? And your
son's party, Leo. They've avoided detection and possible
exploitation because no one has survived long enough to betray
their location. The raptors make sure of that."

"You're the expert, Dr. Russell," Leo said.
"What exactly are these raptors?"

"I wish I knew for sure. All we have to go
on is that they're feathered, yet incapable of flight, have scaled
skin, and the lower appendages of a condor. They don't have beaks,
and their teeth are crocodilian. They're nocturnal and they hunt in
packs. As an ornithologist, I'm the furthest thing from an expert.
I specialize in birds, specifically birds of prey."

"What are you saying?"

"These raptors are like no type I've ever
encountered, and, honestly, I don't believe they're birds at all.
In fact, I can only think of a few extinct species that are even
remotely similar."

"Like what?" Sam asked.

"Archaeopteryx, for one, but it was much
smaller and omnivorous. Possibly deinonychus or achillobator. I
recently read about the discovery of fossils of a new species in
Argentina called neuquenraptor, which was six feet long from snout
to tail. Unfortunately, that's about the extent of my knowledge. I
merely try to keep up with the evidence as it pertains to the
evolution of avians for my classes."

"So you're suggesting these animals are like
velociraptors?" Merritt asked.

Galen scoffed. "Fossils discovered in
Mongolia suggest that velociraptors were no bigger than turkeys,
but a similar concept, I suppose."

"Stop right there," Leo said. He huffed and
rose from where he'd been seated beside the fire. "You're talking
about dinosaurs."

"Feathered serpent gods," Sam whispered.

"What else could they possibly be?" Galen
stood and paced as he composed his thoughts. "Dinosaurs are the
predecessors of modern avians. Feathers are simply elaborate
scales. They have the same general keratin composition and serve to
maintain the body temperature of warm-blooded animals. Who's to say
that something like the neuquenraptor couldn't have survived
through the eons up here in total isolation from the rest of the
world?"

"That's absurd," Leo snapped. "The dinosaurs
were all killed by a single extinction event. An asteroid strike,
or whatever the favored theory of the day might be."

"Were they? If that was the case, then how
is there avian life on the planet? Everything had to evolve from
something else. Man came from apes, after all. Crocodilians are
nearly identical anatomically to their ancestors from tens of
millions of years ago. And birds evolved from dinosaurs."

"That doesn't explain how they could have
remained hidden here for millennia."

"Think about that cavern we found. They've
been living underground and only coming out to hunt at night.
They're the perfect nocturnal carnivore. And they even defecate
where no one will find their spoor. There's no way you could track
them without blindly stumbling upon them like we did."

"So if we're dealing with a species that has
thrived longer than any other in recorded history, and survived an
extinction event that wiped out nearly all life forms on the
planet," Merritt asked, "then what are our chances of surviving
them
?"

Silence filled the chamber, broken only by
the crackle of flames and the echoing patter of leaking water.

Merritt turned his back on the others and
walked into the open doorway. The gentle breeze felt soothing
against his face, the smell of ozone vastly preferable to that of
the smoke. Where the torchlight died, the jungle was a wall of
darkness.

Somewhere out there, death stalked the
shadows.

And he could feel it inching closer with
each passing second.

9:48 p.m.

Colton crept through the underbrush at the
edge of the wavering light. On one side of him lay a golden wash of
tangled scrub interspersed with mighty trees that cast long
swatches of shadow over an obstacle course of bushes and rotting
trunks, while on the other side, darkness reigned supreme. He could
barely distinguish the silhouettes of the ceiba trunks from the
collapsed stone ruins. The proliferation of lianas and vines made
it impossible to detect the source of the movement he could sense
all around him. While he couldn't see them out there, he could
definitely hear them. To the untrained ear, it may have sounded
like the gentle rustling of leaves at the urging of a weak breeze
or the sporadic dripping of rain through the canopy and into the
waiting puddles, but to Colton, it sounded as though an entire army
converged upon their position, advancing in increments of inches.
Even beneath the ruckus of the rain, he noticed the subtle slurping
sounds of feet being pried from the muck and carefully replaced
with only a slight shift of weight. He'd been doing this for far
too long not to know when he was being hunted.

His finger tensed on the trigger. He was
prepared to swing the barrel to his left at the first indication of
the commencement of the impending assault, but he couldn't afford
to tip his hand too soon. So far, as he had theorized, the
predators clung to the darkness, staying well out of the light. He
couldn't trust that advantage to last indefinitely. They were
sizing him up, gauging what kind of threat he posed, while
simultaneously assessing his weaknesses and plotting the most
opportune moment to spring the trap he could feel closing around
him with each step.

They were smart, which not only made them
more dangerous, but unpredictable. With their sheer numbers and
their familiarity with the topography, they could have slain him a
hundred times over, and yet they continued to stalk him. The only
explanation was that they weren't simply waiting for the perfect
opportunity, they were determining the best course of action to
take all of them at once.