Burial Ground (47 page)

Fifteen yards later, the crack opened into a
large cavern. The faint grumble of the waterfall called to her from
ahead. She listened for the sounds of the bats up against the
ceiling, but they must have continued past this chamber. The
headlamp illuminated only a churning cloud of dust.

She hurried forward and had to clap her hand
over her mouth and nose when the smell struck her. It didn't reek
of feces as the last cavern had, but of the more repulsive, fresh
stench of decomposition. She imagined rotting carcasses strewn
across the ground in various states of consumption and decay.

The drone of flies provided an unremitting,
dull buzz.

"Keep going," Leo said. He shoved her into
the cavern from behind. She felt hands on her head as Leo relieved
her of the helmet and donned it himself. "Lord only knows how much
of a head start Colton bought us."

"Where
is
Colton?" she asked.

Leo didn't answer. Instead, he strode
forward into the haze.

There was a snap and a hiss behind her, then
the metallic clamor of a canister bounding across the uneven floor
into the room ahead of her. Merritt's hand found hers as a fierce
red glare blossomed from the incendiary grenade.

"That's my last one," he whispered, and
pulled her toward it.

A shadow passed through her peripheral
vision to her right. The crimson glow highlighted Galen's features
and sparkled from the tears on his face. He started to jog in an
attempt to catch up with Leo, who was already nearly twenty feet
ahead of them.

"Hold on to my belt and stay behind me,"
Merritt said, releasing her hand so he could seat the rifle against
his shoulder.

The ground was covered with a mat of
feathers, upon which the dust accumulated like snow. She saw the
hint of a ribcage to her right. Sharply broken bones stood at odd
angles from the feathers, over the top of which she recognized the
crowns of skulls and disarticulated skeletal remains of all kinds,
human and animal alike, some fresh and glistening with blood,
others older and aged to a dull brown. Something crunched under her
left foot and she looked down. A thin, arched section of what
looked like grayish-blue plastic had cracked beneath her weight
almost like an---

"Eggshell," she whispered. She turned to her
right and noticed a cupped structure composed of dry branches,
leaves, and reeds. The bowl of the nest brimmed with downy feathers
and the shattered remnants of countless hatched generations.

There was a shuffling sound outside of the
light's reach.

Sam stifled a scream.

They weren't alone.

Merritt stiffened at the sound and slowed
his progress. He turned his rifle toward its origin.

More rustling noises from the other side of
them, which slowly melted away beneath the rising rumble of the
waterfall.

They had to hurry, but they could only
advance so quickly. They could no longer hear the motion around
them, yet still Sam could sense predatory stares upon her from
beyond the diminishing glare of the incendiary grenade, which
fizzled and sparkled in its death throes. A ring of feathers burned
around it. The meek flames were more smoke than fire, and would
only last so long.

Leo passed the canister and fired into the
blackness in front of him. As the intense flare dwindled, the light
on his helmet became more apparent. The pale yellow beam
spotlighted the mouth of a stone tunnel.

A gust of cool air that smelled of ozone
caressed Sam's face. She nearly sobbed at the realization that they
had to be close to the outside world.

The sound of the waterfall grew to a roar
that made the rock thrum beneath her feet. If they could just reach
the river, she knew it would eventually lead them to safety. And
they were so close now...

"I can see the opening!" Leo called back to
them. The darkness swallowed his headlamp to weak aura. "We're
right behind the waterfall. I can even see---"

An avian
skree
cut his words
short.

A rush of shadows eclipsed Leo's silhouette.
The helmet flew from his head and clattered against the stone wall.
It winked once, then extinguished.

More shrieking, and beneath it, Leo's
horrible screams.

The incendiary grenade issued a long hiss, a
prelude to its demise.

Only the diminutive flames crackled from the
mess of feathers.

A
skree
from ahead was answered by
another to her right.

Merritt fired toward the sound and bullets
pinged from bare rock.

The carbine whirred. His finger clicked on
the trigger to no avail.

Out of ammunition.

His hand searched for hers and squeezed it
tightly.

She knew exactly what was about to happen,
and prayed it would be swift.

10:52 p.m.

Galen had nearly caught up with Leo, spurred
by the grumble of the waterfall and the flow of fresh air, when the
hawk-like scream caused him to freeze in place. He remembered
seeing the mouth of the cave behind the falls and had been in the
process of trying to mentally recreate the image of the thin ledge
that led to it from the edge of the fortress when the creatures
materialized from the darkness at a sprint and swarmed over Leo.
They had leaped with outstretched legs, clawed toes raised in
preparation of impaling meat, slender arms reaching. Feathers
flared from their elbows in the vestiges of wings. Mouths had
opened and teeth had glistened. He had turned to run back toward
the cavern before Leo started to scream.

And then the darkness had swallowed him.
There had been shrieks and gunfire. And now nothing but the crackle
of the small flames and the buzz of flies.

They had been so close. So close...

He ran right into Merritt and sent them both
sprawling to the ground. Merritt's rifle clattered away from
them.

From behind him, he heard bones snap and
flesh rip. The choking sounds of the creatures tossing back straps
of muscle and swallowing them down into their gullets.

Merritt tried to shove out from beneath him,
but Galen used all of his strength to hold the man down.

"Stay still!" he whispered directly into
Merritt's face.

His mind raced with the possibilities. They
would never be able run fast enough to evade the raptors. And even
if they managed to get a decent head start while the creatures
consumed Leo's flesh, he couldn't remember seeing anywhere to hide.
The explosion had collapsed their only means of retreat, and escape
meant passing directly through the flock.

He thought of the creatures' aversion to
bright light. It overwhelmed their visual senses, which were
enhanced by retinal reflectors that provided acute night vision by
which to hunt.

They were shrouded in darkness, which gave
the predators every advantage.

He remembered their shrieks, like those of a
circling bird of prey, meant to flush their targets from the brush,
to instill the panic that would trigger their flight instincts.

The creatures required the element of motion
to hone in for the kill.

He remembered the victims all over the
ground in various states of slaughter and decomposition. Unlike
carrion birds, the raptors didn't eat the flesh of the dead. Did
that imply a sense of smell? Taste? Or did it once again play into
their necessity for movement?

Thus far, they had only attacked Galen's
party one at a time, or as a pair separated from the group. Was
there some sort of pack or flock mentality at work? Did they lie in
wait to surround their prey and overwhelm it with superior
numbers?

The jaguar had been ambushed and run down in
the clearing.

The skeletal remains littered throughout the
ruins suggested the same had happened to the former occupants of
the fortress.

What would happen if they simply didn't run
and tried to hide in plain sight?

Were these the neuquenraptors they had
recently exhumed as fossils in Argentina? If so, it was speculated
that dinosaurs, especially prehistoric, bipedal raptor species,
relied almost exclusively on their senses of sight and hearing.

Another shrill scream from perhaps a dozen
feet away in the darkness.

There was no more time.

Either they gambled that he understood the
nature of the creatures, or they made a mad dash for the outside
world and hoped that the monsters wouldn't be able to butcher all
of them at once.

And that was a risk none of them could
afford to take.

"Listen to me!" he whispered to Merritt. An
avian cry echoed through the cavern. "The creatures...they can't see
us if we don't move. Their vision is motion-based. They're like
modern birds of prey in that sense. That's why they emit those
shrill screams. To force their prey to run. Think about it! All of
the remains we've encountered, from the jaguar to the humans, have
indicated that they were attacked while running or trying to seek
cover. And didn't you notice that they don't completely consume the
dead? Our only option is to lie still and pray they pass us
by."

"And what if you're wrong?" Merritt
whispered.

A shrill scream answered for him.

"You'll just have to trust that I know what
I'm talking about."

Galen locked stares with Merritt in the
dwindling firelight for a long moment, then slowly rolled off of
him. He half-expected Merritt to immediately leap to his feet and
make a break for it, but the pilot merely stared up into the
stalactite-riddled ceiling.

Another horrific screech. The sounds of
cracking bones and tearing flesh faded, leaving only the muffled
grumble of the waterfall and the drone of flies.

Galen flattened to his back and began piling
the feathers from the ground onto his legs and torso. He scattered
them over his face so that he could barely see through them and
thrust his arms down into the centuries of accumulation.

He felt insects crawling all over his skin
beneath his clothing. They started to bite almost
instantaneously.

Bird mites.

Motionless, he awaited his fate.

There was one thing that he hadn't
considered. Even if his idea worked, they were still right in the
middle of the raptors' nesting chamber.

How were they supposed to get out?

10:56 p.m.

Sam's eyes widened in horror as Merritt
hurriedly explained Galen's plan. Were they out of their minds? She
couldn't fathom the possibility that these evolutionary aberrations
hunted solely with their eyes. But what were their other
alternatives? She raced through them in her mind, playing out
scenarios that all ended with violent and painful deaths.

Without making a conscious decision to do
so, she slowly crouched beside Merritt and lay down on her back. In
the weak glow, she watched Galen heap feathers over his supine
form, and, with trembling hands, began to do the same. The feathers
reeked of age and death, and the tiny insects that lived within
them made her skin crawl.

There was a sharp cry, then another from off
to her right.

Merritt's hand closed over hers under the
feathers. She squeezed it for dear life.

Her heart pounded, and she was sure her
chest rose and fell like a billows. She had to focus to silence her
panicked breathing and slow her respirations, while she wanted
nothing more than to scream.

Another
skree
.

Closer.

The feathers covering her face constricted
her vision. She could see the small flames burning only five feet
away. They advanced steadily outward as they consumed the feathers,
producing a rich black smoke that singed her nostrils and stank of
charnel. Only Merritt's eye was visible through the mound beside
her. Everything else was either darkness or shadow.

A high-pitched shriek.

Mere feet away.

Every fiber of her being cried out for her
to lunge to her feet and run away as fast as she could.

Soft rustling sounds above her head. More to
either side.

A shadow eclipsed the glow of the fire.

Her breath caught in her throat.

A thin leg emerged from the edge of her
vision. Three long scaled toes. The outer two hung limply, while
the inside digit was curved upward to support a sharp, hooked claw
the size of her middle finger. They flattened to the floor, save
the one bearing the elevated claw, which tapped eagerly. The leg
bent backward at the knee, where the slick scales gave way to
feathers. Its smooth belly was covered with larger, broader scales
reminiscent of those on the soft underside of an alligator, and
framed to either side by a fringe of iridescent green and brown
feathers. Another step, and she saw its long tail, held parallel to
the ground, covered with feathers that hung downward as though
parted along its spine. A twig-like arm with longer feathers, which
appeared as though they had been draped from the skinny elbow like
moss from a bough, reached forward a heartbeat before the creature
lowered its head to the ground. Its long neck wavered from side to
side in a slithering motion while its head stayed still. Snaggled
teeth nestled together on the outside of the scaled lips of a blunt
snout. A crown of quills grew over its cranium from a widow's peak
between filmy eyes that shimmered with firelight. It had to be
nearly six feet long from its finely-scaled nostrils to the tip of
its tail. Its jaws snapped open nearly vertically and she glimpsed
a pointed gray tongue that trilled when it released a deafening
skree
.

She pinched her eyes shut and felt spittle
on her face. The thing's breath reeked of a slaughterhouse floor,
of meat, red and wet...of what she recognized with a start to be
Leo.

The cry ended and it nudged her head with
its snout. She had to bite her lip to contain a scream.

This wasn't going to work.