Burial Ground

by Michael McBride

  "I've got it," he said. The expression on his face was that of embarrassment, not concern. He shook his head as if silently chastising himself, and began to drag himself upward.

  "Let it go! Hurry! Get up here!" Sam grabbed his wrist and pulled as hard as she could.

  Two of the men dove to her side and seized Jay by the forearm and elbow right as the trunk reached the river's edge and exploded out of the water in a blur of wide jaws and sharp teeth.

  The caiman snapped down on the backpack and nearly yanked the cameraman out of their grasp. It shook its head violently from side to side and jerked away. There was a flash of its yellowish belly, and then it disappeared with a splash, dragging its prize to the bottom of the river where it could pin it against the soft bed and wait for it to drown before consuming it.

  Fortunately, all the beast had stolen was the backpack, and Sam was able to help Jay up over the lip. He fell to all fours and retched. His face had gone a deathly shade of pale and one of his boots belonged to the mud for the time being, but at least he was alive.

  "Are you all right?" Merritt asked from her right. He and Sorenson had been the ones to rush to her aid.

  "Jesus Christ," Jay said, rubbing his hand as though to confirm it was still there. "I saw it coming the whole time. I thought it was just a tree trunk."

  "You have to be more careful," Sam snapped. "Out here, nothing is ever what it seems."

  III

  2:28 p.m.

  They ate and lounged at the edge of the rainforest until the torrent waned to a patter. The river had risen nearly to the banks, but the amount of debris had diminished substantially. Large branches and broken trunks still sped downstream, although in nowhere near the same numbers as before, and the current had slowed just enough to provide suitable notice to dodge them. There were sections where the limbs had tangled to form impromptu barricades, which were fairly easily skirted. All in all, they had only lost two and a half hours, and were again making excellent time. Barring any further delays, they should reach their point of debarkation shortly after nightfall.

  And from there the real trek would begin.

  Merritt hunkered down in the boat with his poncho over his head, using the man in front of him as a screen from the brunt of the rain, now more of a blowing mist then an actual storm. At first, listening to the birdman naming every species of avian that poked its beak out of the trees had amused him, but over the last three hours it had grown monotonous, and he currently enjoyed fantasies of casting the man over the side in hopes he might have the opportunity to identify the various species of crocodilians and carnivorous fish. Merritt shifted in his seat to get some feeling back into his rear end. His knees bumped the birdman's back, silencing his Latin recitation between genus and species. He couldn't hide his grin.

  What was he doing here anyway? He had allowed himself to be bullied and bought, neither of which sat well with him. While the old man hadn't come right out and said that he would go directly to the Army with news of his whereabouts, the threat had certainly been implied. There was more to it than that, though. He had lied. The money would be a godsend and would buy him several more years of anonymity, but that wasn't the true reason he had agreed to come along either, if he were being completely honest with himself.

  He peered over the birdman's shoulder toward the lead boat. His eyes immediately settled on Sam's back. She turned to look at the forest and he studied her profile. What was it about her? It wasn't as though she had shown any interest in him. In fact, quite the opposite. She hadn't missed an opportunity to be condescending, and her personality was really quite maddening, but there was simply something about her...something more than just her outward beauty that drew him inexorably to her. Of course, he could justify his presence here in any number of ways, but truth be told, he was here because he had sensed the aura of danger surrounding them. He imagined rolling over the body he had found by the river, only instead of Gearhardt's son's face, he saw Sam's, her wide blue eyes reminiscent of another pair already scarred into his soul, and quickly chased the image away. He couldn't allow that to happen to her. That was the reason he now sat in this boat, shivering and stinking like a wet dog, listening to the litany of scientific names for random birds, staring at a woman whose skin crawled at the thought of him.

  And he couldn't have been more content.

  Perhaps he would find his decision a poor one, yet for the first time in years, he felt like himself again. Even the sensation of the cool rain on his skin was invigorating.

  He shifted again and prodded his right knee into the birdman's kidney. Just for fun.

  Sam turned around and caught him looking. He offered a guilty smile and averted his gaze. Even soaked to the bone and wrapped in an unflattering poncho, she was positively stunning.

  He tilted his face to the sky and reveled in the caress of the elements. The clouds had settled into the upper canopy and clung to the leaves like smoke...billowing from the mouth of the dark tunnel. The red rock blackened in the aftermath of the explosion. They enter the charnel cloud single file. The man in front of him is swallowed by the smoke, and a moment later, so is he. Detail resolves from the murk. Bodies. Everywhere. His breathing grows rapid, echoing inside his mask, but it still isn't enough to drown out the sounds of wailing and sobbing. Cooked skin, split away from weeping burns. Flames burning from charcoaled skin.

  The pitiful screams of the dying.

  Then the gunfire.

  A crawling man, crying and shaking. The barrel of an automatic rifle against his temple. An explosion of blood and gray matter. The thump of the body against the stone floor.

  A woman. Lying on her back. Bleeding. Burning. She opens her startlingly blue eyes and whimpers. Extends a trembling hand through the smoke. Beseeching help, relief from the pain, compassion. She finds only the smoldering steel eye of darkness thrust into her face.

  A gloved hand grabs the rifle and jerks it aside. Before he can question whose hand has stayed the woman's execution, he feels the heat in his palm, and sights down the barrel of his Heckler & Koch HK416 at the surprised face of his friend and brother behind the plastic shield of the rebreathing mask.

  The man's eyes widen behind the dim reflection of flames.

  "There!" the birdman said. He pointed up at a high branch where an ugly bald bird perched. The sagging pink skin on its head reminded Merritt of an old man's, the body too large and fat with slick black feathers. It had a white ring around its neck and a floppy fin of flesh between its eyes. A swarm of flies buzzed around the mangled remains of what once might have been a capybara on the shore below it. "Vultur gryphus. The Andean condor."

  The condor spread its wings as wide as a grown man's embrace and dropped to the ground. Wings still fanned, it half-walked, half-hopped toward the carcass. Its movements were fascinating. It raised the first toe of each foot high, bearing its weight on its outer digits, and held its neck and stiff tail feathers parallel to the ground. When it reached the remains, it flapped its wings to stir the flies and speared the meat with its sharp beak. It was a hideous sight. The bird ducked in, ripped away straps of dead flesh, and raised its head to choke them down its gullet.

  There was one thing for which to be thankful, Merritt supposed. At least if something happened to them in the jungle, they would be long gone before having to confront such a horrible monster up close and personally.

  IV

  8:38 p.m.

  They raced the darkness. The setting sun had cast long shadows from the steep peaks over the river hours ago, but the ambient light that diffused through the canopy had provided a wan twilight aura. Now, even that was fading, and the night had begun to close in around them. With its descent, the forest had come to life with screeching, cawing, and howling, as dark forms knifed through the branches and darted between the trees. They had even heard the husky growl of a jaguar and glimpsed a flash of its golden fur from time to time as it mirrored their progress from the bank before it eventually lost interest. The sk
y continued to drizzle, yet the insects appeared unaffected, their numbers swelling in anticipation of their evening meal. Leather-winged bats shot out of the darkness, whistling between the passengers in the boats and just over their heads before vanishing back into the trees. The river had taken on a pale gray cast, and would soon be as black as the night.

  The motors had been throttled down to give the guides extra time to maneuver around the obstacles in their way, yet still the resounding thuds of the hulls bouncing from unseen boulders echoed around them. Prudence suggested they should make camp for the night and finish the remaining leg in the morning, but they were so close now. Too close to simply give up.

  The overgrowth of trees no longer merely towered over them. Instead, the forest rose above them, ascending the steep mountains to either side in tangles of vegetation that seemed to cling to the slopes by sheer will alone. Vertical basalt cliffs, formed by distinct volcanic columns and smoothed by eons of running water, crowded the river before finally relenting and falling away as they passed through the first wave of the Andes.

  Leo felt the journey in a spiritual sense. His son was all around him here, as though his soul were preserved by the very jungle itself. He could feel the same excitement, the same sense of anticipation Hunter must have experienced, the same awe at the majesty of his surroundings and the secrets they kept. He had been in dozens of locations similar to this one over the course of a life spent in pursuit of both natural and manmade treasure. This time was different, though. This time it was intimately personal, not just because he was following in the footsteps that had led his son to a premature grave, but because he knew this would be his final expedition. In losing his son, he had lost a part of himself as well. Where once his lust for adventure had resided, there was now only rage. The life that had given him so much through the years had in the end stolen back more than it had ever offered, leaving the scales tipped in cruel life's favor. He was here to restore the balance.

  Sheer limestone embankments pressed in from either side, narrowing the river by half and increasing the speed of the current. The outboards wailed and the bow rose and fell roughly on the choppy waves. For the first time, Santos had to hop down from his perch. He used his pole to keep the boat from slamming into the rock walls, which showed a watermark of discoloration a full five feet above its current level. Roots and lianas trailed down the smooth stone like so many serpents, their shifting shadows imitating movement.

  After several minutes, during which Leo feared they might capsize, the cliffs fell aside and opened into a deep valley reminiscent of a volcanic crater. Lush green mountains rose on all sides and reached up into the clouds. Streams cascaded down their faces, alternately hidden behind dense vegetation and then revealed in series of waterfalls that stepped down from the mist and thundered into the lake onto which they now motored. It was as though they had passed into an Eden of sorts, a great bowl of virgin rainforest surrounding a seasonal lake perhaps two hundred yards wide, fed by streams from what appeared to be the entire Andes range.

  The sight was positively breathtaking.

  They skirted ceiba trees that grew miraculously from the middle of the lake on unseen crests of land on their way to the southwestern shore, where a dense fog was trapped in the thin passage separating two steep mountains. Groves of ceibas interspersed with the dominant Brazil nut behemoths encroached all the way to the edge of the water, and down the slope to where only their leafy canopies remained above the surface. Branches scraped against the underside of the hull as Santos again stood and steered them toward dry land. A riot of birds exploded from the trees with a near deafening cacophony of cries, black bodies against the night sky, swirling overhead before alighting deeper in the valley. A shimmer of scales traced a squiggle across the water and vanished into the night. The cough of a jaguar echoed in the distance.

  Killing the motors, they slid silently to the muddy shore. Santos hopped down into the shallows with a splash and dragged the bow up onto solid ground. Leo rose and jumped out onto the earth for the first time in hours. His legs wobbled and the ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. He walked into the trees as his body adjusted, and found a little privacy behind the tented roots of a tree. With a prolonged sigh, he relieved the pressure in his bladder and was just about to rejoin the others when something on the trunk caught his eye. A series of marks scarred the gray wood. Not marks, but letters, and they appeared to have been recently carved. Leo traced the sap-crusted edges in the darkness. There were three rows: two letters on the top, two numbers in the middle, and two more letters on the bottom.

  HG

  10/7

  SW

  He flattened his palm over the carvings. A tentative smile spread across his lips and tears welled against his lashes.

  Hunter Gearhardt had passed through here on October 7th on his way to the southwest.

  Just under three weeks ago, his son had stood in this very spot, preparing to head out into the great unknown, wide-eyed and naïve. Had he sensed somewhere, deep down, that he wouldn't be making the return trip?

  Leo was inclined to think so, for with each passing mile, the feelings of impending doom intensified and he couldn't help but worry that he wouldn't be leaving this jungle alive, either.

  V

  11:28 p.m.

  The fire had dwindled to smoldering coals. Colton had thrown a pile of waxy green leaves onto the embers to create a thick cloud of smoke that would hold the bloodthirsty insects at bay for a little while, if only long enough for the others to fall asleep inside their tents beneath the lower canopy. Rain still fell as a mist and dripped in swollen droplets from the tips of the leaves, creating a sound like invisible creatures scampering across the detritus. The others needed to rest while they could. The journey ahead would be perilous and physically demanding. Colton would have been more than happy to join them were it not for the tingling sensation in his gut. He trusted it implicitly in the way an arthritic trusts his aching joints to predict an imminent storm, and right now it felt as though an electrical current had formed a circuit in his bowels.

  His men must have sensed it, too. They prowled the darkness with feigned curiosity, but Colton knew they were looking for something. The same thing he was. It was gratifying to know that they felt it as well. However, the validation was also unnerving.

  They had grown a tail.

  He had first noticed it earlier in the morning. There were many variables within a man's control, even in the rainforest, but he could never influence or predict nature's response to his intrusion. There had been one bend in particular where their boats had startled a flock of red-masked parakeets to flight. The green and crimson birds had swirled overhead until all three boats had passed before finally returning to their roosts. Roughly two hours later, he had witnessed the same flock rise from the canopy, mere dots through the wavering branches against the pale gray sky in the distance. Later in the day he had seen that same ugly black condor take to the skies far behind them. It had circled the meal it had already claimed for some time before dropping back down out of sight. And every now and then, like the spectral mooning of the wind across a Scottish moor, he could have sworn he heard the faint echo of an outboard motor.

  Someone was definitely following them, but who? And why? This wasn't a frequently traveled waterway. Its seasonal nature and the unpredictability of its rise and fall made it dangerous. Floods could rush down the mountains from the high country with a ferocity that could swamp a boat and drown all aboard. Conversely, the river could also peter to a trickle that would mire even a shallow dugout and potentially leave it stranded for months. It could always be more explorers like themselves, but he hadn't seen anyone in town who fit the bill. Then again, they hadn't kept their profile as low as he had recommended while in the city. Between the roving camera crew and the simple influx of white faces, they had surely drawn enough attention to have half of the population following them out of suspicion. Colton tended to think otherwise, though. He could
n't trust that no one had learned about the relic in Hunter's possession. Antiquities of questionable provenance fetched huge money on the black market, and there were men who were willing to do anything to get their hands on them. If word had leaked that there were artifacts crafted in solid gold at an unspecified location in these mountains, then the hills could already be crawling with murderous bandits. Or worse, if someone had recognized the implications of the rocks Hunter found, they could be dealing with a different kind of pirate entirely. Relics were small game, but a gold mine with a yield in the tens of millions was the big time. Entire expedition parties had been slaughtered for less.

  Or maybe he was just being paranoid.

  One glance at the other men only confirmed that if that were the case, it was contagious.

  If anyone had learned of Hunter's discoveries, then someone must have blabbed. Merritt had found the body and could easily have shared the information. Based on his background and his shady history, it was possible that he had the knowledge to recognize the significance of the placers and the kind of brass clankers it took to stand before them and lie right to their faces. Was he in collusion with those that followed them? Then there was the Consulate. There could be potential leaks anywhere in that building. It was a cog in the capitalistic machine that was the United States after all. And, of course, there was the Peruvian government, which could have sent entire military contingents into the rainforest to search for more treasure.

  He needed to take a step back and evaluate the situation objectively. The Ejército del Perú could be safely eliminated, as its soldiers weren't the kind of men with the requisite patience to follow from a distance. They would have descended upon them with all guns blazing and dragged them by their hair through the jungle to secure the prize. So what did that leave? Again, his thoughts returned to Merritt. The pilot was the wild card, the element of unpredictability. If he were responsible for their stealthy pursuit and proved to be a snake in their midst, then Colton would take great pleasure in slitting his throat.