Burial Ground

by Michael McBride

  Enormous black flies spun drowsily around her, and a smell with which she was now intimately acquainted crinkled her nose.

  Her shoes made a crackling sound as she crossed the tacky floor. She noted the dark, amoeboid shape surrounding her, and then the pile of bones to her right. The sheer amount of flies crawling all over them created the impression of movement.

  Jay's beam fell upon them and she had to look away. They had the same characteristics as the ones they had only just found: fractured, splintered...fresh.

  "Leo!" she called, and quickened her pace, distancing herself from the carnage and the repulsive insects.

  As if in answer, the voices grew louder, more animated.

  By the time the buzzing waned behind her, it began anew in front of her. The ground became uneven and slanted downward, and the rocky ceiling lowered, channeling them deeper into the earth toward the now heated voices.

  "Leo?"

  The argument ceased at the sound of her approach. For a moment, she heard only silence beneath the relentless buzz.

  "Sam?" Leo finally asked. "You shouldn't be in here."

  There was something in his voice...something she had never expected to hear from him. Trepidation, uncertainty...fear.

  "We need to leave this place. Right now," she said, ducking through a narrow threshold and stepping into a domed cavern. "We know what happened to Hunter's party. We found..."

  Her words trailed off. It had taken several seconds to acclimate to the bright lights from the mining helmets. At first, she had seen only the five men gathered in the center of the cave and the stacks of supplies behind them, and then she noticed the body parts scattered on the ground.

  That made four. All of the members of the previous expedition were now accounted for. All of them identically slaughtered. But there had originally been five of them, hadn't there?

  She looked at Leo and tried to glean the truth from his eyes.

  "Hunter didn't drown, did he?"

  "Sam, you have to understand---"

  "Did he?" she screamed.

  Leo broke eye contact.

  "You willingly risked all of our lives without a word of warning? Look over there. That man wasn't just killed. He was ripped apart!"

  "I didn't lie to any of you. Hunter did drown. The medical examiner's report confirmed as much. The only fact that I chose to omit was that he had been stabbed in the back twice prior to immersion in the river. We had no way of knowing that we would find anything like this when we arrived."

  "You should have told us," Sam snapped. Her hands shook with rage. "Now we're in the exact same situation and nobody has any clue what happened to these men, what could happen to us!"

  "They have a right to know," Galen said. The beam on his helmet washed out his features.

  "This is getting us nowhere," Colton said. "We need to formulate a plan and---"

  "How's this for a plan?" Sam asked through bared teeth. "We get the hell out of here while we still can."

  She whirled and stormed out of the cavern. Whether they joined her or not, she no longer cared. Her thoughts were a chaotic jumble. Her childhood friend had been stabbed and the man she had known and trusted for nearly her entire life had lied to her about it. A slideshow of horrors fueled the rising panic. The carnage all around her, from the ancient remains to the modern. The jaguar carcass in the clearing and the tree surrounded by ruined alpaca bones. The Chachapoya chief's parting words. Let them pass. They are dead already. And they were, weren't they?

  Damn the rest of them. She was leaving this fortress right now. And either they followed her or she would have to find a way to live with their deaths on her conscience.

  But at least she would still be alive.

  II

  5:00 p.m.

  Merritt had been transported to a different place and time entirely. The moment he had stepped around that gnarled ceiba tree and faced the deep black maw in the mountain, he had frozen mid-stride. In his mind, smoke boiled out of the orifice on the cries of the wounded. The jungle around him vanished and the world became an eternity of sand. Consciously, he understood that none of this was real, that the hell before him was a product of the deep-seated guilt, shame, and horror that he had until now managed to repress, but he was helpless against the illusion. He had run half the globe away only to end up right back where he had started.

  He wished his prescriptions hadn't been stolen, but even with the antipsychotic and anti-anxiety drugs on board, he knew there was still no way he would have been able to go in there. It was a physiological reaction beyond his control. His legs were leaden, his feet rooted to the earth. His hands grew cold from lack of circulation and the sensation of dizziness worsened. His chest heaved faster and faster and yet he still felt as though he couldn't breathe.

  How long had the others been in there? How long had he been standing here, crippled by the irrational terror from the past? There was death all around him. The threat of the bloodshed to come lingered in the air. This was the time when they needed him most, when he needed to be sharp and focused, and he was useless even to himself as he cowered before the memories of a life long since abandoned.

  With supreme effort, he forced his stilted legs to move, if only in increments of inches.

  The raindrops bludgeoned him, threatening to drive him to his knees.

  Voices echoed from the shaft as though from miles away. Beneath them, the buzzing sound of television static metamorphosed into rapidly approaching footsteps. A weak light blossomed from the core of the darkness. It grew larger and brighter as he watched. A silhouetted figure took form in the center, moving directly toward him. All he could clearly discern was the cape-like outline of a poncho and a pair of slender legs.

  "We're leaving," Sam said, bursting from the shadows. "Now."

  The sense of relief that flooded through Merritt freed his tight muscles so completely that he nearly collapsed.

  Sam blew past him as Jay and Dahlia emerged from the tunnel with the birdman at their heels. Before Merritt found the strength to turn and join them, he looked back into the darkness. No one else was coming.

  "Wait!" he called. His legs felt like noodles, but they strengthened with each stride away from the crevice until he was able to jog. He crashed through the underbrush and ducked around the others until he caught up with Sam at the front of the procession. They were headed north toward the rising rumble of the waterfall and the fallen section of the fortification where they had initially entered. The southern route would likely have been shorter and more direct, but he didn't blame her in the slightest for wanting to avoid the corpses.

  She scrabbled down the black stone rubble, and when she reached the ground, made a beeline toward the trail that led into the jungle. What had formerly been a trickle of water was now a stream racing along the path, the mud beneath it as slick as ice. With the weight of their packs, balance was untenable, yet Sam refused to slow.

  Merritt glanced back and confirmed that the rest were still following them. Jay had been forced to cradle the camera to his chest to keep from slipping, while both Dahlia and Galen were already covered in muck.

  Sam squealed. He turned around to see her sliding on her backpack through the runoff. At the bend ahead, she slammed into the buttress roots of a massive tree with a resounding crack. She rolled onto her side and moaned.

  Merritt slid sideways down the trail, bracing his hand on the ground for stability.

  "Are you all right?" He helped her to her feet and gave her a quick once over. No visibly broken bones. No sign of blood. She rubbed her forehead where a knot was already beginning to swell.

  "I'm fine," she said, brushing away his hands. "We don't have time for this."

  She turned her back on him and continued down the trail.

  Ahead, the rumble of running water called to them. They had to be near the stream that divided this mountain from the next. Beyond lay the sheer rock formation that contained the cavern with the purunmachus and the path back down
to the lake where they had spent the previous night.

  The sun had already begun to set and twilight claimed the forest.

  It would be completely dark in under an hour. No moonlight would be able to permeate the storm clouds and mist, which now formed a haze around them as it crept to the ground from the canopy.

  The path ahead would grow increasingly treacherous.

  Their window of opportunity had closed.

  There was no way they were getting off the mountain tonight.

  III

  5:13 p.m.

  They had barely heard their prey coming in time to duck from the path and into the jungle. Tasker didn't enjoy being surprised, but that was exactly what had happened. From where he crouched in a cage of tented roots with ant-covered vines draped over his head, he watched them race down to the swollen stream and attempt to ford it to no avail. The dark-haired woman, Carson, had tried to hop to where the first stone lurked beneath several inches of racing water and had nearly been swept off her feet, would have were it not for a last second save by the pilot, who had dragged her to the muddy shore. She now screamed up into the raging storm in frustration and futility. The others paced the bank nervously. He could almost hear their thoughts as they contemplated the possibility of braving the rapids.

  What had spooked them to flight? Had they sensed his approach? He couldn't believe that was the case. Neither he nor McMasters had done anything to warrant their suspicion. They must have encountered something that frightened them up the path ahead...but what?

  Again his mind recalled the carcasses they had disentombed in the cave, but he chased the image away and focused on the task at hand.

  It would be simple enough to take down their targets at the river's edge right now. Five quick shots and they could drag the bodies into the underbrush, but where were the other men in their party? Had they secured the high ground at this very moment? Were he and McMasters pinned down under unseen sights? He thought it unlikely. If that were the case, then that meant the others were using the panicked civilians as bait, and that went against their job description and any even moderately developed sense of ethics. He and McMasters needed to stick to cover for the time being. It was too soon to betray their presence. They had a solid plan in place. Straying from it would only allow variables to crop up at the least opportune moments. They had been patient thus far. It wouldn't be much longer now.

  The pilot attempted to console Carson, but she swatted his hands aside, whirled away from the impasse, and stomped back toward the path.

  Tasker pressed back deeper into the blind. Brown ants crawled over his face and scalp. He suppressed the sensation.

  Carson sloshed up the muddy slope a mere ten feet to his left. Even over the clamor of the rain in the upper canopy, he could hear her crying. The pilot followed, trying in vain to console her, even though he appeared every bit as rattled. The pudgy academic fought to keep up, while the blonde and her cameraman trailed, visibly struggling with the treacherous footing.

  Tasker caught snippets of conversation.

  "...wait out the storm..."

  "...try again in the morning..."

  "...if we make it that long."

  "...you saw the condition of the bodies..."

  None of them so much as glanced in his direction.

  They were distracted, which only served his purposes.

  But what had they discovered? And where was their security contingent?

  IV

  5:37 p.m.

  There was no way in hell that Colton was abandoning a fortune in gold now that it was firmly in his grasp. He had taken command of the situation and had his men running around making the necessary preparations. With the way the level of the river had risen even while they crossed it hours ago, he knew there was no chance the others would make it beyond the engorged banks tonight. Not with the way the rain continued to fall. They would return at any moment, but in the meantime, he and his men needed to ready themselves for the coming night. The fortress was too large and sprawling, and too thick with vegetation to easily patrol, so they needed to fortify a defensible perimeter. But against what were they defending themselves? While he had initially scoffed at Russell's nonsensical blatherings, the evidence was impossible to ignore. The broken and disarticulated skeletons everywhere. The slaughtered remains of Gearhardt's son's party. The feathers, and especially the feces containing human matter.

  He couldn't fool himself into thinking that firepower was the solution. After all, Rippeth had been armed to the teeth when he had been torn apart.

  How could anything like what Russell proposed have survived so long without being discovered, even this high in the unexplored cloud forest? He thought of Carson's theory, that the primitive Mesoamerican tribes had known about them and had worshipped them as gods. Unfortunately, all of those venerable civilizations---the Aztec, the Inca, the Maya---had all vanished from the face of the planet at the height of their power. Did one correlate to the other?

  There was no time for speculation. There was still too much left to do, and night was already falling as the sun vanished behind the peak above them.

  The first order of business had been to crack open the case and suitably arm themselves. He and his men had each slung one of the SCARs over their shoulders and grabbed a pair of both incendiary and fragmentary grenades. They now scurried around the site following his commands.

  Webber had been dispatched to light fires in all of the columns surrounding the outer fortifications. While the iron cages protected the flames from the rain, they barely burned six inches tall with the limited amount of dry kindling and wood they had been able to find. Tending to them would be a full-time job.

  Morton had set to work with the machete, clearing the area immediately surrounding the main stone building. If the former occupants of the village had determined that the domicile was the safest place to take refuge, then who was he to second guess them? There was no time to find a more secure location.

  Sorenson was nearly finished reassembling the fallen stone barricades that had once blocked the doorways, and was preparing to move on to his next task.

  Leo had managed to light the handful of torches that formed a half-circle around the stone platforms and the front half of the main dwelling between repeated attempts to raise the outside world on the satellite phone. He hadn't even been able to get a signal. Sure, the storm affected their reception, but Colton knew it was more than just that, and he was close to proving it.

  The ground-penetrating radar had shown that the paving stones had been laid on a solid foundation of bedrock, as he had expected. Granted, there were varying thicknesses in the strata, but all of it was solid rock to the furthest depths of the sensing device's range. The magnetometer, however, confirmed his hypothesis.

  He studied the small monitor on the magnetometer, which looked like a haphazardly assembled vacuum cleaner made of scraps of metal, as he walked in a straight line. The harness strapped to his shoulders allowed him to hold the unit suspended several inches above the ground. Different types of rocks were displayed in subtle shades of gray and black as the signal released by the magnetometer was interpreted and analyzed to determine the magnetic properties of the ground. As he had hoped, capillaries of gold extended from the main vein. Of course, there were also large deposits of quartz and especially magnetite, which composed the bulk of the stone underfoot and appeared nearly black on the monitor. And what was another name for magnetite? Lodestone. In previous centuries, its magnetic properties had been used to polarize needles to create functional compasses. The ground was positively packed with enough magnetic material to interfere with any satellite uplink.

  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.