Burial Ground

by Michael McBride

  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."

  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."

  III

  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 t
o 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.

  IV

  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.

  V

  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.