Burial Ground

by Michael McBride

  The sound of the shrieking creatures grew louder by the second.

  His tibia snapped with the crack of a bullwhip.

  He prayed the others would make good use of the time his life afforded them, because the whole blasted mountain was about to come down on their heads.

  Colton slid out of the end of the tube into a living blackness filled with avian cries.

  Talons impaled his chest.

  Teeth sawed into his abdomen, his groin.

  He arched his back and opened his mouth for one final scream---

  IV

  10:44 p.m.

  The ground shuddered under Sam's feet. She lost her balance and collapsed to her knees. Chunks of stone broke loose from the ceiling with the sound of thunder and crashed to the ground all around her. One rock clipped her hip and she cried out in pain. The startled bats swirled chaotically before coalescing into a single mass of whistling leather wings and swarming over her head toward the wall in front of her. Until that very moment, she had believed it to be solid. She followed their exodus through tear-blurred eyes, to where the beam on her helmet illuminated a thin fissure in the stone.

  Once more, the earth trembled, and then stilled. The rumbling noise above her faded to the clatter of pebbles raining from the roof.

  She rose and cried out. Her hip throbbed, but at least she could still wiggle her toes and the joint felt functional enough.

  Merritt's voice materialized from the darkness and the settling dust. "Is everyone okay?"

  Galen whimpered that he was, however uncertainly.

  "We need to keep moving," Leo said. His voice had hardened to project a note of command. "The explosion will only buy us so much time. If there's a way out of here, we'd better find it right now."

  "It's directly ahead of me," Sam said.

  "Then quit screwing around and get going." She caught a glimpse of his face before she turned back toward the now silent passage. Were those tears shimmering on his cheeks?

  She advanced into the crevice and focused on the diffuse beam of light. The walls were so close they rubbed against her shoulders, eliciting a constant wave of pain from her injured right. Alternately turning her head from side to side, she forced back the shadows while she navigated the rubble underfoot. They were lucky the fissure hadn't totally collapsed during the quake. Had Leo said 'explosion'? And where was Colton?

  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.

  V

  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.

&
nbsp; 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?

  VI

  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.

  She held her breath and prayed to any god that might be listening.

  Feathers rustled and a toe brushed against her cheek. The raptor stood nearly directly on top of her.

  A whistle of air preceded the strike. Its foot slashed at her chest. Clothing and skin ripped. She felt the sting of the wound and a trickle of blood rolling down her side from the laceration bene
ath her left clavicle.

  It took every ounce of her concentration to keep from screaming. She squeezed Merritt's hand so hard her fingernails gouged into his skin.

  The creature leaned in again and huffed a gust of foul breath onto her face that blew away most of the feathers. Its jaws snapped wide and it cried out again. A wash of saliva slapped onto her closed eyes and trailed over her cheeks, thick with chewed meat that slid through the fluid like slugs.

  It recoiled and slashed at her again with its hind leg. The nails sliced through her upper arm over the biceps. Another unheralded strike, and blood flowed from her chest, just above her right breast.

  The pain was more than she could bear.

  More and more footsteps approached. She felt weight on her right arm before another talon clawed into her shoulder.

  Merritt's hand tightened over hers. His blood spiraled around his wrist and into the union of their palms.

  Another wicked slash, and pain bloomed from a gash on her right thigh.

  Her thoughts turned to the extant Chachapoya in the valley below. The black-painted men whose bodies were so heavily scarred, as though they'd been attacked with straight razors. She had thought the scarring was ritualistic, but it wasn't, was it?

  This was how they survived.

  Another slice across her lower left leg.

  Tears flowed freely from her eyes, and somehow she managed to bite back a whimper of agony.

  The creatures shrieked all around them now. They appeared to be feeding upon one another, growing louder and more frantic.

  Claws slashed, filling the air with a mist of blood.

  She no longer prayed for escape, but for an end to the mounting pain, knowing that all she had to do to make it stop was scream.

  VII

  11:00 p.m.

  Tasker swayed on his feet, trying to maintain his equilibrium. Every inch of his body hurt. He felt like a porcupine with the sheer amount of shrapnel standing from his back. Fractured ribs prodded at his innards, and he was certain that his left wrist was shattered. It was barely functional enough to balance the barrel of his rifle on it. So far, he had already spit out two teeth, and blood dripped through the tatter of his lower lip and over his chin.