Burial Ground

by Michael McBride

  A skree summoned his attention back to the congregation of blood-soaked creatures. One of them had turned in their direction. Merritt caught a flash of eyeshine before it opened its mouth and issued a horrible cry. Other sets of eyes snapped in their direction, snouts dripping with blood and clots of flesh.

  They weren't going to make it.

  III

  11:12 p.m.

  Sam's heart nearly stopped when the lead raptor shrieked once more, spurring the entire pack to motion.

  It was too soon.

  Merritt tugged her to the side toward where the river rumbled at the bottom of the steep embankment. She couldn't even see the water from this angle, only the hint of the far side of the trench through the mist. Was this the last thing Hunter had seen before his death too?

  A glance to her right. The creatures were sprinting toward them, closing the gap far too quickly. Another ten yards and the flock would be upon them.

  She pushed herself to catch up with Merritt, and together they raced to the edge.

  Shrieks filled the night, drowning out all other sounds, even her scream as she and Merritt reached the cliff and leaped out into the air over the rapids. They fell through the smothering mist for an interminable second before they impacted with the water. Her body stiffened against the cold and the current dragged her deeper. She tumbled over sharp rocks that tore at her clothes and skin on the riverbed.

  Her only thought was to hold on to Merritt's hand.

  The pressure increased in her lungs and she opened her eyes.

  All she could see was darkness.

  IV

  11:13 p.m.

  Galen watched Sam and Merritt disappear into the cloud mere feet ahead of him. He didn't have to look back to know that the flock was right on his heels. Their cries were so close they were deafening.

  Two more strides.

  The splash below cleared a section of the mist. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the river, but fortunately, no sharp crests of stone broke the surface. He couldn't see the others. The river was flowing so fast that they could be half a mile away by now.

  One more stride.

  A shriek right behind his head.

  Galen dove into the mist toward the grumbling rapids. With a deep breath, he braced for impact with the frigid water.

  Bolts of searing pain in the backs of his legs.

  The snap of a bear trap over his right flank.

  Teeth lanced through flesh, jerking, tearing.

  He cartwheeled through the air, no longer certain of which way was up.

  A ribbon of blood unspooled from his side.

  He opened his mouth to scream---

  The force of the weight on his back knocked the wind out him when they struck the unforgiving surface of the river. It returned with a lungful of water.

  Talons slashed.

  Teeth ripped.

  Panic preceded the jolt when he struck the rocky bottom.

  V

  11:14 p.m.

  Merritt had surfaced a full twenty yards downstream, sputtering and gasping, and had turned back just in time to see Galen's shadow slice through the cloud behind him. And then the creature's. There had been no time to shout a warning. Legs outstretched, claws spread wide, it had struck him like an eagle snatching a leaping trout with a ferocious skree. Bodies intertwined, they had tumbled into the river with an enormous splash.

  Several more shadows had materialized on the edge of the high bank a moment later, lowering their necks, spreading their jaws, and shrieking their indignation at their prey's escape. They had paused at the brink, then bolted after them along the muddy shore.

  Sam still clung to his hand, her fingers icicles against his skin. She coughed out a flume of water and floated beside him, unable to look away from the point where Galen and the raptor had disappeared.

  The rapids rose and fell, whisking them downstream amid a mess of broken branches and tangled roots. They barely managed to keep their heads above the water as they waited for Galen to resurface, praying that he would. At the mercy of the current, the bank sped past, but the silhouettes kept pace.

  Their cries filled the valley.

  A splash upstream and the feathered crown of a head breached the surface. Its scaled snout opened around a shriek as it floundered toward the shore, where it scrabbled against the slick slope. Rear talons dug for purchase and tiny arms clawed, but it was unable to gain any leverage. Its serpentine neck thrashed and its jaws snapped uselessly at the air. Another cry and it dropped under the waves again with a flash of feathers.

  "I don't see Galen," Sam said. She coughed out another mouthful of water.

  Merritt shook his head. He didn't either. The dark river made it impossible to see into the water. The churning whitecaps filled the air with spray, only to be beaten down by the siege of raindrops.

  He glanced toward the ground above them. The creatures still paralleled their downstream progress.

  When he looked back, he caught a glimpse of a swatch of fabric and tried to swim against the current with one arm while refusing to relinquish Sam's hand from the other. As soon as he was close enough, he grabbed the cloth and pulled it toward him. Galen floated facedown, his arms and legs limp beneath him. Merritt rolled him over and tried to hold the birdman's head above the water even as the current attempted to suck them all under.

  Galen made no attempt to gasp for air.

  Merritt looked to either side. The bank was too steep to drag Galen onto solid ground where he could try to resuscitate him. And even were he able, the creatures would be waiting.

  Galen's eyelids were fixed partially open. In the gap under the lids, Merritt could see the blood-streaked whites and the lower crescents of the irises. Galen's mouth hung open. There was standing fluid behind his tongue.

  Merritt pressed his fingertips against the side of Galen's neck.

  There was no pulse.

  He had to readjust his grip, and in the process felt the warmth diffusing out into the water from above Galen's hip. Following it with his fingers, he stuck his hand into a gaping wound lined by fragments of shattered ribs and filled with spongy viscera. A rope of small bowel had unfolded through the wide gash and slithered through the water behind them.

  There was nothing they could do.

  Galen was gone.

  Merritt had been too distracted to notice the roaring sound, which grew louder and louder by the second. He didn't have to turn downriver to know what it meant.

  He shoved away from Galen's corpse and pulled Sam closer.

  "Hold on to me as tight as you can. Don't let go."

  "What---?"

  He silenced her with a kiss and wrapped his arms around her. Twisting his fists into the back of her jacket, he leaned his cheek against hers and whispered into her ear.

  "Don't you dare let go."

  Her arms tightened around his back.

  The roar escalated to the point that he barely heard her scream right next to his ear.

  Rocks prodded their feet.

  The current increased.

  He watched the creatures skid to an abrupt halt on a limestone overhang to his left, beyond which he could see only mist clinging to the upper canopy of the jungle.

  The world fell away from under them as they plummeted through the air in a weightless cascade of water.

  Galen's body fired from the top of the waterfall above them, appendages flopping lifelessly.

  The raptors leaned over the edge and cried after them through fierce rows of sharp teeth.

  Merritt clung to Sam with everything he had, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.

  A skree cut through the roar, and darkness welcomed them into the crashing waves and the waiting arms of oblivion.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I

  Lima, Peru

  October 31st

  3:02 a.m. PET

  The French balcony doors opened inward with a muffled click. Two men stepped in from the rain, soles squeaking ever so softly o
n the tiled floor. Dressed in black from head to toe, they became one with the darkness inside the house. Only the tan skin around their narrowed eyes was visible through the holes in their ski masks, their irises black coals.

  A flash of lightning through the doors behind them glinted from the pistols they held pressed to their thighs.

  Thunder grumbled as they passed through the formal living room. When it faded, there was only the timpani of raindrops on the ceramic-tiled roof.

  The man was supposed to be expecting them. There should have been a light on somewhere in the house, yet even the foyer had been dark through the front windows. Of course, the man had also expected them to ring the bell, not pick the lock and sneak in through the back.

  So where was he?

  They passed from one room to the next. The kitchen was deserted, the pantry empty. Only the dining room showed signs of recent habitation: a broken bottle on the floor and a demolished cell phone on the table next to a glass ashtray brimming with ashes. They followed the hallway past a bathroom and a vacant guest bedroom to the open door at the end of the corridor.

  The scent of cordite ushered them into a study that contained a much less pleasant aroma.

  A desk chair lay toppled on its side, its occupant sprawled on the ground. The hardwood floor was sticky with a black amoeba of blood, centered around the man's head, the back of which was a ruined crater of bone fragments and singed hair. Gray matter bloomed through the hole, a sickly flower of convolutions.

  Both men looked at the wall to their right, where spatters of blood and brain chunks surrounded a deep hole in the cracked plaster.

  The man had saved them a good deal of effort, but he had also robbed them of the little bit of enjoyment they were ever allowed to derive from their work.

  Their employer wanted the golden artifact. He was just unwilling to pay such an exorbitant cost for its acquisition. Granted, he would have easily been able to turn around and sell it for twice what he paid, but why narrow the margin if he didn't absolutely have to? Their services came at a fraction of that cost, and their employer did have a reputation to uphold after all.

  Besides, the man who had approached them had been an amateur. A greedy little Anglo.

  They approached the corpse. The man clearly wore the headdress. Gold glimmered under his face, and the strap he had used to hold it in place was still around the back below the self-inflicted wound. They rolled him over with gloved hands and stared down at the sad sack of flesh.

  The man's mouth hung open. His pupils were fixed and dilated. Trails of dried blood coiled around his eyebrows and nose. One of his cheeks was crusted with it from lying in the puddle. And the golden headdress covering his forehead---

  "Son of a bitch," the man said in Korean. "It's useless to us now."

  The pounded gold was scorched and warped around the hole where the bullet had entered just underneath the inset chrysocolla eyes. There was no way they would be able to sell an ancient artifact scarred by a bullet hole. The best they could hope for now was to melt it down and sell it as bullion for next to nothing.

  And considering it was covered in blood...

  They had been double-crossed in the act of double-crossing, which was probably what they should have expected from the start, especially knowing that the dead man at their feet was an American politician.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I

  Andes Mountains, Peru

  October 31st

  6:19 a.m. PET

  Blackness bled into a pale red glare through her eyelids, and consciousness returned with a fit of shivers. Sam struggled to open her eyes, but barely managed a crack through which she saw glistening mud and flattened grasses. Her right arm was pinned beneath her in the muck. The current tugged at her legs. She retched and vomited a wash of vile fluids into a puddle against the side of her face and nose. Pain pierced through the fugue and she started to cry.

  She pushed herself up to all fours on shaking arms, filthy strands of hair hanging over her face, and crawled out of the stream onto the bank. With a groan, she rolled over onto her rear end and propped herself up on her elbows.

  The storm had finally abated. Droplets still fell from the dense canopy, glimmering with the pink light of dawn. Through the branches she could see a sliver of blue sky.

  How long had she been unconscious? The last thing she remembered was going over the falls and then a sudden rush of darkness when she hit the water. How far had she traveled?

  She gasped and bolted upright.

  Where was Merritt?

  She fought through the pain to stand, swaying as though acted upon by a ferocious gale that only she could feel.

  "Merritt?" she whimpered.

  She stumbled along the shoreline through waterlogged ferns and tangles of reeds. Nothing looked familiar. It could have been any section of the jungle, every section.

  "Merritt!" she screamed.

  Several times, she tripped and fell, but managed to rise to her feet again. She screamed her throat raw as she followed the river, peering frantically through groves of trees connected by vines and blooming with epiphytes, scouring the surface of the water for any sign of a body pinned against a rock or crumpled near the bank.

  "Merritt!"

  Sam crashed through a wall of shrubs and clapped her hand over her mouth.

  There was a body, facedown on the muddy bank in a clump of cattails. She ran toward it, tears streaming from her eyes, and fell to her knees beside its hip.

  She reached toward it, then recoiled. A sob made her whole body shudder. Gathering her courage, she slid her trembling hands under its shoulder and rolled it onto its side.

  Galen stared back at her, his face a mask of mud, his mouth packed with sludge.

  She jerked her hands away and he fell back onto his chest.

  Rocking back, she screamed up into the sky.

  "What's all the commotion about?"

  She turned toward the sound of the voice. Merritt leaned against the broad trunk of a Brazil nut tree, soaked to the bone, clothes in tatters. He appeared one step shy of death.

  He offered that cocky, lopsided smile.

  Sam leapt up from the ground and ran to him. She threw herself into his arms so hard she nearly knocked both of them down.

  "I thought you were...Galen..." she stammered.

  An avian shriek from above them.

  They both flinched as a dark shape swooped through the branches and alighted on the bank.

  A tall bird with a broad black body and a ring of white feathers around its bald head hopped across the mud and up onto Galen's prone form. The fringe of rubbery flesh above its ivory beak jiggled.

  It seemed a fitting tribute, to in death continue the work to which Galen had devoted his life.

  II

  9:49a.m.

  They followed the river to its terminus, where it fed the placid lake upon the shore of which they had camped only the night before last. That felt like years ago now. Their trail had been easy enough to find from there. After several hours of shuffling through the oppressive jungle, the pangs of hunger had reached a level that surpassed even the sheer exhaustion, but both feared that once they stopped walking, they might never be able to start again. Already their reserves of adrenaline were running dangerously low.

  The heat and humidity were insufferable, and the gashes all over their bodies attracted whining clouds of mosquitoes and black flies. Occasional cries from the birds of prey circling out of sight above the canopy were a constant reminder of what the eternal jungle thought about their odds of survival. They were nearly ready to collapse when they stumbled into a small clearing.

  An alpaca stood twenty paces away, staring directly at them, contentedly chewing from side to side. Its long gray fur was tangled and knitted with briars. A rope hung from its neck, at the distant end of which a painted man walked through the knee-high ferns. He stopped, looked in their direction, and froze. Surprise registered on his face. He lowered his brow and scrut
inized them as though unable to believe his eyes.

  Merritt recognized him as the same man who had initially led them to the village, although this time he grazed a different animal.

  The man took a hesitant step toward them, stopped, then cautiously took another. After several minutes, he finally reached them. The alpaca hovered at his side, indifferently gnawing on a tuft of grass, while the man inspected them more closely. He fingered the cuts on Merritt's arms, then looked deep into his eyes. A step to the side, and he repeated the process with Sam.

  Merritt returned the favor and studied the man, whose skin was scarred under the paint in a similar manner to how Merritt imagined his soon would be. Galen had been right about how the natives had survived the creatures through the centuries. He and Sam owed the birdman their lives.

  After a long pause, the native's face split into a wide grin brimming with sharpened teeth, and he squeezed each of them on the shoulder in turn. He inclined his head toward the path on the other side of the clearing, and, with a tug on the rope, led the alpaca back toward the village.

  The man made a sound that Merritt could have sworn was laughter as they continued along the overgrown path behind him.

  Sam still clung to his hand, though with nowhere near the same desperation she had earlier. Merritt sensed it, too. He no longer felt the aura of threat emanating from the man, as though they had passed some sort of trial in his eyes.

  "Viracocha. Kakulcán. Quetzalcoatl," Sam said. "All of the ancient Mesoamerican tribes knew about these creatures and worshipped them. And the Maya and Aztec? They simply vanished from the face of the earth. Is it possible that they angered their gods, and were slaughtered? Is that how the remaining Chachapoya have managed to survive for so long in total isolation? By forging some sort of symbiotic relationship?"