Burial Ground (26 page)

Movement caught his eye from hundreds of
feet below. Two condors, perhaps the owners of the nest, circled
the jungle, easily identifiable by their black bodies and
staggering wingspans, and, of course, by the white rings of
feathers around their bald heads.

Galen smiled. They weren't members of the
mysterious species he had come to find, but just seeing them in
their natural habitat, doing what vultures do, did his heart good.
Even after all of the tribulations they had endured up until now,
this one sight made it worth it.

He watched them a while longer as they
continued to whirl around the same section of trees before they
finally dropped down into the canopy and vanished from sight. What
kind of carcass awaited them? In the process of speculating, he
realized he hadn't seen any animals other than the ducks far out in
the center of the lake. There had been no mammalian presence. He
hadn't even seen a single rodent. And the cluster of trees wasn't
far from the edge of the lake, or from their campsite. Had the
condors returned to the clearing where they had found all of those
alpaca bones? It seemed unlikely. He had only performed a cursory
inspection of the site because of the god-awful stench, but there
hadn't appeared to be enough meat on any of the bones to warrant a
condor's attention. And wasn't that clearing farther to the east?
He shrugged. It was a question he'd be able to investigate on the
return trip. Something must have died or been killed during the
night. Condors weren't that picky when it came to scavenging,
regardless of how old the remains might be.

The others started their upward trek once
more. There was only one more thing he needed to do before he
joined them. He could always catch up if he fell behind.

Galen turned back to the forest and snapped
a long, slender branch off of the nearest tree. He stripped the
leaves and scoured the trunk until he found what he was looking
for. A crust of amber had formed over a wound in the bark. He
chiseled it away until fresh sap bled through, then dabbed the end
of the stick into the syrupy sludge. Once he had a suitable gob, he
returned to the cliff and sprawled flat on his belly at the
precipice. Holding the stick in his right hand, he extended it down
toward the nest. It swung from side to side just over the
haphazardly assembled wooden bowl.

Just a little farther.

He scooted closer to the edge until his
entire shoulder hung over the abyss, and stretched his arm
downward. The tip of the stick grazed the feathers in the nest. He
retracted it just enough to confirm that several feathers were
stuck to the sap. Excellent. They would make for fine comparisons
to the ones he already had in his pocket. It would be a good
launching point for his study into whether or not the iridescent
green and brown feathers had developed as a new morph or as an
evolutionary offshoot of the Andean condor.

Pleased with his own ingenuity, he pulled
his arm back up. With a crack, the rock ledge broke beneath him.
Fragments of andesite fell away and landed in the nest. His whole
body canted to the right, toward the nothingness below.

"Oh, God."

He felt gravity pull at his body and grabbed
for anything to hold onto with his left hand. More pebbles
skittered out from under him and tumbled down the stone face.

His body began to slide and his stomach
lurched with the inevitability of what was about to happen. He
raced through the various scenarios in his mind, all of which ended
with his broken body tangled in the canopy or splattered on the
forest floor.

The skin on the fingertips of his left hand
tore as he clawed at the smooth stone.

Galen could feel his inertia building. He
was going over the ledge and there was nothing he could do about
it.

He would know how it felt to be a condor in
the moments of freefall before he was impaled on the branches.

"Please," he whimpered. He cried out as the
right half of his chest slid over the edge. "Don't let me die."

A hand grabbed his belt, another the back of
his shirt.

"Quit being so melodramatic," a voice said.
With a sound tug, Galen was hauled back onto the path and away from
the cliff.

Breathing hard, heart racing, Galen leapt to
his feet and embraced his savior. His legs trembled so badly he
could hardly stand on his own.

"That's about enough of that," Merritt said.
He extricated himself from the embrace and dabbed his fingers at
the back of his neck. "Ugh. What did you wipe on me?"

Galen realized he was still holding the
stick. He had pressed the sappy end against the man's neck.

"I'm sorry," he said, but Merritt had
already turned to follow the others. Galen called after him. "You
saved my life. Thank you!"

Merritt gave a slight wave of acknowledgment
over his shoulder.

Galen struck off after him, pulling the
feathers from the sap as he walked. He didn't want to be left
behind again. What would have happened if Merritt hadn't grabbed
him when he had? The image of his rag-doll form plummeting through
the sky nearly caused his knees to buckle.

Jesus Christ. He should have been dead.
Merritt may have shrugged it off as no big deal, but it
was
a big deal to Galen.

He hurried back into line behind Dahlia and
reached into the breast pocket of his vest with trembling fingers,
withdrew one of the feathers, and compared it to one of the remiges
from the condor's nest.

It didn't appear possible that they were, or
had even once been, the same species.

The β-keratin fibers of the iridescent barbs
were better aligned toward the center than to the outside, where
they appeared slightly frayed, while those of the Andean condor
feather were uniformly aligned. He blew on the greenish feather and
the barbs flared subtly apart. He did the same thing to the condor
feather, but the tips of the barbs remained fixed together by the
barbules and barbicels. How had he not noticed this before? The
feathers were nearly identical in structure and shape on a
macroscopic level. If he hadn't been so excited by the prospect of
finding and identifying a new species, he would have recognized it
before now.

Somewhere out there was a raptor that no one
had ever classified.

Only if he was right, this one couldn't
fly.

10:50 a.m.

Over the course of the last hour, the
temperature had dropped nearly ten degrees, while the humidity had
steadily increased. The air grew thinner as they climbed toward the
ceiling of clouds that hid the peak above. Perhaps it was only by
degree, but the forest didn't appear as dense as it once had. They
had only been walking for six hours now, and yet it felt as though
days had passed since they broke camp.

Merritt shrugged the backpack up onto his
shoulders. He was sure that it magically grew heavier with each
step. He couldn't remember whose bag he carried, but the way the
men struggled with the monstrous crate on the narrow, steep path,
he figured it was the least he could do. Better this than being the
downhill man bearing the brunt of the crate's weight.

A faint breeze penetrated the canopy as the
trail wound around the northern slope of the mountain. He welcomed
the cool movement of air across the skin beneath his clothes. The
distant rumble of a waterfall filtered through the trees, in the
upper reaches of which he could see wisps of white, a sight that
set him momentarily at ease. He thought of his plane and the
feeling of preparing to ascend into the thick cloud banks, where he
would be flying blind, completely isolated from his worldly
cares.

The birdman trailed him, scrutinizing a pair
of feathers as he stumbled uphill. If the man thanked him for
saving his life one more time, Merritt was going to throw him over
the next cliff himself. The guy had barely been leaning over the
edge, but the way he told it, he made it sound like he'd been
dangling by a single fingertip. Whatever. At least the feathers
kept him occupied for the time being.

Sam trudged ahead of him, eyeing everything
they passed as though searching for something specific. He admired
her passion, and wished that there was something in his life that
mattered as much to him.

Her scent trailed on the breeze. He inhaled
deeply. She smelled of mint and dragon fruit with an undercurrent
of sweat. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail, which
showcased her slender neck. He imagined how it might feel to press
his lips to the gentle curve under the collar of her flannel
shirt...

She glanced over her shoulder and caught him
staring. He offered a smile, which she returned easily enough. At
least she hadn't turned around a minute ago when he'd been
mesmerized by her swishing hips in those khaki shorts.

Sam faced ahead again as they wound around
the northern slope. The ground fell away to the right to the point
that they could have stepped from the path onto the treetops. To
the left, the mountain became a vertical embankment covered in
vines and lianas. The path appeared to narrow to a mere foot wide.
It was hard to tell with the way the vines covered it and spilled
over the edge in a cascade of flowering emerald ropes.

Colton and Leo were already scooting slowly
out onto the thin ledge, testing their footing on the uneven ground
while maintaining what little distance they could from the drop
into the valley far below.

Sam stopped in her tracks directly ahead of
him. He was about to ask if she was all right when he noticed the
barely perceptible movement that had captured her interest.

The breeze ruffled the curtain of vines,
behind which he saw deep shadows, not a smooth sheet of stone.

Sam eased forward and reached out with her
left arm. Her hand passed through the deceptive screen. She glanced
back at him with a glint in her eyes, smiled, then stepped from the
path and vanished through the cascade of green.

Ahead, Leo similarly tested the invisible
wall, then he and Colton ducked out of sight.

Merritt followed and crossed into muted
darkness, which became complete when the vines fell back into place
behind him. The sensation of claustrophobia closed around him like
a fist. His heart began to pound and his breathing became labored.
He couldn't bear the prospect of being underground for any length
of time, and fought the surge of memories from the Afghan
desert.

The thin beam of a penlight bloomed to his
right. It provided too little illumination to truly gauge the size
of the space beneath the rock overhang, and barely silhouetted the
others.

A triangle of sunlight streamed in from
behind as Galen joined them.

"I need more light," Sam snapped. Her voice
positively trembled with excitement.

"This is all I have," Colton said. He
flashed his beam from side to side to emphasize his point.

"Then we need to get rid of some of those
vines. Who has the machete?"

"I do," Webber said as he passed into the
inner sanctum.

The blade whistled through the air and
struck the layers of vines with a
thuck
. The serpentine
green vines fell away and slithered over the edge of the cliff.
Light slanted through in their absence.

"More," Sam said.

Webber continued to whack through the screen
as Sam slowly approached the rear wall of the broad cave, which was
far larger than Merritt had initially suspected. It was perhaps a
hundred feet long and twenty feet deep with a domed ceiling that
arched a good ten feet over his head. He couldn't tell if it had
been chiseled by human hands or eroded into the hillside by nature
as the seas and rivers receded millions of years ago. Either way,
someone had put the space to good use. As Webber welcomed more and
more light into the alcove, the structures at the rear drew form.
Six tall sculptures stood against the center of the back wall,
nearly reaching the roof. They were all identical: four-foot-wide,
appendage-less bodies painted with various designs in yellow and
red ochre, supporting large, parabolic heads that must have looked
like crescent moons in profile. A single thin line formed the
mouths beneath sharp, triangular noses. The brows were straight and
ridged, and created the impression that the statues wore
headdresses low over their foreheads. Staked on short wooden posts
to their heads were human skulls, their articulated jaws opened in
soundless screams.

To either side of the unsettling statues,
small adobe buildings had been constructed side by side against the
cavern wall. They were multi-tiered, though each level was only
tall enough to accommodate a man if he crouched. Their reddish
walls had been painted with thick, horizontal white stripes, into
which myriad shapes had been etched. Square windows lined each
level, through which only darkness stared out at them. Their roofs
were slanted in such a way that they reminded Merritt of Japanese
pagodas. A single rectangular doorway set into the adobe to either
side of the vaguely human statues serviced all of the dwellings.
While they may have looked separate from the outside, apparently
they were all interconnected.

Dust hung thickly in the air, stirred by the
soft breeze that circulated the musty smells of age and
decomposition.

They were all awed to silence.

Sam approached the strange statuary. All of
the plaster figures were joined together three feet from the floor.
Between the center two, what looked like a hearth had been carved
into their union.

"Let me borrow your flashlight," Sam said,
holding out her open palm without diverting her attention from the
dark opening for a second.

Colton set the penlight in her hand and
leaned over her shoulder as Sam shined it into the recess. A dull
tawny glow reflected back.

Merritt eased closer and craned his neck to
see around her head.