Burial Ground (38 page)

"What are you getting at?" Colton asked. The
beam on his helmet stayed in constant motion along with his eyes in
lighthouse fashion. While the man remained outwardly stoic, his
nerves manifested in the way he shifted from one foot to the
other.

"I'm just stating what I see. We're dealing
with a species that doesn't fit the mold of any modern avian. In
fact, if I didn't know better, judging exclusively on the basis of
the amount of urine and urates as a percentage of volume, I would
suspect our subject was reptilian."

"You've already browbeaten us with your
speculation, Dr. Russell. Now unless you have anything useful to
add---"

Galen gasped. He could barely control his
shaking hand well enough to extract his finding from the pellet.
Pinching it between his fingertips, he threaded it out of the feces
and held it up for the others to see.

It was a clump of thin, dark hair.

Human hair.

Colton took it from him and inspected it
while Galen crumbled the remainder of the pellet and spread it out.
Something hard and sharp prodded his fingertip. He picked it up and
cleared off the foul coating. The base of the small object was
blunt and smooth. Four thin prongs extended from the opposite
side.

He reflexively dropped it and it tumbled
across the granite floor.

The spotlight on his helmet fixed upon
it.

"Oh my God," he whimpered.

The silver of the filling reflected the
light.

It was a human tooth.

Galen scrambled to his feet and swiped his
palms on his pants. If this didn't prove his theory, then nothing
would. And right now he didn't even care what they thought. People
had been killed here. The evidence was everywhere around them, from
the remains in the ossuary and the cavern to those in the feces.
The victims had been butchered and consumed, and he knew with
complete certainty that there was no modern species of raptor
capable of doing that.

He glanced at the fresh piles of feces. They
couldn't be more than twenty-four hours old.

They needed to get out of there.

Now.

"Where are you going?" Colton snapped. "Get
back here!"

Galen didn't even pause as he ran back
toward the tiny tunnel that would eventually lead him back to the
outside world. He dove to his belly and wriggled through as fast as
he could. His head grazed the rock above, which tilted the helmet
so that the beam pointed to the side and barely illuminated his
way.

It had been a mistake to come here. The
biggest mistake of his life.

His panicked breathing echoed in his ears
and tears streamed down his cheeks. The fabric on his knees and
elbows ripped. He felt the sting of cuts and abrasions, but he
didn't care. If they didn't get far away from this mountain, then
that small amount of bleeding would only be the beginning.

4:43 p.m.

The gods were smiling on Tasker. He couldn't
have asked for better luck.

A smile slashed his face as he stood at the
edge of the stream, which, thanks to the ferocity of the storm, had
swelled to the ranks of a full-blown river. So much water funneled
down from the high country that it no longer gracefully cascaded
over the edge, but fired from the top of the waterfall instead. The
roar was nearly deafening. He and McMasters had barely been able to
cross the strategically placed stones, which had already been
claimed by the rising river. One misstep and they would have been
swallowed whole and thrown into the air over the valley hundreds of
feet below. Branches and debris hurtled downstream. Some lodged
against the rock ledge, where they would only serve to raise the
level even more, while others were launched on the flume of white
spray into the nothingness over the canyon. A twenty-foot trunk
sped down the rapids without encountering the slightest resistance
and shot over the falls. Ten seconds later, the crack of wood
shattering on the breakers reverberated through the mountains.

Until the storm abated and the level of the
gorged stream dropped significantly, there would be no way of
crossing it.

His smile broadened as he studied the trail
in the sloppy mud that led into the steep jungle. Their prey were
now effectively isolated on the peak above with no means of
escape.

Everything had fallen into place more
perfectly than he ever could have hoped. All that remained now was
to follow the path laid out before them to their ultimate
destination, loot the ruins of everything of value, and make sure
that no witnesses survived. After that, it would be easy enough to
float their haul down the river to where multiple millions of
dollars awaited them.

Or rather, awaited him.

He glanced at McMasters, who remained
blissfully ignorant. Once they neared Pomacochas with their
treasure, he would have ample opportunity to end their partnership
and countless places to hide the evidence.

The only loose end would be Monahan, and
that little prick would be simple enough to make disappear with a
single, well-placed phone call. A call he looked forward to
making.

In his mind's eye, he saw an Italian villa
on a hillside overlooking the tranquil blue of the Caribbean
Sea.

It was only a matter of time now.

But in the interim, there was still plenty
of fun to be had. They were closing in for the kill. Soon the
valley would echo with the screams of the dying before silence once
again descended upon this lost world.

There was only one variable for which he
couldn't account, if it was even a variable at all.

He pictured the carcasses they had
disinterred from the bundles buried in the statuary. A shiver
rippled down his spine. He chased away the thought. Surely nothing
like that could have survived this long, even so high in the
unexplored Andes. Never mind the fact that the desiccated corpses
couldn't have been more than several hundred years old or the fact
that Jones had been mercilessly ripped apart in a manner consistent
with what he would have expected. There was no problem that
couldn't be solved by the assault rifle on his shoulder. He would
stay vigilant, and unlike Jones, he was an excellent soldier.
Nothing on this planet would be able to catch him unaware. Not even
those hideous creatures from the filthy mummy wraps.

"Are you ready to do this?" McMasters asked.
He shrugged his pack into place on his shoulders and clasped his
Colt IAR in both hands. "If we want to be in position before
nightfall, we'd better get moving."

Tasker looked to the sky. Between the low
ceiling of storm clouds and the elongating shadow of the mountain
peak, darkness would soon be upon them. The thrill of the endgame
surged through him.

"After you," he said, gesturing to the line
of sloppy tracks that led into the dense forest.

He followed his temporary partner into the
jungle for the culmination of the hunt that had begun many miles
and days ago.

In a matter of hours, a new river would
flow, a river of blood, and a fortune in gold would be his.

Andes Mountains, Peru

October 30
^th

4:49 p.m. PET

Morton and Webber no longer stood guard over
the tunnel into the cliff when they arrived. Winded, Sam slowed to
a jog, while Merritt fell back behind her and stopped dead in his
tracks. She was soaked to the bone, and every muscle ached from the
high altitude exertion. She tried not to think about everything she
had seen, but the images of the remains shoved to the forefront of
her mind in grainy still-lifes reminiscent of old crime scene
photographs. The memories were sterile enough to allow her to
distance herself from them; however, the implications assaulted her
like fresh wounds inflicted in her gray matter.

Somewhere along the trail, they had passed
from the world she knew and understood, through the residua of a
past she had until now only been able to imagine, into a nightmare
landscape of bloodshed and death.

And even now, she couldn't help but be
amazed by the sights that greeted her when she entered the dark
crevice.

Jay flicked on the light mounted to his
camera and directed it at the walls as they pressed deeper into the
mountain. Countless recessed arches had been chiseled into the
stone and filled with bones. The skulls faced her, while the rest
of the jumbled skeletons had been crammed into the spaces behind
them. A quick flicker of gold reflected the light.

"Did you see that?" Sam asked. "Shine your
light over there again."

Jay directed the beam back into the alcove.
A golden sparkle winked through the optic canal in the skull's eye
socket.

"There's something inside," he said.

Sam reached through the sticky spider webs
and lifted the aged skull from the centuries of accumulated dust.
The occipital portion of the cranium had been cut away to create
room for the object that rested on the rock shelf. It was
egg-shaped and filigreed with a golden design fused to the rounded
surface, a stunning piece of craftsmanship. More obsidian, she
realized. The volcanic rock had been smoothed and polished, and
decorated with a stylized image that depicted a man made of squares
holding a sharp-toothed monster with a plume of feathers on its
head at bay with a spear.

"It's an Ica stone," she gasped. Her world
had suddenly tilted on its ear.

She replaced the skull over the stone and
moved to the next archway. Similarly lifting the cracked skull, she
exposed another stone nearly identical to the first, only the man
in the design appeared to be riding the back of a dragon as it
tried to snap back over his shoulder at him.

Ica stones were widely considered hoaxes,
their authenticity refuted by any scholar worth his salt. They were
originally discovered in a cave in the vicinity of the coastal town
of Ica, Peru in the Sixties. While supposedly created by the Inca,
they depicted knowledge and events beyond the scope of their
limited comprehension. Everything from open heart surgery and
tracheotomies to flying saucers and dinosaurs. All things that
should have been well beyond their ability to conjure, even in
their wildest dreams, which led to the common conclusion that they
had to be fakes. Radiocarbon dating had been useless in
ascertaining their age as the test could only determine the
approximate era that the obsidian was formed, and not the time when
the designs had been carved. And the others were merely etched, not
overlaid with gold like these were.

Now here she was, staring at them in an
ancient ossuary where they couldn't possibly have been planted by
modern man. They weren't just decorative ornamentation either. They
were death stones, renditions of something of consequence to the
decedent. She moved down the row, raising cranium after cranium to
uncover more stones, all of which bore representations of a man in
mortal combat with the same fanged and plumed creature. Was this
tunnel where their warriors were interred? A quick glance in either
direction confirmed that all of the bones were roughly the same
size. None of them had belonged to children. Was it possible that
these depictions somehow represented their deaths?

The faint sound of buzzing brought her back
to reality.

There wasn't enough time to waste any more
right now. Lord only knew what was out there in the ruins, stalking
them.

From ahead, she heard the distant sound of
voices, made hollow by the acoustics, the words indecipherable over
the drone of flies. She turned in their direction and proceeded
into the darkness. The light from the camera veered to follow,
casting her elongated shadow across the ground in front of---

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.