Burial Ground (50 page)

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.

Lima, Peru

October 31
^st

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 on 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.

Andes Mountains, Peru

October 31
^st

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.

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
scrutinized 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?"

A steep hill rose to their left, surrounded
by a ring of stone pedestals, their torches now extinguished.

The voices of children called from ahead,
shouting, giggling.

They rounded the side of the buried alpaca
pen and stepped into the clearing beyond. The iron gate stood open,
and dozens of tanned children ran and tumbled in the herd's midst.
A young boy who'd been trying to hang from the wool under an
alpaca's belly caught sight of them. He rose, pointed a finger at
them, and shouted back over his shoulder to his friends. They all
stopped playing to stare at Merritt and Sam before sprinting away
in the opposite direction.

The man glanced back at them and smiled,
obviously amused.

After ten more minutes, Merritt glimpsed the
tall thatch roofs rising into the trees and saw the faint outline
of the fortress walls. The low chatter of voices reached his ears,
but he couldn't make out the words. Sam's hand tightened over his.
The path wended around a copse of ceibas until it came within clear
view of the towering fortifications.

A group of natives had gathered outside the
open stone gate in anticipation of their arrival. Their voices
dropped to whispers, and a nervous energy radiated from them.

The older man Merritt assumed to be the
chief separated from the others and strode forward. A topless woman
trailed at his hip, holding a bowl in her cupped hands. The chief
spoke briefly with the alpaca herder. Both stared and gestured at
the strangers, until finally their guide lowered his head and led
the alpaca away from the trail.

Teeth bared, the chief stepped forward and
glared at Merritt, who matched the intensity of his gaze for nearly
a full minute. The chief looked him up and down, and then did the
same to Sam. He probed Merritt's shredded clothing, and prodded the
lacerations hard enough to draw fresh blood. His eyes again rose to
meet Merritt's, and in their locked stare, an understanding passed
between them. With a subtle nod, the older man turned and walked
back into the crowd toward the fortress.