Burial Ground

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.

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?